The Key (19 page)

Now theirs was a culture based not on punishment and retribution, but on what the Master defines as compassion—“finding what others need the most and giving it to them.”

They were just a little bit ahead of where we are now, in the process of coming to the end of the culture of blame and seeking in the dark for some sort of a better way.

The transformation of our world into a place of compassion is at the core of the Key. Compassion would appear to be the essential ingredient in forming a completely new kind of society. But it is not obvious that the conventional definition of compassion—that it is a sort of vague acceptance of the ill will and mistakes of others—will work. Instead, the Master demands a much more rigorous sort of compassion. This compassion is not passive at all. It proactively seeks what others need the most and gives it to them. The personal morality he advocates—“each of you is entirely responsible for all the others”—translates into a beautiful vision of a whole new social order.

The operative word is “delight.” There is extraordinary joy involved in living like this. Putting on the chains of judgment and blame is an amazing feeling. And it isn't as if one must give gold to the thief. Rather give him what will raise him from his habit of thievery.

In a compassionate world, for example, there might well be prisons. They would not be places of punishment, however, but rather places where the congenitally dangerous were kept in the interest of safety, and the mistaken were restored to social usefulness. It would be a world where we could tell the difference between the helplessly criminal and the reformable, because we would have applied clear-eyed science to the problem instead of approaching criminality through the filter of our various agendas.

A compassionate world would be very, very different from this one. It would be less a fallen world. It would be a happier world. And it can certainly be afforded. As the Master makes clear, the culture of blame is costly, and always leads to the eventual destruction of the unbalanced societies that are based in it.

In our conversation, the Master at one point described prayer in a completely amazing way. He said that it was “a lost science of communication.” Throughout our conversation, he alluded to an earlier civilization that seemed to have some powers greater than our own. In this particular area, it must have truly excelled, for he describes it as having built a subtle machine that girded the world and was used as a means of communication between man and God.

I have often wondered whether or not the legends of lost civilizations were some kind of inner myth about a thread we have dropped on the way toward objective understanding of the world—that the golden age they suggest is actually in the future, not the past.

But I no longer think this. There are simply too many strange ruins around the world to dismiss the possibility that an advanced civilization once existed here, and now is gone. I think that we may not even be at the pinnacle of our history, but rather on the long, declining slope of it.

The Master tells a wonderful story, which he describes as “Hindu,” about God entering a pig and becoming so involved in its material delights that he forgets that he is the creator of the universe. He says that we are the spirit in the pig, and that he is here, among others, to awaken us by killing the pig.

At one point, he implies that he and his kind are actually working
against
our discovering our situation, in order to force us to act on our own behalf. And this seems to be one of the essential subtleties of the Key—that we must take action on our own behalf. In a sense, what is happening to us now is very like a birth experience. The comfortable womb of the earth is about to become untenable for us. We will not be able to live here much longer with anything like the comfort we have enjoyed thus far. The water of Aquarius is indeed being poured out, and the little fish that has been growing and evolving in it is going to face the seemingly impossible situation of needing to live out of water.

Perhaps the Master's most interesting claim is that there is conscious energy, and that it is part of the energetic spectrum that we can already detect. If this is true, then there is a whole new world right at hand that is simply waiting for us to begin communication with it. This is an explosive concept, especially given that there has been some scientific work that suggests that it may be true.

The original studies were carried out by Dr. William Roll with the support of the Mind Science Foundation. An attempt was made to determine whether or not objective science could detect anything in areas where hauntings were commonly reported.

Instruments detected the presence of unusual electromagnetic plasmas and areas of markedly reduced air temperature in some of these locations with a consistency that made it possible to conclude that an anomalous phenomenon was being consistently observed in areas where ghosts were seen.

According to the
New Scientist
: “Of the emerging evidence, the most convincing is of sharply fluctuating magnetic fields at spots where ghosts appear.”

It is becoming easy to detect these fields, even for amateurs, and the presence of orbs of light in the area of hauntings is beginning to be observed on videotape, as well as brief snatches of vocalization on both audio- and videotape.

In addition, physicist Frank Tipler, while devising a mathematical model of the end of the universe, found that he had stumbled upon a proof of the existence of God. The book he wrote about this,
The Physics of Immortality
, has had a quietly powerful effect within the scientific community, as other physicists and mathematicians have glimpsed the shadow of a living presence within the structures of nature.

The Master was completely at ease with this idea, speaking as if he could see not only with the eyes of the living, but also with the eyes of the dead. He was a wise and deeply humorous man. His emotions were gently powerful. When we talked about sin, in such a very, very different way from before, I felt that I was face-to-face with somebody who had experienced the disappointments that surround it personally. When he commented that sin is “cruel to God,” I saw for an instant the enormous—and, I suspect, true—scale of human life.

The irony is that, isolated on this little dust mote of a planet lost in the far away, there really is a race of extraordinary beings struggling to face their eternal lives, and to find their place in the consciousness of God.

I do not know if I will ever meet the Master of the Key again. I hope so. Sometimes, I remember things that I did not put in this book—not because they were intentionally withheld, but because I cannot recall them in enough detail to write them down. For example, afterward I mentioned to my wife that he had told me the day of my death. I don't remember that now. There were also other things said that perhaps were not spoken so much as communicated through the flood of love that seemed to pour off this man. I can only say that, whoever he was, he loved us in the most amazingly intimate, informed and joyous way that it is possible to imagine.

As time passes, I suspect that the scientific information that he presented is going to be verified. For example, he made a passing reference to nitrous oxide as a medium for powerful computers. To my surprise, I found what was almost certainly a reference to this idea in the October 3, 1998, issue of the
New Scientist
. It seems that the gas nitric oxide might theoretically make a powerful medium for a whole new kind of computer, one immeasurably more powerful than what we have now. Not only that, the brain already uses nitric oxide in its own functioning, something that I certainly did not know before having this conversation.

I have been working on this book for years. I have tried my best to convey the words of the Master of the Key as they were spoken to me. How well I have succeeded, I do not and cannot know. But reading his magnificent and wise sentences, I think that I have come as close as I could, short of being able to make a tape recording.

If there is anything that the Master said that I feel is most essential, it is probably the way he described our relationship to the earth. Our dysfunction, our profound disconnect—our being “fallen,” as he put it—seems to stem from the central reality of this relationship.

If we could take just those few lines as deep into each of our hearts as anything can go, we could find a motive to remake our world that is greater than the fearsome greed that now rules. We are in the process of being born as children of the earth, struggling to leave the planet and become in some way eternal. But we cannot do it by ignoring our planet's welfare and killing her.

Unless we find a place for ourselves in the universe that makes room for her to grow and heal the injuries she has sustained during the struggle of our birth, we are going to experience appalling trials. If earth dies, so do we. But if earth is flooded with new life, then so will we be.

I was at mass on the morning of November 19, 2000, when one of the readings chilled me to my very core. The words did more than amaze me, they almost left me breathless. I grew physically cold; in a certain sense, they horrified me.

I dropped the missal and stared ahead, barely hearing the mass that was now proceeding without one of the participants.

What I had read appeared to be a direct prophecy about this time, and about the Master of the Key. But how could I be involved in such a thing? It was crazy. I don't belong doing this. At most, I'm a minor writer, hardly even a comma on the page of literature. And yet here was this prophecy, and it seemed to be about the Master and, above all, about the essence of his warning and the essence of his message.

On that night, he had called himself “Michael.” He had prophesied a terrible future, and told me enough about it to enable me to write a book of warning that was based in solid science. And here, in the book of Daniel, was another version of that same exact warning.

But more important, here were the radiant beings he talked about with such clarity and eloquence. Attaining this radiance is the aim of human life, very clearly. It was true for Daniel's time, and it would appear to be equally true now.

Here are the verses that I read that so awed me:

The verses could not be more clear. It is the message of the Master. In the older translations like the King James Version I have quoted, Michael is referred to simply as “the great prince.” The Revised Standard Version calls him “the captain of the angels,” and Young's Literal calls him “the great head.” (Robert Young published his translation in 1898. In it he attempts to preserve the original Greek and Hebrew tenses, structures and words as far as possible.)

I was left with this thought: we do not really know how to describe these great beings like Michael, through whom God shines. We call them angels, lords, princes, but how they may live from day to day, and what they may mean to themselves in the spirit is not given to us to know.

It also states in Daniel 12 that “the wicked will never understand,” which saddens me greatly. When you read the words of the Master of the Key, you see with new eyes the real effect of sin, and you taste a little of the shining ecstasy that is the true aim of humankind.

I am a despised and discredited man. Most of this culture rejects me and calls me a liar. But I am a good man, and for whatever crazy reason, I have ended up with a book of very real wisdom that I think comes from somewhere close to the hand of God. So be it.

Why would a little nobody get this? Probably because the grand are too grand to listen to the words of an old man who knocks on their door in the middle of the night. He came to a nobody because only a nobody would let him in. I can only hope that his words will be heard . . .. at least by other nobodies. Maybe the great have their reward already, in the wealth they share and the praise they heap on each other's heads . . . . perhaps like coals.

Later in chapter 12 of Daniel, inverse 5, it states: “Thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

There could be no more perfect description of our age. We race around like ants, in a world that is exploding with knowledge.

But that was not the end of this phenomenal prophecy, which I believe is a
very exact
description of events that are happening right now. In 12:9 God says to Daniel, “the words are closed up to the end of time.”

Maybe the words have just been opened, and perhaps that's why this ended up getting published at the real beginning of the new millennium, which is 2001.