The Key, Part III
Copyright © 2003 Unknowncountry.com
This is Whitley Strieber. We're continuing with our study of The Key,
and the Master of the Key. We left off, last time, on page 22: We were
talking in the end about animals and the difference between animal
consciousness and human consciousness. This time we're going to
continue on and talk a little bit more about resurrection and what
that means in the context of the Master's discussion. Before we go on,
however, I will say this, that this week's Dreamland with Von Braschler
is quite interesting to me, because the reason I had Von back on
(he was the author of Perfect Timing) was that he's come up with a
new book: Von is an experimenter and a searcher; he really is willing
to try practically anything. He's one of these people who is struggling
with the "sensations," as it were, of the soul, and trying to find out
what he can feel and touch and taste in the spirit. And he came up with
a book called Conversations With the Dream Mentor, and I was immediately
interested in that because I have wondered, of course, who the Master of
the Key was. Von used certain inner exercises which he describes in
his book to call up a "dream guide," and much to his surprise, while he
was working in a photo developing lab on Kirlian photography experiments,
the other people working with him in the lab saw the dream guide too.
They simply saw her as a woman, not as anything special, but just as
another person in the photography lab, but it was obviously the same
being.
This gets to the question of what we are, as it is where we are, and
what surrounds us. The Master of the Key would say that we are
surrounded by a living world, some parts of which we can see, some
parts of which we cannot see. And he would say that there is no
"supernatural," there is only the natural world. Some elements of
it we can detect or perceive, others we cannot as yet, but interestingly
enough, he alludes to the possibility of there being a technology,
a science, as it were, of the spirit. And his whole output is about
seeing the spirit and the work of God from the standpoint of a science.
This universe is composed of ideas and some of those ideas we live with
and accept, others we reject. The reason that we so soundly reject and
hesitate to go toward the science of the spirit is because this is a
place where, as we discussed in the last episode of this series about
The Key, we are meant to be blind, so that we can change. If this was
like the world of the dead, we could see everything. We could see the
future, the past, we could have complete understanding of our own lives,
of our own mistakes and of our own successes, and then we would not have
the energy of surprise coming at us, and therefore would not be able to
change. And our reason for being would cease to exist. I think this is
one of the deepest fears that we have; it's why the skeptics community
is so extraordinarily irrational about these subjects, when it's
abundantly clear at this point that there is something out there.
There have been scientific studies of different kinds for years that
have been meticulously denied to the point where it is sort of an
insanity, or it would seem to be. But it isn't actually: These people
are guarding the gate for themselves and those who are not finished in
this world and must come back to it, and must change here in this life,
who are struggling to change in this life.
But there's a whole other way of living, a whole other way of viewing
the universe, and that is that once you rise or ascend into a certain
level, no longer do you need the blindness, you need the broader vision.
And this is where the whole species has to go; it's what the birth that
our present life on Earth is all about. What is happening here is the
Earth is becoming pregnant, big with child, fat with human life.
The Earth is a great, pregnant lady and she's going to give birth,
like it or not! Aquarius will pour the water out, and leave the
little fish flopping on the shore. We're the little fish, and we're
going to have to learn how to walk and breathe air, whether we want
to or not. This Age is about breathing a "higher air." We have been
swimming in the water of Pisces for 2000+ years, comfortably cosseted
by the planet on which we live. There are too many of us now, and she's
going to give birth to us. Will it be a living birth or not? This is
why there is so much shrillness in the denial that takes place now,
because those who need blindness in order to change are running out
of time. And even if they will not allow themselves to know it on the
surface, in the spirit they do know it.
Now let's get back to Von Braschler's and my experiences: He did not
perceive his guide in the physical, but people around him did.
My guide appeared so physical, that even as I say this, I am really
unwilling to think of him as anything except as another person.
This is because I'm working on it right now: I'm back in the moment,
I'm remembering the evening. When I step away from this part of my
mind, there will be another place that begins to tell me he wasn't
real. But fortunately I have Anne, and the conversation I had with
her the morning after my encounter with him, telling her to keep me
honest about this. To me, that night, he seemed entirely real.
On page 24 I asked, "Can radiant bodies enter the physical world?"
He answered, "Radiant beings may be born into elemental bodies if
they wish, but these are acts of intention, or it may be requested
that they do it, and they go on ‘life-missions' into the elemental
world. These can be dangerous missions that can cause them to fall
from radiance, but also, that may greatly increase their ecstasy.
So they go on these adventures; it is happening a great deal now,
which is why you have so many glorious children among you.
In addition to entering the physical by means of being born, some
high beings may so perfectly create an image of their physical bodies
that they once possessed, that they can walk the streets." I think
I was face-to-face with one of these, and I think at that moment he
told me what he was.
Then I thought to myself, suddenly, about the strange, confusing
story of the birth of Christ and the so-called "Virgin birth" and
all of the politics that surrounds it, and the idea that it was
something invented later by the Church in order to justify the
deification of Jesus, so I asked him, "Can they have babies?"
thinking of Mary, and what she might really have been.
And he said (interesting response), "This would be an act of God,
but certainly it is possible." Now, that is a very exact description
of what happened to Mary, so Mary, maybe, was one of these beings who
had come on a mission here and was given this child. It made sense,
deep sense, as I was listening to what he said.
I immediately, of course, asked, "Does it account for the birth of Jesus?"
He said, and this is so interesting, "Jesus said that he was the Son of Man.
Take Him at his word. He was God, though, a radiant body fully aware of who
He was, and fully invested in All and Everything. He entered the elemental
body consciously. But I remind you: All are God; all are Christ.
The difference was that He knew it." He knew it. In other words,
He was conscious; He had the consciousness of God. What struck me at that
moment was: 'My goodness! We're not so far away! We're not so far away
from that state!' And I felt to myself, Man is close to God. I didn't
say it; I didn't articulate it, but I remember he smiled at me with the
strangest smile; It was like he had read a signal that had come out of
me, and there was a kind of ferocious love in his face that was almost
too much for me, it was almost more than I could look at. And I looked
away from him, and my mind raced to try to understand something else
to ask that would take me away from this contact, because I had come
to the boundary beyond which I could not go; I had come to the point
of my own evolution where I need to be blind beyond that point,
because if I'm not, I won't be able to make the changes I came here
to make. But this is not the point that the skeptics tell us we
should be at; that point is way, way back down in the depths, as far
as I'm concerned and as far as you're concerned. You would not be
listening to this if you weren't at this point. We're naturally coming
together; nature is bringing us together to share in this. That's why
you're here. Some of you who are maybe laughing at this or taking notes
to make a big joke out of it (there are people doing that, by the way):
fine, then you're not in the place you need to be, but it's helping you,
anyway, as you will find, maybe not in this life but in another.
So I asked him, then, trying to escape from looking down the path that
I had just glimpsed in his eyes, "Was He (meaning Jesus,) a product of
recurrence?"
He did not let me escape. His answer was two simple words that took
me right back to where I had just tried to run away from. He said,
"God Is." And when he said, "God Is", it occurred to me that it's
possible for someone to be in a state where they are not God. I had
already asked him if he was God, and I thought maybe it was God,
even though in retrospect I think to myself, how could God be just
this little guy? But you never know what God's form may take.
We have the wonderful work of Meister Eckhart back in the 14th
century about the forms of God, and we haven't really gone very
much farther from there. We have sort of a shorthand, though,
in the West, that God is sort of an elderly guy. In the East the
shorthand is very different among Hindus or the Muslims. Alla is a
much more unformed kind of imagination, and the Buddhist God is a
very, very highly developed energetic concept with them, and so we
all have different meanings attached to this, or different forms
attached to this possibility of a presence. But what the Master of
the Key was doing was challenging my self-deception, which is to
say that I am not God, that "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,"
Jesus said. And the whole search of every man on this Earth is to
find this within.
I asked him, then, "What of Jesus? What of Buddha?"
And he said, "Those are two different, but intertwined questions:
First, you must understand that the teachings of Buddha had reached
the community of Hellenized Jews in which Jesus lived, so they form
a part of Christianity." Now this was a big revelation to me, and it
turns out that there are scholars who have suggested that Buddhism
had reached Judea by the time that Jesus was born, and that he would
have been indirectly exposed to these ideas. And now he spoke of Jesus
in his human being: "He was a spiritual revolutionary who brought a
message of mercy and compassion and the dignity of man to a world of
unimaginable terror. The Roman rule was blind and brutal and unspeakably
greedy. Ancient knowledge was being murdered by Roman ignorance and Roman
power. This knowledge consisted of how to consciously form a radiant body
so that you would not recur into the physical, so that you would be free.
Christ was here to preserve this knowledge and pass it down, but even his
deposit was corrupted by Roman politicians who transformed his practice
into a religion after he died." (This is, incidentally, on page 25.)
And I thought, 'Oh! He died?' And I immediately, of course, asked,
"There was no Resurrection, then?"
His answer, very unexpected and incredibly revealing of some knowledge
that we all need, and perhaps will not turn away from, was, "No, that's
just the point: There was, but you lost the understanding of it.
The Gospels describe what happened with great fidelity: He was seen.
He did walk after his death; he was not his twin." I asked how. Here is
an answer that has great value for every searcher: "His radiant body was
under his conscious control. He could project an image of his physical
body as he wished. Understand that there are practices of meditation and
concentration also among the dead. When the angels sing, this is what
they are doing, engaging in one of the disciplines of ecstasy." I was
blown away by that statement! It was about life in another level of
being, and not speculative! He was speaking from experience and certain
knowledge. I was face-to-face, I'm quite convinced, with someone who
knew what the ecstasy of heaven is, who lived in it and was living in
it at that moment, presumably, on this extraordinary mission that he
had undertaken. He went on, "By releasing thought, they can themselves
come into superposition where they are not in any one place.
Their consciousness can ride the Infinite." My word, what a place
to surf, the wave of Infinity! "They can see all worlds, then, and
participate in the ecstatic union that fills the universe. God will
share All with all." Now, remember the question was, essentially,
how did Christ arise? What was the Resurrection? And this answer is
not a direct answer to that question; it is, instead, opening of a
window into the world of Heaven, into ecstasy as it is lived, right
now, in the Kingdom. Extraordinary! A window into the Kingdom: Real,
for us to glimpse and see what it means. "God will share All with
all. They can see all worlds, then, and participate in the ecstatic
union that fills the universe." What this means, is to be objective
about the whole universe, to be of it and beside it at the same time.
And you can do this in your own life right now.
I'll show you how: Sense your body, your hands, your feet, legs,
arms, your torso, your head. Sense your body, feel your body.
Concentrate your attention on the way you physically feel, not on
your aches and pains, but on the presence of your body. Now take
your attention out of your mind. Let it go down, down deep into your
body, into your center of gravity just below the navel, the solar
plexus. Go deep in there and stay there. You can have little moments
when your mind will whip you back again into your head. This isn't
about staying there forever, and when we discuss The Path later on,
we'll talk about this. This is about the effort, to return to the
center of gravity again and again and again. Life is not about being
Buddha, life is about being about Buddha, very different thing.
And life is not about becoming Christ. How could we be so arrogant?
Life is about being near Christ in our spirits all the time.
So I return again and again and again to the place of objectivity
and centering, where I look out at the world around me and I see
that I am part of it, but I am also apart from it. There's a kind of
double-arrow of consciousness (that) Gurdjieff or P.D. Ouspensky
describes in his wonderful book In Search of the Miraculous.
You, have, in other words, a larger vision. When the Master of the
Key was speaking of the angels having a larger vision that included
all worlds, it meant that they could experience the same process of
sensation of all of the Universe at once, just as you experienced
sensation of your own little body just a few moments ago, and I did,
but they could sense their body as the whole Universe, and be of it,
and yet at the same time apart from it. This is a much higher level
than you and I are on, but that's what he was talking about.
He was opening a door to the inner nature of higher being for us,
here on this plane, so that we can take these ideas into our minds,
and eventually, also, into the spirit, and increase our own energy
with them.
I asked, "Could Christ appear again?"
His answers were never, never was what I expecting, and this was
no exception. He said, "He has many times, and Buddha. But remember
that He comes as a thief in the little shadows. His radiant body
normally fills the cosmos, as I have explained, but it can be
transformed into a form that is, in every respect, physical in
appearance. The great error of the present is the way your religions
externalize Christ. You are always calling on Christ, but you had
better call on your own heart, for it is in your heart that His
mansion is founded." Now, I have to humbly submit to you that I
think that is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard
said. The awesome beauty, the poetry of "Remember he comes as a
thief in the little shadows." It's a subtle allusion to the souls
of children, incidentally, as well as the small shadows of life
where we don't look. And then this: "You had better call on your
own heart, for it is in your heart that His mansion is founded."
In our heart, where we begin the journey and the search that leads
us to becoming consciously part of God.
I asked about Buddha, and he said, "He opened himself..." (He gave
a very different response to the question about Christ. When I asked
about Christ, he began to describe the inner workings of the world
of the House of God.). He said, "He opened himself to the Radiant
World and gained its teaching, which he transmitted accurately.
But let me rephrase it in the terminology of this more informed Age:"
Now strict Buddhists will probably take as much umbrage as this,
as strict Christians will take about his other statements, but I
don't honestly care. In the next few sentences, he described Buddhism
as a science, and it's going to blow some people away. He said,
"The purpose of meditation is twofold: It is to organize the energetic
body so that it will not lose its integrity after it can no longer
depend upon the structure of the elemental body for its form."
That is very, very important: Meditation is building a structure
that we will take with us out of this life and into death; this is
the whole thrust of my book The Path. This is a very, very important
thing, that when we die, we need to take with us a structure that we
built in life, built with meditation. He continued, "Then, also, and
in an interconnected manner, it is to fill the energetic body with
objective sensation. Objective sensation is consciousness: You are
within life, but not entirely absorbed in life. Part of you observes
yourself from a distance. Remember this: If you do not watch, you do
not see, and what you do not see does not impart any change in the
spin to the electrons that make up the energetic body. The parts of
your life that you do not see are not carried with you into ecstasy,
and it is ecstasy upon which the foundation of the radiant body depends."
So now we begin to understand this statement a little bit. In your heart,
where His mansion is founded, do we feel ecstasy? Yes, of course, in the
heart! And I said, thinking to myself, ‘Boy, you know, I've been a bad
guy sometimes, like you have, and everyone who denies their sins is
denying themselves, and falling in love with your sins is a hard thing
to do, because it has to be tough love, and we don't want to love
ourselves; it's much easier not to, to live in the weight of self,
dislike ourselves is easy. To live in self-love is really very, very
difficult. Anyway, "Parts of my life I would like to forget," I said.
He answered, and I remember what his voice sounded like this (a scolding
tone): "No! All life is potentially ecstatic no matter what suffering or
sin is involved; All life, child." And when he said that word "child,"
I felt a kind of delight come over me, and I remembered, "Be as the
little children." And I thought to myself, with him, I can! I can gain
the enormous benefit suggested by the Gospel; I can at this moment be as
a little child, I have the chance! I felt like a child at that moment;
I was freed, freed to feel like a child. You know each of us has a child
within us. The Poet says, "We come trailing clouds of glory from
we-know-not-where. Ah, but He did come to tell us where."
That's from William Wordsworth, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality
Recollected from Early Childhood," a profound, indeed, and beautiful ode.
Read it sometime. It's in all kinds of poetry books. I don't know if you
ever read poetry, but you should. Poetry, at least some poetry, really
speaks to the heart, it speaks to the heart. And our hearts are so
starved in this world. You turn on the television and it's just all
hate and cruelty, and cruel laughter, God, can we ever get enough of it?
I asked him a question, then, "Why do we have elemental bodies?"
He said, "They are essential to growth. The aim of mankind is to enter
ecstasy, but to do this, you must be at once fully realized. That is,
to carry with you into death all of your potential harvest of experience,
and to be objectively conscious of this experience, not to be rated with
recriminations and regrets." And I thought to myself, then, of what I
consider to be my sins and the things that I've done wrong: Some of
them are very subtle. For example: I think that in my writing of
Communion, I denied the benefit of that book, of the tremendous energy
of that book, to a lot of people because I was too taken up by the
romance of the alien. I should have been more rigorously objective
in the book, because the whole book implies I think that it's alien
contact, when in fact I did not think that; I was just so entranced
by the idea. I really genuinely did not know what had happened to me.
I think if I would have been more objective, I would have sold fewer
books, probably. People were also captivated by the romance of the
alien, just like I was, but the book might have opened up more
completely to a lot more souls. Other people tell me, "No, no,
it was done exactly right." I've no idea. But anyway, that's one
of my regrets. I asked this, "How can we ever be free of regret?"
He said, "If we have heard others in life, as we all have, then how
can we ever be free?" And he said, "God forgives. But this does not
mean that you should pray for forgiveness from some old gray-beard
in the sky; You must find who within you bears you forgiveness.
An energetic body that bears such regrets bears them as areas of darkness,
and if that body manifests its memory of its elemental self, the
manifestation bears sores." He was talking about how the dead look to
themselves and each other... "There are areas of darkness in those
glowing auras." Sometimes, actually, there are photographs that show that,
and those areas of darkness are the weight of regrets literally slowing
the dance of the spirit down, letting this all fall away. You know, the
Church's idea of forgiveness has been so desperately perverted recently,
but it is still powerful. That there is forgiveness, that forgiveness is
not an act but a state of being. A person can be in a state of forgiveness
so complete that he forgives his murderer as the bullet passes through
his body: There is where you want to be; that's true humanity.
And you think, oh no! I have a right to punish and I have a right to be
angry, etc., etc., etc., and I say only this: The dark part of the soul
is the dark part of the soul; that's objective reality. I guess it's
never been more true that we have to lighten up. We live in a punitive
culture of punishment. Punish the offender! Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt!
Recently I was thinking about the war in Baghdad and wondering about
the morality of the peace movement that had been so completely uncritical
of Saddam Hussein before the war. Normally I would have been very much a
part of any peace movement, but in this case I just couldn't. I couldn't
reconcile what is inside me that seeks for peace with the choice of
letting that man continue to torture those people, or else going to war
against him. Then I saw in the New York Times a photograph of a prison
execution chamber. But they didn't say much about it. It was just a big
room with a rope hanging down, and the rope was looped; it was a place of
hanging. And I realized that the rope had been padded and made thicker at
the end so that the person's neck would not break, but rather, that they
would die in an agony of slow strangulation. They had worked to make it
that way. And I thought to myself then, ‘How can I personally forgive
people who did that to other people, willingly did that to others?'
Letting go of the world around us is an act of great mastery, my friend.
And, I asked him, "What is the reason for recurrence? Returning to
this life?"
He said, "To row the boat of being toward ecstasy." Oh, this guy knew
how to talk! I have to tell you I was awfully lucky that night!
During my close encounter experience in 1985, the lady visitor there
said to me, "You are the luckiest of the lucky." And I have to tell
you, I honestly believe it's true, that somehow or another I won some
kind of great, huge cosmic lottery. To be with somebody who could say
that: "To row the boat of being toward ecstasy." I feel ecstatic again
after the weight of seeing that hangman's noose. I suddenly find myself
detaching from the weight of the world just because of that sentence.
It's hard to row a boat; it's terribly difficult, and not only that,
you can't really see where you're going. Remember, when you're rowing
a boat, you have to trust yourself in a way that we usually don't trust
ourselves, because you're not looking in the direction that you're
going; you're looking back into life. We're heading outward we know not
where, toward ecstasy, in the boat of being: Your little boat, my little
boat, all of our little boats, heading out. Then he said, "You must live
many times in order to build up a radiant body that is complete. To be
born into this world takes but an hour, but to be born into the next
takes many lifetimes." And somehow that had the ring of truth for me;
it had a certain quality of the balance and order of nature in it.
Because remember, when we're talking about these higher levels of
being, we're not talking about the supernatural, we're talking about
another part of nature that ultimately, to those who understand it,
is as prosaic as the sidewalk in front of your house or the tree under
which you sit, or your car, wherever you happen to be; it's that
prosaic to them.
And then he said, "Unless you follow your own real path, then you
can do it more quickly. Remember this: Path within, signposts without."
That is a big statement, because if you're on a fast track to ecstasy,
you're following your own real, actual path. He says you can do all of
this more quickly. And then, "Path within, signposts without."
We're always looking outside of ourselves for the path, but this is
why the Taoists call it "the pathless path," because it isn't really
there. It's not out there, it's within us. Our path is where life
takes us. I find people who are on real paths all the time and bring
them on the radio program, and some of these people are very humble
people, They're not great, exalted celebrities, most of them, but most
of these people are on real paths because, believe me, I can tell:
I know what a real path is. That's probably why I was knocked off the
air and ended up just on the internet. But it's very much alive because
people hunger for this. They know very well that a lot of these guests
are real, like Von Braschler. The guy is a real searcher; he's the
genuine article. He's not lying.
So now I asked, "What is/are the signposts?"
He said, "You find your own, in life, in love, in religion,
but understand this: The teachings of Buddha, Christ and Mohammed
are interlinked; they are one system in three, not three separate
religions. This has been hidden from you for a long time."
I said, "Three in one? A Triad?"
"A Triad. Christianity is the active side of the Triad, Islam the passive,
Buddhism, the reconciling. Christianity seeks God, Islam surrenders to
God, Buddhism finds God. When you see these as three separate systems,
you miss the great teaching of which each contains but a part.
Seek the Kingdom as a Christian, give yourself to God as a Muslim,
find your new companion in the dynamic silence of Buddhist meditation."
Incidentally, we're stopping in the middle of page 27. When I asked,
"What are the signposts?" he proceeded to give us the best signposts
I think anybody has ever given anybody for the journey on this path
towards ecstasy. He went into a much larger scale and restated the
nature of these three great religions in a way that is mind-bending,
and so far beyond where we are now, with Christians going around saying,
"Only us," and Muslims saying, "If you don't do it our way, we have the
right to kill you," and Buddhists ignoring the rest of them completely.
It's amazing what he said: A Triad. Buckminster Fuller called the triad
the building block of the Universe. Gurdjieff makes a great deal of
triads: Triads are, in inner work, terribly important, because
objectivity comes from a triad and so does energy, the positive,
the negative, and the reconciling. Remember earlier, when we were
talking about meditation, taking the attention down into the solar
plexus? That's the positive act. Negative, it comes back up again
into the head. Reconciling is the process of taking it back down
again. Normally we're blind to that third force, the reconciling
force; it's very hard to see it in life; it takes years of work to
actually see the third force in operation around you. As you get
more objective about your life, though, you begin to see "third force"
more clearly, that strange process of balancing upon which growth is
founded. Ultimately where is it? Well, it's between the head and the
solar plexus: The heart, of course! The heart, the emotional body,
is the source of third force.
Oh, what a journey life's journey is! We've come to the end of our
time together again, and I hope that you take as much from this as
I'm taking from doing it; it is such a journey into consciousness
to do these pieces on The Key. Thank you for being subscribers to
my website and keeping us alive and keeping it all going.
This is Whitley Strieber. Next time we will go deeper into the
Master of the Key and what he said about religion and other
things as well.