The Key, Part IV
Copyright © 2003 Unknowncountry.com
This is Whitley Strieber with The Key, Part Four. I'll be talking
about The Key and the words of the Master of the Key and what
passed through my mind as I listened to this extraordinary being
talking on that night in June of 1998. Last time we left off at
page 26 of the book. We were talking about a wonderful statement
that he made that the reason for living was "to row the boat of
being toward ecstasy." 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."
I think that this man, if he was a man, was truly a Master.
I think he was a Master on the level of the Buddha and the other
great Masters that we have known in our world. He came only for
a few minutes to a little man in a hotel room who was so confused
by the situation that initially I thought I was dealing with a
room-service waiter. But nevertheless, what was said to me on that
night is the most valuable thing that I have, and the most valuable
thing that I have the privilege to give, so I'm so glad that so
many of you are listening to this. It means a great deal to me
because this book means a great deal to me. If I have done anything
in this life at all that's worth doing, it is the creation of
The Key, and this is my great work; this is probably why I was born.
Perhaps between the lives, I had made kind of a compact that I would
do this, that I would find a way to listen to this man.
We were talking, he and I, during this period in the book, about
ecstasy and life and death, and very profound questions. And there
is a section on pages 28 and 29 about the journey of the self
toward God. I remember very well the feeling that I had as this
was being talked about: it was one of hunger because of the speed
with which he was speaking. I would ask a question like, "Why don't
we surrender?" and the answer would come almost immediately.
He didn't have to think about it, he didn't say "Uh," he didn't
pause, he didn't consider, or anything like that; he spoke immediately.
He said to me, "No, please listen: God is not this self of yours,
which your Western culture imagines, God is all-being. To surrender to
God is to make your energetic body transparent so that the light of
God shines through you." It's an amazing statement, because if you go
back into Christian literature, you find only really two places where
this idea is espoused: one is, of course, in the Gospels, in the words
of Jesus. The other is in the words of Meister Eckhart, the 14th
century seer, and, I believe, the greatest of all of the Church
teachers, a man who was called, in this day, a man who knew God, and
he truly did. And he said, "We, the Soul, must be as a clear glass
through which the light of God may shine." This is, of course, a
deeply Buddhist idea, as well. "The self," he went on, "that so
fascinates the West is only your brain-filtered concept of you as
you appear to yourself in this life." And I remember I thought to
myself when he said that, 'I am my name, I am Whitley. This is me.'
And you're John or Frank or Mary or Annie: this is you. But it isn't!
You didn't have a name when you were born, not that name. Some of us
look for our "essence names, and we think, maybe my essence name is
Soultech or something, but it's all in the imagination.
When after I had the close-encounter experience, when I was traveling
around talking about it, people were asking me constantly, "What were
their names?" The name, the name, everyone wants the name. We all want
to know "the name," we identify with the name. But he's saying, let
that go. He's giving us one of the secrets of surrender. True surrender
to higher being is to go beyond your own name. He speaks of this
filtered concept of the self that is Whitley or Anne or whomever you
happen to be or to call yourself, to have been called. He says, "It is
very small. It doesn't include any of the experience you have amassed
in other lives. Many human beings at this point in history are immense,
but your concept of self is constricted; it relates only to this one
life. It is tiny. The god within you is unimaginably vast, and Jesus
said it, he said it perfectly, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.'
And yet the Church fathers politically were interested in capturing
people, to make themselves powerful. So they said, 'The Kingdom of God
is outside of you, "upstairs" somewhere, and you have to earn it by
doing what we say.' It isn't true; you have to earn it by finding
yourself inside you."
I began to think as he was talking about my name, Whitley, and he knew
what I was thinking, you could see it, because he reacted. He was as
aware of my thoughts as I was aware of my own thoughts, but in such a
very gentle way that I didn't feel at all invaded, and felt, in fact,
that the connection between us at that point was one of the most
intimate and beautiful experiences of my life. I remember it now in
two ways: One, I feel it as if it was still there, like it never ended.
And, two, I remember it so fondly, like one of the most beautiful
moments of childhood when you've just gotten out of school for the
summer and it's a bright, sunny day, and you're walking in the sunshine
in your yard and realizing that you have a whole summer ahead of you
with no more homework and no more getting up early for classes, just
the wonderful, ecstatic freedom of being a child. "Be as little
children," Jesus said. He made me feel that at that moment.
And the key to finding your real self and what is really within you
and your memories of your past lives is becoming as a little child.
"We come trailing clouds of glory from we know not where," the poet
Wordsworth said, as I think I mentioned this in one of the other
segments on The Key, but it's an incredibly beautiful and poignant
statement, isn't it? Well, I gave up my name that night: I became
not a name, I became something else, something very much alive, as
if my childhood had suddenly looked up and seen the mysterious shadow
of the adult that I would become, and said, "No, no, why should I bother
with that? I've done that before; I will return to and stay in childhood."
And for a little while, I forgot my own name.
Whether I've had contact with aliens or not, I don't know. I get so
darn tired of people saying, "Who were they? Where were they from?
What were their names?" and trying to drag this thing down from the
level where it belongs and where we must deal with it if we're going
to experience any kind of real relationship with it, into another
lower level, the level in which the New York Times and the Post are
printed, and the level of the hamburger stand and whatnot that we live
in every day. It just isn't enough, this level is too small. It's not
wrong, just too small. And it's just like your name: When you identify
yourself by your name, it's actually too small for most human beings
now, because most of us, as he says, are immense; we've been here and
done this many times. We're huge. These names have become a hindrance
to us. Try stepping outside of your name, stepping outside of Andrew
or Mary or Fred.
One of the interesting exercises you can try is to sit quietly somewhere,
preferably without anybody around or at least anybody who doesn't
understand what you're doing, and start repeating your name out loud.
"John, John, John, (etc.)" Don't do it for one minute, or two minutes;
do it for ten minutes. Really do it. You'll find out when you stop that
your name, briefly, will no longer be a part of you--you will have the
taste of being separated from your name. When you are separated from your
name, you begin to find that your memory is a continuum; it doesn't end in
your childhood, it goes on and it has periods where it's very narrowly
defined and then very much larger periods. Then you realize you’re looking
back across thousands of years. You know that I ultimately looked back
almost to the beginning of this species. I don't know anymore whether or
not any of us were ever created. I don't know if, when we speak to one
another, we're speaking to God, but I do know this: that elegant and
extraordinary question, "Who am I?" has come alive in me and it can become
alive in you, too, through the help of the Master of the Key. He was a
master of these immense subtleties. There's nothing in this book that says
what I just said, but it's all under the surface: the chance to find your
true self, who you truly are. "The New Man," he says, "will live in
ecstasy even though He lives in chains."
And you know, Art and I wrote Superstorm based on something that
the Master of the Key said that's in this book. He was frank about
where we we're going to go in our world, and we're going to have a
rougher and rougher time. Right now we're in the process of
discovering that a lot of the water in the United States that we
drink every day is much more polluted than we thought, with
pollutants that weren't considered pollutants, or weren't even
known, when they first started testing water. All over the country,
outmoded water testing is being used to deceive us into thinking
that our water is clean, and the cancer rates are rising.
That’s just one of a million different things that are going wrong.
The extinction rate on Earth now is as fast as it was during the
time the dinosaurs became extinct. These enormous events are part
of life. We all say, "Oh God, we're causing the extinction."
Well, to an extent, that's true, but we have to remember something:
The extinction event taking place now didn't start 50 years ago or
100 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago, it started 2.8 million years
ago when Central America rose up out of the ocean and changed the
way the climate works, causing it to fluctuate into a series of ice
ages punctuated by periods, like we're in now, where it's warm and
pleasant, and then more 100,000 years of ice. There's an extinction
event and we're in it. We are no more to the Earth than a tiny spark
is to a huge electrical power plant. All of human time, from the
first man who ever looked up at the sky to now and into the time when
our species is concluded (and it will happen, it happens to every
species)--all of that is less than the time that it takes our old
Earth to blink its eyes, so remember this. We need to look upon our
selves in a much larger scale in order to contain the illusion of
importance that the Western world gives us. We're all so darn
important--but we're not! And that's okay; there's nothing wrong
with being a small, unimportant part of the Universe, because
remember, the Universe is holographic in nature; every small part
contains the whole. This is one of the central realities of the
Master of the Key. So even though we live in chains, we will also
live in ecstasy, because we will no longer have to suffer the filter
of the self. We will no longer live in the self; the self will be
merely another tool by which we address the world around us.
I asked him, then, "Define ecstasy." One of the longest answers in
the book came from this, and I think, one of the most amazing,
because this man knew what the nature of the soul actually is and
what it's like to be dead; he knew this as well as I know the back
of my own hand. I will read you his answer: "The energetic body has
a spin or vibration. This can go infinitely fast; it can reach
beyond the speed of light and exit time altogether. When this happens,
the body begins to radiate of its own accord; it becomes at once God
and co-creative with God, a companion." We've talked about this before
and he repeats it a number of times: The motive of God is for us to
become, to realize that we are a part of God, but also to be a
separateness. This is why we live these isolated lives, to gain
separate experience and build a separate reality, to become separate
so that we can become companions of God. "A single bit of God, which
you are, does not only join the whole like a crumb in a cake, it can
obtain so much ecstasy that it becomes the whole." This is another
way of saying it's holographic. We can contain, each one of us, all
of the ecstasy of God, and this is why Jesus said that the kingdom of
heaven is within us and that now, not tomorrow, not after death, but
today, right now, the destiny for each of you is to become all of God.
"But this process is slowed by contact with the points of attachment,
and there are trillions and trillions of them between energetic and
elemental bodies. So detachment, as Buddha said, is essential to
ecstasy. The proper use of meditation will enable you to see life as
both an outsider and as a participant."
I want to interrupt his statement for a moment to say that one of
the things I've been doing recently in preparation for this
experiment in contact that we're going to be engaging in later in
this summer, is looking for very extraordinary and special
meditations. I found two, and I've had shows with both of these
people: One is a guy who calls himself Hypnotica. He's actually a
very nice guy and his CD is called Sphinx of the Imagination, and
what it does, using a kind of aural trickery, is it frees your
imagination in a way that I don't think anything else I've ever heard
does; it's really neat in that respect. The other is probably the most
profound meditation that I have known to have been created in modern
times by anybody, which is Wayne Dyers' meditation, Getting In the Gap.
During July and August, we will be trying to come into contact.
Now there will be idiots out there saying, "Oh well, August the 24th
is the big day, and I'm going to go out there and sit in the backyard
with a can of beer and wait for the visitors to show up" and they're
going to take it to as low a level as they can, but the fact of the
matter is, I'd be very darned surprised if they showed up in the sky
in great numbers. I mean, they will because of the Mars opposition,
but I don't think it's going to change the world, but it might change
you, because you might really come into contact with a very powerful
and potent level of being that does exist, that is not evil, and that
does want you to join. The Master of the Key is a representative; he's
the ambassador. He is here to tell you
nd let you know what you can
expect at this level of being, what is there for you. I repeat again,
it is not demonic, it is not evil, you can join it safely. I mean,
I did years ago and I'm alive, I'm free, I'm not under mind control,
I'm not dead or destroyed in any way; I'm in great shape.
So "Detachment," he went on, "as Buddha said, is essential to ecstasy.
The proper use of meditation will enable you to see life both as an
outsider and as a participant. The outsider notices the glimmer of
sunlight upon the spoon, the sensation of the food in the mouth,
for he is using life to gain impressions. The participant only eats.
So, also, the outsider sees the packed bodies around him, he smells
the sweat and the urine, he hears the soft clatter of the crystals
with absolute objective calm, and inhales the searing torment of the
gas without being in any way identified with the injustice or the
cruelty or the terror all around him, but the participant screams;
it suffers the agony of the elemental body, and knows the greatest
terror man has ever known, which was experienced in the dark gas
chambers of a Holocaust." So we start with a definition of ecstasy,
swooping through the heights of Being, then suddenly he takes us down
into this dark and terrible energy with which he also began our
discussion, by saying that the Holocaust had caused Mankind to become
trapped on Earth, the reason being that the child who would have grown
up to solve the riddle of gravity was gassed, instead, with his parents.
This meant that Mankind, because we as a species allowed that to happen,
are now trapped on the Earth at a time when Earth is going to become
unable to support us. And so, instead of beating our breasts and saying,
"It's our fault," maybe it's better to say, "It's our design" or
"our fate" that we're here doing this. I didn't cause the Holocaust,
you didn't cause the Holocaust. The people who did it are long dead,
although I'm sure some of them have recurred into the current life,
but we have to live with the consequences because we're all in this
together. You may resent this, I resent it deeply, I'm very disturbed
about it.
I had a guy on our show called who wrote the book called Hitler's
Flying Saucers, which was an extraordinary book. He showed that the
Nazis gained access and understanding of this technology! They
understood gravity. But whoever it was who understood gravity never
came back, unless, of course, they showed up in the Betty and
Barney Hill case. Betty Hill remembered Nazis standing in the window
of the spacecraft that was coming to get them, so who knows what
really went on, maybe the Nazis did invent something that enabled
them to travel outside of the limits of the Earth and were intercepted
by somebody who said, essentially, "No way, you're not getting any
farther than this, because you're not ready for this, and you're not
ready to get out either." Well, you're ready to get out, I'm ready to
get out, so let's look at it this way: We old souls are here trying
to help others get out, so we can get out ourselves, let's hope.
I asked him frankly, after he mentioned the Holocaust,
"Are you dead?" He said yes. I asked him that because he seemed to me
like a person who knew death, who knew the life beyond. I then asked
him, "Did you die as a Jew in the camps?" And he said, "I died with
each of them and all of them. When you kill a being, you kill all
beings. I die a million times a day; I am dying now, being murdered,
being starved, devoured by bacteria, crushed, burned, shot, cut,
slaughtered. But I'm also being born, awakening into new life, playing
in grass, discovering the hidden truths of nature, enjoying the sunshine,
reading, eating, engaging in every sexual delight known, all now, all
here, always." Then something happened between us that I will never
forget as long as I live: I asked him, "Are you in ecstasy?"
And he simply stared at me and I realized that ecstasy is not happiness,
ecstasy is knowing. Ecstasy is what occurs when you're no longer
filtered from anything, and in that moment, his ecstasy filled me and
I felt it. I felt the sense of vastness that I can only describe it as
the soul's own glory. The look in that man's face was the most profound,
powerful, spirit-shattering and spirit-enriching thing that I think
I have known. This was the peak night of my life--the night when the
most important things that would ever to happen to me were happening.
You talk about contact, I was having contact that night, face-to-face
contact and the reward of a long conversation that I can now share with
you, thank God. Contact, long conversation, a moment of profound
ecstasy, the discovery that ecstasy contains both the dark and the
light and fills it all with compassion, the knowledge that the love
of God contains everybody and everything, including even Satan, and
no matter how hard the dark may run from the light, it always remains
visible because the light is there.
I said, "Then you are still here: A dead man walking among the
living. You didn't leave when you ascended?" I was trying to
catch him out.
"All leave," he said, "Nobody leaves. Ascension is not a matter
of flying off to some place in the sky, it is a matter of expanding
the being to fill the Universe. You may ascend beyond time and
infinity, but you will still be here as we all are." "We," he said,
and I noticed that word, because it meant there were more than one
of him. He may, indeed, just be an ordinary human being living right
now in Toronto (which is where this event occurred), who has entered
the kingdom of heaven. I remembered when I was a boy, about the
dances. If you ever read the little book The Secret School, you'll
read about the dances that I danced when I was a little boy in these
meetings with the Visitors, that happened partly in this world and
partly in a child's imagination and partly in my current imagination.
But nevertheless, the dancing was the dance of ecstasy; the dancing
was the dance that enables us to be in ourselves and also to fill
the whole Universe.
I asked him, "Where is here?"
"Everywhere", he said, and I said, "Oh, I'm lost." And he said,
"All physical being contains the same elements and thus all are
part of the Earth and of each other. Living bodies are the
consciousness of the Planet; Man is Earth's mind. If Man kills
Earth, then Earth has committed suicide, because its mind could
not reach the next level, which is ecstatic union with the rest
of the Universe." And this is why I recently put up a Journal
entry about the possibility of coming into contact later on this
summer because of the fact that the Mars opposition is coming.
As Jacques Vallee pointed out some years ago, Mars oppositions
result in an increased amount of UFO activity on the Earth,
so I'm going to try a group communications effort. And I got a
letter from a guy saying, "On August the 24th, I am going to go
out into my backyard and get a beer and drink that beer and watch
Whitley Strieber burn down." And I thought, 'Boy, you get a hook
and you toss that hook way, way, way up and you reel in an angel
and suddenly there's this poor guy, me, standing there in front
of you, saying, "It's not about August the 24th, and it's not
about aliens landing and getting out of their spaceships and
handing the President maps of starship plans, for crying out
loud. I'm talking about You, your spirit, your spirit coming
into contact." Listen to Lisette Larkins. Lisette did it, and
she knows how to do it. She's got a little book out; it's a
humble little book, just like most of the things we have on
this show. Some of our guests are great celebrities, but most
of them are not, but they're just real people on real paths doing
real things, real spirit work. She's got this book, Calling On
Extraterrestrials, and it tells some real information about how
to have contact with whoever's out there, or in here.
Extraterrestrials or not, I still don't know, personally.
I think it's everybody; I think it's the dead, the living,
extraterrestrials, God... It's just that everybody's out there
yelling at us, "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" How do you wake up?
Well, start by forgetting your own name. Forget your name, you
don't have a name. Right now, together, you and me, we're putting
our names in a box. We're going to close the box, and we're burying
the box. Ah, at last! It's ecstatic, isn't it, not to have a name?
We've talked about the hologram, and God being the hologram, and I
was beginning to wonder about our leaving the Earth, because I've
seen the essential and profound failure of NASA: We didn't get to
Mars. You know, Brian O' Leary, that now elderly gentleman, was
the Mars astronaut. He was supposed to go to Mars, and he didn't,
did he? We're not even close to Mars, and we're not on the Moon
anymore. We have been pushed back to the immediate proximity of
this planet, and I don't think it was an accident. It's perfectly
possible that some of us will be ready and able to come and go in
the midnight without the others knowing, and I have a feeling those
people are already around, and maybe the Master of the Key is one of
them. Maybe he travels the stars and goes to schools on higher worlds,
who knows, and then comes back here. I said to him, " I feel like a
little fragment. I don't even know if I have a soul and I certainly
don't feel like part of God." "This is a fallen world", he replied,
"and you are an imperfect being."
We had a poll up and discovered that the great majority of you believe
there was a higher civilization in the past before Egypt, despite all
of the evidence to the contrary. I believe it, too: I think this is a
fallen world, and in that world, we had a much more correct idea of
the nature of things than we do now. "The essence of your imperfection,"
he went on, "is that you cannot see yourself as you are. Many lives
must be lived before this will change. Mankind is a community of about
ten billion fragments and each must become transparent to the light of
God before we, as a species, can journey on." He speaks of ten billion
fragments, but there are only six billion people on the Earth, so that
presumably means that there are four billion people outside of the
Earth who have lived on it before. It's just a small statistic, but
quite interesting. "Earlier," I said, "you seemed to imply" (I picked
up on this "we" in reference to the human species immediately, because
I really wanted to know who this guy was--it very much in my mind
throughout the whole conversation), "you were an alien, then God;
now you're human. What are you?"
He answered, helpfully, "Whatever you say."
"A useful thing to be", I said. "How many human beings from Earth
have become radiant bodies?"
Now here's an answer that made me drop my teeth: He said, "About half."
I said, "Half? I thought it would be 50 or 100 at most!" Here came an
answer that I will never forget: "Humanity is a tremendous engine of
the Sacred, but among the living there are only as many such beings
present as absolutely essential for the welfare of others." In other
words, very few of the ascended come among the living, presumably so
that their help will not destroy our chance to make our own honest and
completely independent effort. Like the moment I gazed into his eyes,
their mere presence is helpful in ways that could be a problem for
people who are not close enough to this process of change and becoming
an ecstatic being. They would be harmed by it, it would be made to easy
for them and therefore they would never make their own mistakes and never,
therefore, gain the amount of inner understanding that we've come here to
find.
"How can we tell", I asked him, "who's ascended and who's not?"
He answered, "The meek shall inherit the Earth: Understand this
and you will find them by what is in their hearts."
I asked him, therefore, "Who are the meek?"
"Those who are humble enough in self-will to surrender to Higher Will."
This gets back to the theme of this talk, the theme of name, of getting
past our names. Names are actually a huge obstacle for all of us; our names
define us. We must change that and define our names. How do we get past
name? How can I live without feeling the presence of Whitley, of being
Whitley? Of course, one thing that happens when we try to remember who we
really are, is that other names, like Bamboo Shoot, come into our heads.
Don't let your imagination do this. Be better than that, be stronger.
Let your name go and let all names and sense of self and all of that go
with it; let it all go. Whitley, Whitley, Whitley, (etc.)... Let it go.
Then suddenly it's me as I really am, talking to you, as you really are.
The two of us both notice the same thing at the same time: We are not
alone, you are in the room with me, I'm in the room with you, right now.
Even though there are dozens of you and one of me, we discover that it
doesn't matter, that we are all alone and yet all together at the same
time, and not only that, the Master of the Key is here, right now, alive,
in your room with you, in my room with me, in my mind, in your mind, with
us, aware of us, knowledgeable about us, laughing a little, smiling.
But it's a serious smile: The Master of the Key's smile is infinitely
careful and infinitely possessive. It is the smile of God.
When we get resume, we're going to be talking about our role
in the Universe, because the Master talked about there being
another world that needs us to help it evolve. And it was
fantastic to hear that, because, of course, somebody is here
helping us evolve, and their growth depends on our growth,
just as our growth depends on the growth of this other world.
There will come a time when those of you listening to this now,
if Mankind survives and we don't break the chain, will go to
this other world and begin to do for other spirits what the
Visitors are doing here for us now. Can you imagine that this
is partly your fate, that part of the reason that you're
listening to this and in this school today is because you
have been chosen to do that in 500 years or 5000 or
10,000 years--whenever it is? That you will walk on the
surface of another planet fully knowledgeable about what
the Visitors did here and doing the same thing there?
It's interesting, isn't it?
Who are you?