The Key

by Whitley Strieber

  There was no resurrection, then?

  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. It was not his twin.

  How?

  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. By releasing thought, they can themselves come into superposition, where they are not in any one place. Their consciousness can ride the infinite. They can see all worlds then, and participate in the ecstatic union that fills the universe. God will share all with all.

  Could Christ appear again?

  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.

  And Buddha?

  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: 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. 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 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 formation of the radiant body depends.

  There are parts of my life that I would like to forget.

  No. All life is potentially ecstatic, no matter what suffering or sin is involved. All life, child.

  Why do we have elemental bodies?

  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 weighted with recriminations and regrets.

  If we have hurt others in life, as we all have, then how can we ever be free of regret?

  God forgives. But this does not mean that you should pray for forgiveness from some old graybeard 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.

  And we live again and again—why? What is the reason for recurrence?

  To row the boat of being toward ecstasy. 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. Unless you follow your own real path, then you can do it more quickly. Remember this—path within, signposts without.

  What are the signposts?

  You find your own, in life, in love, in religion. But understand this: the teachings of Buddha, Christ and Muhammad are interlinked. They are one system in three, not three separate religions. This has been hidden from you for a long time.

  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.

  Then a true seeker seeks in all faiths?

  These three masters created one system. But there are many systems that have evolved in other ways, that have grown rather than been created.

  Hinduism, for example?

  The gods of the Hindus are the structures of personality purified into their essential meaning. Hinduism is the path of soul-knowledge, for knowledge of the gods is knowledge of the soul. The great systems of self-knowledge were the Egyptian religion and Hinduism. No amount of scientific knowledge of the “unconscious” will provide as much food for the energetic body as true relationship with the Hindu gods.

  Who were Muhammad and Buddha?

  Exactly who history portrays them to have been. But to understand what happened to them, you must understand that your entire pantheon of deities is you. God is you. The gods are you. Angels and demons are you. So it was mankind who spoke to Muhammad in his cave. So also, to Buddha under the Bhodi Tree, and to Christ in the desert. Who do you think showed him the cities of the plain? Satan is man, just as God is man. Satan seeks, God waits. But you do not surrender. Not even Muslims. Although the great Sufis have, some of them, somewhat, surrendered to God. As long as you defy God by self-will, Satan finds you and captures you.

  Why don’t we surrender?

  Self-will, the illusion that you can act and must act on your own behalf, prevents you from entering the will of God. And the God of which I speak is not a distant being off in some heaven. You yourself are the distant being you seek.

  But if the self is God—

  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. This “self” that so fascinates the west is only your brain-filtered concept of you as you appear to yourself in this life. It is very small. It does not 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.

  You speak of a journey toward self-perfection. But isn’t perfection impossible for us to achieve?

  You can become perfect. Buddha did. Muhammad did. Christ did. Many have, hidden to history, done the same. You may find Buddha sleeping on a park bench, Muhammad pumping gasoline, Christ starving in the backstreet.

  But if Christ was God, and God is perfect, why would he need to become perfect?

  Christ was not perfect or he would not have been human. His humanity asked that the cup be taken from him, his divinity died a conscious death. But you must understand that his imperfect humanity and his perfect divinity were the same thing. That seems irreconcilable, but it isn’t, because even when Christ suffered, he was in ecstasy. I am here to get you to recognize yourself as divine—that is to say, as a participant in ecstasy even during elemental life. The new man will live in ecstasy, even though he lives in chains.

  Define ecstasy.

  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. A single bit of God, which you are, does not only join the whole like a crumb in a cake, it can attain so much of ecstasy that it becomes the whole. Your destiny, 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 the energetic and elemental bodies. So detachment, as Buddha said, is essential to ecstasy. The proper use of meditation is to enable you to see life as both an outsider and 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 the Holocaust.

  Are you dead?

  Yes.

  And did you die a Jew in the camps?

  I died with each of them and all of them. When you kill a being, you kill all being. 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 am 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.

  And you are in ecstasy?

  (He only gazed at me in answer.)

  Then you are still here, a dead man among the living. You didn’t leave when you ascended?

  All leave, 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.

  Where is here?

  Everywhere.

  Ah. I’m lost.

  All being includes all elements of the earth, and thus all are part of all bodies. We are the consciousness of the planetary level that it has spent all of its life evolving, each and all of us. My being is the awakening earth. As is yours. The destiny of earth and the destiny of man are one. If we kill earth, we kill ourselves. If we die before our time, then we will not be able to enter ecstasy as a whole being. You are not a whole being, child. And “Whitley” is only a tiny part of you. All mankind in all time is a whole being.

  If we kill earth before we have all reached ecstasy, what happens? We wait until and if the earth spins elemental bodies once again that fit all the attachments of our energetic bodies. If it does not, then we wait forever. We remain incomplete.

  What would this waiting be like?

  Energetic bodies hunger to be radiant. They taste of ecstasy and want desperately to find their way to the completion of joy. But energetic bodies need return to time to reconstruct what of themselves impedes their ecstasy. If they cannot, they must suffer the anguish of regret and the pain of being able to see, but not enter, joy. When you taste of ecstasy, your hunger for more is appalling. It is appalling. It has driven me to wander the world, to construct this shell of flesh, to seek you out and come to you with my message, to serve you, little child, as my master.

  What if earth never “spins” these new bodies?

  We will join others in the same state. There are many.

  We would be a species in hell, in effect?

  We would be constantly aware that we had missed ecstasy. This pain I suffer now would last forever.

  So the eternal joy of humankind depends upon the health of the earth?

  Completely.

  We think of ourselves as individuals. My sins are my own. My neighbor’s sins are his problem.

  Every joy, every sorrow, every good, every evil belongs to all. All are responsible for all. All are dependent upon all. Humanity is one.

  But not all intelligent life. We are one species, but are there not others?

  God is one. Ultimately, all being seeks to join all ecstasy. It is the destiny of every stone, every star, every intelligent creature and simple creature, to become the word. And the word, then, will be made flesh.

  I don’t understand. Hasn’t that already happened?

  It is always happening. But there will come a time when the stars themselves fall. The universe is breathing, expanding and contracting. It has happened many times before. Eventually, it will all contract to something no bigger than a baseball. Then it will explode again, journeying once more through the vastness. Each time it dies, though, it is reborn at a new and higher intensity. Eventually, there will come a moment when its rebirth is so energetic that the velocity of the “big bang” will exceed the speed of light. At that instant, the material world will, itself, go beyond time. Then the prophecy will be fulfilled,

  “I am.”

  And we are all part of God?

  We are not part of God, we are God.

  And all other species, what of them?

  The tree, the worm, the wolf. All are God.

  Worms are eternal beings?

  Even the smallest spark unto itself is great.

  Then the fly and the rat are ascended beings?

  They cannot change. You can change. Look to your own soul.

  God, then, is in the fragments?

  God is like a hologram. The whole is fully present in every fragment, no matter how small.

  So the whole of God is in the tip of my finger?

  The whole of God is in a grain of sand. In a single electron. A quark.

  I had not thought of God as a hologram before.

  Infinite consciousness is in everything. In your pajama. In my sweater. All knowledge is present in every cell, every spark of fire, bit of trash.

  That’s—it’s appalling.

  The universe is the flesh of God.

  But I have no access to the whole. 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 and you are an imperfect being.

  The essence of your imperfection is that you cannot see yourself as you are. Many lives must live 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.

  Earlier you seemed to imply that you were an alien. Then God. Now you’re human. What are you?

  Whatever you say.

  A useful thing to be. How many human beings from earth have become radiant bodies?

  About half.

  Half! I thought it would be fifty or a hundred at most. 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 the others.

  How can we tell who’s ascended and who isn’t?

  The meek shall inherit the earth. Understand this, and you will find them by what is in their hearts.

  Who are the meek?

  Those who are humble enough in self-will to surrender to higher will.

  How can we tell if we are surrendered to higher will?

  Go to the children. They will tell you with their eyes what you are.

  Could we ever be rescued, if we destroy the earth before we were finished perfecting ourselves?

  Nobody can change except inside the stream of time. Outside of it nothing changes. Nothing can. We enter the time stream by inserting our energetic bodies into elemental bodies on this planet of which we were born.

  What about going to another planet?

  The leaf cannot grow on another tree.

  It can be grafted.

  If you are given leave to enter the interstellar world in the elemental body, you will go as the others do, from a firm foundation of radiant being. But if you destroy your world, you die here.

  We could travel the stars?

  If you are good householders, you may participate in the life of the whole city of God. There exists a world now that is waiting for human help. Just as your world is being helped by others now.

  What form does this help take?

  It is a process of creating questions that can neither be borne nor answered. You know this.

  I have written of it—evolutionary pressure. It explains what’s being done to us—the theatrical appearance of UFOs in the sky, the assaults on us by night, the ferocious official secrecy, the collapse of the environment—all of it.

  I
t is all part of the plan of your evolution. Pisces, the little fish, will be poured out onto dry land by the stream of Aquarius. Then, how will you live? How will you breathe? You will make a leap of evolution. You will square the circle or die.

  Now what about this other world you mentioned, waiting for our help?