The Key

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by Whitley Strieber


  But if there had been no gas chambers, would there then have been none of this grandeur?

  They made of their suffering, with great effort, what one who attains the heart of a child may easily make of the drift of a cloud or the peaceful ringing of a bell upon a summer evening. And only a few. Most died in agony and confusion, all for nothing. It is easier to reach ecstasy through joy than through suffering.

  What happened to the Nazis?

  It takes great courage to enter an elemental body, because you are putting yourself in a position where the weakest part of you may imprint your energetic body eternally. Sin is that which bars us from ecstasy. How does sin actually feel after death? At first, after you die, you begin to taste of the most exquisite pleasure. It is extremely intimate, extremely personal, and as it builds, you begin to live in more and more of your lives. You taste the food and smell the air, you kiss your kisses and love your loves, and it gets more and more beautiful and more and more innocent. And then, suddenly, your hand is opening the gas canister—and you are swept with all the fear that made you do it, the primitive tribalism that you indulged to monstrous and distorted proportions. You feel sick with a filthy disease, you feel agonizingly ugly, as you kneel at the feet of those you destroyed. And they see you, utterly, as you are. They glow with compassion for you, but their compassion causes you the most terrible anguish because of what it makes you see, and you fall back from ecstasy. You cannot bear to be seen or to see the glory around you, which seems to you like a searing fire, so you turn inward, shielding yourself as a man would shield himself from the burning sun. But you cannot escape. For you, the fire of ecstasy is the fire of agony.

  What about little sins?

  Little imperfections are simply part of nature. Sin is willful indulgence of imperfection. Most sin is hidden during life. You have sins. I can see them. But you hide them from yourself.

  What are my sins?

  Living among you, as I do, is to live in an ocean of sacred beings who have no idea what they are. The man in the room next to this sleeps a troubled sleep, but I see the glory of his radiant body, and the couple above, who are engaging in fellatio, I see her patient faith in deliverance, and in him, I see a brave heart on a journey to glory. But I also see the way they see themselves, the shadows of their recriminations and disappointments. Be as little children.

  I realize that you see us all totally, and I must say that you’ve caught me by surprise.

  (Laughs) Watch out for the thief.

  What will happen to me?

  To die takes great courage. This is the glory of the living world, its courage. For, after all, most of you have no knowledge of higher worlds at all. They cannot feel their energetic body. They die as they live, blind. But you are not blind.

  What about my wife and son?

  They will suffer and die, as all. I will pray for them, that they may find joy in the transit of their lives.

  You’ll pray for them?

  Is that so strange?

  Because you’d be praying to yourself. I think you’re God.

  I think you’re God.

  What is real religion?

  A means of transforming accident into fate. It is a science. Real religion and real science are the same.

  I don’t understand.

  Fate is life lived. Accident is life let pass. To live means to notice and take responsibility. Otherwise, it just happens as it happens. Because you are fallen, you cannot see the difference between the large-scale aim of being and the randomness of chance. To be fallen is to be blind. This is the land of the blind.

  Can we be cured of our blindness?

  Let me offer you a picture of the universe as it really is. There are many thousands of worlds like this one, in varying states of development. Some are worse off than yours, others better. Some have even reached such ecstasy in the elemental body that they can enjoy congress across the reaches of space and time. In these worlds, the elemental body is radiant. The physics of material being for them is the same as the physics of energetic being. This is why, when they come among you, they may walk through walls, or fly, or disappear or change form. But most beings in other worlds live and die confined to the planets of their origin, as you do.

  You said thousands of worlds. I would have thought millions—billions.

  Intelligent life is extremely rare because planets which can sustain complex bodies are extremely rare. Life, however, is common. It is not just planetary. Life is ubiquitous. It is a part of the essential structure of reality—the nervous system, as it were, of the body of God. There is much energetic life, for example, that is not intelligent. Life need not be planet-bound at all.

  Why is life so common?

  Because perception is essential to the structure of the universe. If a thing is not perceived, it doesn’t have form. Life is thus the mechanism that gives form to nature. However, matter need not be perceived by an intelligent creature to have form. When it is, different laws apply, because the perception of intelligent creatures influences the form of what they perceive by the expectations built into their brains. The universe looks as it does to you, and functions by the laws that you see controlling it, because of the way your brain manages the process of perception. Conscious creatures, however, may control the form of the universe. The truly conscious are responsible for the laws that intelligent creatures follow by nature.

  Will we ever be conscious?

  If you survive.

  What is consciousness?

  Self-realization. A fully self-realized being understands the whole creation, for it is completely present everywhere.

  I could understand everything?

  Not in your current state of being. You can only understand as much as the structures of your elemental body can support. But you understand only a small part even of that.

  How far away from understanding all that I can now understand am I?

  If all you could understand in your present state was a star the size of the sun, then your understanding right now is a thimbleful of light.

  Well, that isn’t much.

  On the contrary, it is a very great deal. You human beings are right on the edge of becoming a conscious species.

  This is why we are here. We’re midwives to your birth, as you yourself have speculated. You were to be born into consciousness before, but you miscarried. You fell from understanding because you misused the power that your growing consciousness gave you. Better to start over again.

  How did we misuse this power?

  In those days, there were a few people on the earth with understanding greater than that of all your great scientists of today. But they guarded their knowledge ferociously. They were extremely secretive. The average man was little more than an animal, eating his brother for strength. So they lost everything, because you are a single being, and thus only as conscious as the least of you.

  Theirs was a slave state?

  Your world is a slave state. You are all slaves to the demons who run it, who keep you in ignorance.

  Our leaders are demons?

  They wish to conceal real knowledge from the common man, just as was true in the past civilization. Secrecy destroyed that world, and, if this one is to die, it is secrecy that will destroy it. This is why they conceal the truth about the past and the presence of those who seek to help you. They think that they do this on behalf of mankind, some of them, but they actually seek the destruction of the species. This hunger for self-destruction is the essence of your dark side, but we will speak of the death wish later. If you passively let them confine the wealth and keep the secrets, I will overturn your world yet again.

  You could personally destroy our entire world?

  (Silence.)

  Name some of these demons.

  Find the demon in your own heart, then I will betray the demon rulers of your world to you. Remember that the evil also serve me. Without evil, you could not taste of the good. Without them, you could not make the choice to follow
me.

  But a moment ago you said that aliens were here actively suppressing our progress. Now you say it’s our leaders. What does this mean?

  You must take your future from the hands of your oppressors. Do you think that there is a single human heart that is not filled with love for mankind? No, your demons make you strong.

  Who are you? Christ? Or a demon yourself?

  Stop thinking this way. This is no longer the Middle Ages.

  Be objective. Remember that God is in everything. The whole of creation is the matter of God. Nothing is separate from God, nor can ever be. Your sense of independence is an illusion, so that you can take the journey of discovery. So also, no matter what you may call me, I am in God.

  But what about the people who keep the secrets, for example, about aliens? Or the secrets about the past as it really was, or conceal the truth about Mars?

  When they die, they will see that they have crystallized imperfections in themselves by the indulgence of self-will. They will suffer the fire of love, as I have already described it. Some of them will die in eternity and be part of you no more. Others will go on to become companions of God.

  What about me?

  You know what you are. Don’t ask me.

  You are saying that the demon is not evil, that he is—what—the bringer of knowledge?

  We learn from our mistakes. But those who give themselves to evil suffer. Make no mistake. They can become so heavy that they sink into the earth. Just as the energetic body can enjoy extraordinary pleasure, it can suffer excruciating pain. You have in your body a few million nerves. But in your energetic body, every tiny bit of being can experience the totality of ecstasy or agony.

  There are those who experience eternal agony?

  A fallen master may, one who by some foolish intention rejects the joy of the kingdom. But remember, always, that were it not for the darkness of the night, you would not see the stars. Look into your astrophysics texts. You will find that your science does not understand the darkness. The darkness is the compassion of God, which gives us our vision of the universe. So also, the darkness in your heart is your own compassion toward yourself, for unless you bore evil, you would not be able to discern good.

  This suggests to me that the fall of man has to do with a mistake of some kind. We failed to understand something. What did we fail to understand?

  That the kingdom of heaven is within you. Not one human being, living or dead, has ever been able to face that, not since it was uttered. But if you cannot find the kingdom, you cannot gain the kingdom.

  How can we regain our vision?

  Fear is blindness. Fear rules this world. It is extremely deep. When a microbe is threatened, it will recoil. That’s how deep fear is. In the fields, fear rides. In the struggle of the deer to survive the jaw of the wolf or gunfire of the man, fear rides. A shadow has fallen here, into the very atoms that construct this place.

  This is an impossible problem. It’s beyond our ability to correct. If one of you could live one moment without fear, then all the world would be free. The emergence of physical life is at once its fall and its salvation. How can you be fallen and ascended at the same time? In other words, how may the elemental world gain communion with the energetic one? The hidden meaning of mankind is that you may reconcile the irreconcilable. You are here to save all that lives on earth from the fear of death by surrendering your will to God’s. Read the Koran, listen to Muhammad. He brought the message of surrender impeccably. You say that it is impossible. It is. But you are here to square the circle. This is why earth evolved intelligence. The aim of mankind is to clear the vision of the living, so that you can join in full consciousness to the dead, and thus learn that fear of death is fear of nothing.

  There seems to be something very extraordinary hidden in what you’re saying. You’re saying that the fall of mankind was the emergence of life on earth. Am I right?

  You are, but that is a three-dimensional view, and thus limited by the limits of three-dimensional vision. Remember the analogy of how the two-dimensional being sees a solid object. As a ball passes through the flat plane on which such a being would be confined, it would not see the real shape, or even be able to conceive of it. By definition, a two-dimensional being cannot look up, for then it would see into the third dimension, which is impossible for it to do. What it would see, always looking straight ahead, would be a dot that would grow into a line, then slowly contract again into a dot and disappear. It would never understand the true nature of the ball, because its two-dimensional mind cannot contain the concept of a solid object.

  I don’t want to seem thickheaded, but I don’t think you answered my question.

  The inference should be enough.

  It isn’t!

  The emergence of life on earth and the fall of man are the same, in two ways. First, outside of time, all events are one, so they happen simultaneously. Not that they have happened, but that they are always happening. Every moment is forever, as you will recall after you die and begin to live in your memories. You will see the importance, then, of living a life that satisfies you and fulfills your destiny, because everything you have done will be immediately present in your consciousness all the time. Second, the emergence of the word—that is to say, the possibility of all things that may exist in concrete form—into physical reality placed it in the position of needing to struggle to survive. When the word became flesh, it became vulnerable. If physical beings don’t struggle, you die. So you cannot surrender. And yet you cannot stop your fall unless you do surrender. If you continue to struggle against nature, you will die. But if you don’t struggle, you will die. This is tragedy of the word in physical form, and is the essential human problem. This is the problem you must solve, if you are to avoid going extinct.

  I think that’s the most profound statement I’ve ever heard. You are defining the word as God manifesting into physical reality and thus including physical vulnerability and weakness in his perfection. I see this as the key to our salvation. Am I right?

  The word is potential. Just as your uttering of the word “automobile” is not an automobile, but contains the possibility of one, so also this word contained the possibility of everything. The word was not God. The word was an idea that turned into sound when it penetrated the physical.

  I’m disappointed. I saw more in what you said than was there. No, you saw exactly, and your observation was precisely correct. But I want you never to forget that there is no world but this one. The radiant world is not separate. It’s all around you. Energetic being is just as detectable and accessible to science as elemental being.

  God can be measured by science?

  If you dare.

  If we dare? What’s to dare?

  If you develop a means that will enable you to communicate with your dead, which, as I have said, is quite possible, you will begin to know, in life, what you are only meant to know in death. But the unready souls fear this congress. It is also why you tell yourselves that the soul is on some strange ethereal plane far distant from you. You fear to find it, because then you will have to face yourselves as you are.

  Are we so terrible?

  You are not terrible. Your fear is terrible. Instinct makes you fear congress with the dead, because they see more than you dare to see.

  What did the word sound like?

  I don’t know, I wasn’t there.

  But what will actually happen to us? Will we return to the forest? The civilization of the northern peoples will be reduced to shadows and memories in the minds of the living. It will follow its own past because of its flaws.

  What are its flaws?

  Greed and secretiveness. All who keep secrets that others should know keep evil in their hearts. All who amass more than they need, take bread from others. The wealth of the first world is its sin, and it will go the way of sinful things.

  What are good and evil?

  They are teaching tools. You are free to embrace either, because in life you can b
e blind to the consequences. This blindness is your free will. It is what enables you to learn. If you could see as I see, you would never in a million years perform the least evil act. Never! But then, I’ve been along that road already.

  Are you perfect?

  God is.

  I feel worshipful toward you.

  Worship at your own feet. It is far more challenging to face your mastery.

  I have no mastery.

  That is your mastery.

  What did you mean when you said our civilization would follow its own past?

 

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