The first world is a slave owner. You are all slave owners. You have enslaved the people of God, your own brothers and sisters who are poor. Do you understand the cruelty of the world as it is now, with five billion people enslaved to a billion? Each of you owns five slaves. But you never see your slaves, so you need not be concerned about their health and welfare. You let them fend for themselves, locked away in their poverty and suffering. I will tell you this: when one of my children dies in the slave barrens that cover this planet, I also die, and you, my arrogant friend, even you die a little.
He identifies himself holographically—here, calling himself the parent of the poor of the world, a role claimed for Christ. But in other places he implies different things. In fact, through the course of the conversation he suggested many identities for himself. Here are some of the ways he identified himself:
My being includes all elements of the earth, and thus I am part of all bodies.
I am human.
I belong to many worlds.
Christ said it: I am the son of man, meaning that Christ is all and all are Christ.
So also, no matter what you may call me, I am in God.
I’m only a Canadian.
My home is within you.
When I asked him his name, he said, “What if I said Michael?” Then he suggested that maybe his name was Legion, the biblical demon. In the end, perhaps this was his most telling identification of himself:
I can imagine no greater honor than to be called human.
But he did not characterize us as being fully human. He explained matters this way:
A true human being has four levels of mind. Most of you have only three, and perhaps a vestige of the fourth. Your destiny is to enter the humanity of the universe. But you may not fulfill it.
So the question became for me, What is this fourth level of mind and how do we attain it? His answer to this particular question goes to the heart of his uniqueness. Instead of vague generalities, he made very specific statements that took the whole issue out of the mystical arena and placed it firmly in a practical context.
A part of the electromagnetic field that fills the nervous system rests a few centimeters above the skin, outside of the body. This field is an organ just like the heart or the brain. It is in quantum superposition, the electrons effectively everywhere in the universe and nowhere specific. It may be imprinted by information from anywhere and any time. With it, you may see other worlds, you may see the past and the future, you may see into the lives of those around you. You may haunt God.
What he may have meant by the cryptic sentence, “You may haunt God,” I do not know. Perhaps we’ll find that out when we are better able to utilize this electromagnetic organ of ours.
But the rest of the statement is richly informative. In fact, there has been considerable scientific research into this electromagnetic field and even into its possible properties as a medium for what we call “psychic” exchange. In their paper “Does Psi Exist?” published in the Psychological Bulletin (vol. 115, no. 1, 4–18) in 1994, Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton attempt a theory of psychic activity. They theorize that “Bell’s theorem states that any model of reality that is compatible with quantum mechanisms must be nonlocal. It must allow for the possibility that results of observations at two arbitrarily distant locations can be correlated in ways that are incompatible with any physically permissible causal mechanism.”
Could it be that the Master of the Key has identified a specific mechanism by which information gathered nonlocally can be introduced into the brain and processed there? He mentions that the electromagnetic organ of which he speaks is centered in the pineal, the enigmatic gland that is known to produce melatonin in response to light levels, and which, in lower animals, contains minute amounts of magnetite, which some researchers believe that the human pineal may also contain. Most notably, the pineal has been found to be the source of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, an extremely powerful but short-acting psychedelic.
In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Park Street Press, 2001), Dr. Rick Strassman explains that high DMT doses can induce every sort of spiritual experience. In 1990, Dr. Strassman commenced the first new research on the effects of psychedelics to be conducted in the United States in twenty years. He administered four hundred doses of DMT to sixty volunteers over a five-year period at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque. He chronicled the experiences of his volunteers, commenting from his observations that “we enter into invisible realms, ones we cannot normally sense and whose presence we can scarcely imagine. Even more surprising, these realms appear to be inhabited.”
Dr. Strassman’s research has challenged the assumption that stimulation of the pineal results in mere hallucinations. “Our volunteers’ reports were so clear, convincing and ‘real’ that I repeatedly thought, This sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard about in my therapy patients’ dream life. It is much more bizarre, well-remembered and internally consistent.”
Additionally, there were consistencies among the observations made by different volunteers that suggested that they were seeing as if through a window into another world, rather than generating random hallucinations.
In ancient times, the pineal was thought of as the “third eye,” and the Master of the Key suggested that its vision depended upon the electromagnetic field around the body remaining “nonlocal” even as it gathered impressions. The gland is actually a vestigial eye in some lower invertebrates.
The Master of the Key is very specific about how to access information through this mechanism, explaining in precise terms why a familiar meditative state would be necessary to succeed with the process. Robert Monroe, in his classic Journeys Out of the Body, describes it as an asleep/ awake state, “body sleeping, mind awake,” and the Monroe Institute offers tapes that guide the user in how to achieve it. Additionally, in the Gurdjieff Foundation, I was taught about a state of meditation where one concentrates one’s attention on physical sensation and allows the automatic “inner talking” of the mind to proceed on its own. In the Gurdjieff discipline, this state of being objectively aware of oneself is the beginning of becoming truly awake.
It is a state that is described in one way or another in every meditative practice. What is new here is the why of the thing—that there would be an actual organ involved, and that this organ would need a higher form of attention to function. What makes the author of these words a master is the clarity and simplicity of his explanations of what until now have been complete mysteries.
I cannot say that this particular part of his teaching surprised me, as I had been meditating regularly for twenty-eight years when I had my conversation with him. Often, I have experienced a bright light inside my head while in a meditative state. It is an intense, uniform white glow with cathedral depth to it, but when one really tries to look at it, it disappears. If, however, a balance can be maintained between seeing and not seeing, much can be gained.
I cannot say with certainty that I have seen other worlds using this means, but I have certainly glimpsed some wondrous sights. For example, I’ve observed street scenes so detailed and rich that it is hard not to think that they were real. However, I cannot point to somebody else who had precisely the same vision, and certainly not under anything approaching controlled conditions.
Once I asked to see a world slightly worse off than our own, and another slightly better off. The one that was worse off was divided between two dictatorial states, as if Hitler had defeated the west and not attacked Russia. I only saw a few brief glimpses of this ramshackle, polluted place, and they were so strange that I initially could not understand the meaning of what I was looking at. It was only the movement of things like bodies and vehicles that enabled me to integrate the vision in such a way that I could begin to tell that I was looking at a wide avenue in a city. The buildings were long and almost featureless. A vehicle—a bus?—passed. It was filled with dark-eyed, spindly creatures. The sky was brown with pollutio
n, worse than the worst Mexico City or Houston has to offer.
A few days later, on October 13, 1996, the entire place abruptly exploded in a massive nuclear war of the kind we never had. The two totalitarian states had not been able to maintain the same kind of balance that the flexible, innovative west had maintained with the suspicious, aggressive Soviet Union. The total lack of freedom in this world had destroyed it.
The Master of the Key is very clear about what happens when a planet is destroyed. He explains exactly how we are bound to our planet, and how the continued growth of each soul is dependent upon the planet still being there. But the planet I saw is now no longer habitable. So what is happening to them now? The same thing that will happen to us if earth is destroyed:
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.
And if that doesn’t happen, then we will miss our chance at ecstasy, and he makes it clear that this is a terrible thing indeed.
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.
This last statement—“it has driven me to wander the world”—conceals some implications that were undoubtedly intended to disturb me. In 1 Peter, 5:8, the devil is described as “going about seeking whom he may devour.”
And in the Catholic tradition, he is described as the one who “wanders the world, seeking the ruin of souls.” But also, the seeker may wander the world in search of enlightenment, and he told me that I would find it by serving a little child. What this means, I think, is that he seeks to serve me, but also there is a warning implied, that if I misuse his wisdom, he will become something very different from what he at first appeared.
He has an entirely different view of evil than what has been in the past. It isn’t the biblical view or the modern, mechanistic view, or even the awful view that evil is something we bring on ourselves. But rather, he doesn’t see it as something to be avoided, so much as to be understood and used. He puts it this way:
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 remarkable statement offers a whole new approach to evil, viewing it as a tool rather than some awful, external force that can only victimize us. Like the whole of the Key, it demands personal responsibility not just for one’s own acts but for the whole world.
The Master’s definition of evil is strikingly simple and new:
Entropy is the natural tendency of all things to disintegrate. Evil is the addition of intention to that process.
He also suggests that evil is a necessity in human life, “without which you would not be able to discern good.”
However, this is also a brilliantly satanic defense of evil, and the dark side of the Master cannot be ignored. However, he spoke so eloquently of compassion that it is hard to see how he could be essentially evil.
The second of the two worlds that I saw was different from ours in another way than the first. The creatures in it were not even close to us in the way they looked. But the one I saw, who also saw me, had a lot of expression in his or her face that I could identify with. The expression was one of rueful compassion. They’d had a hard history. But their world had recently changed in a fundamental way. They had survived a terrible environmental crisis—had come through fire, as it were.
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.
In such a world, it is everybody’s duty and delight to find what every other they come into contact with needs most from them, and give it to them.
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.
The Key Page 14
