The Key (18 page)

It has also left me with a huge question: What is to be done on behalf of the children? Should I become a pilgrim on their behalf?

How those words haunt me. They have the ring of “come and follow me,” but am I not like the rich man whose possessions prevented him from taking the greatest of all journeys?

I have asked myself, “What is wealth?” I think that my wealth lies in two areas: my ability to write, and my incredible luck at having met, in the flesh, some very great and extraordinary beings, the most forthcoming of whom was certainly the Master of the Key. So my use of my wealth to enrich the world lies in creating books like this one. However, when I retire, I can easily imagine myself going somewhere deep in the third world and starting an orphanage. Once, when passing through the streets of a huge third-world city, I saw all the street children and I thought to myself: “Each of them is as precious and potentially as valuable as our children at home.” But we pretend, don't we, not only that they don't have as much value, but that they aren't even there.

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:

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:

But he did not characterize us as being fully human. He explained matters this way:

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.

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 pollution, 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:

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:

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:

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.