The Key (3 page)

He left the subject with this admonition: “The greater part of human industry and culture, along with the species' most educated populations, will be destroyed in a single season. This will happen suddenly and without warning, or rather, the warning will not be recognized for what it is.”

I suppose that the clearest warning will be the appearance of methane bubbles in arctic waters.

In July 2010, Professor Igor Semiletov of the International Siberian Shelf Study, said, “Methane release from the East Siberian Shelf is under way and it looks stronger than it was supposed to be.”

This could well be the warning that he referred to, and I would be very surprised to see it heeded in any way. We will, however, find out what it means, most likely under conditions of extraordinary upheaval and human suffering.

If the Master of the Key would be heeded, we might at least be able to develop contingency plans that would to some degree ameliorate such a disaster. But he will not be heeded. In fact, most people who might be in a position to act on the warnings he has given us will not do so, because the existence of the man cannot be explained and he apparently cannot be recontacted. Even if he could, I doubt that the importance of his message would be acknowledged.

Despite the general denial in science that there could possibly be anyone here from another world, be it another planet or some other seemingly impossible place, I know quite prominent scientists whose work has benefited significantly and in useful ways from contact with inexplicable visitors, perhaps from other worlds. But if even scientists this prominent were to come forward with the truth, they would be drummed out of their careers.

This is a misfortune, but it is also, I believe, something that has been constructed by the same presence that is behind the whole mystery, be it alien or human, or even nonphysical in origin.

Whatever it is, quite clearly its knowledge is far in advance of ours, and this is probably why it is so secretive.

In the May 6, 1977, edition of
Science,
T.B.H. Kuiper and Mark Morris offered the speculation that aliens coming here would keep themselves well hidden, because the only motive of people so advanced as to be capable of such a journey would be to discover what new knowledge we might have to offer, and “by intervening in our natural progress now, members of an extraterrestrial society could easily extinguish the only resource on this planet that could be of any value to them,” which would be the uniqueness of the human experience.

Even if the only difference between us and visitors from another world was that they possessed a technology that could control gravity, the gap between us would be very great. But there could be other things that would make it even greater.

For example, my experience between 1985 and 1993 with creatures that appeared to be alien was associated with a surprising side effect, which was simultaneous contact with the dead, who would appear along with the visitors, and not as ghosts. They would seem to be completely physical.

Perhaps, if we had a clearer understanding of the soul, the gap between us and this mysterious other intelligence would narrow, and perhaps that's why the Master talked so much about the soul, attempting to get me to understand it in a new way.

He said that “souls are part of nature,” and that “the science of the soul is just another science. There is no supernatural, only physics.”

Science does not believe this. Science believes that we can't detect the soul because there is no soul. But the Master saw it as part of nature, even to the extent of being exploitable as a resource by those with the skill to do this.

Modern western culture has a schizophrenic relationship with the soul, very much as was true during the Roman Empire, when an educated elite developed that included the soul among the superstitions of the uneducated, and dismissed it, along with the gods, as nonsense.

Similarly, few western scientists and intellectuals consider the soul a viable idea. Where is it? What form might it take? How could anything bearing consciousness continue to exist after the seat of consciousness, the brain, has ceased to function?

The Master of the Key takes a completely novel approach to the whole idea. He denies the existence of the supernatural, saying that only the natural world exists, some parts of which we understand and some parts of which we don't.

It is a characteristic of human thought and culture that we deny the parts of nature that we don't understand. Voltaire dismissed fossils as fish bones tossed aside by travelers. The existence of meteors was once considered an absurd fantasy. Eight days before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the
New York Times
published the opinion that it was time to stop nattering on about the absurd notion of flight using heavier-than-air machines. Both the
Times
and
Scientific American
initially claimed that the flights must have been a hoax.

Such denial is a human habit of mind, and it remains as deeply ingrained in us as it always has been. Despite the many experiences I have had with ghosts and such, I myself have always been skeptical about the soul. Where would it get its energy? What sort of material reality could it possibly possess?

For this reason, as I sat face-to-face with my visitor, I initially found his commentary on the soul off-putting.

The reason was that, despite all the evidence I had in my own life, including an extraordinary moment of out-of-body travel that had taken place in 1986, I had no way to understand why anything would survive the death of the physical.

However, he took an entirely unexpected approach. First, he used the phrase “soul-blind” to describe us. I'd heard it before, and I couldn't disagree. But were we soul blind because there's nothing to see, or because of some appalling human insufficiency?

When he said that the soul was, simply, a part of nature, I found myself thinking that things like radio had also always been part of nature, but for a great long time we couldn't even conceive of them, let alone detect them. And he was saying, essentially, that the issue with the soul is also one of detection. This would correspond with his assertion that “conscious energy” is essentially electromagnetic in nature.

But how would that work? Are such fields plasmas? If so, what holds them together? What are the physics of the soul?

In the mid-nineties we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and were invited to the home of a friend who was taking many photographs of what are known as “orbs” in ghost-hunter and parapsychological circles. I thought that the great masses of objects that were appearing on random shots he was taking inside and outside his house must be condensation or dust, or something else along those lines, that was very close to the camera lens. But when I went to the house and we took shots of exactly the same spot with two different cameras from different angles, the objects showed up in both pictures. This means that they were not tiny specs near the camera, but larger objects three or four feet away, which was very perplexing.

Later, I went out into the back garden and felt an absolutely distinct presence. It was my mother, long since passed away. It was as if she was right there. It was palpable. I stood there, my eyes closed, communing with her. I didn't know it, but another member of the group took a picture of me at that moment.

In the picture, above me and perhaps ten feet in front of me, is a glowing orb. It isn't enormous, more like a sort of a spark, but why does it happen to be there? Is it an indication of the persistence of the soul after death? It is certainly true that it seemed to me that my mother was there.

The Master of the Key made an interesting case for souls being part of material reality, basically for the idea that consciousness could remain coherently structured while in an energetic form.

Over the years, there has been so much evidence gathered that ghostly apparitions are associated with magnetic fields that there is little point in my advocating on its behalf.

Listening to the Master appears to have broken a barrier in me. I became much more sensitive to the presence of the dead than I had been before I listened to his ideas about what they were.

I began to see the dead quite frequently and would find myself communicating with them. Recently, for example, my wife's father came to mind in away that felt more like a sort of penetration of my consciousness than an ordinary thought or memory. I told her that I could feel his presence, and that he wanted badly to communicate with her. When he was alive, their relationship had been seriously strained, and he seemed to want to make amends.

There was also a woman with him, but it wasn't Anne's mother or her father's second wife. Anne told me that there hadn't been any other women in his life.

Her father then said to me, “Tell her it's Marcelle,” so I did so. Anne was genuinely startled. She said, “He
did
have a sister. That's my aunt Marcelle. I met her only once in my life. I haven't thought about her since.”

I would be remiss if I said that I could prove that Anne had never mentioned Marcelle to me, but she says, I think correctly, that she never did.

If this was the only incident in my life of a communication with the dead, I would take it with a grain of salt. But it is not the only one.

We have an Australian friend, Glennys MacKay, who is quite a powerful medium. She's strictly no-frills and she asks only that she be given something belonging to the person who wishes to have a reading. She doesn't want to know anything about the person, not even their sex.

Seeing a chance to make a test, Anne gave her a lock of our hairdresser's hair. She held it for a moment and then said, “I hear somebody calling, ‘Howie, Howie.'” There was a bit more, which Anne dutifully wrote down. But since the hairdresser's name is Jay, it seemed a waste of time.

Nevertheless, she let Jay know the outcome. When she did, he said, “Oh, my God, that was my dead sister. She always called me Howie. My real name is Howard.”

I thought of the Master's explanation that the soul is conscious energy, and also his disturbing suggestion that such energy is accessible to technological manipulation, and that it can be exploited by those with the means to do so, and I remembered the way that the dead and the visitors seem to show up together.

Once a man telephoned me and explained that his seven-year-old boy had awakened with a number of these creatures in his bedroom, and his older brother had been with them. The older brother had said to tell their parents that he was all right. Moments later, his wife had observed a huge light race away from the house.

He had gotten through to me via my literary agents, desperate to know if this had ever happened to anybody else.

I was able to tell him that it was a commonplace of the close encounter experience, although undocumented by UFO investigators, because it obviously suggests that something quite unexpected and very little understood is actually going on.

The reason that he was so eager to know this was that the older brother, their seventeen-year-old son, had been killed the previous week in an auto accident.

Another incident took place, also involving Glennys MacKay, that convinced me once and for all that the Master's detailed explanations of the soul must in some sense be correct. It does persist after the death of the body, perhaps not as a disincarnate version of the person who lived, but in some coherent manner.

Anne and I were driving Glennys and her husband to dinner. I asked her if she always saw the dead. She said that she did. So I asked her if there were any dead with us at that moment. She said yes, that a dead person was with me. He was wearing a tuxedo and he had played the piano. Then she added, also the violin.

As a lover of classical music, that could cover a pretty broad range of performers I've enjoyed. But then she added, “He says his name is Milton.”

I was so surprised that I almost drove off the highway. She had asked no leading questions—in fact, none at all. She'd simply said what she saw.

When I was a child, an older boy who lived across the street had played both the piano and the violin. He had become a violinist with the local symphony orchestra, and wore a tuxedo during performances.

His name had been Milton. I was aware that he'd died in the early seventies, but I had not thought of him, not at all, in at least thirty years.

Something is out there, something alive, and it is exquisitely aware of our lives and associations, and I am going to let myself believe that the situation is as the Master of the Key has claimed.

When I asked him what the soul was, he replied that it was a “radiant body,” potentially. “Formed out of conscious energy.”

He said that it is not passive to manipulation, but that a relationship must be formed with it if one is to really engage with it. He added that “it is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, easily detectable by your science as it exists now.”

Researchers like William Roll have presented evidence that plasmas are associated with ghostly presences, and done this using relatively straightforward instruments. The Master offered a marvelous inducement to further study in this area: “The undiscovered country can become your backyard.”

Our world would change in very fundamental ways if this happened. It seems to me that our species is actually severed into two parts, one physical and the other in some sort of plasmic state. It's as if two halves of a single brain had been severed, as in a cerebral commissurotomy.

In the end, I have come to accept that the soul is, indeed, part of the physical world, in exactly the same sense that an electromagnetic field is part of the physical world. However, I don't think that it's clear what, exactly, this means. It has advanced the question in my own mind from “Does the soul exist?” to “How are we to understand the existence of the soul?”