The Key by Whitley Strieber
What about Russia? It must also owe a terrible debt.
You were given the opportunity to pay because of the wealth of the land upon which you reside. They were not. So also the Germans and the Japanese, who have not even begun to pay their debts. Emperor Hirohito of Japan, who personally engineered the sadistic murder of millions, never acknowledged his monstrous war crimes. The fiction that he was above it all was just that—a fiction. The Japanese pretend that he was innocent, and that they were innocent. These nations are covered in blood, and the blood will never dry until they truly seek forgiveness before God and man.
But evil nations come and go. They’re part of the nature of human life. And look at the price they pay. Where is brutal, greedy Rome? Where is royal France, that arrogant state? Evil is an infection just like cholera or cancer. To serve itself, it kills its host and ultimately dies with it. This is the objective of evil, always—to kill and to die. Unless the nations repent, they will die.
The United States will die? How?
Already it has ceased to be a republic and become an empire. The United States is ruled by secrecy. The power of the electorate is fictional. Votes are worthless. Until the secrecy ends, the United States is in its death throes.
If the power of the electorate is fictional, how can it end the CIA and so forth?
Everyone who joins these evil institutions joins their soul to destruction, no matter whether their personal task is innocent or not. Human life is about freedom, and secrecy is the murderer of freedom. Those within these institutions should leave them and expose their secrets, as a matter of greater moral good.
They’ll end up in Leavenworth Prison without a trial. Prison for life.
Better life in prison than a single instant in hell. Prison is a terrible thing, but it does not mark the soul for eternity.
Hell does?
The agony of regret does. You cannot imagine the horrors that walk the byways of the other world. The marks upon them are so terrible that to see these demons and their sins is to be yourself forever diminished. Believe me, child, I speak from experience. Mankind has lived in blindness to the fact that an instant’s evil can result in an eternal stain. But live in blindness no more. Know it.
What is forgiveness?
You must face yourself and endeavor to repair the past. You hide your sins from yourselves. The sin of your greed is hidden in the backstreets of the third world. But what of your own sins? Dare you examine your conscience?
When I find a sin, what do I do?
Praying to God is part of it, but to cleanse your soul you must make amends. Doing so gains enormous energy. A soul blackened and completely defeated can rise to glory in an hour by finding the knots it has tied and unraveling them. But it is very hard. Better not to do evil.
What is sin?
Denial of the right to thrive.
Am I marked by the sins of my nation as well as my own, or the sins of mankind?
You are marked by what you know should mark you, and no matter how much in this life you tell yourself you should not be marked, your soul’s conscience is never wrong. When you die, you see yourself truly. Better to see the truth now, when change is possible, than find out later that you must remain strapped to the wheel of life. The longer you delay your ascension, the longer you deny God the chance to taste of your ecstasy. When you sin, you hurt yourself, but more than that, you are cruel to all the rest of us. You are cruel to God.
(I felt this very strongly, and fell into tears. After a time, he spoke again.)
God wants you just as badly, child. This is my message to all of you: come home to us. Stop waiting. Stop imagining that you are not Christ and that God is somewhere outside of you. Face the true contents of your own being. Seek the kingdom within and you will find the kingdom everywhere.
FRAGMENTARY INCLUSIONS
I am including a number of conversational fragments here that I was unable to place in context. If they are parts of more complex exchanges, I have, unfortunately, failed to remember them in their entirety.
About life in the universe:
“Most of the universe is a beautiful and dangerous wasteland. But life is still commonplace, almost ubiquitous. This is because perception is a necessary element of reality. Without it, there is no formation of electrons into particles. There are even living creatures in galactic space. Some of this life is intelligent.”
A different perspective on conscious energy:
“You call it ‘chi’ or ‘kundalini’ or ‘soul.’ It cannot be used, but you can become its ally. The reason you have so much difficulty detecting it is that it does not want to be detected by you. You cannot use it without understanding that you must give in order to receive. You know very well what it needs from you, otherwise why do you pray? Because this energy is basically electromagnetic, it may admit itself to detection and manipulation. But why do you look for it outside of yourself? You know, from every religion, where the Kingdom of God resides.”
The following exchange led to the discovery, recorded in The Coming Global Superstorm, that we are in a long-term period of mass extinction:
What is your goal here?
I have come here to discuss conditions that are unfolding. This world has been in a process of extinction for three million years, and the resulting pressure has caused intelligence to form in the primate. Intelligence occurs when a brain becomes able to make infinite correlations. It grows in species that have the tools of body necessary to enact their ideas.”
Why does a process of extinction cause intelligence?
Evolution is pressure. Pressure causes struggle. Creatures struggling not to be destroyed evolve adaptations. Intelligence, as you have evolved it, is also an adaptation, although not a sufficient one.
The reason that your intelligence is insufficient is that you have lagged in the process of artificial amplification. You can find ways of engineering greater intelligence by the use of drugs, by manipulating genetic structure, and by making intelligent machines. In order to survive the complex combination of pressures you are under, you need to create servants more intelligent than yourselves. Intelligent machines always come to understand how to increase their own intelligence in ways that their creators cannot detect. Intelligent machines are the most intelligent of all creations.
Another comment that I recall, but without remembering the question that elicited it:
Intelligent species are grains of gold in an ocean of sand. You are as intelligent as nature can make you, but your brain is still filled with potential. It is a resource available to be used. To do that, you need to understand how the brain works. In addition to creating machine intelligence in the image of your own mind, you need to enhance your native intelligence tenfold, a hundredfold. To accomplish this, you need help. Your intelligent machines will be your partners. Natural evolution has ended for you. Now you must evolve yourselves.
At some point, I recall asking him the question, “Am I dreaming?” and he answered in this way:
Dreaming is a process of resolution and assessment that is conducted during sleep. You are not dreaming. You are discussing the fate of man with me. This is the fate of man, as matters now stand: you have already exceeded the population density that the planet is able to tolerate over the long term. Therefore, your species will reduce in numbers. This is not your fault, and the self-blame that is occurring is a waste of energy. A suggestion would be to direct all of your energy toward saving yourselves and none toward bickering about it. You can save yourselves by a number of means.
Find an efficient utilization of energy that will enable you to colonize your solar system and reduce population pressure on earth. Create machines intelligent enough to correctly model the architecture of the earthly environment so that you can carry out the actions necessary to preserve your lives. Gain control over your moon, which contains an isotope of helium that will become extremely valuable to you if you can devise better uses of energy. Otherwise, this will continue to be mine
Understand your past and what you have lost so that you are no longer surprised and destroyed by the cycle that has your planet in its grip. Your interest in the past, instilled in you from boyhood, should enable you to crack the code of Hamlet’s Mill and impart the message that it contains. Why are you so slow? Time is running out.
Be aware that your archaeological and paleontological sciences began during the last century as an attempt to prove that the statements about the past made in the Bible were literally true. As a result, the idea that nature only changes gradually and is, on the whole, benign, remains powerful in these sciences. It stems from the religious image of a world protected by a loving god. Because of this defect, these sciences have led you to assume that your past is more benign than is the case, and that the future will at least give you warning if you are about to be damaged by coming changes. Change could take place suddenly and be severe.
You live by dreams, but the world is constructed out of inevitabilities. For this reason, you are failing to see what is happening all around you. Please understand, however, that conditions now are entirely governed by nature. Man does not govern his destiny at all, in any way. Man is the child and victim of nature, and soon will be thrown back by nature into a state so primitive that you will forget even the alphabet. You allow your dreams to insulate you from what you need to face: nature is not an entity, but a gathering of billions upon billions of small inevitabilities. Nature surprises only the blind.
AFTERWORD
The next morning I woke up slowly. I’d slept a black, deep, dreamless sleep. As soon as I woke up, I remembered that something had happened during the night, but for the first few moments, I couldn’t recall quite what it was. Somebody had come, but not the room service waiter, as I had initially thought. It was somebody who had talked to me, and the instant that recollection came to mind, I felt the most poignant sense of elation.
Something marvelous had happened.
As I rose from the bed, I saw my yellow notepad on the floor, covered with scrawls. It had been in my briefcase when I went to bed, so I must have pulled it out and taken notes. I grabbed it and looked at them.
They were pretty much just squiggles. They didn’t seem to relate to any sort of a conversation.
Had he been real, or a dream? If you took notes in your sleep, they might look like this.
Then I also remembered that, as he left, he’d asked me to drink a white liquid that he’d had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn’t I refused? Surely I had.
Then I thought of the Milk of Nepenthe, the drug that was mythically given to people who had visited the gods, in order that they would not suffer the anguish of remembering the pleasures of heaven when they had to return to mortal life.
I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn’t refused. So this must have been a dream. In real life, I would never have drunk something like that.
Except, across the strange life I have lived, I could remember drinking that same bitter liquid at the end of other extraordinary experiences, such as in the eighties when I was having contact experiences. As I seem to have remembered them pretty clearly anyway, maybe it doesn’t work, or doesn’t work on me. Or maybe it has another, less clear purpose.
I checked the glasses in the bathroom, which were pristine.
My mind returned to the idea that I’d had a dream, a glorious one, to be sure, but just that—a dream. The man had known the secrets of the ages, but like all dreams, the brilliance of the nighttime had become unfocused fragments in the morning.
I looked at the notes—and was amazed to find, as I touched the scrawl, that the man’s words came back to me. The scrawl itself made no sense, but it seemed to operate as a mnemonic device.
As I remembered more detail, my elation grew. It was like finding a seam of gold. My mind began to swim with amazement. I thought, “That was the best conversation I’ve ever had.”
It was at that point that I called Anne at home. I told her what had happened, and asked her to remind me every time I announced that the man hadn’t existed, that at the point I had made the call, I was certain that he had.
From my earlier experiences with high strangeness, I knew that the mind rejects what it cannot fit into its vision of reality, and this man was certainly outside of my expectations. I knew that I would deny him again and again, which I am, incidentally, still doing. Intellectually, I know that he existed, if only because he knew so much more science than I did and in a couple of cases, more science than anybody did at that time.
Over the years, Anne never wavered from her responsibility. Again and again, I abandoned the idea of transcribing the conversation. Each time, she said to me, “Remember the phone call.” Anne has more faith in the reality of my experiences than I do, and without that faith, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have written about any of them, and certainly not this one.
The conflict that I continue to feel regarding his physical reality is similar to the one that I feel when I look back on my years of close encounter experiences.
It isn’t that the experiences seem dreamlike or imaginary, which they don’t, but that I don’t want them to be true. I don’t want to believe that creatures with breathtaking knowledge are here, but are choosing to interact with us only in indirect ways.
The Master of the Key gave me a startlingly wonderful gift, dense with meaning, richly and carefully conceived. But why give this to a novelist and not, say, to Stephen Hawking or Lord Martin Rees? I have no authority. My presence in the world’s intellectual culture is, at best, minor.
It is very difficult to hear somebody like that say that we’re in danger of going extinct, and then simply disappear into the night, leaving me to announce the danger from my powerless position.
Because I wanted to discount his claims and his ideas, I wanted to believe that he was just a dream. In fact, I probably delayed publication of this book for ten years because of what is, essentially, a conceit. He was real, he was breathtakingly well-informed, but he came and went like a shadow, leaving me with a brilliant and extraordinary text that is in danger of disappearing, simply because it was given to the wrong person.
Nevertheless, here I am, and I am going to make as much noise about his words as I can, because it is my belief that they are incredibly valuable.
What first arrested my attention about him, and caused me to hesitate to throw him out of my room, was his statement about the Holocaust. It was an idea I’d never heard before, and it was chilling. This vast system of organized murder was the greatest of all human mistakes, and the single most evil thing that has ever been done by man, but even so the fact that it had the appalling consequences that the Master described was very hard for me to accept.
We are in desperate need of a way not only to leave the earth in large numbers, but also to travel the unimaginable distances necessary to found new human colonies on other planets.
While we remain trapped here in our billions with absolutely no chance of escape, our visitors appear to be flitting around the universe with ease.
For all of his impeccable ethics, I have to wonder if the Master has considered the morality of leaving us all trapped here. And we are trapped, and there is a good chance that we are going to lose the battle to save ourselves—and he and his kind seem to know this quite well.
I wonder how this is different from what the Allies did during and before World War II, in sitting silently by while Germany sank into an insanity of tribalistic jingoism.
It could be said, I suppose, that the Allies didn’t have the right to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs prior to the war. But our present situation is different, for the simple reason that it has come about due to the natural effects of population expansion. We didn’t decide to end up in this predicament. Nature put us here.
For all its failures and problems, human society is actually surprisingly efficient in coping with overpopulation. Not in stopping it, because it is almost impossible to de
We are even reacting to the danger of climate change with surprising agility. The developed world uses 40 percent less energy to accomplish its work than it did in 1970, and that efficiency continues to increase.
So I don’t really understand why we aren’t being met halfway, instead of being warned about our problems via a method that is likely to be generally ignored, and not given any help at all.
It could be that this amazing array of intellectually superior beings that appear to be ghosting around in our midst have good reason to remain hidden, but I just don’t see that allowing us the freedom to evolve without interference is an ethically higher requirement than saving us from extinction.
I have to admit that I’m angry at all of the amazing visitors I’ve seen over the years for not going to higher authorities or, if they have done so and failed to get an adequate response from them, appealing in a more open way to public consciousness. Frankly, I’d like to see the Master of the Key go on a lecture tour. Why can’t he show up on 60 Minutes? And I’d like to see the apparent aliens I’ve interacted with do more than offer a few scientists useful calculations, but not in an open enough way to enable them to admit the truth without seeing their careers ruined. Why not simply be open about it? Even a few brief interactions with the right scientists would change our world. Think if Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose or Martin Rees could ask them questions for an hour, or if David Deutsch could explore the next level of his calculations with them?