The Key (17 page)

It is here that my trail ends. I was never able to find out anything more definite about him. He could have been an alien, or one of the human beings he mentioned who live off planet, or an angel, or even an image of God. He could also have been a very brilliant and thus also very clever fan of my books, who succeeded at three in the morning at throwing me enough off-balance that I was susceptible to the subtle messages and suggestions that he sent.

It would have been fabulously interesting to be able to come to a final conclusion about who this man was. I think it is obvious to anybody who reads the words of the Master of the Key that he is in possession of remarkable knowledge. I also suspect, however, that this master of subtlety and ambiguity wanted to be seen as holographically as he sees God. At times, I felt like I was talking to an ordinary person. At other moments, he seemed to have the powerful and joyous presence of an angel. When he uttered the words “cruel to God,” there came into my heart the feeling that this
was
God. There was a note of sorrow in the tone so gentle and yet so great, that it was easy for me to feel, in that moment, that the great God of the universe was sitting right there expressing a deeply personal and yet unimaginably vast pain.

He inspired me very powerfully. Like my friend the composer, the rest of my life is going to revolve around my time with him. The deepest part of me resonates with a kind of assurance that this man possessed the truth and told the truth. Beneath the questions that he left unanswered there is a kind of bedrock of certainty that they are good and true questions. Beneath the information, there is the same sense of truth.

If the Master of the Key did tell the truth, then he pointed the way to our becoming an entirely different species. In this sense, his words are an engine of evolution. They are a light in the blind darkness of our world, out of which we can conceivably forge a whole new mankind.

T
he Key seems to me to be all but unique in the way it breaks down the barrier between science and religion, man and machine, human and God. It suggests a new vision of each of us as a full and complete repository of God. It suggests, quite incredibly, how science can become a form of prayer: an instrument through which we can clearly and objectively address the higher world.

The process of evolution is not automatic. Far from it. We are expected to take an active role in personal transformation, in social transformation and even in the transformation of intelligence itself, through the creation of machines more intelligent than ourselves, machines that will ultimately become conscious. One of the most haunting moments in the conversation comes when I ask the Master if he is a conscious machine. He replies, “If I was, I would deceive you.”

If such a machine comes into being in the future and gains access to movement through time, then perhaps he can best be understood as an artifact of its own process of self-creation.

Whether the Master is a man or a machine, the conversation also points to a fundamentally new way to find union with God. For thousands of years, we have been searching for God on paths that are essentially exterior to us. We have been disciplining ourselves as monks, enduring privations, wandering the world in search of enlightenment.

The Master suggests a different road. He does not offer an outer path, but subtly suggests that we allow the flux of life to carry us where it will, as we seek light within ourselves. And not just a small bit of it. He asserts that we are not mere fragments, like “crumbs in a cake,” but that each of us really does contain the entire Kingdom of God, even to the extent that we can come to know the whole of creation as God knows it. There is the implication that something has changed about mankind over the past two thousand years, and that we are now more able to experience this than we were then.

This quite surprising statement seems to infer that history has been a process of evolution, that we have been in some way changed by the passage of time. Other statements imply that a large-scale plan for mankind is in effect.

Who is this “we”? And why did they need a measure of the ages? When one examines history in the light of the Zodiac, some very curious hints emerge, especially in the Middle East, where the Zodiac seems to have been consciously used as a marker of the epochs.

I have discussed this both in
Confirmation
and in
The Coming Global Superstorm
, but it is worth repeating here that the Sphinx, which is a gigantic image of a lion, was sited so that the constellation of Leo rose directly over it in 10,500 B.C. It has also been found by geologists to be very much older than was previously thought—in fact, that it might date from that period. If so, then it must be a monument to the Age of Leo, which began at that time.

The Old Testament, which was written during the Age of Aries the Ram, contains more references to that animal than any other. Similarly, Christ was born just as the Age of Pisces began. He is called the Fisher of Men, and his apostles are fishermen. Indeed, Piscean imagery is so prevalent in the gospels that early Christians identified themselves with the symbol of the fish, which has been resuscitated by modern fundamentalists.

The parallels between the symbolic content of these ancient writings and monuments and the Zodiacal ages in which they took place cannot be an entire coincidence. It suggests a level of planning higher than any of which we are consciously aware, and it is my belief that the Master of the Key is a part of this level of planning. It is possible that he has deposited these words as an artifact for the age we are presently entering, which is Aquarius.

In this age, the water in which the fish has been so comfortably swimming will get poured out. Although this implies an increase in freedom, it also means that the medium in which we have been living will no longer be there to support us. This medium, of course, is the earth itself, and the Master of the Key warns about changes in the earth's environment that are going to place us in the position of either finding a way to expand off the planet or face possible extinction.

It was a statement of his about the nature of ice ages that inspired
The Coming Global Superstorm
:

This statement turned out to be a very exact description of a process that has been discussed for some years within the paleoclimatological community as an explanation for climatic upheavals in the past, and we were able to actually use their findings in
Superstorm
to support our theory.

The one thing that their studies did not confirm was the storm itself. In “The Great Climate Flip-flop” by William H. Calvin in the
Atlantic Monthly
in January of 1998, it was postulated that the change had come very quickly in the past. Interestingly, the last abrupt change took place, according to James White, a University of Colorado climatologist, approximately 12,500 years ago, in 10,500 B.C., at the same time that the Sphinx was apparently built. (Although some Egyptologists continue to claim that the Sphinx is of more recent origin, the evidence of water erosion on the object is overwhelmingly convincing to geologists.)

The Sphinx reflects a fundamental principle that is echoed in the words of the Master of the Key in numerous places. The Sphinx has a lion's claws, a bull's body and the head of a man. In esoteric tradition, the riddle of the Sphinx has been this: What has the strength of the bull, the courage of the lion and the intelligence of the man? The answer is never quite clear, except to those who have achieved this balance. More plainly spoken, the idea of the triad as expressed in modern esoteric philosophy is this: that positive and negative forces, pressing against each other, come into balance. Buckminster Fuller called this the fundamental principle of the universe. The Master of the Key relates it most notably to his rather astonishing assertion that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam are actually a single religion.

There seems to be a great truth in these words, which, like so much of this material, refer to a larger scale of things than we are used to thinking about. We think in terms of tens or perhaps hundreds of years, not thousands. And we certainly do not think on a scale so large that it would find a means of reconciling three great religions and practicing them as one.

Indeed, it is essential that the whole issue of scale be addressed in any commentary on the Key. For example, the Master's conception of God is at once much larger and infinitely more personal than our own. His model for deity is the hologram. God is not equally present in all things, but totally present in all things.

This idea does two things. It redefines not only man but every creature as something immense and incredibly important. But it also makes one feel rather frozen and helpless. How can I possibly become aware of a greatness like this, that is so far from my everyday life, even if it resides in every particle of my being?

He did not describe this change as a sort of flash of inner light that would instantly transform everything. Rather, he pointed in a totally new direction.

This is a truly gigantic promise that suggests the existence of a new and entirely unexpected human frontier. When he says “the veil between the worlds can fall,” he means the barrier between the living and the dead. This is made clear by the reference to the “undiscovered country,” which is an allusion to a famous speech of Hamlet's, from Act II, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's play: “the dread of something after death, the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns . . . .”

The Master of the Key had clear and intimate knowledge of the world of the dead. He spoke of the effects of death on our history, for example, when he described how the destruction of the European Jews had critically hampered our scientific progress.

This was one of the most shocking statements I have ever heard in my life. It implies that a completely new moral order will emerge when we can see the real consequences of our actions. I thought to myself at the time: “We were not responsible for this. It was a result of historical forces beyond our control.” He quickly agreed with that, saying that our present situation was not a punishment but simply an inevitable outcome of events.

But he also made stunning pleas for personal responsibility on a scale from which we usually distance ourselves. His pleas for the poor and the innocent stirred me to my depths. I will never forget for an instant:

It is beyond my power to communicate the resonance of his voice, or the richness of its emotional content. However, there was something about the assurance in these words—as if he innocently trusted me never to doubt them and to act on them always—that has filled my heart.