My last journal entry was about the dark side of my close
encounter experience, and quite a few people wrote asking me
why I kept on. Why not just sell the cabin and get out of
there, and why keep bringing your child to such a place?
These are important questions and they deserve a response.
If you perceive something as dangerous, normally you
wouldn't continue challenging it, obviously.
However, there is another side to what happened to me, and I
was very aware of it even at the time.
A couple of days after the close encounter when I went to
the doctor, I was not too shocked to be informed that I had
a rectal injury. It was obvious to me, and had been since it
happened.
Initially, I did not perceive what had happened to me as a
close encounter of the third kind. The reason is this: I had
seen an old friend of mine with the visitors. He had joined
the CIA out of college and, as far as he had told me,
retired in the early eighties.
I had the bizarre experience of listening to him telling me
about some sort of problem with the then highly classified
stealth bomber.
After I realized that the experience was indeed physical, my
first thought was that I had been drugged and attacked by
criminals, of which he was one.
I thought this because I had just previously published a
book called Warday, which had affected the national debate
on hardening our industrial infrastructure against nuclear
attack, and played a role in a congressional decision not to
pursue such a program.
This had infuriated powerful people, and, given my knowledge
of CIA mind control experiments such as MK-Ultra, I thought
that I'd been assaulted, and that my "friend" was involved.
So I phoned him, only to discover that he'd been dead for
months. So I had seen a dead man during the abduction.
I was pretty flabbergasted, but by that time I had also read
enough about the abduction experience to understand that it
was radically different from what it had initially seemed to me.
Perhaps I had come into contact with people from another world.
I could not turn my back on that, and thus I started going
out into the woods to try to contact them again. I became
obsessed. I lived for the weekends at the cabin. Night after
night, I took my flashlight and went out into those woods,
and never mind the godawful terror, I did it anyway.
And gradually, I gained a relationship with the visitors,
which did not end until 1997 when we left the area. We moved
to a small condo in Texas, and there were a few experiences
there, but nothing like what it was like at the cabin.
In fact, the last night we were there, the group of them who
had been meditating with me nightly for three years came for
a last time. I begged for help. They showed signs of
discomfort, but did nothing.
The next day, we were driving through Virginia when my
cellphone rang. It was one of my oldest friends in New York,
in fact, the first person I'd ever told about the close
encounters. He said, "Whitley, I just saw your friend on
Fourteenth Street." (He was referring to the lady on the
cover of Communion. She looks, or can look, close enough to
human to pass in a crowd.)
Then he said, "I was stuck in traffic, and she came up to my
car and said, 'are you going west?' I told her no, I was
going east and she said, 'well, that's good.'"
I knew at once that a period had just been placed at the end
of one of the most extraordinary experiences any human being
has ever been privileged to have. What had happened to me
was something that is usually buried in symbol and myth, but
in my life it had unfolded much more plainly.
From this standpoint, the night of December 26, 1985 can be
viewed as an initiatory moment, and the subsequent years as
a journey through the underworld. But it is in darkness that
knowledge lies. The demon, the tormentor, is the daimon, the
bringer of knowledge from within.
So much rich and unusual experience came to me. I went far
with the visitors in both the inner and outer worlds. I came
to know that our conventional wisdom about the world is
profoundly flawed, and that we are much larger, more
incredible and more vibrantly alive beings than we allow
ourselves to be.
I came unstuck in reality and found myself able to challenge
all of my preconceptions about the narrow linear
conventionalities of life with actual experiences.
I got Robert Monroe's book Journeys Out of the Body and had
a completely conscious and clean separation from my body.
This was because they came and helped me do it, and it
proved to me that the soul is a real thing, and that it is
also part of the physical world.
All of my beliefs and expectations were turned upside down.
I came to know many different visitors, and had the
privilege of having them come to my cabin and meet other
people there. The only thing they did not allow was
photographs, and this was because this experience is not
about proof of the kind that closes questions.
Their school is a school of ascension, and to be free in the
way that is on offer, it is essential that we entertain
questions that we can neither answer nor bear to leave open.
The energy of living with such questions expands the mind
and enriches the soul. So the more enigmatic and provocative
the visitors are, the more intense the questions we are left
with and the stronger we get.
Ascension means to rise above, and a confrontation with a
power as complicated and contradictory as the visitors
leaves us with no choice.
They broke the shell of assumptions in which I used to live,
that life is linear, that the only real world is the one I
can see, that afterlife is a hypothesis, that we are living
at the pinnacle of human civilization, that there are
unbreakable laws of physics that vastly limit our scope, and
that morality is nothing more than social conventions.
Life is hyperdimensional, not linear and the mind can be
trained to see this. This is not our only reality. In the
physical state, we are active. When our bodies
transform--there is no death--we will have a much larger
vision and will contemplate our physical lives until we
either release from the wheel of life or re-enter the
physical to more fully explore ourselves.
The afterlife is real. In fact, it is MORE REAL than this
life. Here, we are more-or-less blind. There, we see across
space and time, returning to what the Book of Ecclesiastes
calls the "long home," which is a state of awareness of all
our lives.
We are not living at the pinnacle of human civilization. We
live on a planet that is prone to catastrophes, and this
species has been buffeted back and forth between
civilization and ignorance many times.
The laws of physics are accessible to manipulation. They can
be changed and circumvented. Faster than light movement is
possible. Time travel is possible. The promise of physical
expansion to other planets is real.
But no amount of tinkering with supercolliders or inventing
exotic fuels will help us. To advance to a higher level,
morality does matter. In fact, it is everything. This is
because ascension depends on lightness of being, and you
cannot be light if you are embroiled in greed and afflicted
by conscience.
My wife had one of the great near-death experiences when she
saw the waystation where dead people wait with their great
bundles, unable to go anywhere, doomed to eventually return
to the physical and resume the struggle again. Those bundles
are the desires, guilts, cares, you name it, of the world.
What the visitors are here doing is creating conditions
within us that enable us to release the bundles. And when we
do that, their awful appearance changes in a totally amazing
way. These oppressive, dangerous and challenging demons come
to seem stunningly child-like, bright with innocence.
I tell you that this is true. I have seen it and lived it.
The way is clear: open the mind, devote yourself to the
moral teaching of the ma'at, the Ten Commandments and, above
all, to the sublime directions laid down in the gospels.
And another thing I learned from them, which, as always, my
wife has brought me back to again and again and again.
Through all suffering and all despair, in the fears of the
night and the miseries of the day, be a gardener, not a
plunderer in life. Give of oneself without condition, and
therefore have joy.
