Have Joy

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.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.