On July 12, I wrote in this journal: ?So far, there has been a fairly high level of UFO activity worldwide, and some events involving the crop circle phenomenon suggest that there will be a window of opportunity for communication between August 11 and August 24.?

Recently, I have been receiving emails deriding me for claiming that aliens would land on August 11. Of course, I never said such a thing. It?s being spread on Christian Fundamentalist websites by skilled propagandists who are doing their ?lying for Christ? bit in the mistaken belief that the greater good of discrediting Whitley Strieber justifies the telling of a big, fat lie. Sometimes I wonder just how deep into evil these people can sink without realizing how corrupt they are becoming.

However, something quite amazing has happened. In fact, two things. First, August 11 was one terribly important date, and second, there has indeed been an upsurge in reports from people who are experiencing contact. I can?t tell for certain, because not all of the letters mention the little meditations I have been suggesting, but some of them are very specific about the fact that they are using these meditations.

The reason that the visitor experience is often so difficult is that it?s hard to look into the eyes of a greater mind, very hard. It is the reason that your dog will weep if you look into his eyes. I have felt this, looking directly into the eyes of a visitor for a long time, and it was agony. But I choose not to weep. I choose to accept this challenge and try to use it to grow.

So, why was August 11 so important? Debka News, among many others reported over the past few days ?Al Qaeda had fixed on last week to launch its most devastating simultaneous mega-terror offensive since September 11, 2001, in several countries of the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and East Africa. However, sweeping, timely counter-action blunted its impetus.? (In this context, “last week” means the week of the 11th, when this was first announced.)

British Airways went so far as to cancel all flights to Saudi Arabia during the week of the 11th, and Saudi Prince Abdullah announced that even passively tolerating Al Qaeda was an offense in the Saudi kingdom, something the U.S. has been trying to get him to say for years.

In my July 6 entry in this journal, I wrote, ?The first question is, how have they pointed toward the eleventh? Quite simply, really. There exists, at this point, a process of pattern repetition in crop circles. On July 25, 2001, a magnificent crop circle appeared near the Gog Magog Hills in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire. 49 days later was September 11, 2001. In itself, that?s probably just a random occurrence. What may not be random, however, is this: On June 25, 2003, an identical circle appeared in a field in Belgium. 49 days later would be August 11, 2003. Using the language of crop circles, if indeed it exists, it could be that the 2003 crop circle is being used to point to August 11 as a day when some extraordinary event, and possibly a violent one, is going to take place. Or it could just as easily be that I?m reading too much into the whole thing.?

It turns out that I was not reading too much into anything. A violent and terrible event was indeed planned for that day, and thwarted. I take this as an immensely positive sign and a reason for real joy. Some people who would harm and destroy our world and throw away valuable lives for filthy ideologies were turned aside, their threat reduced, at least for a while. The warning communicated in the fields of Europe was an accurate one, and accurately understood by somebody who is too often taken for granted or dismissed: Linda Moulton Howe. She is a person of extraordinary courage, willing to explore the extremes even though this exposes her to constant criticism and rejection. She has the courage to make the inevitable missteps in the name of discovery. She?s an explorer in the truest sense of that word. Because of the choices she has made, this marvelous reporter has been marginalized by our society. But she doesn?t deserve this any more than I do or any of the people of courage who choose to look into the eyes of the unknown.

Of course, it could also be that another violent event, the Great Blackout of 2003 was a successful terrorist act. Right now, nobody knows what happened. If so, then it probably qualifies as part of the violence that we were warned about in that Belgian field back in June.

I cannot express how marvelous I think that this successful communication is. Coupled with the sudden upsurge in contact reports, it does suggest that we are finally making some real progress in freeing human consciousness from the chains of ideology that bind it. Of course, the chains are very heavy and the numbers bound by them are vast, but even a few little sparks of freedom are tremendously important. The reason is that these few people will be able to be conduits for this energy into the world. Like all that is good, it is immortal and has no limits. This is why a little of it goes a long way.

Evil, unlike good, has an end. All that falls does. Eventually, the it reaches death. This is why both Moslem and Christian fundamentalist leaders sing a siren song about death. The Moslems tell their poor victims that they will be delivered into heaven by killing themselves. The Christians say that they will reach an equally fictional rapture by doing what they can to help induce Armageddon.

Naked, these are both revealed as the same very human impulse: the death-wish that drives fallen souls. It is beautifully expressed in the gospel in the story of Judas. He was condemned not because he had done wrong, but because he did not trust God.

In the end, what all of this is all about is trusting God. To a person who lives in a fallen world and is part of such a world, as all of us are, this feels like trusting the dark. Trusting God is just about the scariest thing we can possibly do.

The great poet, Rainier Maria Rilke, had at the town of Duino in Italy a series of angelic revelations that have echoed down the years as one of modern man?s truest encounters with the deity. He wrote, in the second of these elegies, ?Every angel is terrible, and still, alas/ knowing all that I serenade you/ you almost deadly birds of the soul.?

Trusting God means that we must look into the eyes of the angels even though it hurts and seems dangerous and, indeed, is dangerous. It is very, very dangerous, because those who do not want us to be free are all around us, too. They hate the good and work against them. Evil scientists work through the medium of false knowledge, evil religionists through the medium of false belief.

They are out there singing a song that the only way to salvation is through death. This ancient song has been sung since Odysseus was tempted by the sirens to sail his ship into destruction. It recent years, it has become more strident: Moslem extremists sing that the way to salvation is through suicide terrorism; Christian extremists that the way to the rapture is to hasten the end of the world. Both sing the same demon?s song: come with us to death, little man. Who chooses life will never be saved.

Of course, the opposite is true. God is life, and who chooses life, chooses God. The way to salvation is as it has always been: ?Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.? This is not about going without clothes. It is about going naked before God.

But we are not naked before God. Remember when God asked Adam, ?Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?? This tells us what we need to do to recover ourselves, to find our way back from the fall of knowledge. But this is not knowledge such as real science; God gave us our intellect to use in life, for the same reason the bird was given his wings or the lion his claws.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil is the process of judging our fellow man and all around us, it is the process, so deeply natural to us, of filtering the world through a system of ideas that we have toiled to spin.

When I first saw into the eyes of a visitor, on that terrifying night in December of 1985, I was plunged into a pure agony of screaming terror. But I recovered from that agony. I went on down the road, because I also remembered in those eyes a dark purity that was not of this world. Where there is no filter of beliefs, there is knowledge of everything. A man without ideas of his own is a man filled with the ideas of God. Such a man is more a brilliant animal than one of us, a true creature of nature.

But how in the world can I become a creature of nature, I who live in a house and wear clothes and drive a car and all of those other things?

The answer is that it is not necessary to abandon ordinary life to become a creature of nature. A man who lives in the forest is less natural than a man who lives in shelter. Our intellect is the essence of our nature, therefore what we do with it is natural. And not just the good. Pollution and war and cruelty are as much a part of our natural expression of ourselves as are cleanliness and peace and compassion. Death and life dance together in us.

What is higher in us is what brings our nature into balance, and this is what the visitors have on offer, a chance to see and taste this in all its raw terror and beauty. They offer us their own nakedness, as a lifeboat for a species drowning in illusions and lies.

To come back from the fall, we need to spread our wings again. Then, at once, God’s pure spiritual air will enable us to fly. At once, think of it! The kingdom of heaven is not somewhere far away, waiting for the suicide or the raptured dead. It is right here, now, in you as you read these words. But you cannot open the door because you don’t have the keys.

The keys to the kingdom are no mystery.

I have been privileged to have many great teachers. One of the greatest of these was P. L. Travers. Few people know that, in addition to being the author of Mary Poppins, she was one of the most advanced souls of this age. You can see a little of it in her books like ?About the Sleeping Beauty.? Her surrender to God had brought her to the divine feminine, and she used to say to us that we must ?lie in the lap of the goddess.? And when you asked her what that meant, she would say, ?it means to be unsure.?

This is the essence of surrender to God and the royal road to the higher consciousness that is opening itself to us in this specific time, extending a hand that a few of us, in these next couple of weeks, are going to grasp: to take the hand of the visitors means to embrace the question. We WILL NOT KNOW what they are when we do it. I can tell you that I went deep into the woods with them and was not harmed. But how can you know that? What of the object that resides in my left ear? Perhaps it has made me an android, incapable of independent thought. Maybe I am the siren, you are Odysseus. What is worse, when you are alone and this presence approaches you, I tell you now, that the anguish will be appalling.

I can also tell you what to do with this anguish, that comes from lying in God?s lap: give it to the wind. Surrender to it. If you want to scream, scream. The visitors are old. They?ve heard it before. Remember that they, also, are afraid. The agony of contact works both ways. We are invading each other?s most fundamental realities, and it is absolutely terrifying to have that set of beliefs challenged. I do not speak, now, of religious beliefs. I speak of the beliefs that make the world look as it does, that make leaves green and blood red. To have contact is to cause the part of ourselves that is maintaining our contact with reality on this level feel unsure.

And there, in that unsureness, is God. Remember this, if you are among those who reach contact during our work together over the next few weeks: what is important is not the fact of what you have achieved. The real gift of contact is the unsureness, the question. For it is in that burning question, the agony of the fire in the night, that you will find the sweet and terrible embrace of God.

My two books, the Key, and especially, in the context of this journal, the Path offer insight into my particular approach to these ideas, and useful information for the seeker.

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