The Key Read Online Free PDF Page A

instruments. The Master offered a marvelous inducement to further study in this area: “The undiscovered country can become your backyard.”
    Our world would change in very fundamental ways if this happened. It seems to me that our species is actually severed into two parts, one physical and the other in some sort of plasmic state. It’s as if two halves of a single brain had been severed, as in a cerebral commissurotomy.
    In the end, I have come to accept that the soul is, indeed, part of the physical world, in exactly the same sense that an electromagnetic field is part of the physical world. However, I don’t think that it’s clear what, exactly, this means. It has advanced the question in my own mind from “Does the soul exist?” to “How are we to understand the existence of the soul?”
    Perhaps the dead can assist us from their side in repairing the fissure between us, and if so, maybe then the gap between us and whoever else is here can be closed enough for them to have meaningful interaction with us.
    In any case, if the dead exist and can be made accessible to reliable and repeatable communication, that would be in itself a revolution of world-historic proportions.
    He described ours as a “fallen” world and said that “because you have no plan for yourselves, there is no plan for you.” Although he didn’t say it outright, there was the strong implication that the reason we cannot see the world as it is, and continually deny the existence of an afterlife, is that it forces us to face the raw and unbearable truth of our own sins and insufficiencies.
    Throughout the conversation I had with him, this remarkable man promoted a powerful and consistent morality, as if to say that leading a moral life frees us to see ourselves as we really are.
    He offered a strikingly original definition of sin: “denial of the right to thrive.”
    I have found that taking this definition to heart has increased my moral precision. One can see much about oneself by applying those words to one’s own actions. They are really quite powerful and useful to anybody striving to lead a moral life.
    His attitude toward social responsibility was uncompromising. “All are responsible for all.” Like the visitors I engaged with in the mid-eighties, he regarded humility as absolutely essential to a moral life, and as well, essential even to an ability to see the world clearly.
    Ego does battle with our mortality and, above all, with our smallness. An astronaut I knew years ago stated the position of the scientific and intellectual communities with memorable eloquence when I pointed out to him that he knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t lying about my contact experiences, and that they were not an outcome of some sort of disease process or delusion. He said, “I know that’s probably true, but I have to tell you, I want us to be at the top of the food chain even if we have to lie to ourselves to stay there.”
    He also said, “I don’t want the path to Mars to be wellworn,” and I find that very understandable. I also think that it illustrates a subtle but important danger that is inherent in opening one’s eyes too wide. It is the same thing that has disempowered so many indigenous cultures when they have been exposed to western technological civilization, which is a sense of futility and irrelevance.
    If the veil between the world should fall, the implication is strong that we are going to discover that we are a footnote in a super-conscious vastness that we can hardly even begin to comprehend, but which is chiefly characterized by a kind of absolute knowledge that makes such things as discovery and innovation superfluous.
    Read with care; the words of the Master of the Key have a darkness concealed within them. There is a suggestion that souls can be subjected to exploitation, and even that, while everybody is to some extent participant