The Key Read Online Free PDF

in conscious energy, not all possess the “radiant body” that requires attention to maintain.
    Could this be why the great majority of the dead just seem to disappear? Usually, after somebody I know dies, I will see them for a few days, and then they are gone. Rarely they may return, seemingly perfectly intact, years later, but not often. When they do, it often seems more as if I am dealing with something that has been gathered into a certain form in order to engage in communication, and that what lies behind it is, in a sense, focusing itself into this particular form only so that it can be understood.
    However, in my mind, there are certainly dead people who have a continuous and discreet presence of some sort. Between 1989 and 1993, I meditated almost nightly with such people.
    One summer night in 1989, I was in the guest bedroom where I meditated around eleven each night when I suddenly felt a presence so palpable that I could not ignore it. Finally, I said aloud that if I couldn’t see whoever was there, I had to leave the room. A few moments later, I did so.
    After a period of what could charitably be called disquiet, I fell asleep, only to be awakened at about three by a familiar blow to my shoulder. Many times over the past few years, I’d been woken up like this, usually to face some bizarre experience or other. But this time what happened was completely incredible.
    I saw, sitting on the foot of the bed, a small man wearing a tunic. He slumped against the bedstead like a rag doll. I threw off the covers and went down to him. Up close, he was compact. His eyes were deep set but his appearance was human. I took his hand in mine. It was as light as air. From experience with such apparitions, I attempted to anchor myself by smelling his skin. He was startlingly ripe, as if bathing was not a custom he was familiar with.
    An instant later, he disappeared. I went down the hall and began meditating. Soon, I could hear breathing behind me, as regular as if it was being generated by a machine.
    For the next three years, we meditated together regularly. He would appear with a great clatter of noise on the roof above the meditation room, and we would begin. Often, he would come into the bedroom around three, and we would meditate together.
    Once, my wife came in to meditate with us, but when the clatter began on the roof, she said, “I’m not ready for this,” and left the room.
    Because I had been made such a public laughingstock, people were becoming embarrassed to buy my books and my financial situation was deteriorating. On the night before we left the cabin forever, I asked to see him as he really was. Obviously, someone who seemed to use his physicality in the same way that we use clothes could not be, in the end, like us and subject to the same rigors that constrain us.
    I waited, but nothing happened, and finally I went back to bed. Suddenly there appeared in the front yard a terrific light. It was so bright that I thought for a moment that the house had caught fire.
    I rushed to the window and there glided out from the meditation room and across the yard what was probably the most magnificent thing I have ever seen. It was a bright light, like a huge star floating twenty feet off the ground. Out of it there came piercing rays that I could actually feel as if they were pinpricks. It was as if they were penetrating my skin, and where they entered me, I felt a sweet sense of another human presence, as if I was being embraced by a dear old friend—which, of course, is exactly what was happening.
    In 1998, when the Master of the Key described the radiant body, I knew exactly what he meant, because I had seen a person in this state and had lived and worked with him for years. It is endlessly interesting to me that he could control the degree to which he was physical.
    When I asked him, once, what he was, he indicated a book in my library called Life Between Lives , and I suppose that is where