A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  I didn’t sit on the bedside for long. My mind went back to the last time I was woken up by being jostled or otherwise disturbed in the wee hours. This happened back in the 1990s when seven people who indicated that they were from between lives kept trying to get me to meditate with them at this hour. I did it for a few weeks or months, I forget how long. Then we lost the cabin and moved to Texas, and I saw no more of them.

  I recalled the weeks I spent mediating with them as being one of the best periods of contact of my life, a rich learning experience. (I’ve discussed it in more detail in both Solving the Communion Enigma and The Super Natural.) After I entered the meditation room the first time, they called me, they came pounding down onto the roof, making seven loud thuds. Then they fell silent. A few seconds later, I had the impression that somebody was standing right in front of me. I explained that I couldn’t meditate with invisible people present. I had to see them. When nobody materialized, I left the room and went to bed.

  A few hours later, one of them, a man, human appearing, became visible for a few unforgettable moments while sitting on the foot of the bed.

  Their ability to control their density might involve a natural process or technology, I cannot say. If they are coming and going from the mirror universe, then maybe they don’t disappear at all but simply pass back into the other reality, perhaps using some form of mental process or, of course, technology. (How, I wish I knew!)

  There is one thing that, if we could do it, we could control our own density. This would involve increasing and decreasing the space between atoms—in other words, controlling the gluons that mediate that space.

  The physical world is a near-vacuum. For example, the atoms that make up most of the mass of a piece of steel are actually just 0.0000000000001% of its volume. Statistically, physical matter can hardly be said to exist. It is maintained by what is known as the strong nuclear force, which is the only reason that the world we live in is here.

  Their ability to rearrange atoms has to mean that they can control the strong force and, thus, may be in possession of technology that can alter density. Of course, there are other possible reasons, too. This gets back to the mirror universe, which would necessarily occupy reality in a way that mirrors our own place in it. If this is true, the math of wormholes tells us that passing back and forth might be easier than would be using a wormhole to go to another part of our own universe. The amount of energy needed to bend space-time in order to bring two points in the same universe together is far greater than the amount needed to briefly open a hole in the membrane between mirror universes.

  When the man materialized before my eyes, I took his hand. It was small and light, very light. But it had definite heft. It felt solid. But I wondered if he was actually, physically present. How could he be? No matter how real it appeared, it had to be in my mind.

  So I held it to my nose and smelled the back of it. Once again, I was surprised. His skin was pungent. There was a sharpness to the odor that I associate with people who don’t bathe. Frankly, the guy was ripe. There’s no other way to put it.

  I was so surprised that I dropped it—whereupon he winked out of existence. I sat there completely flabbergasted. Now, looking back to that event of more than twenty years ago, I would think that controlling the strong nuclear force may even be a natural ability, perhaps even one that can be found, with disciplined concentration, within ourselves. If so, then it must have something to do with control of attention. It really did seem, in that moment, that my dropping his hand had broken his concentration, which is what caused him to disappear.

  Fast forward to 2015 and to the third night that I was called. The first night, I experienced a shock that was inexplicable to me. On the second night came a pinch that made me realize that I was once again in contact. And now came the third night and another awakening at 3. No question now. I got up, went into the living room, took my seat and began to move my attention from mind to body.

  Since then, the early morning meditation has become part of my life, and with some of this unfolding so very close to physical reality. From October of 2015 until April of 2019, they woke me up every night by blowing on my face or the back of my hand, sometimes by kissing me.

  It’s easy to say, “He’s just hallucinating,” and ignore me. Many people don’t even want to think about a life like mine, let alone entertain the idea of living with demanding invisible beings who refuse to allow you a full night’s rest and who involve themselves in your inner life in ways that are often extremely challenging. But there’s another, more fundamental reason they prefer to doubt me. It is that whoever or whatever is here doing this is obviously in possession of extraordinary capabilities, and that feels like a threat.

  During the October–December period in 1985 in upstate New York when they were taking me physically, I felt captured, which was why I reacted like a wild animal that had been snared. And in fact, this is what I was. We are a social species, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not wild. We don’t normally feel that wildness, but when one is face to face with an unknown being who is obviously in control of the situation and whose motives one cannot even guess at, it will come out.

  This response is instinctual and is probably the underlying reason that we so generally reject this whole experience. The only way to overcome it is for both sides to keep trying to get used to one another.

  There is a taming process necessary, and it isn’t easy, not even when you know what is happening. I’ve been trying to get used to them for thirty years and have only just recently begun to think of my fear of them as something that has passed. Frankly, my wife’s participation in the process from the other side has more than anything else been what has enabled me to make progress, and, to me, this is an indication that contact isn’t going to succeed if we continue to deny the existence of our souls and thus also our dead, and they are not involved. We need to finally stop pretending to ourselves that they don’t exist and get down to the business of enlisting their support as we go deeper into this new life.

  Here are two examples of just how deep and powerful our fear of doing this is. In February of 2017, I was at the Esalen Institute in Northern California at a conference with Jeff Kripal. We were sleeping in the same room, one in which I had briefly encountered the visitors on a previous visit. It’s in a building called the Murphy House and is called the Sea View Room because it has a deck that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. When they are going to drop into a physical density, the visitors do tend to prefer spaces that offer a quick exit to an open area such as a large forest or the sea.

  At 3 on the last morning of the conference, an invisible presence blew on the back of my left hand. I was lying with my head turned to the right, which meant that I was facing toward the window that overlooks the sea. As the burst of air on my left hand caused me to open my eyes and turn toward the hand, I glimpsed a dark figure at the bedside on my right. I saw no detail except that it was short, and I assume that the fact that the left hand was involved was intended to cause me to turn away from it as I awoke. Even as recently as 2017, I would have reacted to face-to-face contact with a burst of fear.

  The next moment, I recovered myself. I got up and, as usual, opened my inner self with the sensing exercise. Nothing further happened to me, and I completed the exercise, as I normally did in those days, after about fifteen minutes of inner work.

  The next morning, Jeff remembered hearing a tremendous crashing sound and feeling an uncanny sense of dislocation. My experience had come around 3, and his about an hour later. He heard an inner voice that was at the same time his own say, “Oh my God.” He told me later that he felt a sense of devastation, as if his entire world was collapsing.

  This is because contact involves the breakdown of the barrier between the living and the dead and at least a partial drawing of the ego out of the time stream—a sort of death before dying. This threatens a fate that is horrifying in the extreme to the inner person, which is being plunged into the nonmeaning that
accompanies knowledge of future and past.

  The natural reaction is to think, “Oh, I’d love to know my future.”

  But what would that actually be like? In fact, you’d feel like you were riding on rails, or a marionette being manipulated by an unseen puppeteer. Your spontaneity would be lost. Life would entirely lose its meaning.

  I think that this is why Jeff was so devastated in his moment of contact and why I and so many others have struggled with the ferocious, nameless fear that comes to us when the visitors approach.

  The fear can be much worse than what Jeff experienced. It can be life threatening.

  The previous summer, I had been at a country house where I’ve been encountering the visitors since boyhood. It has a sleeping porch upstairs, which a number of the bedrooms open onto. An individual who was in one of these rooms heard scraping footsteps outside her window and then a low, husky voice growl, “Why aren’t you asleep?”

  She called out and asked if it was me. I was in the living room and called back that I was downstairs reading. I had also heard those footsteps, though. When I was a boy, I heard them on that same porch many times.

  In the morning, I asked her if she had been upset. She said no, but I knew from experience that an encounter like that, even one so small, can have powerful effects.

  Sure enough, that afternoon she began to experience symptoms of what I suspected could be a silent heart attack. We called a doctor friend who lives nearby. He came over immediately, confirmed that a heart attack was in progress, called EMS and got her to the hospital. She ended up with a pacemaker.

  These are typical examples of the kind of stress close encounter produces. I was allowed on the night at Esalen only a glimpse of what was there. Any more than that, and my ego would have felt itself being drawn out of time, and the terror would have come.

  Understand that this doesn’t just happen when we have contact with nonhuman intelligences. The literature of ghostly encounters with dead human beings is a literature of fear. But although both types of event are among the most challenging experiences a person can have, both can also be not only endurable, but also productive.

  We can see a version of our own fear in the fear that wild animals have of us. In the distant past, I would think that they were no more wary of us than of other predators, and larger predators weren’t afraid of us at all. That was, however, before we came to understand the inevitability of death. Because we know this, we are now different from all the other creatures on the earth, and they know it because they can see it as a darkness in our eyes, exactly as we see in their terrible glances the visitors’ knowledge of the future, not just that death is inevitable but the day and the hour.

  The visitor who caused me to turn away from him did so out of kindness. If I had woken up while I was turned toward him, I would be looking right into his face. A moment or so of that, and all spontaneity would be leached from my life, for knowledge of the hour of death must shed a cruel light along the path of future life as well.

  I knew a man who had something close to this happen. After looking into the eyes of a visitor, he spent the rest of his life in a state of permanent déjà vu.

  Once you know the moment of your death, you also know everything that transpires between. We are not here to move through life on the grim rails of future knowledge but to experience events spontaneously. Even if they are preplanned, which for all I know they may be, our purpose here is to be surprised and to gain self-knowledge by observing the way we react to what life presents to us.

  If the visitors, not to mention our own dead, are going to commune with us, they are going to have to hide very carefully, because if they slip up and cause us to lose the chance to react spontaneously, then they also lose what they are here to experience.

  This is the primary, but deeply hidden, reason for all the secrecy that surrounds the contact experience. Contact—communion—involves not only a new kind of intimacy but also a new kind of mutual discipline. We have to open ourselves to them without seeking to know them, and they have to enter us without revealing their knowledge of our futures to us.

  Without us having confidence that this won’t happen, communion can only go so far, and it’s not going to be far enough for either side.

  The question remains, “If it’s all predestined, why bother to do anything?” The answer has to do with the reason that history itself exists. Over the six or seven thousand years of the current cycle, in each generation, more complex lives have become possible. The number of alternative histories on offer to each soul has become larger and larger. Even though the end is always the same and the game remains the game, there are more possible moves in every generation, more twists and turns. Although the end is always the same, the paths of life become more and more forked, and the journey richer in discoveries.

  Knowing all that, though, what practical means do we have to work with the fear?

  Just as tame animals don’t fear us, we can learn not to fear the visitors. That’s a great part of what this book is about. In February of 2017 at Esalen, I dared not look into their eyes. Now, in Santa Monica in August of 2019, I understand why I shouldn’t and, therefore, have no fear of this. I’m not going to ruin the spontaneity of my life when I’m with them because I know how to avoid doing it.

  I get knowledge from them. My life becomes richer. They get relief from me. Yes, it’s a game, and just as Shakespeare said, this is a theater and we are the players. He didn’t think about the audience, though. They are the audience, and when they have a seat in the theater of our lives, they enjoy the great pleasure of being alive again.

  It’s an illusion, of course, but it must be a satisfying one because they do come back to me for it very often indeed, and they are clamoring for more opportunities with more people. If we can do a good job for them on the little stage that is this earth, they are going to help us keep the theater open—that is, help us rebalance nature.

  It’s going to be hard to make the relationship work, though. Probably a goodly number of my readers are recoiling in horror right now, thinking to themselves, “My god, he lets himself be possessed!”

  No, shared. If they controlled me, they would bring the knowledge they want to leave behind with them. A lot of close encounter witnesses intuit this. It’s why they are so often called “The Watchers.”

  Communion is a new state for us. From experience, once one relaxes into it, the idea of living in the old way becomes the real terror. This is especially true because of the alternative, which is upheaval, incredible human suffering on an unimaginable scale, and possibly even extinction.

  8

  The Man from Paradise

  Until recently, I did not understand the multiple witness encounters that took place at our cabin in the late 1980s for what they were. It is only as I have gotten into deeper contact with the visitors that I have been able to understand that they were messages and decode them.

  As I’ve done this, a whole new picture of who the visitors are and what they want has emerged.

  The first of the big cabin events involved the kobolds, the second the grays. On the first weekend, there were ten adults present and one child. Anne, Dora Ruffner and Peter Frohe have since passed away. Ed Conroy, who was then writing Report on Communion, Lorie Barnes and Raven Dana have agreed that I may use their names in this book.

  Raven has been kind enough to send me an email detailing her memories of what happened on that night in the living room where she, Dora, Peter and another man were sleeping. I will call him “B.”

  Lorie was in a guest room along the hall, our son in his bedroom, and Ed and his companion in the basement. Anne and I were upstairs in our room.

  Raven writes, “Dora and B. were maybe five feet apart, sleeping parallel to each other. I was sleeping with my back to them. I woke up because I had become hot and uncomfortable. When I tried to roll over, I found that I couldn’t move. I was wide awake though and thought, ‘sonofabitch!’ I tried to relax. Then I hear
d Dora and B talking but I couldn’t make out what was being said over the driving rain.” (A sound like rain would often fill the house as the visitors approached from above.) “Then I heard some thumping, bumping sounds. The rain let up and I heard birds.”

  “This all happened over a period of just a few minutes. Heat. Heavy rain. Could not move. Muted voices. Thumping. Then silence and I could move. My eyes were open the whole time. I rolled over and said, “What the heck is going on?”

  “Dora and B. both started talking at the same time…talking over each other…me, too. I asked, “Did you hear that rain? What was all that noise? What time is it?”

  “B. said that the visitors were just there, and had been doing ‘acrobatics; around the beds. Dora said it was 2:40 and that she didn’t think what we heard was rain. We all went to the door and…nope...there had been no rain. Everything was dry and we could no longer hear birds.”

  “Apparently when I could not turn over, several small blue beings were jumping on or around B.’s bed. That is the noise I heard.”

  While this was taking place in the living room, in the basement, Ed and his friend were astonished to see a young woman walk down the stairs holding a badly torn up sweater. It was a close friend of theirs, who had died in the 1983 Mexico City earthquake. She had been so terribly crushed that all that was recovered of her had been the sweater. Here she was, though, seemingly perfectly healthy, carrying it! (This is very typical of contacts with those in the afterlife, by the way. Most of us cannot hear them, so they will come carrying objects that identify them.) After conveying the information that she was all right, she disappeared. Upstairs, the fun went on for about fifteen minutes more, then the dark blue acrobats were gone.

  Pretty much everybody in the house stayed up talking all night except me and Anne and our son. We were in our bedrooms and slept through the whole thing.

  As I now understand, it was a communication on two levels.