When I go out, my consciousness, or the part of it I identify as me, is what emerges. My name does not come but rather something deeper. I think that this is second body. It is not formless but bordered. I feel like a sort of orb. In other words, it is a body but without a familiar shape until I become visible, whereupon it turns into a form recognizable as me, generally in clothes I was wearing either at the time of separation or shortly before.
I would like to mention again at this point that I cannot control this. The two clearest separations have begun with that sensation of being unlocked along the spine. When I have been seen, I have in no way chosen this, nor have I been able to control the process directly, although I suspect that it has something to do with the ease of self-sensing that I have built up over years of my meditation practice.
The Pyramid Text says that that the spinal cord contains light. We can detect a concentration of electrical energy in this dense nerve bundle. Is that electricity somehow different from the light that they perceived? I suspect that the answer is both yes and no, in that the life force generates the electrical energy in the spine but is not that energy. We can detect the electricity. They could see the life force. They also believed that it can leave the body and remain coherent, and that it does so at death. So the energy involved is not like that of the physical part of the nervous system, which will wink out shortly after the heart stops pumping. This energy will instead rise out of the body as what must be a sort of plasma and begin to experience life in a new way.
I think that it is this that some of the predators want, essentially an entire life that may be tasted in exquisite detail, filled with all the energy of surprise and wonder that went into it. What I have experienced when my teachers have taken me out of my body tells me that separation can be caused by applying some sort of energy to the spine. The result is the ineffable blessing of out-of-body movement.
It might be, though, that somebody who cannot taste of the wonder of life on their own, they might want to steal it. They might do that by ripping the spine right out of the body, thus detaching the energetic body and enabling them to capture it.
We might think of this as unspeakably evil. And it is certainly terrible for the poor person who loses this most precious of all possessions. All the effort that has gone into the life is taken, and the soul ends up empty handed. But is this evil? When a shark devours an innocent swimmer, it is terrible, but it isn’t evil. It’s just nature being nature. The same thing holds true when a person is attacked in the night, their spine extracted and their energetic body captured. It’s just nature being nature—which is all well and good, but the immediate question that any swimmer in the ocean of life must have is, how do I continue to benefit from my swim until I am ready to return to shore without getting eaten by some soul shark?
This may seem like a very theoretical question now, and probably to many people a crazy one. But it is not theoretical, it is essential, and it is not crazy at all, but exactly as logical as how to protect oneself from a physical shark.
As they become more evident, there is going to be a lot of fear. The media will rush to tell horror stories. Believers will be trumpeting danger, claiming that these are the proverbial demons of darkest legend. Close encounter witnesses will be tearfully recounting their horror stories, many of them entirely real.
I am convinced that the main thing that has caused me to lose my fear of them is my work toward a strong soul, and I think that this is how we will defeat the fear. How ironic that, to save ourselves from the predatory side of the visitors, all we need do is to become good human beings.
Living a life of love, compassion and humility is all that it really takes. It isn’t necessary to engage in religious rituals, hexes or anything like that. It isn’t even necessary to believe that the visitors are real or that the soul exists. All that is necessary is to understand how to live this way and to do it with all the determination that one can bring to the effort.
Knowledge of why living a good life is important goes all the way back to our very oldest moral codes, to the Egyptian law of ma’at and the Ten Commandments that are a distillation of its many admonitions.
In my experience with the visitors, the first formal lesson I was given was one in humility. It was 1988, Communion had just been published and I was the king of the hill. My brother, eleven years my junior, came up to the cabin to see where it had all happened.
As I proudly took him down to the clearing from which I had originally been taken up into the UFO, I heard a low, tough voice say in my head, “Arrogance. I can do anything I want to you.” I hoped that it was just my imagination admonishing me and decided to tone down the bragging a bit. But when we got to the clearing, a huge UFO appeared. It was early evening, and there was no question what that big oval disk in the sky was. We both stood there looking right up at it. Then I saw three figures in a nearby clearing. He didn’t, but that didn’t matter to me. I knew now that the voice had been real, and to my astonishment, I realized that I was being called out for my lack of humility. But what would happen? “I can do anything I want to you.”
The next morning, my bank called. I was told that I had no account with them, and there were checks needing to be paid. But what could they be talking about? Of course I had an account! All the money I had in the world was in it, except for about fifty dollars in my wallet. The banker suggested that maybe I’d moved to another bank. I told him that they’d lost my account. He was disbelieving but agreed to search in their records for it. He also said that if the problem wasn’t resolved by the close of business, they’d have to bounce my checks. I had a hell of a day waiting. He called at about ten minutes of five and told me that they still hadn’t found my account. After a bit of wrangling, he agreed to hold the checks over for another day and get a search done in the bank’s backup records.
During the sleepless night that followed, I reflected deeply on humility, thought long and hard about how I lived in my ego, and considered that “Whitley,” after all, was just a name, and that back somewhere behind the edifice of the famous writer was a soul trying to accomplish a life task that was only impeded by his inflated self-importance. I resolved to reimagine “Whitley” as a social tool rather than as all that I am.
The next morning, the banker called. My account had been found in the backup records they kept in case of a general electronic emergency.
Humility is a task I still work on every day of my life.
Another excellent lesson I received, that is in my mind connected with them, or related to their presence in my life, once again involved the Master of the Key.
I had never understood exactly what sin was. When I was a boy, I lived in a maze of Catholic sins, all designed to make certain that the church, with its ability to manage forgiveness, remained central to our lives. We used to get little cards that showed how many years in purgatory each sin would lead to. Sass your mother, expect to burn for a thousand years. Do it to a nun, expect a hundred thousand. Eat meat on Friday, burn in hell forever.
I couldn’t figure it out. And why was fish ok? It was meat, too, wasn’t it? And what about chicken? Did it mean hell or just purgatory?
I could understand things like murder and robbery and such as sins, but most of us never do anything that bad. In fact, as I know now, great sin is rare. It takes work to do real evil. But doing things that we will later regret in our lives is commonplace, and it is our fear of our regrets that causes our fear of the visitors.
During the meeting with the Master of The Key, as I sat listening to one wise statement after another, I decided to ask him about the mystery of sin. He replied at once: “Sin is the denial of the right to thrive.”
Since the moment I heard those words, I have been examining my life through them as best I can and also understand enough about the way others are living to be able to be compassionate, which proves to be an extraordinary challenge.
I don’t think of myself as being qualified to tell anybody else how to live
a moral life, let alone what compassion means and how to enact it. I can, however, say what it means to me. It is always thought of as being endlessly forgiving and kind, but it is not that. It begins with looking deeply into people, oneself included, without judgement or preconceptions, and finding what needs you can fulfill. This includes everybody, not just the people around us but also every creature, be it physical or otherwise, from the grass under our feet to the angel soaring.
One of the loveliest and, I feel, most useful things Anne said after she died was, “We are, each of us, all we have.” If we really take that to heart and make it part of mind blood and bone, if we live it and breathe it every moment, there is really nothing else that needs to be known about compassion. If we put ourselves behind the eyes of any creature, no matter how humble or how great, we will see immediately that we all share the same struggle and are, each of us, deeply alone and in need.
When I was a boy, I asked one of the nuns at my school why she was a sister. She said, “Because here I am always needed.”
That is true of every one of us. Know it, and compassion becomes your path.
We must understand ourselves if we are to understand others. This cannot be done with ego. It takes humility. Once we do it, then love comes forth, and we are the stronger for it. We will see what others need through the medium of seeing what we truly need. And, into the bargain, we cease to have anything about ourselves that we would prefer to hide. So when the visitors look at us, their vision penetrating to our truth, our truth can look right back, unafraid.
So love flows out of compassion, which rests in humility. As Anne communicated with me from beyond the grave with eloquence and ease, I realized that she, who was in her essence a teacher and a wonderful one in this life, had achieved mastery in the next level. I asked her to help me find an aim that would give direction to the rest of my life. This is when she said, “Enlightenment is what happens when there is nothing left of us but love.”
Live that, and the visitors will cease to be demons in your view and become angels. As is said in the film Jacob’s Ladder, “The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
Life with the visitors begins when we have made our peace with ourselves.
10
Dark Truths and Light
Close encounter is not only among the most mysterious and complex of human experiences, and certainly among the most fulfilling, it can also be dangerous. But for most people, it is not that. It is far from that.
Still, if there’s any danger, we need to understand very clearly what it involves and how we can cope with it.
Some of the early researchers saw only the dark side of it, but at the time the modern experience was just beginning and there was little else to see. The forced abductions started in the 1960, so when people like Budd Hopkins became aware of them, there were no witnesses who had as yet developed relationships with the visitors, and pretty much everybody was terrified.
When I first met Budd, he was careful to avoid sharing his thoughts and opinions about the story I told him. For my part, I had nothing to say about it other than to describe it as it had emerged into memory. At that point, only Timothy and Anne had heard it and I was keeping my injuries very much to myself.
Budd suggested hypnosis, and referred me to Dr. Donald Klein, who performed the two hypnosis sessions which led to the writing of Communion and are archived on my website. From the horror of those experiences to the life I live now has been a long road, but I have not traveled it alone, for it is now seen to be the path of many, if not most, close encounter witnesses.
The experiences often start violently. Great terror can be involved—and why not, who could fail to be terrified by the apparitions that we see? Some of us, most particularly those who have only a few experiences, never get beyond that point. Others report being continually hounded by bizarre entities. But for most of us, there is an arc that starts in fear and ends in a life of deep inner search, and psychological, intellectual and spiritual exploration.
During my first hypnosis with Dr. Klein, I remembered seeing one of the kobolds standing across our bedroom. This result was entirely unexpected. In an instant, my vision of the world we live in was upended. The thing didn’t look all that menacing, but it was there. I erupted into a torrent of screaming so intense that it nearly brought the police. I’d never known that such an intense feeling of fear, fiery, raw and desperate. And yet it had been hiding inside me all along, certainly at least from the previous summer. My interior underworld had risen to the surface.
Reading the literature of close encounter, including the letters that Anne saved and the dozens of books by researchers like Hopkins, David Jacobs and Dr. John Mack, one sees a picture emerging that is quite like my own experience: a frightening, world-shaking initial encounter, followed, if the experiences continue, by a long struggle to come to terms with the situation.
The FREE organization, founded by Rey Hernandez and sanctioned by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, is embarked on a study of close encounter witnesses designed to explore how their relationship with the visitors evolves over time, where it leads, and how the witnesses’ perceptions change because of what they are experiencing. (FREE is an acronym for Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences.) Rey, an attorney, was inspired to start the organization by his own close encounter with a UFO, which unfolded in the presence of his wife and daughter. Like me, like Budd Hopkins and so many others, he had been called to action by the phenomenon itself.
Despite the usual paucity of funding, FREE has managed to accomplish a substantial amount of statistical research, the results of which are compiled into a book called Beyond UFOs: the Science of Consciousness and Contact with Nonhuman Intelligence.”
By creating a website designed to attract the interest of close encounter witnesses and providing extensive professionally designed questionnaires, they have developed the beginnings of a profile of what people actually think about what’s happening to them. Of course, what they have done so far suffers from being a self-selected sample, but nobody in this field presently has the financial resources to do random sampling. Even so, with over 5,000 respondents at this point and a high level of consistency, there is reason to believe that FREE has developed a reasonably accurate picture of the human experience.
What is found essentially agrees with the work of Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, who sees the first contact as initiatory in nature. In our book Super Natural, he says, “The calling of the shaman is often signaled by what Mircea Eliade, in his classic study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), called an “initiatory illness,” a severe psychological trial or physical illness that effects a transformation of the future shaman’s being, that spiritually mutates him, if you will. Other common tropes include the presence of “power animals” or totems, the ability to leave one’s body and travel in the interworld, a proclivity for trance states and robust visionary experience, erotic contact or marriage between the shaman and a particular deity, spirit or discarnate being, and the use of psychoactive sacred plants to catalyze and supercharge these various magical powers.”
This could be a description of the opening phase of a life in close encounter. As such, I see it as one part of a vast process of re-enchantment of the world. In The Afterlife Revolution, Anne and I make the point that the near death experience is, like the close encounter experience, upending of one’s understanding of reality and thus also initiatory in nature. In addition, medical advances which are increasingly able to return people from the edge of death, are causing a distinct increase in such experiences. In Changed in a Flash, for example, Elizabeth Krohn describes actually being asked to decide, w
hile her body lay effectively dead, whether or not to come back. She did, and was able to because modern medical science could save her.
What we would appear to be looking at, then, in both the close encounter and near death experiences, is a massive increase in initiation. So this is not so much about the arrival of aliens as it is about a change in awareness—essentially, a deepening of the human experience of reality. These experiences challenge the way the mind sees the world, and even change, along with meditative practices, how the brain works.
While there is an expansion of consciousness in process on a massive scale, I personally cannot ignore the findings of Hopkins and Jacobs. This is because the horrors they describe in their books happened to me and Anne. During my abduction, a device was inserted into my rectum that caused an erection. This wasn’t anything exotic. It was an electrostimulator, used in those days in cases of sexual dysfunction and still common in animal husbandry. My frantic effort to push it out was what caused the rectal tear that left me in pain for years thereafter.
In my second hypnosis session, you can hear me reliving the experience and commenting with confusion in my voice that I have an erection. Semen was then extracted from me. Sometime in the next year, Anne and I had the experience of being shown a baby, exactly as Hopkins and Jacobs report.
So, as always, this experience has more than one level of complexity. On the one hand, it is certainly leading toward some sort of awakening of the human species. On the other, there are indeed ominous, dangerous and bizarre elements that should not be ignored.
A New World Page 14