A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  In short, we will feel disempowered, and just as that feeling has been an illusion for indigenous peoples all over the world, it will be one for mankind as a species. When we look for the rewards of relationship with them, we must also look to and embrace our own strengths rather than becoming obsessed by their skills and their possessions.

  It will help us also to remember that, while their skills may be far greater than ours, their vulnerabilities, while different, may be profound.

  Let me explain.

  Any ethicist will tell you that technological and ethical advancement do not necessarily go hand in hand. The briefest glance at our own history reveals that the Spaniards were hardly the only society to trample on less technologically advanced cultures. An even more egregious example is Nazi Germany, which used its superior organization and advanced weapons technology to lay waste to most of Europe and senselessly annihilate millions of innocent people. And why? Because the entire culture of Nazism wasn’t just ethically impoverished, it was proactively insane.

  So the donation site stands as both a promise and a warning that it’s a big universe out there. We have obtained marvelous technology from it. Jeff Kripal has gone so far as to identify one of the people who has done the most in terms of transforming what has been found into beneficial advances for mankind as an angel.

  It is time for a new conversation with the visitors to begin. The challenge goes both ways. They have to take the risk that we won’t be able to bear their presence and we have to take the risk that they might be dangerous to us in irrecoverable ways.

  There is such promise for us: the knowledge that the energetic body is real and that it exists to serve a soul that is also very real, the knowledge that you can leave your physical body and travel far, the promise of learning how to accomplish reliable communication between physical and nonphysical mankind. Most of all, gaining real communication with the visitors and from there entering a state of communion with them that enriches them with newness and us with knowledge.

  As we do these things, I think we will see that a lot of what looks like extraordinary technology—the ability to be invisible, to travel great distances instantaneously and without a machine, even the ability to cross between universes—is really something intrinsic to life itself and which can be learned. I think that such abilities are physical expressions of soul craft.

  Among the most important advances that are likely to take place as we get closer to the visitors is the institutionalization of nonphysical travel.

  Because second body cannot be detected by the instruments we now possess, the idea that second body exists, let alone that such travel is possible, is generally rejected.

  When I was last seen out of body was at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in northern California, by the scientist I cannot name. I was in a dormitory of small single rooms. I’d meditated as usual at 11 and 3 when, to my annoyance, I was woken up at 4 by what felt like an electric current shooting down my spine. I got up, tried to meditate again, but was too tired then went back to bed. The next thing I knew, I was in the hall outside my room. I turned around and saw that my door was closed and therefore also locked. For a moment, I thought I’d locked myself out but then realized that, because of the gliding motion of my body, I was, in fact, in the nonphysical state. I thought immediately that I would like to make myself seen to as many of the academics and scientists at the conference as I could. I went into Jeff Kripal’s room, but he was sleeping like a log. I didn’t try to wake him up. I know from experience that I can’t do anything physically in this state. I’ve tried, for example, to pull a leaf off a tree. Although I myself am woken up by nonphysical entities all the time, so far I have not been able to affect anything in the physical world while in a nonphysical state.

  After trying Jeff, I tried the person in the next room. The result was the same.

  In the third room I entered, I found the occupant sort of half awake. I did the sensing exercise, which, I believe, may help make me visible. It doesn’t feel like it does in the physical. In this state, it is like becoming aware of one’s boundaries, as if you are somehow cupped in your own hands.

  He saw me all right. I could see it in his face.

  I found myself conversing with him, but not of my own free will and not physically. I was being used to deliver a message to him about the soul and the importance of living a life that leaves one unburdened by guilt. Some months later, he chose to take his soul’s journey on the path of religion. If one treads it without becoming doctrinaire or falling into the trap of belief in such a way that one feels compelled to hurt others, it can be a rich experience.

  After the conversation ended, I found myself rising. I went up through the ceiling, ascending very quickly, so high that I could see the line of dawn to the east and the dark shadow of the California coast below. I was at the edge of the atmosphere, and it was glorious. I was neither hot nor cold. I didn’t need to breathe. Then I shot down and eastward at breakneck speed until I found myself on what appeared to be a college campus. I noted all the details I could. I tried to make myself seen by a man on a sidewalk but failed. I went into a dormitory and down a hallway but could not rouse the man I found sleeping in one of the rooms. I saw something leaning against the wall beside the door that looked to me like an exceptionally large dulcimer. Later, when I entered that same dorm in the physical, I saw that it was a type of skateboard that I hadn’t known existed, a longboard. This tiny detail should not be forgotten, because it represents a much larger issue about what is available to one when not in the physical. I find that I have a hard time correctly perceiving something that I had never seen while I was in my body. Without the comparative files and logic of the brain, it seems very hard to do that, at least for me.

  A few minutes later, realizing how far I was from my physical body, I felt a desire to return to it. I floated gently upward then shot back to my body in a flash.

  I lay in the bed in a state of amazement. What an experience!

  The next morning at breakfast, to my delight and amusement, I found that the scientist was telling people what had happened, and that he had seen me go up through the ceiling of his room. When I described the campus I’d been to, Diana Pasulka and one of the other participants knew it well: it was theirs, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. A year later, I found myself in the amazing position of going physically to a place that I had first seen while in the nonphysical state. When I entered the dormitory I’d gone into in the nonphysical state, I found myself looking at what may have been the same longboard I had seen the year before but this time understanding perfectly well that it was some sort of skateboard.

  While some members of the scientific and academic communities may be more willing than in the past to entertain the possibility that unidentified flying objects might be a real phenomenon, it remains strictly forbidden to discuss the idea that something might be coming out of them and that people might be interacting with them.

  This position is obviously illogical, but it nevertheless is widely held. Serious scientists, serious academics and the serious media will not discuss the likelihood that something is liable to be in those UFOs—or more accurately, I think, will not face it.

  Given the urgency of the situation, in February of 2017, I begged them to emerge, persisting day and night to the point that they got angry at me. I was convinced that my own example proved that our fear reaction would not overwhelm us. As I had already balked at direct, physical contact twice in my life—the nine knocks and the incident in the woods in February of 1987—they conducted an experiment.

  I woke up in the middle of the night aware that there was something in the bed between my legs. It was lightly touching my genitals. As I live alone and have no pets, I immediately concluded that it was one of them. A terrific shock of terror went through me, and I leaped out of bed. So did the dark shape, which shot up toward the ceiling and was gone. I was left with a deep scratch on my left calf that was still faintly visible
a year later. I sent a picture of it to the group of people I work with, with a description of exactly what had happened.

  Then they embarked on what has amounted to another wonderful lesson, attempting to reveal to me what they want, what they have to give in return and how communication can work. This book is the result.

  As I have said before in these pages, the visitors are a complex presence…just like us. Because we know them so little, we tend to think of them as alien races. Each species is either good or bad. Belief in evil reptilians and angelic blonds are two examples of this. But how can that possibly be the case? Look at us. Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi lived at the same time, and that is just one example of the tremendously varied array of lives, motives, beliefs and cultures that characterize just one species—our own.

  Only if we can open ourselves to the possibilities and dare the dangers are we going to succeed in the endeavor of contact. Because they are here to share our surprise and our discoveries, we are never going to be sure of anything about them, not even when they are more engaged with us than we can ever be with each other. This will be more intimate than that. It will be the most intimate thing that can happen. Can we get used to it, in the end, make it our own? In other words, can we bear it?

  That is the fundamental question of this book, and, I feel rather sure, of human life at this time. Can we?

  12

  Is Any of This Real?

  We have come to the core. I think that the material I will discuss now probably needs to be taken into careful account if there is to be more direct communication with the visitors. I am hoping that this book will cause them to emerge in a more definite way, and I think that this part of my discussion is what is most essential to that happening.

  How ironic that it isn’t proof that they are real. In order to communicate usefully with them, one would think that things like whether or not they are fundamentally a physical presence would need to be firmly established.

  Except that may be exactly what we must not do, not if we want to develop a real relationship with them.

  As we approach the coming climax in our history, these entities, which have been considered legend, myth and folklore, are apparently turning out to be much more than that. This is happening as we come closer to two things: the failure of our planet’s ability to support us and proof that parallel universes are real. Does this mean, then, that the inhabitants of enigmatic places like the mirror universe are attempting to find ways to concretize themselves in our world, perhaps in order to give us aid? I think that this is one direction in which the evidence points. At the same time, fairy folk, sylphs, trolls, djinn and even to some extent what in the past were called gods are turning out to be real entities that have probably been with us right here in our own universe from time immemorial, which we now perceive as aliens. Add to this the addition of a previously unremarked presence that started mutilating cattle on an ever-growing scale about 150 years ago, and may recently have done the same to a few of us, and you have quite an astonishing picture. But it doesn’t end there. We are also in something close to verifiable contact with our own dead, or something that appears to be that.

  It would seem that, as we get closer to the extinction crisis, the hidden world, which in the past has always been vague and hard to classify, is coming into a new sort of focus—is, in fact, turning out to be real.

  Except…exactly what does that word “real” actually mean?

  Come with me, to the rabbit hole where we now must go.

  I know that my stories are generally impossible to believe. But I also know that they happened.

  Or do I?

  The world of the visitors is so strange, so completely out-of-bounds, that one would think that surely it cannot be factual. If it is, then what we now consider real is the actual fantasy.

  Or could they both be real and fantasy at the same time?

  Let’s explore.

  A growing body of theory and now also evidence suggests that there may be no final truth, not in this universe. Perhaps others have different laws, but in this one, belief does not work—and not just on the level of the extremely small—the quantum level, where nothing is fixed and definite until it is somehow noticed. Belief doesn’t work on our level, either. The reason is that we don’t have an absolute ground of truth that can be relied on completely. As we are now, we simply decide that one thing or another is true.

  As I reported in Transformation, I once saw a city which was described to me as “a place where the truth is known.” At the time, I thought, “Oh, my, there must be such secrets locked away there.” Now I suspect that the message was more subtle. It could well be that its residents think using an input strategy rather than an output strategy.

  Because we use an output strategy, we are definitely going to know that the structure in the pantry is a box of cereal and so be able to eat breakfast. But we are not going to know what that box actually is—which, for us, isn’t going to be a problem. Normally. But we have, with our exquisite minds, evolved formulae and constructed machines that enable us to see below the limit where output strategy applies. We can use detectors to see, with our output-wired brains, the hidden workings of the interior world. In other words, we can see the truth.

  And what we see is that it’s ambiguous!

  The city where the truth is known was flooded with bright light—presumably symbolizing its clarity—but it went on forever. I never came to a border. The reason is, of course, that something that is ambiguous has no border.

  We know that quantum indeterminacy is real because we can see it. But, due to the way our brains are constructed and therefore the way our minds work, it makes no sense. A wave can’t resolve into a particle just because we’re looking at it. But it does. The double-slit experiment that proves that this is true works every darned time.

  It also drives me nuts, and I love it.

  There are, however, some things about the double-slit experiment that need to be unpacked a bit before we assume that the popular notion that an observer is required for a wave to resolve into a particle is correct. There is a quantum theory called decoherence which suggests that the wave function never collapses, but rather the appearance of coherence comes from its surroundings. Stretching the theory a bit, this might actually mean that our brains are what cause the world to appear coherent to us. In other words, our output strategy is, for us, reality.

  But wait a minute, a brain strategy isn’t any such thing. It’s just a method of making things look a certain way. It’s not even the only output strategy. Bees, for example, who see into the ultraviolet, have a very different one.

  While this doesn’t solve the mystery, it does suggest that, if the underlying wave function never actually collapses, then its inherent ambiguity is still there even though what we see all around us seems entirely coherent.

  And indeed, the Schrodinger’s cat hypothesis hints that what we really live in is an ambiguous reality insofar as it predicts that two contradictory states of something can both be simultaneously real. Schrodinger’s cat can indeed be alive and dead at the same time. But surely these are physics issues, not life problems for us to worry about. Quanta are very tiny, so they don’t apply in our big world of absolute realities and reliable output strategies. Schrodinger’s cat isn’t any sort of feline at all, she’s a subatomic particle. So to quote a great genius of the 20 th century, Prof. Alfred E. Neumann, “What, me worry?”

  Oh, but I do!

  This is because the indeterminacy of the wave function does not appear to be confined to quanta. We’re living in it, which is why I call this world of ours a labyrinth of mirrors.

  So, it’s all ambiguous. Problem solved.

  But no, that’s not true, either. This is because this whole ambiguous, deceptive and confusing garden of forked paths functions as it does and appears as it is because of…constants.

  Oh well…

  When I was in the throes of being driven even crazier than my baseline by writ
ing this book, I turned to my implant for help. And people wonder why I don’t get it removed. (But why should I, it’s not there, after all.) Anne was right, and thank all the holies that her argument prevailed, because, despite the fact that it doesn’t exist, it is my trusty guide in the labyrinth of mirrors.

  I asked it to lead me to something that I needed to know for this book but knew absolutely nothing about.

  Enter physicist Wolfgang Pauli, psychiatrist Carl Jung and the strangest thing in physics, which is something called the fine-structure constant. It is set by nature at 1/137. It’s an absolute. If any other fraction was there, everything would be different and most of the world wouldn’t work. All well and good, but why that particular fraction? Why not 1/136 or, say, 1/7000?

  Here’s the fun of it: Nobody knows.

  It’s just…there.

  The other constants can be seen to be inevitable outcomes of the processes that they define. Not the fine-structure constant, though. It’s dimensionless. This means that, no matter what system of units you use to derive it, it’s always going to be 1/137.

  Physically, it’s the splitting of the spectral lines of hydrogen atoms.

  Which would seem to be no big deal, except for one tiny detail, which is that if that distance was anything else, the world would be entirely different and under most scenarios wouldn’t work at all.

  And yet, it’s just there. There’s no underlying principle that compels it to be what it is. God might as well have said, “Hey, this one looks nice. I’ll use it.”

  This drove Pauli crazy, as it has many a physicist since. I’m not even a member of that particular lunatic fringe (mine is nowhere near as weird), and it drives me crazy, too.

  Like Pauli, I love things that do that. Anne always said during her lifetime that tackling unanswerable questions makes the mind grow. I think the mystery of the visitors is just this sort of question, and maybe they are keeping themselves so ambiguous in order to induce an increase in human intellect.