About ten years after hearing this story, I was in a surgery waiting room with dear friends. The father of this family was undergoing emergency heart surgery. It was unlikely that he would survive. The next thing I knew, I saw him come walking out of the operating theater. At that point in my life, I had seen many dead people appear like that, and I whispered to Anne that he had just died. A moment later, the surgeon appeared and gave his wife the news.
I then saw, in my mind’s eye, something quite extraordinary. He was being carried by two kobolds. They were not here, but in a crowded forecourt in what appeared to be India. They made a quick sort of turning motion, and he was inside the body of a very new baby that a young man was holding in his arms. The baby erupted into screaming, and I knew at once what had happened.
He had not been a very good man in this life but, at the same time, had raised some fine children who were a real credit to him. If he had had to face his life, he would have fallen at once and all the good that was there buried in him would have been lost. He deserved another chance, which is why he had been raced into this new body before he had a chance to really see himself.
When the children would see the kobolds at our cabin, they would say that they called themselves doctors. They would shine lights on them and tell them that they were examining their souls. Lorie Barnes heard them call themselves “soultechs.” Soul technologists, I would think.
I know that all of this sounds fictional. Of course it does. I don’t think it is, though. I think that I am describing things that we will see and understand more clearly as we draw closer to the visitors and thus also to our own real place in the world.
What these stories tell me is that the kobolds are in some way part of us, perhaps another form of the human species that manages the movement of our souls and watches over them.
Many species have more than one form. It’s not unusual in nature for a larval form and a mature form to be completely different, as the tadpole and the frog and the caterpillar and the butterfly show.
As science advances in its ability to see reality and philosophy in its ability to interpret its vision, it is coming to seem that the world is far larger and more complex than we ever imagined, and mysterious beings like our visitors, which we dismissed as imaginary, are turning out to be in some ways quite literally more real than we are. Communion with them seems not so much to be something to be attained but something that has always been part of us, and which is now raising its ancient voice again, calling to all of us to look up to the stars and inward to the infinity of our minds, and find our own greatness, and save ourselves.
When the visitors draw close to you, barriers like vast the distances between the stars come to seem almost trivial. As they slip in secret through our skies and our thoughts, they become less like mirages, and more like an eerie truth that we have thus far been afraid to face.
As we are coming to realize that they are real and here, we also find ourselves asking the same question that Col. Philip Corso asked so long ago when he found himself facing them in the darkness of a cave: “What’s in it for us?”
The bottom line here is this: whoever they are, and whoever we are, they want to join us and live in conscious contact with us. They need us, but more, we need them—their wisdom and their devastatingly accurate insight into the fragile truth of the world.
Dare we open our door to them?
On the night of Wednesday, June 12, 2019, I sat to do my usual 11 PM exercise. Almost immediately, I felt a sense of pressure all around me, as if the air had become more dense. It was almost as if I had been wrapped in an invisible blanket. The next thing I knew, I heard a young male voice say excitedly, “We’re in!” The next instant, I saw hanging before me a complex schematic. I found myself pushing it away with my mind, which caused it to vibrate. I did it again, but then the thing disappeared, and I knew that somebody had just forced their way into me. (I cannot say what was on the schematic. I have no idea what it was, only that it was some sort of chart that looked like circuitry. I was seeing, I would think, the input level of whatever was there.)
After a moment, I calmed down. I completed the meditation and went to bed. During the 3 AM meditation, I felt my ear get hot. The implant had turned on. A moment later, I found myself wanting to pray for protection. I had been afraid when I was entered. I didn’t want it to happen again. On Thursday and Friday nights, I once again surrounded myself in my imagination with protective light, saying that nobody could come through it unless they had something to give me that would strengthen me in return for their participation in my life. I also prayed, invoking Jesus, whose journey I have come to understand in a deep way and whom I have reason to believe can be addressed and will respond.
Once again, even though my door was open, nobody came to me.
Then came June 16, 2019, Father’s Day. The time was approximately 4 in the morning. I was in a hotel for the night. I’d done the 11 PM meditation as usual and had just sat down to do the early morning one. As I settled myself into a chair, I noticed a vertical oblong shape, absolutely black, hanging in midair. It was across the room, maybe ten feet from where I was sitting. Wondering if it was a shadow, I moved my head from side to side. It remained stationary. I then felt a sense of presence, exactly as if it was a person standing in front of me.
But this was not a person as we understand that term. It most resembled a vesica piscis, the intersection of two overlapping disks. It appears in Euclid’s first proposition, where it is used in forming an equilateral triangle. It is also both a Christian and a Masonic symbol. In Medieval art, it was used to enclose figures of saints and of Christ. The lid of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, England, contains a vesica piscis. In ancient times, the area enclosed by the vesica was more than just empty space. It was a sacred entity. This is why sacred figures were placed within it. The reason that it was considered sacred was that, before the development of sophisticated mathematics, geometry was used in the planning of structures. It was the foundation of human endeavor, and the vesica was the fundamental geometric form where all measurement began. Man built using geometry, and the vesica contained the basis of measurement. This is also why it is an important form in Masonry.
In my hotel room that night, then, was a living representation of this fundamental and deeply sacred form. It was linked to me through the Chalice Well, where I have experienced some of the deepest and most joyous times of meditation in my life.
I wish that I’d had the presence of mind to understand all this in the moment, but I was excited and pretty amazed, so I really spent my time with the form watching it as it moved toward me. The next thing I knew, it had dropped to the floor and was lying across my feet. I felt something light but solid there. It seemed like a living thing, although I don’t think that it was a biological entity as we understand such things. It was more of a living symbol, in some way guided by intelligence. Or maybe it was actually a body that I was seeing though an input strategy and therefore observing what it is before it focuses into a physical form. Had I seen it through an output strategy, maybe it would have appeared as a creature.
I looked down, and the vertical oval now covered my feet with blackness. I thought at once, “If I don’t move, it will enter me.”
Another moment had arrived like the nine knocks, the confrontation in the woods in 1987 and the time the entity got between my legs in 2017. All three of those times had caused a fear response and a refusal of the call.
This time there was a very different feeling. It felt as if the entity lying across my feet was beseeching me for entry into my body. What would that mean, though? I thought perhaps it would be too much to give up to let it into me so frankly and directly. It is one thing to commune during meditation, another to allow the actual, physical penetration of another consciousness. Much more of a challenge, to say the least. I had the sense that it wanted badly to do this, but also that it was begging that it would not force itself on me.
I moved my feet back sli
ghtly, and it at once disappeared. For a time, I continued with the sensing exercise. The next thing I knew, I was in a sort of waking dream. There was a man pointing a big silver gun at my face. However, it wasn’t real. I could see clearly that the barrel was plugged. In fact, it looked like the sort of toy gun I used to play with as a child.
The event then ended. It was once again just me, the shadowy hotel room and the distant hiss of night traffic on the highway outside. I continued the meditation for a short time then returned to bed. I slept the limitless sleep of a child.
To me, this communication, coming just as I was finishing this book, meant that they want deeper communion—in fact, that there is a demand there, although a gentle one.
They are not going to force anything, and there is also an element of play involved. Thus, the use of a child’s toy that represents a lethal weapon.
Back at home the next night, I felt regret for the conditions I had placed on the entity. Again, I asked for guidance.
The next night, things returned to normal. Before the early morning meditation, there sometimes appears hanging in a line on the window beside my bed a series of hieroglyphics. They are not Egyptian and are generally only there for a moment. I do not understand them, and so far I cannot say that I have seen the same sequence twice. This happens only a few times in a year, and it happened that night. What it signifies, I don’t know, but as soon as I saw it, I went to do the meditation, which became so deep that it was as if I was sitting in another world and in this one at the same time.
I let my body be open to the need I sense is there.
If I had continued to refuse, would the plea have become more forceful? Would the gun have become some sort of genuine threat? It’s a question I cannot answer. I can only forge on, trusting myself and the visitors as best I can, never forgetting that communion is not about doing something new, but accepting something that has always been part of human life by bringing it into conscious awareness. When we do this, there is an exponential leap in richness for both sides. I know this because, on October 16, 2019, I finally allowed entry while I was in full consciousness. Not only that, I managed, quite by accident, to record the moment in audio.
As I’ve said, despite years of trying, I’ve had very little luck with video. On the afternoon of the 15 th, I happened to see that there was such a thing as a “sleep recorder” app that records sounds made while you sleep. I thought that maybe I could experiment with this. When the evening of the 15 th arrived, I sensed that the visitors might make a close appearance—not necessarily physical, but very close. After an extremely deep 11 PM sensing meditation that lasted the better part of an hour, I went to sleep. After the 3 AM meditation, as I was falling back to sleep, I felt weight come down onto my legs. Unlike what happened with the vesica piscis, I felt within me a calm sense of welcoming. I was open. Then I fell asleep.
In the morning, I listened to what the sleep recorder had picked up. To my astonishment, amid the predictable grunts and snores, there were some words. Just after 4, I say in a sleep-dense voice, “What is that?” Then, a second or so later, still coming up from sleep, “Oh, Mature.” Another few seconds pass and I say in an entirely different voice, rich with pleasure and anticipation, full of sensual joy, “Teach me, Mature.” A short time later, there is a little sigh that does not sound like me. It sounds feminine. A sound expert has analyzed it, although not too deeply, and also feels that it is feminine. But there was no woman there.
Or was there? After about fifteen minutes of silence, I am heard grieving for Anne.
Let me explain what I understand of what happened. First, the use of the word “Mature” as a name. I think that it is used in place of “Master” because that word is too ego-charged. My sense is that the visitors prefer a word like Mature, which indicates somebody who has no need to drop into the physical world again. In other words, what we would call an ascended master.
Except for the sigh, the entity never makes a physical sound. In my experience, there have been almost no physical words. “Have joy” and perhaps a few others. What I remember is a sense of intense intellectual contact causing pleasure that was almost sexual in nature. If you can imagine an exploration of ideas so beautiful and intense that it was like a form of spiritual sex, that might be in the direction of what I felt.
I think that this whole book might have been examined in those few moments. I think that, unlike Communion, which they more-or-less laughed at, it was accepted as a useful effort. (You will find the story of their reaction to Communion in Transformation and Super Natural. Suffice to say that they let an editor at William Morrow & Company know that I’d gotten a lot wrong, and found the book nothing more than amusing…but, of course, at the same time they honored my effort by appearing in front of the editor right in the middle of a bookstore, no less.)
I must not get this wrong, not this time. We urgently need to rise to a new level of coherence, which we cannot do except in deepest communion. And by “we” I mean all levels of entity, physical and other, human and other.
On the morning of October 27 th, 2019, I had an encounter that felt physical and also ambiguous—in other words, an encounter with what life in communion will be like.
You will recall the short man who lurked in the woods in upstate New York and then outside our condo in Texas. I saw him again, but this time in a very much better state. He looked clean and calm and happy. His eyes were shining. He was not smoking, and opened his mouth and showed me the pink tongue of a child. Then I saw a woman with a lovely, sweet face. I couldn’t tell if they were physical or not. I did not seem to be dreaming, but they were also not plainly standing beside the bed. They were in a place that will, I suspect, become more familiar as we go deeper into communion, which is the quintessential “dangerous perhaps,” the uneasy edge between our ordinary world and the greater mystery in which it is embedded. The woman seemed at once a stranger and yet also very familiar to me, and seeing her inspired a poignant sense of memory. I asked her, “How long have you known me?” She replied, “Since you were born.”
And then it ended. I slipped into sleep and they into the ocean that tosses beneath the lives of us all. He is transformed, that poor boy who followed me in the mysteries of the night, a very real person in possession of tools of mind that enabled him to enter into places in me where he did not belong. Now, as I have found peace, his pain has also released its grip on him and he has become a tender child.
It’s impossible, of course. He would be thirty now, or more. Nobody like that could live very long. Somewhere in some shadowy place, I am sure his bones lie, maybe buried, maybe not. And her, what of her? All in white, she stood, a girl like a drop of sunlight, a young mother I thought, and I felt her as a mother. But she cannot be mine.
In those few minutes, I was under the water of life, in a place that communion must inevitably take us, where our demons and angels dance together, sweetly singing and beckoning us to walk the cliffs of knowledge, ever closer to the edge.
There it ended, and I think that this lovely, gentle experience perfectly illustrates what I have been suggesting throughout this book, which is that, if we are to proceed beyond contact and into communion, we are going to have to embrace the fundamental ambiguity of consciousness itself, and accept the mystery that is all around us as the “immense great benevolence” that the attendee who saw me briefly disappear at the conference perceived during her experience.
It is morning now. There is bright sun. I can smell smoke from distant fires. Later, I will begin another night’s journey, open now to embrace and no longer afraid. Night before last, as happens often now, a presence settled down on my body. This time, though, it had more weight and substance than ever before. I opened my eyes but could see nothing. I could only feel it there. The weight was solid and very real. I was open and ready. But it gently lifted away.
In just these few months since the encounter with the vesica piscis, I feel that I have finally gone beyond fear. I see how the b
oundaries with which we define ourselves are its real source, for they don’t actually exist and we know it, and facing our borderless, wandering reality feels very close to ceasing to exist. Communion, in this sense, feels like death, which is why Jeff Kripal was so devastated by even a brief second of it on that night at Esalen. But we have no boundaries. There is only one of us—alien, human, living, dead, whatever. What we are is a wave-front of consciousness, speeding into the unknown.
When you embrace this ambiguity as yourself, you discover the abiding peace the Hindus call shanti. It makes no sense. It reconciles nothing. And yet everything within you, all the fears, the angers, the hatreds, the lusts, the disappointments, the ambitions, all that lies within the scope of your life, comes to rest, and you know that you have found your heart.
It is what Anne meant when she said, “Enlightenment is what happens when there is nothing left of us but love.” When all that you have been fighting against and for is stripped away, your nakedness that has so frightened you for so long, is soothed by the gauze of angels.
It’s not easy, though. The first step out of oneself and into communion is a very hard one to take. Open, innocent surrender to the enormous presence that underlies reality is never going to be easy, and it is never going to be certain. But it is also a priceless resource, offering a path into greater knowledge, a new science that is more true because it includes more of what is real, philosophical understanding that feeds the mind with the stuff of truth, and limitless expansion of the scope of mankind.
A New World Page 19