Future Communion with Whitley Strieber Video Transcript - New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove www.newthinkingallowed.org
Recorded on April 18, 2020 Published to YouTube on May 21, 2020
Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation
(00:28) JM: Hello and welcome, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. My guest today is Whitley Strieber, a man who has written probably more than a dozen books, all associated with his ostensible contact with beings whom he refers to as the Visitors. I’m talking about Communion, Transformation, Breakthrough, Beyond Communion, The Secret School, The Key, Hybrids, and most recently, A New World. In today’s interview we’re going to explore the potential of future communication between these visitors and the human race. Once again, this is an internet interview. Now, I’ll switch over to the internet video.
(01:17) JM: Welcome, Whitley. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
(01:20) WS: Well, it's good to be back, Jeffrey.
(01:23) JM: It’s been, I guess, over a year since we’ve spoken. I hope you’re safe and well.
(01:29) WS: Well, I am. I’m bored, isolated. I live, like everybody does right now, through a screen.
(01:39) JM: I’ve been looking over your body of work. I see that you’ve written, it must be over a dozen books now, dealing with, not only your own encounters with the Visitors, as you call them, but also quite a bit of reporting on research by other scholars who have been looking into it. You’ve been, I have to say, pushing this subject now for decades. I notice at the end of your recent book, A New World, you refer to yourself as conjuring, conjuring up maybe a new world that we can live in. Which makes me think that, perhaps, you’re not just a contactee but maybe even a bit of a magician.
(02:29) WS: [Laughs] You caught me. Yes, I am... attempting to work a magic, but it needs more critical mass, there have to be more people involved so far for that really to unfold on a large scale. But, it is quietly unfolding behind the scenes where nobody can see, in certain lives, for sure. What it consists of is helping others to open themselves in such a way that they can be seen and related to by something that is moving through
1 reality in a very different way. That’s essentially what the conjuring is about, placing people in a situation where they can do this, making it happen on a larger scale. There's a critical mass, where if it had happened to a certain number of people it would probably eventually begin to happen with everybody. You know, it was very hard to ride a bicycle when they were first invented. It's quite easy now, it only takes a few minutes to learn. The same principle applies here.
(03:57) JM: At the moment, when I think of a parallel to perhaps what you’ve been doing, it's not the best parallel, but I’m thinking of the Nobel Laureate poet, W.B. Yeats, who was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. I think in … fact, I did an interview with the scholar Gary Lachman [Correction: This conversation about Yeats was with James Tunney in “The Irish Contribution to Understanding Consciousness”], a scholar of esoteric history, which, he describes Yeats as deliberately trying to conjure up, through his writing, his poetry in particular, an awareness of the ancient Irish fairy faith, the ancient Irish contact with many beings of the supersensible world. It seems in a way that you’re continuing in that tradition.
(04:45) WS: [Recites poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by W.B. Yeats:] I went out to [the] hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.
When I [had] laid it on the floor And [I] went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name [and ran] And vanished [faded] through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find [out] where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands;
2 And walk [among] long dappled grass, [And pluck] Till time and times are done, And pluck the silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
(05:54) WS: That’s the song of wandering Aengus. When Annie was dying, in January of 2015, she knew - I did not at that time, she didn't actually pass until August - she began telling me that I must memorize that poem. When I did, finally, after she died, the white moth became the central figure of our relationship and has been ever since. Her favorite story of mine, written many years ago, it’s called “The White Moths.” It is about a woman discovering that she has died. Yeats’ journey is a very profound part of my own life, because he left the magic of his journey in his poetry. He was a successful magician and conjurer.
(07:00) JM: Sometimes you describe yourself, in spite of your enormous output, as not having succeeded, you feel last time we spoke, over a year ago, that the world had basically rejected you. …
(07:16) WS: Well, it has. The world has rejected me, but that doesn't mean necessarily that I’m not succeeding on a personal level, which is very much the case, I am. There’s a tiny coterie of people who know that and who participate with me in this journey, but the world at large For example, I heard a fellow … called Dennis McKenna on Joe Rogan’s show, and talking about me, which is always an unpleasant thing to hear. I don't listen to Joe Rogan’s show, generally, but somebody sent me a tape of it. And there he was, saying, “Oh, you know,” Rogan was saying, “Oh, I wouldn't have Whitley Strieber on my show because he’s too strange.” And, Dennis McKenna was saying, “Oh yes, well, that's true. I was with him at a conference and he certainly has got an element of strangeness about him. But, if you have him on, you should have him on with that professor, Jeffrey Krippal, who sort of writes with him.” But, this is the that's the … general gist of it. But, mostly, mostly, I’m totally and completely ignored. It's as if I didn't exist. Now, my books for example, nearly a year since it’s publication, A New World has been reviewed exactly … once off somewhere outside of Amazon, by a reviewer with an ability to write. That appeared in the San Antonio Express News. I would be surprised if anything appeared anywhere else because the assumption is that anyone who advocates what I advocate, that the soul is real and that there are many entities in consciousness, is simply going to be ignored because soul blindness is not something that it's not only an affliction, it's also an addiction. We’re addicted to not wanting to feel … responsible for our lives.
(09:53) JM: Well, that’s a very profound thought, and maybe one of the reasons that people have such difficulty, is because you’re challenging them to go so deep.
3 (10:05) WS: Yeah, I am challenging them to look at themselves in places that they don't want to look. But, you know, why not look now. You’re gonna look later, for sure. I have encountered many souls in the other level, who end up doing this after they have died. There's no way to repair the situation then. They have to you’re left then with what you’ve brought. You carry your basket into the other world … and once you leave this one you can't take anything out of it or put anything in again.
(10:45) JM: It seems to me, Whitley, that we have a few things in common in that regard. I’m a parapsychologist, as I think you know and I have the only doctoral diploma ever issued by an accredited university that says, “Parapsychology,” so here I am. But, you know, I have a YouTube following, there are 75,000 subscribers to this channel and I know that you also have a big following of people who don’t care about the larger public perception, they see you for who you are.
(11:25) WS: That’s right. And that’s why we're both here, because there are people, and more and more every day like that. They’re hungry people. They know that there is something missing, that this is a culture of starvation. One of the Visitors, years ago, I think it was the old lady whose on the cover of Communion, whom I’ve seen a few times and I portrayed her very poorly, but she’s fortunately not vain, so she’s been amused by it. But in any case, she wants in some context that I can’t really recall clearly, she said, “You are very poor to me [meaning us].” The human species is very poor. She meant, not in physical context, because our physical world is a very rich one. But, spiritually we are impoverished. We have been cursed by belief. We went through in the West, a 1,000 years of religious dictatorship. And there's still a religious dictatorship in many parts of the world, in different religions. When we escaped from the religious dictatorship, we had the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment also turned off lights, it turned off the light of the soul, while turning on the light of science. But both lights are quite real and we need to have them both on at the same time. A car with one headlight is not going to be a very safe one to drive, and it's not. So, here we are. Here we are.
(13:30) JM: One of the really striking things I found in your recent book was the idea that the Visitors come... they’re very interested in us because one of our most unique, and perhaps to them endearing qualities, which is we can’t see the future, like they do.
(13:52) WS: Yes, we are in the timestream. We have that grace. Everyone is always saying, “Oh please, ask them what’s going to happen next.” You know, they’re not going to tell us that. Our whole purpose, we have come into these very sacred receptacles that are known as bodies, in order to experience time and to be surprised by the future. So, you know, people who are with me when the Visitors show up are often very unexpectedly frightened in ways that they didn’t know they could be. It’s a devastating experience. The reason is, their entire being parts of their being they’re not directly … in touch with, are challenged by this presence because this is a presence that has a larger scale in terms of its knowledge of time. We’re very much like fish swimming in time, in a time stream and the Visitors are on the shore looking down into the stream and it's a beautiful place and they can’t enjoy it unless they share with us in some way. They have to be very careful about that though because they
4 have to come down into the stream of time and join the fish in his swimming, not pull the fish out of the stream of time, because if they do that the fish suddenly has a lot of trouble. So, you have to learn how to balance this so that when they do come to enjoy sharing with you, you’re ready to share and you’re not going to lose your balance and end up slipping out of the time stream in ways that you’re not meant to. It took me a long time to be comfortable with that, but I’m quite comfortable with it now. They show up in my life all the time and I have a really lovely time, frankly. It used to be so hard and they were so scary, but now it's very gentle and lovely. They have a lot of fun with it. They want more people that they can do this with, you can be sure. I’m not the only one. There’s thousands of people they do it with, I’m sure, many of them don't even know.
(16:41) JM: I’m under that impression as well, just from the feedback I receive from the various broadcasts we do. And I know you’ve received, what, over 100,000 letters from people.
(16:55) WS: Oh yeah, those are all people. And on my website, on Unknown Country, it's full of people who are doing this, all the time. They are in contact. You know, people are always saying, “Well, when is contact going to happen?” Well, I think to myself: Really? That happened that may have happened … before we even existed. We’ve been in contact always. But, something did change in the late 40’s. Whoever is here, or part of this, saw that we were in danger of destroying ourselves, or perhaps saw that we would, and probably saw it on the horizon. They suddenly ramped up their presence dramatically and that's what all of the explosion of UFOs, then the close encounter experience, and all those 100,000 letters, all that’s about. It was more than 100,000. Anne used to know the correct number, but it was really a lot.
(17:56) JM: It would seem to me, at the same time, there are changes going on within humanity itself. For example, near-death experiences have come to the forefront of our awareness.
(18:11) WS: Yeah, I wrote about that in The Afterlife Revolution. The actual truth is, the shamanic journey starts with an initiation and it's often an initiation that takes you to and just beyond the edge of death. In fact, in many cultures it can be quite dangerous because if it's going to be real, you really do have to challenge death. However, something has happened, and that is that people are dying and being brought back to life by medicine, like Anne was, and many of those people have the initiatory experience during the process of dying and being brought back to life by science. So, science is the great initiator, now. Anne was initiated into the afterlife and into the reality of greater life by her NDE, which would never have happened if she did not have medical science. She had a choice. At one point during the NDE a voice said to her, “You can go back or you can come with us.” She decided to come back, and she did. We had another 10 years and she saw her son married and two of her grandchildren born and she was right to come back.
5 (19:36) JM: Well, I know from having interviewed Pim van Lommel in the Netherlands that there are hundreds of instances of people going through cardiac arrest in the hospital under medical supervision and being revived, after having been, for all intents and purposes, clinically dead.
(19:56) WS: Right. Those who remember a near-death experience have had an initiation. They’ve had an initiation. That’s what an initiation was in the past in … ancient Greece. We don't know too much about the initiatory experience, except we do know that people died during that experience from time to time. Certainly, the shamanic initiations that we know in most of the world now, in indigenous populations, they are a real serious challenge to death. You have to face death. So, science is turning a lot of people into spiritual masters, while itself believing that their souls don’t exist. I find that wonderfully amusing, and very typical of this humorous universe. It has a fabulous sense of humor, there's no question about that.
(21:00) JM: Writers such as yourself, even though I know you’ve been a best selling author, you consider yourself, with good justification, to be on the margins of society. I feel the same way, in some regards. But you also write about your visit to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where they held a conference related to contact. I’m under the impression that amongst indigenous people who are also marginalized, this idea of having a kind of natural communion with otherworldly beings seems to be almost second nature to them around the world.
(21:43) WS: Well, it is in a lot of cultures. The Visitors like the Lakota Sioux, I know that from experience. I had, on that reservation, the single most extraordinary experience of my life, and I’ve had a life full of extraordinary experiences. I have been blessed beyond blessing with this. But, what happened on that reservation was, I guess I noticed it about 6 hours after I arrived, I was riding in a car and I happened to close my eyes, it's a big place and I was being driven somewhere, it was about a half hour drive or so. And to my astonishment, when I closed my eyes, I didn't just see the dark, I saw another world. It wasn't it was a version of this world, like a slightly different version of it in … incredible detail. For example, in this world, the car was going down a very nicely graded road. In the other world, we were also on a road but it was an older road and not graded. It went up and down the hillsides. When the car I was in would go on the graded road and my eyes were closed and I was watching this on the other road, and the other road would go down with the contour of the Earth, it felt like the car was flying. It was just extraordinary. And it went on and on and on for days. Every time I closed my eyes I could see this other world. I could I could go in any corner and close my eyes and … look down and I would see grasses and flowers and everything just as they were. But when I opened my eyes they would all be slightly different. In other words, there were two worlds superimposed on each other.
6 (24:00) I had the honor of being taken to a family, a very powerful family ceremony. In the ceremony we were in a kind of clearing and when my eyes were open, it was very loud, there was a lot of chanting. When I closed my eyes the chanting moved off to the right and it was in the distance. I didn't hear the chanting in front of me any more. There was a similar ceremony going on in the other world, but it was not in that exact same place. It went on like that. It was just marvelous. Really, it changed my life. I never saw anything so precise and so elaborate and it was really Oh, and another thing that … happened we went to the Wounded Knee Memorial and I was in a very intense, very physical state, … because you know, we always think of consciousness as being, oh that’s part of my mind. No, your mind is part of consciousness. To find consciousness you need to expand your awareness into your whole body, to expand your attention into the sensation of your body. Then, it will grow and your attention, your sensation, your consciousness will grow. So, I had been doing this now for days and we went to the Wounded Knee Memorial and this one man kept walking by me. I was looking down at the graves, and honoring in my heart the fallen, and he kept walking up to me and walking back and walking up to me. I thought, what’s he doing? And, he said, finally said, “Mr. Strieber, I can see the bones in the graves under the soil when I stand next to you, but not when I don't.” And I thought, well how extraordinary, becasue I can't see them. I thought to myself then, how much do we filter out? I was probably filtering that out right then. We could probably, any of us, have seen them. But we are hiding behind a wall of beliefs and assumptions. I was going to get to that earlier, that one of the first things my wife said after she passed away was, “The human species is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.” And boy, that resonated with me and I’ve been trying to give up my beliefs ever since and replace them with questions. It's like growing wings, I can tell you that for sure.
(27:05) JM: That particular experience suggests that we haven’t begun to catalogue all the different kinds of siddhis or powers or gifts of the spirit or psychic abilities that people can have. We have a very tiny list, actually, of what might be possible.
(27:30) WS: Oh yeah, you know when I was a boy, I had quite a few incidents of going up in the air, physically. I don’t remember them very directly. I remember a couple of them, but one of them was when I was playing in the front yard, I must have been about three because I had a maroon toy sports car and I remember that vividly. All of a sudden I saw the sky and I was involved with some there … were wires, three wires that went up the yard from the street to the house and I was involved in these wires, and I remember looking down, I thought I was looking up and then I saw my mother’s face in the kitchen window very, very frowning up at me. I thought I was in trouble. Then the gardener came with a big ladder and got me down. There's a 30 foot gap between the ground and those wires at that point. No one ever knew how in the world I had gotten up there. But I used to get into so many peculiar situations no one ever thought twice about it. My mother told the story many times of when Whitley ended up in the wires. There were a couple of other times later when I was 9 or 10 when I would rise up out of the front yard and it was a physical thing, it wasn't an out of body experience and it was just lovely. Remembering it is such a pleasure. You
7 know, we had people like Padre Pio who, when his town was about to be bombed, the bombers all saw him standing in the air in front of them. They didn't bomb the town because, you know, the bombardiers were concerned that maybe that would be a bad idea. We don't know who we are and what we are. I find that so exciting. It's so exciting to not live in the dark place of, “Oh, I’m just this and nothing more.” But in the light place of, “I don't know what I am. And I can explore and maybe I’ll go down a lot of blind alleys.” But so what, at least I’m going to have the journey.
(30:14) JM: Your experience on the Pine Ridge Reservation, if I recall correctly, it seemed to suggest to you the possibility that we are intersecting a kind of parallel universe.
(30:27) WS: A mirror universe. Well, you know there's in A New World, I outline a lot of evidence, scientific evidence that this is true. Recently there has been more suggesting that it absolutely, that it must be true. That there is a mirror universe here. In the New Scientist, just recently there was an article about this. I don't want to discuss it extensively because I haven't had a chance to actually read the papers, but it seems as if there was a discovery of a particle, basically, a high energy neutrino that came up out of the ground. What makes this so odd is you have two types of neutrino, high energy and low energy, and if it comes up out of the ground it has to be a low energy neutrino because high energy neutrinos can’t pass through the planet. Low energy neutrinos can pass as if it wasn't there, but not high energy neutrinos. So, that means for that neutrino the planet didn't exist. The neutrino wasn't in this universe, it was in another universe. It almost has to be true. This happened in 2016, but the significance wasn't noticed until just recently and it's a very exciting discovery. There's also another experiment going on with neutrinos that uses a very thick block of lead that's capable of stopping them. If any come through it, it means they’re not seeing the lead. They’re passing through it because it's not there in the universe they are in. It's so exciting. I love this sort of thing.
(32:34) JM: Neutrinos are really quite fascinating. Also, your story about driving in the car and the road was slightly different when you closed your eyes …
(32:45) WS: Well, more than slightly different. It was an old carriage road in the other world, but a brand new fancy road in this one.
(32:50) JM: You probably recall in Robert Monroe’s book on Journeys Out of the Body, he had several repeated journeys to another world in which people had automobiles but they were wider than they were long.
(33:08) WS: I wonder about that. That seems so improbable. But who knows? Who knows? There might be many you know, I think that the many worlds … theory is in a lot of trouble. I don't think the theory is going to survive because of
8 some discoveries in other areas of physics that are beginning to suggest that there is no such thing I … love physics and I’m very involved and I think about physics a lot, but most people don't and A) will not be spouting off any equations and B) I won't talk about it much. But there is something called the collapse of the wave function and it is becoming clear When the wave function collapses every point, … the theory is, every point it could have collapsed to becomes a reality and that's the multiverse, constantly flowing out of all of these possibilities. But, it seems clear that the wave function actually never collapses. Therefore, reality does not work the way the multiverse and the Copenhagen interpretation suggest. So, we shall see what comes of this. Now, the beauty of this is, the double slit experiment, we can actually see the collapse of the wave function. So, if it's not happening, what are we seeing? I love that.
(34:56) JM: Well, you point out in A New World that the Visitors seem to have this power to actually manipulate molecules and atoms and particles.
(35:09) WS: Yes. Well, years and years ago, they said to one of the close encounter witnesses, something I thought was terribly important. They said, “We rearrange atoms.” Now, we talked about Yeats and we started talking about magic by talking about magic. Rearranging atoms is magic. It's not easy because there's an enormous amount of energy involved in keeping atoms where they are. But if you could rearrange them you could make anything into anything else. You could do essentially anything. So, the Visitors have an ability like that. And then of course, here we are, they have an ability, we have an adventure, and where do they want to be? To hell with the ability, they want the adventure. So here they are. That's what contact is all about, sharing, oddly enough, sharing our innocence with them.
(36:16) JM: And yet from all accounts it would seem that we're very different than them. It's amazing there could be any communication at all.
(36:27) WS: Well, I go into that very deeply in the book, in A New World, because it's terribly important to understand Well, like last night, as we’re talking today, there's a place, I’m not going to go into … any details about exactly what is going on in this apartment, but suffice it to say there are a lot of things that go on in here, that perhaps would be considered unusual. One of them is, there are these drop downs of sort of hieroglyphics that I never consciously understand. There was one last night that was orange, sort of an orange pink in color and it dropped down and was present for a while. I wondered at the time what it was. It was a communication of some sort. Now, I know because of the fact that when we started to talk about physics it became more like something, like ideas that were coming into my body and mind. So, that's a kind of communication that we don't have. Another type is the way they communicate using the natural world. For example, they are often seen as owls. If you look at the life of the owl, it's very much like the life of the little gray, fairy or alien or whatever they are, I don't know which to say. In any case, the owl has wonderful hearing and he can sit in a tree and listen to the little scuttling safely around in his burrow in the night and then swoop down, rip the
9 ground open and pull him up out of his burrow and fly into the sky with him. Now, that’s ascension all right. The gray can come down into our little burrow in the dead of the night and sweep us up into the sky too. That happened to me. It happens to millions of people. What is that about? Well, you either don't remember it at all, you remember it frozen in fear, or you remember it and you say to yourself, “Hot damn, what happened to me? That was incredible.” You start to run after it and an awful lot of people are starting to run after it. They see those of us who started running after it a while ago and nothing has eaten us, unlike the poor little stoke, we got taken back. But you see the way the communication works. And you see also they are teachers to their core. That's why the owl, we see the similarity with the owl and we see that the owl devours its prey. And then we have to think, am I prey too? What am I to do with this? That's part of the communication. That's the part where you must look into yourself and find your own truth and your own courage and your own willingness to proceed even though you don't know. You know, I had a wonderful teacher years ago, a writer called Pamela Travers. She was in the Gurdjieff Foundation. She used to say that to sit in the lap of the goddess means to be unsure and that is where we are with the Visitors. Their primary manifestation, incidentally, is female. I think for a good reason.
(40:52) JM: Now, I know one thing about owls, which is that they regurgitate the prey. I've gone on various hiking expeditions and you can see a little clump of fur and bone. After they’ve sort of sucked all the juices and meat out of the mouse they regurgitate the rest.
(41:51) WS: After they have tasted of our experience of life, after they have tasted all of the rich experience that is in second body, that is stored in us, they regurgitate the physical body and send it right back to your bedroom, most of the time. Do they take or not? I would say not. I think they... I think they sample and participate. But if they take, then why do I have such a rich, such a rich.... My second body is rich with memory. It's rich with memory. So, they didn't take any of the good stuff, that's for sure.
(42:13) JM: You know, another paradox strikes me that, while on the one hand they seem so alien and so very different, on the other hand you’ve had encounters with beings who seem perfectly human and could converse with you in normal human language.
(42:32) WS: I have indeed. That’s a complicated area because of the fact that it bleeds off into... into things that I’m not ready to discuss. However, I had a period of contact with a being that was quite disturbed, what looked like a boy. This ended in 1997 and started in 1995, I believe. I can't be sure of the date. I don't want to be... someone to be looking oh, he said ‘97 then now he's saying ‘96, … therefore the complete thing is a fake. You have to be more realistic. In any case it was in the late ‘90s that this all happened. He was short. When I first encountered him I thought that he was a child smoking a cigarette in the back woods behind my house and I wanted to warn him about the dryness.
10 He was very disturbed. He could clearly read minds, there’s no question in my mind about that, and he was living in a kind of agony. I think his experience of life was like that of a schizophrenic whose mind is full of voices that he can't turn off. The smoking was... it was exactly like the smoking of a schizophrenic, nicotine will damp down the voices to a degree. But, he followed us to Texas when we lost our cabin and moved to Texas. He stayed with us for a little while, standing outside the condo we were living in. I drove him off with an automatic light that would light up in the little corner he was hiding in. I’ve always regretted that. I’ve always regretted it. More recently, I’m waked up, or I wake myself up around 3 every morning to do a meditation and recently I did not wake up and I heard a child’s voice from the living room call out, “Daddy, have you not forgotten me?” I then got up and went and did the meditation. I’ve had other experiences of people who were involved in this as well. But there are people involved. And not only that, there are some people involved in this who don't know it in this life, but do know it in another level of reality. And I’m sure I’m one of them. I know of some other people who I have seen and interacted with in another reality, in the Visitor context, who don’t know it in this context. One in particular was... I had a very powerful sexual experience with a Visitor that was conducted at the cabin, I think about 1989. It was in a room, the guest room, there was a large number of people there, one of whom I recognized because I had known him for a long time. He was an intelligence officer I had known for years, a military man. Afterwards, I thought how odd that he would be watching this spectacle. Thirty years passed. I met a man from Romania, who said to me he had had one experience in his life and it was a total blackness, except for one thing. He remembered them getting him to underline a name in a detective novel he was reading. He said, “I don't know why, but that's the only evidence I have that it even happened.” And I said, what's the name? It was the name of the intelligence officer who had been there 30 years before.
(47:20) JM: It suggests that the reality in which we live has dream-like qualities. We think of it as being very mechanical and physical, but it seems as if there are elements of our reality that are better expressed as dream like or even like a poem.
(47:42) WS: You know, I think that it is terribly important not to think of this whole experience so much in the linear and formalistic language of correspondence that we have evolved. But rather in the much more ambiguous language of poetry which is a bigger language. In A New World, I talk about the use of imagery, imagistic writing and hieroglyphs and how the Visitors' ways of communicating is very similar to, especially Egyptian hieroglyphs which use natural objects and their meanings and their significance to express parts of words. So, you had an incredibly complex and rich language that was operating on many different levels at the same time. It was operating on a mundane level of communicating ideas and specific information and so forth, but at the same time it was cunning about the natural world that our language just can't anymore because we have stripped that level off. But the Visitors haven't, that’s still how they communicate. That’s why when they communicate with me it's in these hieroglyphics. And I have to tell you, I don't consciously know what the hieroglyphics mean. But what I do, when I see that particular thing appear I try to just empty my mind just as best I can and take my attention away from my thoughts and put it on my body and just let the information, whatever it
11 happens to be, come in if it's going to. I don't question it or anything. And often enough, later on it turns out, it becomes clear and it's useful.
(49:55) JM: You refer several times in your new book to a previous book called The Key, and a figure called the Master of the Key, who appeared mysteriously in a hotel room where you were staying after midnight and spent a half hour with you involved in a very deep scientific discussion and then left. You imply that you think this person was also a Visitor, not of this world.
(50:25) WS: I don't think he was of this world, I don't see how he could have been. A lot of what he said reflected some very, very deep Masonic lore. I thought perhaps he was a Templar because there are Templar Masons in Canada. But, I got involved with one of their leaders and talked about him extensively and I don't think that this man was connected with them. The whole thing started when I had had room service and it was the last night of the last author tour I would ever be invited to do. Of course, I didn't know that at the time. Someone knocked on the door, and I felt like I was just dozing, but I didn't realize it was now 2 o’clock in the morning. I thought it was about 10:30 or 11:00 maybe. I got up, I woke up and sat and saw that the tray was still on the desk where I had eaten my dinner. So, I thought it was the room service guy and I opened the door. This man came in. He wasn't particularly tall. He looked rather slight, dressed in gray. He had a very mild, very sweet face. He was still there and that was a problem because at that hour there is no such thing as a fan whom you are going to be pleased to have a conversation with in your hotel room unexpectedly. That fan will be trouble, or not a fan at all, more likely. But he proceeded to turn around and start talking. He stood against the window and he said the most extraordinary thing. He said we are chained to the ground because of the Holocaust. Because the child who would have understood the secret of gravity died in the womb of his mother in the gas chambers and therefore this species is trapped on Earth. Boy, when that book came out I got a lot of death threats from right wing fanatics and Hitler lovers because you know, they didn't want to hear that their little escapade and the concentration camps had placed mankind in a situation that we are in now, where our population is growing out of control and we can't leave. There is no way... I know people who are working on gravity very hard and trying to understand it. You can't understand gravity unless you understand, first, the yearning that is the basis of reality, because reality comes out of it. When you assume that there is no consciousness, that it's all natural and you look for methodologies and systematic approaches you don't look in the right place, so they get nowhere with gravity. We need to learn how to find the secret of gravity or we’re going to have trouble here. And we lost our chance because that happened. That's not the primary message of The Key. There's a lot of scientific information in The Key that has mostly actually come true, in fact all of it actually, over time. But there was something in The Key, one of the things that he said that has been so useful to me because we always need to try to understand, where am I in my life? What am I doing? Am I living an examined life? A good life? How do I examine my life? They have this concept of sin, which of course growing up Catholic I was absolutely fascinated with,
12 and mystified by it too, because I didn't know quite what it was, but we do know what it is. So, I asked him the question, “What is sin?” And he answered immediately with the best answer I have ever heard. He said, “Sin is denial of the right to thrive.” When you think of that, suddenly your whole life comes into focus and you understand yourself and where you are and where you need to be and need to go. So, that was the Master of The Key.
(55:27) JM: You assume that this is an non-earthly being, rather than just a very wise man.
(55:38) WS: Well, you know, he gave me a drink called the Milk of Nepenthe, that the Greeks called the Milk of Nepenthe, which is actually opium, in liquid mixed with alcohol. I figured out what it was eventually. There is a little marjoram, I believe, or something in it, to kind of cut the bitterness. It's very bitter though. I’ve had it twice. I had it once from the Visitors and once from him. What it does is it simply puts you to sleep. It's nothing miraculous. It's not a space drink. Then you wake up in the morning and you may not remember what happened. But in any case, he must have been a physical person or he wouldn't have needed to do that, he would have simply disappeared. But he left via the door and entered via the door with a knock. Now, does that mean he lives somewhere in Canada? Possibly. Possibly it was just a very wise man. But if he was a wise man who is living in this timestream, in this reality now, then he’s truly extraordinary and I wish I could find him again but I haven't been able to.
(56:59) JM: You know, another comment that you made in your book that struck me relates to the enormous literature that’s coming out of people who believe that they are in contact with alien beings through remote viewing, or through channeling. I think your inclination was to dismiss it simply because we can't know the extent to which imagination was involved in the production of this literature.
(57:27) WS: Well, yeah, the channeled literature is a very big problem, because if you resonate with something channeled, well, you should go with it. But, you can't prove it. There's no way to. It's un-anchorable. That's why I have so much trouble with it. I'm not a good channeler, I want to be able to anchor my thoughts and my beliefs in the process of my exploration, that's why I’m so careful. Whenever possible, I add witnesses in my work. I think, in terms of paranormal experiences, my books are amongst the most extensively documented in terms of there being additional witnesses, named witnesses of any. I’m very careful about that. But to me, channeling is you can't pin it down, you … can't know. Every once in a while a psychic will come along who is very powerful, and I‘ve known some who proved their power by feats of knowledge, feats of knowing that were beyond belief. And then when they channel, you think to yourself maybe there's something there, because at least you do know there's a real power in this person.
(59:09) JM: Of course, I wrote a book called The PK Man, about just such a person who …
13 (59:14) WS: A wonderful book …
(59:16) JM: It seems as if when there are these anchors or these hooks where you can attach something tangible to what would otherwise seem to be a flight of imagination, there's good reason to begin to take it more seriously. I’m sure you’re aware of the work of the philosopher Henri Corbin who made the distinction between imaginary and imaginal.
(59:44) WS: Yes. I am aware of his work. You know, it's a useful distinction on the one hand, on the other hand, imagination, just regular imagination, is an abandoned tool that we have abandoned and now think of as a toy. Imagination is not a toy. Imagination is a useful tool and disciplined imagination is the core, the primary tool of the Magician. When you look at the Tarot of Marseille, and the Fool is there with his bundle on his back and then you look at the card for the Magician and there are all the tools laid out because the Fool has advanced into the journey of the path of the Tarot, that is to say he has laid out his tools. One of those tools is a wand. That wand is the imagination.
(1:00:50) JM: So, I would think that just as you are endeavouring to conjure up a new world, in which the human race can be communicating with this whole spectrum of other beings, let’s call it a parallel dimension or supersensible worlds, the same might be said of many other people who are working with imagination, such as you in your other career as a writer of fiction.
(1:01:20) WS: Yeah, conjuring is one of the things we are gradually coming to realize that it can be real. People who say that thoughts are things, they are beginning to understand that this is quite true. You know, we’re changing, we are beginning to dimensionalize the higher levels of consciousness within us, which are within, and doing it in a sense because the loudest voice of all, which is the voice of science and the media and so forth, is saying, “You are small, material fragments. You have a limited existence. You’re born, you live and you die. And buy more cars and buy more hamburgers, while you can.” When the truth is very different. We’re going to be circling back all the way to the time before this history was even recorded, this time that we call history was even recorded, to find ourselves. Once we have understood how it could be that 36,000 people who lived in the British Isles during the time of the building of Stonehenge, that tiny number of people could spend 500 years building that monument. Once we have understood why it was that people built Gobekli Tepe and took 1,000 years doing it, and then another 1,000 years to bury it. Once we have uncovered the mind that did that, which is the real human mind, we will link it up with all of our current knowledge and we will, in effect, return to the forest. But this time
14 it will be the forest that we have had a share in making. Because when nature comes to be rebalanced it will be us. We have to do the work. That work will be done by both body and spirit.
(1:03:49) JM: Whitley Strieber, what a magnificent conversation this has been. I’m so delighted to have reconnected with you.
(1:03:56) WS: You have such a skill at asking questions. I have to tell you, Jeffrey, it's a delight to be with you.
(1:04:04) JM: Well, let's do it more often. I was hoping we could arrange for you to come to Albuquerque and I still hope that's possible. But now we’re on lockdown and perhaps we can take more advantage of this internet communication. I know that our viewers would be very happy to have further conversations.
(1:04:26) WS: Well, good. I’m looking forward to it already.
(1:04:29) JM: Thank you so much Whitley for sharing your spirit, your soul and your wisdom with me and with our viewers.
(1:04:38) WS: Thank you very much, Jeffrey.
(1:04:40) JM: And for those of you who have been watching this video, thank you for being with us.
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