The Key Read Online Free

forward with the truth, they would be drummed out of their careers.
    This is a misfortune, but it is also, I believe, something that has been constructed by the same presence that is behind the whole mystery, be it alien or human, or even nonphysical in origin.
    Whatever it is, quite clearly its knowledge is far in advance of ours, and this is probably why it is so secretive.
    In the May 6, 1977, edition of Science, T.B.H. Kuiper and Mark Morris offered the speculation that aliens coming here would keep themselves well hidden, because the only motive of people so advanced as to be capable of such a journey would be to discover what new knowledge we might have to offer, and “by intervening in our natural progress now, members of an extraterrestrial society could easily extinguish the only resource on this planet that could be of any value to them,” which would be the uniqueness of the human experience.
    Even if the only difference between us and visitors from another world was that they possessed a technology that could control gravity, the gap between us would be very great. But there could be other things that would make it even greater.
    For example, my experience between 1985 and 1993 with creatures that appeared to be alien was associated with a surprising side effect, which was simultaneous contact with the dead, who would appear along with the visitors, and not as ghosts. They would seem to be completely physical.
    Perhaps, if we had a clearer understanding of the soul, the gap between us and this mysterious other intelligence would narrow, and perhaps that’s why the Master talked so much about the soul, attempting to get me to understand it in a new way.
    He said that “souls are part of nature,” and that “the science of the soul is just another science. There is no supernatural, only physics.”
    Science does not believe this. Science believes that we can’t detect the soul because there is no soul. But the Master saw it as part of nature, even to the extent of being exploitable as a resource by those with the skill to do this.
    Modern western culture has a schizophrenic relationship with the soul, very much as was true during the Roman Empire, when an educated elite developed that included the soul among the superstitions of the uneducated, and dismissed it, along with the gods, as nonsense.
    Similarly, few western scientists and intellectuals consider the soul a viable idea. Where is it? What form might it take? How could anything bearing consciousness continue to exist after the seat of consciousness, the brain, has ceased to function?
    The Master of the Key takes a completely novel approach to the whole idea. He denies the existence of the supernatural, saying that only the natural world exists, some parts of which we understand and some parts of which we don’t.
    It is a characteristic of human thought and culture that we deny the parts of nature that we don’t understand. Voltaire dismissed fossils as fish bones tossed aside by travelers. The existence of meteors was once considered an absurd fantasy. Eight days before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the New York Times published the opinion that it was time to stop nattering on about the absurd notion of flight using heavier-than-air machines. Both the Times and Scientific American initially claimed that the flights must have been a hoax.
    Such denial is a human habit of mind, and it remains as deeply ingrained in us as it always has been. Despite the many experiences I have had with ghosts and such, I myself have always been skeptical about the soul. Where would it get its energy? What sort of material reality could it possibly possess?
    For this reason, as I sat face-to-face with my visitor, I initially found his commentary on the soul off-putting.
    The reason was that, despite all the evidence I had in my own life, including an extraordinary moment of out-of-body travel that had taken place in 1986, I had no