The Key Read Online Free Page A

way to understand why anything would survive the death of the physical.
    However, he took an entirely unexpected approach. First, he used the phrase “soul-blind” to describe us. I’d heard it before, and I couldn’t disagree. But were we soul blind because there’s nothing to see, or because of some appalling human insufficiency?
    When he said that the soul was, simply, a part of nature, I found myself thinking that things like radio had also always been part of nature, but for a great long time we couldn’t even conceive of them, let alone detect them. And he was saying, essentially, that the issue with the soul is also one of detection. This would correspond with his assertion that “conscious energy” is essentially electromagnetic in nature.
    But how would that work? Are such fields plasmas? If so, what holds them together? What are the physics of the soul?
    In the mid-nineties we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and were invited to the home of a friend who was taking many photographs of what are known as “orbs” in ghost-hunter and parapsychological circles. I thought that the great masses of objects that were appearing on random shots he was taking inside and outside his house must be condensation or dust, or something else along those lines, that was very close to the camera lens. But when I went to the house and we took shots of exactly the same spot with two different cameras from different angles, the objects showed up in both pictures. This means that they were not tiny specs near the camera, but larger objects three or four feet away, which was very perplexing.
    Later, I went out into the back garden and felt an absolutely distinct presence. It was my mother, long since passed away. It was as if she was right there. It was palpable. I stood there, my eyes closed, communing with her. I didn’t know it, but another member of the group took a picture of me at that moment.
    In the picture, above me and perhaps ten feet in front of me, is a glowing orb. It isn’t enormous, more like a sort of a spark, but why does it happen to be there? Is it an indication of the persistence of the soul after death? It is certainly true that it seemed to me that my mother was there.
    The Master of the Key made an interesting case for souls being part of material reality, basically for the idea that consciousness could remain coherently structured while in an energetic form.
    Over the years, there has been so much evidence gathered that ghostly apparitions are associated with magnetic fields that there is little point in my advocating on its behalf.
    Listening to the Master appears to have broken a barrier in me. I became much more sensitive to the presence of the dead than I had been before I listened to his ideas about what they were.
    I began to see the dead quite frequently and would find myself communicating with them. Recently, for example, my wife’s father came to mind in away that felt more like a sort of penetration of my consciousness than an ordinary thought or memory. I told her that I could feel his presence, and that he wanted badly to communicate with her. When he was alive, their relationship had been seriously strained, and he seemed to want to make amends.
    There was also a woman with him, but it wasn’t Anne’s mother or her father’s second wife. Anne told me that there hadn’t been any other women in his life.
    Her father then said to me, “Tell her it’s Marcelle,” so I did so. Anne was genuinely startled. She said, “He did have a sister. That’s my aunt Marcelle. I met her only once in my life. I haven’t thought about her since.”
    I would be remiss if I said that I could prove that Anne had never mentioned Marcelle to me, but she says, I think correctly, that she never did.
    If this was the only incident in my life of a communication with the dead, I would take it with a grain of salt. But it is not the only