The Key by Whitley Strieber Page A

bench, Muhammad pumping gasoline, Christ starving in the backstreet.
    Â 
    But if Christ was God, and God is perfect, why would he need to become perfect?
    Christ was not perfect or he would not have been human. His humanity asked that the cup be taken from him, his divinity died a conscious death. But you must understand that his imperfect humanity and his perfect divinity were the same thing. That seems irreconcilable, but it isn’t, because even when Christ suffered, he was in ecstasy. I am here to get you to recognize yourself as divine—that is to say, as a participant in ecstasy even during elemental life. The new man will live in ecstasy, even though he lives in chains.
    Â 
    Define ecstasy.
    The energetic body has a spin, or vibration. This can go infinitely fast. It can reach beyond the speed of light, and exit time altogether. When this happens, the body begins to radiate of its own accord. It becomes at once God and co-creative with God, a companion. A single bit of God, which you are, does not only join the whole like a crumb in a cake, it can attain so much of ecstasy that it becomes the whole. Your destiny, each of you, is to become all of God. But this process is slowed by contact with the points of attachment—and there are trillions and trillions of them—between the energetic and elemental bodies. So detachment, as Buddha said, is essential to ecstasy. The proper use of meditation is to enable you to see life as both an outsider and a participant. The outsider notices the glimmer of sunlight upon the spoon, the sensation of the food in the mouth, for he is using life to gain impressions. The participant only eats. So also, the outsider sees the packed bodies around him, he smells the sweat and the urine, he hears the soft clatter of the crystals with absolute objective calm, and inhales the searing torment of the gas without being in any way identified with the injustice or the cruelty or the terror all around him. But the participant screams, it suffers the agony of the elemental body, and knows the greatest terror man has ever known, which was experienced in the dark gas chambers of the Holocaust.
    Â 
    Are you dead?
    Yes.
    Â 
    And did you die a Jew in the camps?
    I died with each of them and all of them. When you kill a being, you kill all being. I die a million times a day. I am dying now, being murdered, being starved, devoured by bacteria, crushed, burned, shot, cut, slaughtered. But I am also being born, awakening into new life, playing in grass, discovering the hidden truths of nature, enjoying the sunshine, reading, eating, engaging in every sexual delight known, all now, all here, always.
    Â 
    And you are in ecstasy?
    (He only gazed at me in answer.)
    Â 
    Then you are still here, a dead man among the living. You didn’t leave when you ascended?
    All leave, nobody leaves. Ascension is not a matter of flying off to some place in the sky, it is a matter of expanding the being to fill the universe. You may ascend beyond time and infinity, but you will still be here, as we all are.
    Â 
    Where is here?
    Everywhere.
    Â 
    Ah. I’m lost.
    All being includes all elements of the earth, and thus all are part of all bodies. We are the consciousness of the planetary level that it has spent all of its life evolving, each and all of us. My being is the awakening earth. As is yours. The destiny of earth and the destiny of man are one. If we kill earth, we kill ourselves. If we die before our time, then we will not be able to enter ecstasy as a whole being. You are not a whole being, child. And “Whitley” is only a tiny part of you. All mankind in all time is a whole being.
    Â 
    If we kill earth before we have all reached ecstasy, what happens? We wait until and if the earth spins elemental bodies once again that fit all the attachments of our energetic bodies. If it does not, then we wait forever. We remain incomplete.
    Â 
    What would this waiting be like?
    Energetic