Meeting the Master of the Key (June 6, 1998)

I was alerted to this book by a retrospective YouTube video from Whitley Strieber:

Here’s what I read on amazon.ca:

From the bestselling author of Communion comes the mysterious true story of how an unknown visitor barged into Strieber’s hotel room late one night–and imparted extraordinary lessons in personal development and man’s fate that challenge us to rethink every assumption about the meaning of life.

At two-thirty in the morning of June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber was awakened by somebody knocking on his hotel room door. A man came in, and everything he said was life-altering.

This is the unsettling and ultimately enlightening narrative of what happened that night. Strieber was never really sure who this strange and knowing visitor was–a “Master of Wisdom”? A figure from a different realm of consciousness? A preternaturally intelligent being? He called him the Master of the Key. The one thing of which Strieber was certain is that both the man and the encounter were real.

The main concern of the Master of the Key is to save each of us from self-imprisonment. “Mankind is trapped,” the stranger tells Strieber. “I want to help you spring the trap.” In a sweeping exchange between Strieber and the stranger–which takes the form of a classical student- teacher dialogue in pursuit of inner understanding–the unknown man presents a lesson in human potential, esoteric psychology, and man’s fate. He illuminates why man has been caught in a cycle of repeat violence and self-destruction–and the slender, but very real, possibility for release.

In its breadth and intimacy, The Key is on par with contemporary metaphysical traditions, such as A Course in Miracles, or even with the dialogues of modern wisdom teachers, such as D.T. Suzuki and Carl Jung.

Well, how could I resist?

High strangeness, indeed: Venus is inconjunct with Pluto. (That’s probably why Whitley rang his wife, Anne, the very same morning after waking up to get her to be witness to the fact that this event did happen, even if it was months and then years before he got it finally in a print form for the public. She was the push he needed to remind himself that it truly did happen and that he should write it down.)

The Key to the whole adventure was that Venus (being conjunct Whitley’s Venus in Taurus) making that inconjunct significant in Whitley’s life. The other interactive inconjunct links Whitley’s Saturn with the event’s Uranus. It seems to me that a small doorway between two different worlds was opened that night.

I’ll be reading this book and reviewing it in a later post. But for now, let’s enjoy the fact that nothing is accidental, and that there really is nothing new under the sun.