Communion: A True Story (35 page)

The imprinting of triangles on myself and Dr. X may also have a similar significance.

The idea of the triad is not static. It is an expression of a series of emanations. The third force emerges when the first and second forces come into balance, and when all three are in harmony they become a fourth thing, an indivisible whole.

I do not wish to imply by this anything beyond a human context. It is possible for man to become more whole, for each of us to make our private journey back to the place of emergence, and find there the simplest and most real of truths: that we are all at heart the same, that every body contains every soul and has room for every act without reference to its quality. There is a deep, objective awareness of self and universe that is available to all of us.

We could be part of a triad that includes the visitors. They might be the aggressive force, entering us, enforcing our passivity, seeking to draw from the relationship some new creation.

But the triad can never come into harmony until there is a firm ground of understanding. We need not be blindly welcoming. What is required is objectivity. We must have a care, for if they are real it can be as persuasively argued that they are aggressive as it can be that they are benevolent. They take us in the night They introduce their instruments and thus their reality into our brains. It is, however, too easy to call them evil, just as it is too easy to say that they are saints, kindly guides from the beyond. They are a very real and immensely complex force, the provocative nature of which demands neither hate nor love, but rather respect in a context of intellectual objectivity and emotional strength.

In ancient Taoist thought the fundamental force in the universe was duality, the yin and the yang, positive and negative, thrusting and opening, seeking and waiting, male and female.

This was also thought by the Aztec and many other cultures to be fundamental to everything.

And the duality, when it was in harmony, formed the triad. Throughout this chapter I will draw primarily on the Aztec imagery, as a reminder of the fragility and seriousness of our situation if we are indeed dancing a real dance with real visitors.

The triad cannot become strong unless it is preceded by a strong duality. Without the friction of bodies there can be no child, and the universe cannot proceed. There must first be two forces, equal opposites, one that pushes and one that resists. Do the visitors perceive themselves as the aggressive force, seeking to open us to their presence. If so, everything depends on our slowly growing understanding, for unless we understand we cannot be their equal. Unless the two forces are equal, the triad will not have a chance to balance itself and the relationship will not be creative.

When the opposition between two is in balance, the third force emerges. Perhaps the French call the moment of sexual climax "the little death" because it suggests the passing of the parents and the turning of the generations. Or maybe because it is like the death of self that is involved in entering pure being, climax being a moment when the self is absorbed m ecstasy.

On the night of December 26 I felt psychologically destroyed, as if my very self had died.

It could be that the basis of the fear we feel for the visitors, and — it seems to me — they for us, comes from a biological, instinctive awareness that our coming together nay mean the creation of a third and greater form which will supplant us as the child dues his parents.

The third force is not a small thing: It is the immense progress of life, the very movement of the universe toward whatever goal it seeks. First and second forces are people struggling in a bed. Third force is at once their frantic union and the whole urgency and implication of creation. It is their mutual attraction, the friction of their bodies--and their child.

When the internal triad of mind, body, and heart becomes fixed in a state of permanent harmony, it is because the seeker has finally died to himself and all the allures of life. Out of this death the fourth state emerges. This is the ecstatic objectivity that the Western seeker cherishes, the nirvana of the Hindu, the blooming lotus of Zen.

The human being in a state of spiritual harmony is looked upon as a sort of cosmic egg out of which hatches the bird of resurrection, which is the phoenix, also characterized as an eagle, the symbol of the yin.

In the old imagery of the tarot, and in the gospel story of the Mama Feast at Cana, the feminine is viewed as a cup, the masculine as what is poured into it. The Aztec poets sang of the creative impact of the God and Goddess of Duality, and called the third force the song of the flower.

Distantly as I sit here on the porch at the cabin, I hear the roaring of one of our brooks, swollen by spring melt. The leaves shimmer on the trees, a swarm of Mayflies hovers in the sun. Suddenly two phoebes battle, a scream, a fluff of feathers, and then silence, both birds gone. At some moment, for a reason that seems to me to be as large and enigmatic as the universe itself, the female ceased to resist the male. The duality joined, the triad emerged, new life is now vibrant in her belly.

And both birds are a little older.

Each independent act of creation vibrates the whole web of the world, when the phoebe mates, when a woman takes the pleasure of a man.

It is hard for me to think that the relationship between two intelligent species would not be dense with creative potential.

When we were first married, Anne and I found a motto for ourselves in the Bible, from Ecclesiastes, "Two are better than one . . . and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped."

Anne cross-stitched it and it has been with us ever since. The third strand is the love, then the child, then the long unraveling of the years. At last it is what is left of a lifetime spent together, the fading remembrance, the generations to come, and also the joy that ripens in souls.

Among the Aztecs, the Lord and Lady of Duality created out of their harmony a truly extraordinary third force:

Man was born,

sent here by our mother, our father

the Lord and Lady of Duality.

The Aztec philosophers asked the question, what is the third force, what is the bond and outcome of harmony? But they did not ask it in these structure-laden words, rather they asked, what is his flower, what is her song? The love and the child both make the marriage true.

And when the flower and the song came together, the Aztecs would say:
The flowers sprout, they are fresh, they grow;

they open their blossoms,

and from within emerge the flowers of song;

among men You scatter them, You send them.

You are the singer!

The flower is the man, the song the woman, the flower of song the third strand winding gaily in the dark.

This must be a very careful business, this communion, for it can easily make such a flame that the flower is burned.

My flowers shall not cease to live;

My songs shall never end:

I, a singer, intone them:

They become scattered, they are spread about.

Cortez emerged from the sea, and the shadow of the creator as destroyer stalked in the land, then the flowers were trodden down and the brutal, beautiful Aztec civilization was destroyed forever.

Destined is my heart to vanish,

like the ever-withering flowers?

What can my heart do?

At least flowers, at least songs!

So a dark triad was completed, the gory Aztec flower cut by the booming Spanish song.

For there to be growth instead of death, much more must be brought to the triad than mere conquest. Or "contact," which, if the visitors are as advanced as they seem, would amount to a form of conquest. Communion is as wide as all the knowledge of both partners, as deep as their whole souls. Marriage requires patience, giving without thought to keep accounts. When one says' I gave this and so I am owed that," the marriage has not yet begun. Real sharing rests in a balanced recognition of sameness and difference. It is a discovery of balances and equalities.

We need to give ourselves to our experience, without knowing what it is, trusting that our understanding will grow as we proceed. To participate truly in this experience, we must marry the unknown. The only belief is the question itself: Love is a matter of leaping out into the sky.

But then again, one cannot be objective in the context of an excess of passion. We must be careful, for the stakes are high: Mankind is in the position of maturing as a species at the same time that our planet could be dying. We have a difficult road ahead. We must resist all temptation to wait for the visitors to save us. If we wait, we can be sure that nothing will save us. We have to learn to live on the edge of the razor.

When two in balance cause a third to emerge and remain in balance, something more happens: The three together become a greater whole. All seeking toward higher consciousness is a search for the sort of balance that will cause the triad to cease to be a collection of parts and become a solid.

Hidden in the Sphinx, one of our most ancient objects, is a great idea, simple and extremely powerful. To understand the riddle of the Sphinx is to know how to begin one's walk along the ancient way, the "pathless path" of old.

The most powerful moment I experienced in my search through the modern literature about the visitors took place when I was reading
The Andreasson Affair
. Few of the accounts I have read contain as much symbolism. But this one contained a great deal, and it was quite remarkable. What interested me most about it was that Mrs. Andreasson obviously had no idea at all what it meant. But it has great meaning, and is entirely coherent in context with all I have been discussing here.

"I'm standing before a large bird," Mrs. Andreasson reported. "It's very warm .... And that bird looks like an eagle to me. And it's living! It has a white head and there is light in back of it — real, white light .... The light seems so bright in back of it. It's beautiful, bright light . . .

The light just keeps sending out rays. They keep on getting bigger and bigger. Oh, the heat is so strong!

The great symbol of transformation, the fourth beast of the Sphinx, is the eagle. It is ever associated with heat, the energy of the sun that at once sheds the light of wisdom and the heat that burns the self away.

The riddle of the Sphinx: What has the strength of a bull, the courage of a lion, and the intelligence of a man? The answer is the Sphinx itself, who then takes wind like an eagle and looks down over life from outside of time, with true objectivity.

The flying Sphinx is a triad rendered in yet a fourth dimension of reality: a triangular solid, a pyramid, known in esoteric thought as the living eternal. The pyramids may or may not have been tombs; they were certainly symbols of the immortality of the pharaohs who built them.

Betty Andreasson had no idea what her vision was about. They asked her, "Do you understand?"

"No, I don't understand what this is all about, why I'm even here."

The central effort of my life has been the fulfillment of the triad, the creation of the eagle within me. And now I find the key myth of this transformational effort embedded in the innocent literature of the abductees, in a passage of immense power and force. Later in her transcript, Mrs. Andreasson reports being told like so many of us that she has been "chosen."

This confused her, because she did not see the significance of what she had been shown.

Since this image was so powerful, and so much at the center of her testimony, it seems logical that whatever it was that chose her did so to convey it.

My day alone at the cabin drew to an end. The dark came slipping out of the woods, and at length I went inside and had a. meal. I did not turn on the lights, but rather chose to let the night in.

Sitting in my silent living room on the couch where the visitors left me on the night of December 26, reading through the late night hours, I reflected on the relationship between the innocent and the sublime, the new and the ancient. How is it that Mrs. Andreasson — a middle-aged American housewife with probably no access to the texts that concern themselves with this deep secret-hit upon the very symbol of the complete triad?

What old beast is shuffling toward the surface of human experience — surely not the very eagle, the Phoenix of transformation whose shadow has made me sweat with longing?

Let us turn now toward the rigorous objectivity that might allow a human spirit to take wing, to soar beyond the attractions of life that the Hindu sages have given the wonderful name maya, which P. D. Ouspensky in his more utilitarian interpretation described simply as

"identification" with the illusionary importance of everyday affairs. It seems important to cleave to the things of life, the details of every day, but it is not very important. With care, our obsession with these things can be put aside even while our responsibility for them remains.

We do not even know if there are visitors. We do not know what we are, or why this is happening, or exactly what is happening. The real center of the experience lies not m some facile explanation, it lies in opening. oneself to the question as it really exists, with all its mystery and danger.

To get that particular flower to open a little more, it may be helpful to turn to another enigma: the tarot. First, please set aside any notion of fortune-telling. I suggest that the Major Arcana reveal a hidden symbolic coherence of great purity that has more to do with order than chance. About fifteen years ago I became interested in the tarot when I was studying the rise of monasticism in Europe for a historical novel I never actually wrote. I came to realize that the tarot is much more than a deck of fortune-telling cards; it is a sort philosophical machine that presents its ideas in the form of pictures rather than words.

The story it tells is an interesting one: The face cards of the tarot — the Major Arcana —can be arranged in such a manner that they work as signposts toward spiritual evolution. Card twenty-one, the final card in this arrangement, is called the World. There is in this card as deep a representation of the spirit and force of the triad as exists on earth: It consists of the four beasts of the Sphinx, one at each corner, surrounding an enigmatic and powerful figure who stands within a wreath.