Communion: A True Story (36 page)

This figure's genitals are hidden by a cloth; it has breasts and also the suggestion of a male form. It is intended, I think, to represent a potential in all human beings. In the hands are carried tools from the table of the card of the Magician, most specifically, his wand. The figure may represent humankind transformed, the beast reborn, man or woman, half human and half god.

Out of communion there emerges transformation. The strong body, the brave heart, and the intelligence of a human being.

What is the true aim of mind? Does it seek knowledge only for the sake of constructing the intricate pleasures and poisons of technology, or just to know, or is there another dancer in the shadows?

The mind can bring understanding to body and heart. It can direct the body toward healthy ways and the heart toward the balm of insight.

Then, when a being comes into harmony, body, mind, and heart reconciled, there is a chance to look up from the plodding and the toil, and there to encounter the whole tremendous ecstasy that made the phoebes scream in the morning light.

It is then that the struggling worm turns from clay into fire and the soul takes wing, sweeping out of time and chance, going higher and higher, daring like the eagle the relentless, revealing fire of the sun.

In all of us there is an unaddressed urgency which we cannot really name, which seems to lie at the heart of our hope for ourselves. It is the flight of the eagle that we seek, the walk of the monk down the nirvana road, the faith of the old priest whose mass in his humble little church last Sunday was really said between the worlds of body and soul.

We go from the endless battle of duality to the harmony of the triad, and then to the mystery of the eagle. Each of us is potentially a transfigure being, the friend of God, the Phoenix gliding free.

Are the visitors asking us to form a triad with them? Is that the purpose of all the triangular and pyramidal imagery? Maybe, but there may be another truth here. Maybe I have located these symbols in the visitor material simply because they are so central to my own life. My whole soul and breath are devoted to the groping toward transformation. Maybe it is inevitable that I would extract relevant material from any enigma that I encounter.

And yet, I cannot think that Betty Andreasson chose to present the fiery drama of the risen eagle with such force in her testimony entirely on her own.

Life is expressed in Christian cosmology as having emerged from the unity of the Trinity.

And this is nothing mystical, it is very simply true: We could not exist without all three of the dimensions that sustain us. Solids depend on breadth, depth, and height, and we cannot construct a perceptual reality sufficiently reflective of all potential with fewer dimensions.

The advantage of three dimensions is that they allow parallel movement through space and time, which is essential to experience.

Everybody is afraid of giving up themselves and just being. The fire behind the eagle felt so hot that it terrified Betty Andreasson, for it was the fire that consumes the self. It was the apocalypse of the soul.

Our agony is to stand before the utter blackness of the unknown with full knowledge that there is something there, and it is alive, and if one is to remain on the path of inner search, one must trust it even though it may very certainly be dangerous. Strength is needed to endure the fire; courage to enter it, intelligence to come out alive.

There has ever been in the life of man this idea of the triad as the primary force of growth.

The Sphinx is a very old construction, and the sacred graphic known as the Kali yantra or Primordial Image in the Indian Tantras may be older still. This ancient symbol, a triangle with the
bindu
, or spark of life, at the center, is associated with the Trip Goddess who rules past, present, and future (length, breadth, and depth), and the trimesters of pregnancy, and the three seasons of life: childhood, maturity, and age.

Out in my woods the hemlocks are sighing with the long breath of the night.

Three Ways was one name of the Roman goddess Hecate, whose three-faced image at crossroads traditionally received offerings of cake, fruit, and money. Money is still offered at one of her ancient shrines, the Trevi Fountain, and the traditional idea of being blessed by throwing three coins in the fountain has persisted into our era.

The Irish god Trefuilngid is the patron of the trefoil, or three leaf, the shamrock.

Trefuilngid is known as the Triple Bearer of the Triple Key, which is the same appellation given Shiva, Astarte, and Ishtar, three ancient manifestations of the Triune Goddess. Of course, the shamrock is also the symbol of St. Patrick. Among the ancient Arabs the trefoil was called the
shamrakh
, which was a symbol of the male trident of fertility. Did the Irish once know the Arabs? What dark seas flowed before we learned how to write our history down, and what triumphs have been swallowed by their waters?

In the Greek alphabet the fourth letter, delta, is the symbol of the Holy Door, and among the Egyptians the triangle was the symbol of Men-Nefer, the very ancient goddess of the mother city Memphis, as identified in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The object of the worship of the Yantra is to attain unity with the Mother of the Universe in Her forms as Mind, Life, and Matter ... preparator to Yoga union with Her as She is in herself as Pure Consciousness.

To the Gnostics of the later Roman Empire, the triangle signified creative intellect, the balancing coolness of mind, the persistent reconciliation that proceeds in the souls of the ones who seek Christ within.

Among the ancient Sumerians Ishtar was the Triune Goddess, as among modern Christians the Trinity is the central figure of the creative force, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The Way to Christ is lit by the Star of Bethlehem, as also the word
Ishtar
means "Star."

Babylonian scriptures call Ishtar the Light of the World, Opener of the Womb, Leader of Armies, Lawgiver, Forgiver of Sins. It is from the legend of Ishtar that the story of the descent into the underworld enters so many of man's traditions: The giver of life overcomes the taker of life, and rebirth emerges.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo traveled the bath of transformation, and were not consumed in its fires. They symbolically sat astride the shoulders of the eagle, as did the medicine men of Native America, the shamans of the Siberian plains, the witches of old Europe when the ice king strode half the continent.

Transformation: Among the Apache, when someone was called in his heart to be a shaman, it meant that he had to go into the world of the dead, he had to dare the fire. The Apache would find a cliff and jump off. If he lived, he became a man of medicine. If he died, he died.

Length and breadth, when they merge, make the solid, which the Pythagoreans thought of as mind emerging into reality. "Know thyself," was ever the refrain of the old Greek mystical philosophers, the admonition of Apollo and of the visitors who took Betty Andreasson.

Could it be that we are about to rediscover the actual, physical truth of the ancient idea that to know the mind is to know the universe? A child reported: "The unconscious mind is like the universe beyond the quasars. It's a place we want to go to find out what's there."

What is there? Could there be in the tinkling caves of the soul a door that leads beyond the edge of reality? Is that where the eagle will go when it takes flight? Is that where the visitors came from?

No matter what factual reality attaches to the experience of the visitors, the presence of the triangle as a frequently observed symbol by many people who have no idea at all of its rich heritage suggests that there is much here that is worth exploring, and not only with the tools of science but also with the tools of myth and philosophy, with the heart as well as the intellect.

At the least, we are dealing with a grand flight of our own mind, in some mysterious way collecting itself against thunder from the future, seeking in this time of world danger toward its oldest truth.

It could be that the triangle performs a similar symbolic function wherever the three-dimensional universe prevails. In speaking to us through that particular form — if that is what they are doing — the visitors may be announcing themselves as belonging to the same laws that inscribe our beings, and identifying their presence with the everlasting ideology of transformation. It could be a symbol not only of mutuality of structure but of shared aim, which is the continuation of life and the search for wisdom. The additional presence of the eagle in this symbology confirms its sense and direction and makes it difficult to assert that it is all just an accident, as anchored in chance as a remarkable thing I once saw during a terrible stone at sea.

I was in a small cabin cruiser and a squall had come up out of nowhere on the Gulf of Mexico. The wind was gusting terrifically and twenty-foot waves were threatening to swamp the boat. Should the engine get flooded by water coming in over the transom, we had very little chance of survival..

Slowly, painfully, the boat climbed the wall of a wave. As we teetered over, I saw across the sweep of whitecaps an amazing sight: In the middle of a shaft of bright sunlight stood a tall pyramidal wave. Its sides were glassy smooth, its peak streaming white spray into the wind. For a moment it seemed perfect, solid, and eternal. Then it sank slowly down, the victim of the same random forces that had created it. As we limped back into Port Aransas after the storm the captain commented, "You see some strange things out there."

EPILOGUE

Where can such a journey as this end? Swaying in the wind with the stars, or along the dark strand of faith? For me it must be in the human dimension, for that is the only place where we can hope to make progress toward a fuller understanding.

I do not have it in me to be a believer. Nor can I be a true skeptic, for I loathe the narrow and love the broad. I cannot say, in all truth, that I am certain the visitors are present as entities entirely independent of their observers. Nor can I say that I do not think they are here at all.

It is not enough for us to ascribe the visitor experience to some unusual manifestation of known phenomena and then ignore it. Science has not explained the visitors; indeed, it has not even begun to explore them. Nor is it sufficient to say that "higher" beings are studying us, and remain passively waiting for what tidbits of knowledge they may toss us.

A striking fact of the colloquy was the general expectation of catastrophe, a possibility that I also fear. Throughout the literature of abduction, there is a frequent message of apocalypse. This is also the message of Fundamentalism — and of some parts of both the peace and environmental movements.

Presently in the Soviet Union there is so much fear regarding the "end of days" that Premier Gorbachev has taken to wearing makeup on Soviet television to obscure a birthmark on his forehead because people have called it "the mark of the 294 beast." And there has been an undertone of fear in relation to the fact that the word
chernobyl
in Ukranian means

"wormwood," the name of the star in the Book of Revelation that is poison to a third of the waters.

As the ninth century closed toward the first millennium, the Western world was also swept by wave after wave of millennial hysteria. The end of days was expected momentarily.

Of course, they did not have nuclear weapons and an expanding hole in the ozone layer.

The Celtic tradition held that the veil between the worlds of man and spirit could grow thin at certain seasons of the year. Maybe there are seasons of ages, and the veil between matter and mind is note growing, thin. It could be that thought is beginning to cross into the concrete world, or even that mind is learning how to manipulate reality to its own secret ends.

Why did an actor report that a UFO was the source of the great New York City blackout, considering that the first "UFO-induced" blackout took place in a play? And the first recorded instance of a UFO killing a car's engine seems to have been in a work of fiction.

Understand, I am not dismissing the phenomenon with yet another version of the "wind making the stars sway" explanation. No, the visitors may very well be real. Quite real. But what are they, and what in their context does the word real actually mean? I do not think that this is a question that will in the end admit itself to a linear and mechanistic answer.

The visitor experience drives us to extremes. Those who have seen the devices or their occupants are often convinced that they are extraterrestrial m origin. And science debunks that, just as the clergy debunked the fairies in centuries past, and for the same reason: These outrageous enigmatics so threaten the established order of belief that they must at all costs be rejected. There was no room in seventeenth-century Christian theology for fairies, and there is scarcely more in twentieth-century scientific theory for visitors as peculiar as these.

But the difference between science and theology is that science can make room .for new things. In 1932 Dr. Albert Einstein stated, "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." Within the decade, he would write President Roosevelt the letter that started the United States on the road to splitting the atom and creating the atomic bomb.

"I know in my heart that they might possibly be here," one skeptic said to me, "but if they are, and they're acting like this, it's just so damned disappointing that I prefer not to believe it."

Why disappointing? Why not leave the question open for now? True, the visitors have not come down from their spaceships and given us a holographic atlas of their "home planet" . . .

or the secret of their interstellar drive. They are very strange. But that could be a two-way street. We may also be very strange.

Looking back over my experiences with the visitors, I cannot say that I felt inferior to them. On the contrary, the people I encountered did not seem superior so much as wiser, but also more simple and unformed as individuals. And they not only feared me, they seemed in awe of me. When they asked me what they could do to help me stop screaming, there was an edge of panic among them.