New Realities recorded on April 25, 2017
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews author Whitley Strieber about his evolving understanding of the UFO and extraterrestrial phenomena. Strieber discusses his initial encounters, how his perspective has moved beyond the ‘alien hypothesis,’ and his belief that humanity is undergoing an initiatory experience. He emphasizes the importance of stepping outside the ego, realizing the universe is driven by a quest for knowledge and objective love, and understanding that the ‘visitors’ might serve as midwives to the birth of the human soul into a higher dimension of reality.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. I’m Alan Steinfeld, and I’ve been investigating the nature of the UFO ET phenomena for many years. And I would say one of the major spokespeople for this movement awakening transition of being is Whitley Strieber. His books have been a major influence on our pop culture and also the emerging culture of this other awareness. He’ll be speaking at Contact in the Desert this year, May 19th to the 22nd at Joshua Tree, California. Get tickets at contactinthedesert.com. Thanks, Whitley, for being on the interview.
Whitley Strieber
Well, thank you for having me.
Alan Steinfeld
Of course. I see you as one of the leaders of this movement because of your lucidity of experience and also your progression. You are moving through this phenomena as an intelligent, aware being. Do you want to just give us a little overview of where you are at now as you deal with what’s been called the visitors or other phenomena. I mean, your book Supernatural explains some, but could you just give us a little overview of your present state?
Whitley Strieber
Well, I’m not that far from where I started in some respects. I started with Communion with a series of questions about what this is. And in the frontispiece of the book, I added a statement to the effect that the human mind winks back from the dark. And I have never been at all sure this had anything to do with aliens. And I still am unsure of that, that even if there are intelligences that aren’t human, I’m not at all certain they got in flying saucers and flew from other planets in this universe. Something is certainly happening and there is evidence in my own life and extensive evidence that it’s really very unusual. But it’s so unusual that the alien hypothesis struggles in the face of the actual experience. And that’s kind of where I am with it right now.
Alan Steinfeld
The alien hypothesis struggles right because you’re having experiences that in a way I would say are undefinable and we may call it alien. Is that what you mean?
Whitley Strieber
Well, it may be that this is not something that we’re able to understand. And it may be that we can never understand it. It’s been going on in human life for a long time. And over the generations and millennia, we have always interpreted it in one way or another. We’ve always connected the dots. And I don’t think somehow that this makes much sense. They’ve been gods, sylphs, fairy folk, now most recently they’re aliens. They’ve always been here in one way or another. They seem to have increased in numbers and prevalence as two things have happened. First, the population of the planet has exploded dramatically. And second, our ability to communicate with each other has increased exponentially, especially in the past few years. To the point that it has become a kind of cottage industry. And there are lots of places like on YouTube where in order to make their money, which they make from click-throughs, they’ve got to get a new UFO story up every day or more than one. And so they just make fakes up. And for the most part, the public doesn’t care. They’re there for the entertainment. They’re not there anymore to find out whether or not something is real. That doesn’t matter anymore. And the result is that you can get someone who puts out a book that he flew around the backside of the moon with the US Air Force and he’s a popular person in this field. Another fellow claims to have spent 17 years living on Mars and he packs the house because it’s become a form of entertainment. It’s not a journey anymore. It’s simply people sitting passively back and listening to the most exciting story that they can find without any real interest in whether or not it’s true.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. No, I agree with this. And what makes your experience different I feel is first your awareness, your lucid understanding that happened to you that night starting on December 26, 1985, right, was when you first had contact. Something awoke in your mind, in your awareness that wasn’t available to you before. And perhaps you were just ahead of the curve. Do you feel that way? And…
Whitley Strieber
What I think happened to me was an initiatory experience. And it happens like that to many people where they are really roughed up at first. And it is an experience that is a direct challenge from the unknown, and it’s very, very powerful. It is an experience that we have been creating for ourselves for thousands of years in initiatory practices. There are some Native American tribes when a man wanted to be a medicine person or a woman wanted to be a medicine person, the way they determined whether or not they would be able to do this is jumped off a cliff. And the ones who lived were right in their belief about their calling, and the ones who died were wrong. In other words, it’s a direct challenge of the greatest of all unknowns, whatever that happens to be in a given culture. And in most cultures it’s been death. In our culture, it’s a little different. In our culture, it is facing a conscious, intelligent unknown that you can’t control. That is a fear greater than the fear of death for us. So that’s how it begins. And in my case, once I realized that at least a significant part of this was taking place outside of my own mind, I decided that an absolute devotion to the truth was essential. Now when I say truth, I don’t say that I know what this is. My truth is describing it as accurately as I can. That is my truth, and I make nothing up. My experiences are far weirder than the strangest experiences that the hucksters come up with. Oddly enough, so strange that people will just tune me out and figure, oh god, he must be completely crazy. But that’s not the case. The situation is I’m looking this straight in the eye and reporting what I see.
Alan Steinfeld
When you said it takes place outside your own mind, that’s an interesting term. I would like you to explain what you mean by that.
Whitley Strieber
Well, some parts of any experience take place inside the mind. The brain is reacting to stimulus from the outside and using its equipment, sight, hearing, etc. and so forth, to gather information and its temporal lobe to interpret it based on what it knows or doesn’t. That’s what it’s doing. Now, I’m not so sure that’s all that’s happening. I think that consciousness is that this body, brain body system filters consciousness, it doesn’t generate it. I think that there’s something else going on. And for example, last fall I had an out of body experience while I was at a conference with a bunch of scientists. Without realizing where I had gone, I went to a campus where two of these people, a philosopher and a professor of religion, history of religion, were professors. And I went into a dormitory and went down a hallway, and when I described this at the conference, they recognized the place immediately as their campus. Recently, I returned physically, not in the non-physical, and found myself standing in the same place that I had gone non-physically. Now, to me, that means the human consciousness itself is not confined necessarily to the body, but rather uses the body as a kind of platform to penetrate into this level of reality.
Alan Steinfeld
So, I would say because of your activity or visitor activity, you’ve sort of become a mystic of sorts. You’ve tapped into the realms where in a sense religious leaders or people who have this greater awareness that is far beyond what the common human being is even concerned with. But there does seem to be a shift at this time. Do you agree with that or not?
Whitley Strieber
Yeah, most people are basically sitting around waiting for disclosure, which is to me a meaningless activity. And it’s used by the hucksters to say something’s going to happen in the future. They’re very careful about how they do that, you can listen to them when they give speeches that this is about to happen, it’s about to happen. They fail to mention the fact that it’s been about to happen for 70 years. And that there have been dozens and dozens of big disclosure moments that haven’t amounted to anything. Because whatever is there is more like it is engaged in the quantum perception problem. The more you look at it definitely, the less clear it becomes, it becomes amorphous. I don’t think there’s all that much to disclose. So…
Alan Steinfeld
But you do say in Supernatural, and I think this is a really great point, is that we need to bring our awareness to the phenomena in order for them to really show up in this reality. Do you remember that line?
Whitley Strieber
I think so. I think that’s exactly right. I think that it’s a two-way street and we must be proactive. Otherwise, they have a very limited ability to penetrate our reality. And I also feel that there’s an enormous question there. Because is this something we want? Is it something we want in our lives? And incidentally, for those of you who are watching me on video, please be aware of the fact that I’m having a ferocious allergy attack right now. That’s what closing up my eyes and wiping my nose is all about. I’m going crazy.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you want to take a break or are you okay?
Whitley Strieber
I’m fine. No, I’m absolutely fine. I just want you to understand what’s going on over here. This pollen season has started in California and I’m having fun with it as I always do. In any case, we have a situation in which I think we’re up against something that we actually can’t ever fully understand anymore than a chimpanzee, no matter how carefully instructed, is ever going to be able to figure out a car. How to drive a car, let alone what a car even is or what makes it work. They’re so far behind, the gulf is simply too great. Now, for example, gravity is a mysterious force in our world. We don’t know what it is, we only know that it works. And one of the things that we have never tried to do is to understand it in terms of anything except mechanics. In other words, if we could look at it clearly enough, the mechanics of it clearly enough, we would eventually be able to understand it or the energies. But what if it’s something more like love that holds the universe together? Literally holds it together. How can we ever understand a thing like that? And yet, that certainly is what my experience of the visitors would suggest. They think that our science is incomplete because it doesn’t recognize that these things that we call emotions are actually states of matter as well and energy, and that you can’t progress too far beyond where we are without understanding that. And you can’t really understand that as long as you stay inside the physical world as we know it and continue to insist that this is all there is. So where are we to go from here?
Alan Steinfeld
But how do you integrate that statement about love and emotion with the previous understanding from what I got from your books that they were lacking a degree of emotional empathy because of the traumas they have…
Whitley Strieber
I don’t think it has any… this isn’t anything to do with emotional empathy and I’m not so sure I said that. Let me be very specific because there is a particularly specific observation here. I had an encounter in February of 1988, I believe, where I almost went down into a clearing in the woods and had a face-to-face meeting with them. I couldn’t do it because I felt so responsible for my family and frankly I was scared. I couldn’t walk down there and as I returned to the cabin a very interesting thing happened. I heard three cries in the air above the woods where I would have had to go through this small woods in order to get to the clearing. These three cries were at once the most perfect sounds I’ve ever heard in the sense of being… I would think that if you had recorded them and you looked at the tape on a tape recorder with an electron microscope you would find that the cry had stopped in exactly the same line of electrons. That’s how perfect it was. Three cries. But they were also the most emotionally complex sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. The most mechanical and the most emotional. And so to say that I think that or have ever thought that they were somehow mechanical in nature and that I believe that aspect of the UFO lore isn’t correct. What I believe is that they… if they are indeed aliens they may have already gone down a path that we are just starting on, which is the path of melding biology and machine.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I’m sure you’re misquoted all the time. So, you know, but there is… I think what I get from what you’re saying is perhaps we have yet to understand what true love and emotion really is. And if they are an evolved race or whatever these beings are, their depth of feeling and being themselves is beyond our human capacity, but in a way not beyond… I’m putting this in… not beyond our soul capacity. Would you agree with that?
Whitley Strieber
Well, I think that we do have much more capability of understanding things when we’re outside of the body. The body is a very restrictive environment for a reason. We are here to have a novel experience and to react to it from our own truth. And the way you do that is you filter out the larger time frames so that you can only see the moment emerging and no more than that. And there’s a cost. The cost is you no longer understand the universe. But let’s get back to this idea of love. It’s necessary to objectify it first and to see it initially to see it not as an emotion, but as an actual force in reality. As my wife has said, love is the basis of being. It is the cement, as it were, that holds the universe together. But not necessarily the kind of emotional love, the palpitating heart and the go-go eyes of that type of love. But another type of love that is much more objective in its vision, and which comes down to this. As Anne left her life, a book fell open on one of our bookshelves. This book is called Physics from Fisher Information. It fell open to a page which said the Big Bang occurred because of a primordial quest for knowledge, and this quest is reality. This is the universe. And it is the reason the universe is so enormous, and the reason there are probably many more than one universe is that there is a lot of potential knowledge out there. And we are part of the journey that is seeking to find it. And when you look at this on the shadow line between the material and the immaterial, you realize there’s a lot we can’t understand because we see love as an emotion, not as a part of the physics of reality. And that’s the difference.
Alan Steinfeld
It reminds me of that quote by John Mack. I think he said UFOs are like an outreach program from the universe for the consciously impaired. You know, we’ve been taught and programmed and conditioned to think of that love in romantic love, and we’ve forgotten ourselves. So the path these visitors have taken you on is truly to understand the deeper parts of yourself. So it’s…
Whitley Strieber
Well those cries were the most loving sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. They came from someone who had really beaten me up a year before. But they were filled with love, regard, respect, cherishing, disappointment, and pride among many other things. As I said, it was a very rich sound. The pride was pride that I had come as far as I have, because I know from the visitors that I’ve come a long way with this, longer way with this than anyone else ever has on this planet. And they consider this a treasure because it means that they’ve learned so much about our capabilities and limitations from this relationship that they have never learned before.
Alan Steinfeld
But when you say beat you up, I mean that’s a traumatic… how do you integrate that inner sense of abuse with that love? How does the human psyche bring that together?
Whitley Strieber
I could not hear them or see them. They started coming in September of 1985. By October, I was beside myself with a nameless fear. I could not wake up. Finally, they dragged me out basically by my hair and shook me until I finally could see them and react to their presence. That is the core of the initiatory experience. To shake you out of your filtered expectations and cause you to see more of the world. And it was an incredible gift. It took courage, because I may very well have reacted by hating them forever. And they had after all been with me all of my life. They would have lost something if I had reacted that way. But instead, I decided that I don’t care what they are, they are in my life, they are real, and I’m going to go out in those woods by myself at night in order to signal to them that I’m here and I’m so to speak willing to parley.
Alan Steinfeld
I think what I’m writing about also is this is the threshold that the human race seems to be at now. What you’ve gone through into the fear and out the other side. It seems like we have to do this if we are going to solve the problems of this world and our fight with each other.
Whitley Strieber
Not out the other side yet. Don’t be so confident. The reason being that the annihilating fear comes whenever they are close. I had an experience of it about four or five months ago when they came very close to this flat where I’m living. They come in here all the time. And but they came in a way that made it really difficult for me to stay outside of the fear context and I didn’t. I went into it. And they left, because they backed off because of that. So it’s always going to be true. The reason is, as I said earlier, this is a fear greater than death. It’s a fear of annihilating your purpose for being. And that’s a big, big fear. And it’s very hard to live with. And the truth is I’m not going to annihilate, it’s not never going to end. What I have to do is to keep going ahead even though it’s there.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And it will always be there. But this is the challenge to the personality who wants to exist as an ego form. And this is the challenge…
Whitley Strieber
You have to get past ego early on, or you can’t go anywhere with this.
Alan Steinfeld
But there’s that self reflective… I mean, I had a friend who said he kept challenging himself. There was a like some kind of poisonous snake behind a glass cage and he kept putting his hand up to the glass and the snake like would go for it and he had a reaction even though he knew the glass was there to protect him. There’s this automatic survival reaction that’s embedded that perhaps you’re saying we need to overcome and look at, try to identify with the thing beyond our personality.
Whitley Strieber
Yeah, because the personality is part of the body. You know, the ego will die. That’s why it’s so afraid of death. Because it can see itself and it’s going to die. It’s part of biology. It comes about when after we’re born, we’re named. And the people around us begin to interact with that name. And by the time you’re five or six, you are your name. And you know, we are our names. But that’s not really true. There’s someone else here who is not named, who is unnameable, who is nameless. And that is our reality. That’s who’s really here and that’s who has projected itself into the physical world for the purpose of taking the journey of the body. And that’s who we need to, that’s where our consciousness and awareness need to start. And then all of the ego stuff, the physical stuff and so forth becomes in a sense outside of oneself. And I’m not talking about schizophrenic dissociation or induced dissociation at all. I’m talking about a very real state that accepts the being body as a tool, not as oneself.
Alan Steinfeld
No, I know what you’re saying. And it is the way of the mystic or those seeking a deeper sense. It’s escaping from Maya or all those levels. You are also, if you care to talk about this, actually integrating in a sense these other levels. I mean, I witnessed it myself when I saw you speak last in New York. There was almost merging of energies. And I thought that seemed like a whole different approach to this incredible thing that’s been happening to you. Do you care to talk about that?
Whitley Strieber
Well, yeah. I have become a different kind of being. I am not what I used to be at all. In that I don’t live in my ego anymore. I use my ego, my ego is a tool, not me. So I’m behind this. There’s someone else talking to you now.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m Alan Steinfeld for New Realities and I’m back here with Whitley Strieber, who I feel has been the most lucid experiencer of the contact experience. And what I was asking you before, Whitley, is there seems to be something else going on with you. There seems to be more of a merging of consciousness. Something I witnessed myself when I saw you speak. There was this shininess to your eyes and an elevation of being. Can you describe what’s happening to you now?
Whitley Strieber
Yeah, I’m not living in my ego much anymore. I do live in it from time to time because it draws you in. But I use it, it’s a tool that I use in order to function in the world. It’s part of your body. It’s not you. Whitley is something that is part of my biology, it’s not me. And after meditating now for so many years, I have gotten to the point where my sensation doesn’t end with the body, the physical system or the ego. And that’s what you saw basically was that other energy.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. It seemed like they were almost, I don’t want to use the word channeling, but coming through you. Whoever they are, what is that?
Whitley Strieber
Well, that’s not exactly that. It’s not that they were coming through me so much as that you were seeing me as I am. And people will say, oh, that means he’s an alien. But you know, if that’s what they want to say, then they fail to understand this in any way whatsoever. And it’s not my business to deal with that. I can’t.
Alan Steinfeld
I was just saying, would you say those beings, whoever they may be, have transcended a personal ego from your experience?
Whitley Strieber
Yeah, they are. They use the being body as a tool and they’re not necessarily in it. Remember, I described once seeing some of them putting on their bodies like suits. The bodies were coming animated out of drawers. And they use them in the same way that we use scuba gear to go underwater. And to us the body is an enormously important, it’s everything. But it’s not, at all. You don’t, it’s only part of it. And it’s possible, for example, part of the energy of this for me was building a bridge between the world of the dead and this world because after my wife died, I wanted to stay in touch with her in some way. Because I knew she was there. I know that very well. It’s not a question really in my life anymore because of all the things I’ve seen. And in building that bridge of love between us, I also found myself living in a new way.
Alan Steinfeld
And she is with you and you are able to communicate as if she’s almost there as well.
Whitley Strieber
Sometimes. Not always. It’s been very difficult lately, but just recently, two weeks ago, it was very easy. It comes in cycles.
Alan Steinfeld
So, you know, your reality, and I call this program New Realities, is vastly different than the average person out there. It feels so much more fluid and so much more dimensionally aware.
Whitley Strieber
I would say it certainly is more fluid. Most people are living in their egos and the ego is not fluid. It’s very rigid. And it’s clinging to life desperately. That’s why we have these whole big systems of hospitals, which now seem to me extremely strange, where people go in and they have a disease that ultimately will prove fatal. And they fight and they fight and they fight to keep the body going. And there are scientific groups fighting to figure out how to make the body immortal and all of this. And being in a body is only an incident in existence. It’s not the be-all and end-all of things at all. When a fatal disease comes to me, I’m not going to go running to a hospital to be given any few seconds or days more. I’m going to prepare myself for the transition and enjoy it because it’s a wonderful adventure. The transition. I saw my wife do it and she had a fascinating experience. I could see that.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s interesting that Anne is so close to you being on the other side, because wasn’t she the first one to point out the fact that part of the visitor’s experience included people who had passed over to the other side?
Whitley Strieber
She was. She came out of her office one day and said, this has something to do with what we call death. Which I think is the single most important thing that’s ever been said about this experience. And not just in recent history, but forever. It is the critical statement upon which the turn of reality depends. Embracing that and coming to understand that is our task for this era and the future. Because unless we embrace that, unless we understand it as best we can, we’re going nowhere.
Alan Steinfeld
But can you help us understand, because I don’t really understand what the visitors, who may or may not be these creatures, have to do with death.
Whitley Strieber
They live in, what we call the world of the dead when you’re in it feels like the world of the living. Let me tell you what Annie says is we can see you, but it looks like you are intentionally ignoring us. And we are literally turned away from reality. We are just peering down the tunnel of time and refusing to see anything beyond it. And it’s not because, there’s nothing wrong with this. But there are better, richer ways in fact to live. As far as the visitors are concerned, they don’t live primarily on this level. This is not where their home is. They are born into a different level of reality with an entirely different vibration. And it’s quite possible that they’re human. That we are like caterpillars and they are like butterflies. You know, one doesn’t know what a caterpillar might think of a butterfly. It could be that the aesthetics of butterflies are quite disturbing to caterpillars.
Alan Steinfeld
You know, this does go back to what Jacques Vallee initially said in his early books and what you actually wrote a forward to in his book Dimensions. And he’ll be at Contact in the Desert this May. I’d be interested to see what kind of dialogue could emerge out of that because if we acknowledge what you’re saying here that the death experience and those have crossed over are right here and the ETs or whatever they are, part of this, then in order for us to graduate, if we want to call it that, as human beings, we have to embrace this bigger reality.
Whitley Strieber
Yeah. And you can start now. There’s no sense in not doing that. And you can begin the practice of soul coherence. So that when your body dies, your soul doesn’t simply go into the light, but rather the light comes into your soul and you stay as yourself.
Alan Steinfeld
How would we do that?
Whitley Strieber
Well, you have to meditate. You have to learn to sense yourself. You have to live by the three pillars of the soul, love, compassion, and humility. And you have to do what Annie says in her diary entry, the love that led me home, that you have to drop the burdens of life. And the angers, the disappointments, the unmet desires and needs, all of that. You have to put that all aside. And then you become like the Sphinx. You know, the story of the Sphinx is this. It has the strength of a bull, the courage of a lion. These are balanced by the intelligence of the man. And when they are in harmony, it spreads its wings and flies above the time stream and sees objectively. And when you see me in the state you saw me that night, that’s because I’m in that harmonious state condition. It’s not something I’m in always, but it’s something I understand and can get into from time to time. Yes. So, but we all can. And if you do this practice in this life, then when your body dies, you have a lot of choices. You’re not just simply part of the natural wheel of life anymore. You stand outside of it and you make your own decisions as to where you want to go and what you want to do with your consciousness or your fragment of consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
It sounds like the ancient Egyptian practice that Omm Sety has outlined in her book. Did you ever read that book, In Search of Omm Sety?
Whitley Strieber
A long time ago, but I do remember it.
Alan Steinfeld
Seti the first came to her because he was able to develop this body, whatever the Ka body, I think it’s called.
Whitley Strieber
The Ka body is what they call it, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, and this is…
Whitley Strieber
It’s very real and it’s possible to live in it.
Alan Steinfeld
And this is what a lot of religions, actually, the Tibetans talk about the rainbow body. If you read the book The Fire From Within by Carlos Castaneda, he says his teacher created the emanations of that fire and left with that.
Whitley Strieber
When Anne died, all of the signs of the rainbow body appeared. As she was taken away, her body was taken away, a fine mist filled the air behind our house as the hearse moved off. And then the next day and for days thereafter, there were rainbow after rainbow after rainbow. And that’s because she had reached a level of objective being and died in consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
So these visitors, whatever we will call them, live in that state of objective being and they want us to get that. This is what I’m getting from you. They want us to get there.
Whitley Strieber
They want us to get there, but they’re going to fight us tooth and nail because you don’t get there, it’s not an easy path. The only way to get there is to surrender your desires. In the West, we flounder and wander quite a lot emotionally and intellectually in our journey because we don’t have a facile vision of the concept of Maya. We don’t know what it is in the West. But if you really sit down and you learn Maya, you learn it not as simply an idea, but as something real that is part of you, then you begin to get a sense of who you really are and that you’re not part of this illusory being and this illusory world. You’re something else. And then you begin to taste that something else. And you know what you start to understand immediately? You start to understand why Meister Eckhart says God laughs and plays, because that’s what it’s like. It’s not awful, it’s quite a bit of fun. It’s fun to be conscious, it’s really fun.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that brings me to the question that a lot of people ask, are we being inhibited by some kind of force?
Whitley Strieber
Yes.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, well…
Whitley Strieber
Of course. We’re being inhibited by some kind of force, and if it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be able to strengthen ourselves. We are being resisted so we will be strong.
Alan Steinfeld
But most people just go to sleep, you know, that’s their reaction.
Whitley Strieber
That’s what they do. They end up sitting and waiting, sitting in chairs listening to guys tell them about living on Mars for 20 years and waiting for disclosure to happen.
Alan Steinfeld
Or not even that. They sit at home watching the football game or the shopping network and drinking beers. I mean, at least the people listening to the life on Mars are somewhat curious.
Whitley Strieber
Yeah, but that’s fine. I mean, this is like a school of… actually, what we’re most like is a school of sperm. Only a few reach the egg.
Alan Steinfeld
Right.
Whitley Strieber
You know, and that’s nature. Most of them are gonna disappear. You know, the ones that led good lives will have a bigger remnant and the ones that didn’t will be very small. There will be very, very little fragments and they’ll be sort of magnetically drawn back into a womb and life. Whether human life or not, it’ll happen.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but I think what you’re saying is that there is this resistance to make us strong. But I also think it’s a plot in a sense, a conspiracy, I don’t like to go there, of a negative force that wants to hold onto our human consciousness because it sees the power of who we can be once we start to move into these other realms. Is that something you agree with?
Whitley Strieber
Well, you know, if you look at a demon in one way, he’s an angel. You look at him in another way, he’s a demon. So you just have to… those conspiracies don’t mean much. They’re important in that they’re something to get beyond. There’s something to surrender yourself in such a way that you just accept their presence. I mean, I’ve been face-to-face with unspeakably evil beings. And now I’ve heard myself recently on some radio show, they were saying, “Well, he’s got Stockholm syndrome. That is to say, he’s become an apologist for the evil aliens.” And you know, they just… that’s what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna go through this life and then they’ll recur in this life and go on and on like that, and it’s fine. It’s the way it should be. It’s the way it’s meant to be or it wouldn’t be like this. Nothing is wrong, Alan. Nothing is wrong. That’s what is so hard for us to understand. Nothing is wrong. This is a perfect world. My great-grandmother at the family home in Texas, in the archway between the large living room and the dining room, she caused to be placed on in brass letters the quote from Robert Browning’s last line of Pippa Passes, his little seemingly slight little poem, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” And throughout World War I, her sons were saying, “We’ve got to take it down because it’s so obviously not true.” And she said, “You will never take it down. This is always true. It’s always true. This is a perfect world.” It is. And once you see that, then suddenly you find your way to a new kind of freedom that is surrendered to the pain of it. That’s what my story Pain is all about. That’s what I was struggling with early on when I wrote that story years and years ago and got accused of being a sadomasochist for having written it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that was your first reaction to the visitors.
Whitley Strieber
Yeah, that was my first reaction. This incredibly dominant, powerful, but extremely good female presence had given me a good knock up the side of the head, is what happened.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what you’re saying though about everything being perfect is what a lot of the awakened teachers do say and they’ve said that throughout history.
Whitley Strieber
And then someone will say, “Well, what about this? And what about that? And what about the other thing?” And the truth is that we cannot break the balance. We can’t. We’re not at that level anymore than a chimpanzee can ever so much as unlock a screen door. We can’t break the balance.
Alan Steinfeld
Actually, because you brought up that female presence, there’s always been a kind of vague area that I felt in some of your books because, are you still in touch with this being in that sense?
Whitley Strieber
Oh, sure, at times, but mostly not.
Alan Steinfeld
What did she want? Was she your particular partner? Or does she partner with lots of people? What was the relationship?
Whitley Strieber
Well, I don’t know. Jeff Kripal, who wrote Supernatural with me, thinks it’s Anne. And I think that might be true. I’m not so sure where all… I’m not so sure that we’re just in this form and I’m not so sure we graduate, we may be in other forms at the same time. A human being is a really complex thing. It’s not a simple thing.
Alan Steinfeld
So you might actually be the visitors that have visited you in that sense.
Whitley Strieber
Of course. And exactly. I might be married to the one who’s painted on the cover of Communion. Alan, I’m coming to the end of my ability to speak with you, so we’re going to have to close down.
Alan Steinfeld
All right. Thank you, Whitley. But let me just ask you, do you feel there’s an evolution to humanity that’s happening at this point?
Whitley Strieber
Well, I don’t know. Hopefully. But then we’ve been hoping that for a long time. We entered history about 5,000 years ago. History being a time when you begin to record your actions and see yourself in time. Prior to that, we lived a timeless existence. Now, we will not be in history forever. We’re going to… the planet is going to reject us in the same sense that a womb rejects a baby. And we’re going to be born into a new level of reality, like it or not. And we’re going to be screaming and crying, we’re going to be making a lot of noise, and it’s going to be really hard. And the baby may or may not be born dead. I don’t know the answer to that question, and neither do the visitors, or they wouldn’t bother to be here because there would be no point. Look at it this way. They’re midwives.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes.
Whitley Strieber
Midwives.
Alan Steinfeld
And put it this way, you were going to say, sorry, one more thing?
Whitley Strieber
No, I was just going to say put it this way, they’re midwives. Midwives to the human soul.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Thank you, Whitley. I’m looking forward to hearing you at Contact because of the intelligence and the experience, and you’re able to help move this idea of who we are in relationship to a greater cosmos forward. So thank you for your time today.
Whitley Strieber
Thank you, Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
And I’ll just say Whitley will be speaking, one of the keynote featured speakers at the upcoming Contact in the Desert, that’s May 19th to the 22nd, 2017. You can get tickets at contactinthedesert.com. My name’s Alan Steinfeld at newrealities.com and Whitley Strieber is unknowncountry.com, right?
Whitley Strieber
Yes.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks, Whitley. I look forward to seeing you in May.
Whitley Strieber
Thank you.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks for your time.