The Millenium is-Well, It’s Here

(Goin? From One Piece of Holy Ground to the Next)

Y2K chaos?not. The Second Coming–not. Armageddon–not. A million tons of low-grade gunpowder all lit up and a whole lot of beer down the gullet of the world?you got it!

I don?t know about you, but I feel as if we just got to the summit of a mountain that we?ve been struggling toward for all of our history, and found that the view of the other side reveals?more mountains.

This was a very profound transition for me, because it marks a fundamental change in the way I am going to be approaching life, one I have been thinking about and preparing for since 1985.

As I stated on this website some months ago, I didn?t expect Y2K to be all that big a deal, because the problem was discovered in time. There will still be effects, and maybe some significant ones, but for the most part the world simply isn?t computerized enough for the kind of chaos that was being predicted. Still, trillions of lines of computer code have been repaired in the past few years, and the fact that there was no chaos should be counted as a major achievement.

I never believed in the Second Coming. The Second Coming is within us, and hopefully the failure of this event to materialize physically has dealt the Christian literalists something of a blow. It is time and past time to leave their brand of narrow- mindedness behind. It?s so unchristian.

Armageddon?well, there isn?t anybody in possession of nuclear weapons at the moment who has the capacity to bring it about. In any case, even that threat has been somewhat overblown. A full-scale exhaustion of all the nuclear weapons in the world would not bring about the end of life on earth, even if this unlikely event could be triggered.

So what was the millenium? What does it mean to be in the storied year 2000? Personally, I feel a real sense of eternity stretching out before us. We are at the beginning of another thousand years, which is an awesome stretch of time. All of modern history has been buried in the second millenium. And now, suddenly, we are face-to-face with the infinite future.

And yet, are we really? A millenium isn?t even a moment, in the history of the earth. There have been hundreds of millions of them since the beginning of the planet, and there will be hundreds of millions more before it comes upon its end. Friday night witnessed an explosion of human happiness all over the earth, and that was its real importance. It was a wonder to see and feel. Anne and I spent our time with another couple, among our oldest friends. His father and my father were friends, our grandfathers were friends, so also our great- grandfathers. It was a good time, a quiet time with a friend whose history belongs to my history. Anne and his wife have been friends since we met, for over thirty years.

We reflected on the fact that, in our mid-fifties, we are past the middle of our lives. It is unlikely that all four of us will be there to celebrate the first quarter century of the new millenium?maybe none of us will be there.

We had a very happy time together, chatting and watching the television and enjoying one another?s company. We were part of the truth of mankind that night, for in its deepest essence, this truth has nothing to do with violence and hate and greet?those things are like small storms or foam upon a dashing sea. The truth of mankind is happiness?not the great jubilations of history, but the little joys of our little lives, the crowning of the baby, the first word, the pink cheeks of the wedding night, the soft final breath.

I thought on the most important thing that the visitors ever said to me. In the dark time of my life, when my beautiful home and the seat of my contacts was being taken from me, they came to me with two words: ?have joy.?

This is the key to our future relationship with them, if we have one. I believe that we do, for I stand on the side of the increase of human happiness and freedom. I want to see us free ourselves from the hatreds and angers and fears of the past, and open our hearts to one another and the living cosmos that surrounds us.

For Whitley Strieber, the year 2000 means fundamental change. Previously, in all my books and all my public statements, I have said that the issue of whether or not the visitors are here should be kept in question. But now I am going to change my position, and start by admitting freely that the visitors are entirely real. They are here and they are available to us as a resource of enormous value. The next ten years of my life are going to be devoted to attempting to achieve open contact with them. Over the past fifteen years, my objectives have been three:

1. To awaken those who have already been touched to the fact that they are in contact.

2. To enable them to entertain and resolve their fears.

3. To empower them to face the reality of the visitors.

I know from my letters and e-mail that I have succeeded to a great degree? indeed, to a much greater degree than I would have expected in 1986 when I started. As things are at the present moment, there is a culture of fear surrounding the visitors, and I intend to do what I can to dispel it, using knowledge and understanding as my tools.

The simple truth is that the visitors, while being quite different from us and treating us in ways that make us uncomfortable, are not hostile to us. There are no hostile aliens here at all, not in any form. The horror stories about them are similar in every respect to the stories a little kitten might tell of its visit to the veterinary. Also, a great number of the horror stories originate with an American intelligence community bent on retaining control of the society for the existing power structure even in the context of contact.

Understand, only a few people are involved in this in the intelligence community. Probably not even a hundred. But because they know such potent secrets, they are very powerful.

However, that community is also going to make a fundamental change in its approach. The US is going to follow the lead of the French in this regard. This will begin with a gradual change in the culture of science, away from denial and toward acceptance of the reality of the UFO mystery. The press will follow as official denial bleeds into tacit acceptance. This going to happen because of the realization that the presence of the visitors offers us the chance to gain new knowledge in areas that we urgently need to make progress.

For many years, the US intelligence community has operated a program that seeks to create two false impressions about the visitors: one, that they are fearfully dangerous; two, that the US government has secret contact with them and secret knowledge of them. Both of these things are false. The visitors are not dangerous. When face to face with them, they appear almost like gentle little forest creatures from some enchanted woods. They take incredible care with us, and have evolved astonishingly reliable and competent technologies to insure that a ground for contact can be prepared within human life and society, with minimal disturbance to us and no danger at all.

The US government has had little to no contact with them. There are no secret bases where American scientists work hand-in-hand with aliens. There has been a little bleed- through of technology, but only a little.

The ordinary people know more about the visitors than the government does, and the ordinary man is in general much more capable of executing contact than the leaders. Thus contact will remain as it has been?a matter that is transacted not between state leaders, but between ordinary creatures, visitor and human.

The intelligence community has also endeavored to limit the impact of people believed to be linked to the visitors. There has been a lot of paranoia about this. It is my hope that the National Security State which maintains the wall of secrecy around these activities will fall within the next decade, and the people who have been damaged by these ?dirty tricks? can received recompense from a government that has allowed them to be treated in a very irresponsible manner.

There is one set of conditions under which contact could occur that would not be a happy occasion for mankind. This would be if we allow an environmental breakdown to occur that threatens the existence of our species and our world. If that happens, the visitors may well come openly to earth. If they have to do this, then we will be relieved of our ability to govern ourselves for as long as it takes to repair the situation. It will be many generations before we are entirely free again, and this captivity will leave the very deepest of scars on the human spirit.

You can learn much from the visitors about what it is like to bear such scars, for they themselves bear them.

If we are more successful, then they will continue to stay just at the edge of question. Even after contact is effected, we will all burn with the question: yes, but who are they?

They way they intend to address our society in the future is similar to the way they addressed it in the past. When I asked them how they might relate to us, they pointed me to the 17th verse of the Tao Te Ching: ?when the best master?s work is done, the people all say, ?we did it ourselves.?

The less seen they are, the happier they will be. This is because the less we need them, the stronger we are.

If they must come to us because the biosphere is collapsing, they will fulfill the beatitude, ?the meek shall inherit the earth.? So I might remind the powerful?most of whom know the truth about the visitors already?that it is very much in their interest to work to return the planet to health, as their wealth and power depend entirely upon their doing this. They have only a few years before the situation slips out of their hands. In my ideal world, the average person will have the same richness of contact in ten years that it has been my own privilege to enjoy. Deeply personal, it is not the kind of thing that smothers the soul in awe, but that makes it free. Contact rests in a compassionate spirit that is devoted to the good. Those who are full of fear and hate and sorrow, as I was when the visitors began awakening me in 1985, will find the process very hard.

Beyond the darkness, there is such a gentle light.

I am in an interesting situation. The great battles of my life have already been fought and won. The fact that I was able to open my eyes and admit the visitors into my conscious mind was the greatest of those battles. To understand why this was so hard, it is necessary to understand the true nature of sin and the depths of human denial?what in the bible is called the fall of man, and to know the strength of the that which so ardently and patiently seeks our destruction. We must understand that everything we do is etched upon us permanently, and we do not want to face that. There is only one way into contact and into the kingdom, to come to rest in God.

Life with the visitors is at once far more sublime and ?civilized? than life among us. You get used very quickly to not having any secrets, and when you return to this existence and find that everybody is full of secrets, it?s very odd. It is important to live in such a way that you don?t need your secrets, because if you want to be close to the visitors and the people who have a foot on their side of the line, you will not be able to keep them. The world of the visitors is a place where the truth us known. It is surrendered, profoundly surrendered, to the uses of God.

If we fulfill our destiny, we will also find our way back to Eden. They did it, and they made one hell of a mess of themselves.

You know, if I could leave you with anything that is really useful in the hard upstream journey toward contact, it is this: read Seymour, An Introduction by J.D. Salinger. It is a novel, but also an instruction set about how to go along the road. ?Seymour once said that all we do all our lives is go from one piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong??

We?re on our way, 48 hours into the new millenium, to that next piece of Holy Ground.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.