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.