Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

He had found a very unusual substance, one that Dr. Hal Puthoff, of the Austin Institute for Advanced Studies, said “bends” space and time.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that colloidal gold does help people with rheumatoid arthritis, and can even raise I.Q., but this is different from white powder gold.

Because the modern substance doesn’t seem to be as dramatically efficacious as the ancient one, in The Omega Point some of the ancient substance must be acquired first before the material that is used in the story can have its full effect.

This effect involves the ability to see events outside of time, before they have actually happened, as well as the ability to physically move into the past and the future.

Now, one would assume that such things are fiction. My problem with that is that I have actually done them. I’ve gone into the past and into the future both, and have often had physical experience of events before they happened.

From time to time I’ve read things in newspapers, only to look again a moment later and find them gone—and then to discover them weeks later in the latest edition of the same paper. Sadly, these little visions have not involved the stock market tables. An annoyance, to be sure.

The first of these involved the Claude Chabrol film, A Girl Cut in Two. I saw a listing of it in the Los Angeles Times in June of 2008, looked up and said to my wife, “There’s a new Chabrol movie. We’ve got to go.” I then turned back to the paper to find out where it was playing, and the listing had completely disappeared. There was no mention of it in the paper at all. So I went online and discovered that it had not yet been released.

Six weeks later, in August, I saw the same listing again. Naturally we went to the film.

But what had happened? Well, truthfully, I’m not at all sure. It was as if I read a listing from August in June. Since then, this has happened to me three or four times.

It is far from the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me involving time. The most amazing of these events took place in March of 1983, when we lived on LaGuardia Place in Manhattan. One rainy Saturday morning, I was crossing Houston Street on the way to the bank when I suddenly heard a terrific creaking and sloshing and clip-clopping in front of me. This symphony passed me and turned the corner, and I turned with it, to see an immense wagon come into view as if out of nowhere. It was stacked with barrels and there was a strong smell of pickles. High atop it sat a man wrapped in a black leather apron. It was being drawn by a huge horse, I assume a dray horse.

Of course, I thought that it was one of the Budweiser Clydesdales, but it was worn and dirty, and the smell was very clearly not beer.

As it passed up the street, I found that LaGuardia Place had changed entirely. Gone was the street I knew, with modern co-op towers on the northeast side of LaGuardia and Houston. Instead, a man in a derby stood across the street, much closer and in front of a row of smaller buildings. He shouted something, and at the same moment, there was movement to my right, and I turned to see a small woman dressed entirely in black go skittering away from me. Then I saw, coming up what in 1983 was West Broadway, a group of five or six riders on gorgeous horses, looking like some sort of equestrian team.

I became aware of the fact that this was no longer the New York of 1983, but that, somehow, I was seeing the same street corner in the past. I noticed an odd, curved curb at my feet, then a bit of paper in it. I thought, if I get that paper, that’ll prove what’s happening. But as I bent down, something that felt like ice-cold water seemed to pour right through my body, and with it came a loneliness so intense that, had it persisted for more than a few moments, it might have driven me mad.

The thought came that, if I touched that paper, I would remain here forever, and I froze. Slowly, the sharp smell of coal and the denser stench of manure dissipated. Then the sound of cars returned. When I looked up, everything seemed normal.

Forgetting about the bank, I rushed home, frightened that something was terribly wrong and I might never see my family again. This was before my 1985 close encounter, so I was totally unprepared for anything in the least unusual.

It never happened quite like that again, but I never forgot it. I went to the library and read endless microfiche records of old newspapers, looking for classified ads that might have been placed by people trapped in time. I didn’t find anything.

These experiences, though, have led me to think that we are not fixed in time, and that we don’t really need any technology more exotic than the human body to move through it.

In The Omega Point, movement through time has been developed to an art and a science, and the time machine involved is a mixture of both. It is a scientific device, in that the colors mixed for it contain chemical properties that enable movement through time. But it is also created with love and artistry, and it is the combination of science and art that confers its amazing properties on it.

This is because it is constructed using not the arid principles of modern science, but those of the lost science of the soul, which combines, in my novel and perhaps in reality, a rigorous physical technology with a carefully controlled and immeasurably potent emotional state, the love that Caroline Light needs so badly to succeed, and gets, after a struggle, when her beloved David finally remembers what they shared as children.

Christian principles of love, compassion, and forgiveness are explored throughout the book, and it is love, in the end, that confers on mankind the ability to move on into time, and reestablish our presence in the physical world.

I am not a conventional Christian, but I am certainly a believer in the intelligence and compassionate insights of Jesus, and the meaning of his resurrection. I reject the idea that it was done to free us from some sort of sin. It was an example of what happens when a person lives an ethical life that feeds the soul, and dies without attachment to life’s hungers.

One of the most ancient of all human ideas is that there is a judgment after death. The Egyptians saw the soul as being weighed, and in my story, greed, cruelty, and arrogance weigh souls down to the point that, when the body dies, the soul literally drops out of it and ends up imprisoned in the depths of the earth, remaining there, presumably, until the end of time. Other souls—the great majority—which are light enough to rise, ascend into a state that is never described in the book, because its mystery has never really been explored, and perhaps cannot be explored.

So far, the plan described in The Omega Point mirrors the one in the Book of Revelation. But then it takes a turn in another direction. In the Sermon on the Mount, which is probably the most profound statement ever made, there is mention that the meek will inherit the earth.

To me, this is promise of some surcease from the ages-long torment that the ordinary human being has experienced at the hands of the more aggressive and powerful. In my story, the great of the world are left hiding in their holes to die, I suppose, a lingering death. The innocent majority ascend, as well as those chosen for the special work of constructing a new home for mankind to move forward in time and continue our ages-long journey toward ecstasy, but this time without the cruel, the avaricious, and the arrogant, only with those who are fully human.

When I was a young man, I had the extraordinary privilege of being an occasional student of P. L. Travers, who was deeply involved in esoteric work. She taught a powerful ethics of the meek, whom she used to call “the little cottagers,” and this ethic was present not only in her talks but also in the letters I received from her. It affected me profoundly, and I have never forgotten that it is, in the end, the humble man at the bottom of the world, the one who is entirely overlooked by the grand and the powerful, who is forced into war, starved, left to die, ignored, and broken on the wheel of the avarice of the great, who emerges into immortality while, as Jesus put it so succinctly, those who display their excellence receive their reward in life.