The Bottom Line Magazine

March 2008

Author Peter Anthony prefers the word messenger over prophet. “These aren’t all my visions,” he tells me as we sit in his study, discussing his book, Key Master on a gorgeous winter day in February. It was one of those days when it’s so clear the blue of the sky seems to almost crackle with energy. People were moving about outside enjoying the warmth after a week of chilly winter weather – but not us, and this reporter could’ve cared less about the outdoors at that moment – the conversation was just too intense to pay any mind to the nice weather, or to pay attention to the time for that matter. Peter Anthony, a recent transplant to the desert from Dallas, has that effect on a person. His handsome, dark good looks, clear and kind brown eyes and soothing voice – with just a touch of Texas accent – instantly put a person at ease, as though you were sitting down with an old friend you hadn’t seen for years to catch up – his presence simultaneously engaging and comfortable. I had just asked him if he considered himself a prophet, an easy inference to make after reading his book, which treads the literary water somewhere between a memoir and a novel – a fictionalized memoir of an astounding personal journey of spiritual awakening that has taken place over the past two decades.

It all began in 1982. Ethan Michaels, the protagonist of the story (who for all purposes is Anthony himself), is a young man recovering from a broken relationship. While licking his wounds in St. Thomas, he meets a tall, long white-haired, piercing blue-eyed elderly man known only as “Brussels” who imparts some infinite wisdom to him during his Easter weekend get away. The enlightening encounters, powerful spiritual messages and stunning coincidences contained in the book aren’t products of fiction, but rather the personal experiences of Anthony – only the names, places and dates have been changed in Key Master, sometimes to protect anonymity, sometimes to allow creative license for the flow of the story. But as Anthony stresses, “Every person in this book is a real person, Ethan’s experiences are my experiences. I’ve had to curtail some of the story lines just for timeframes. There’s so much that was left out. These experiences, these encounters: very real, very true.” But they were experiences that only grew protein with the passage of time. “When this happened to me [the St. Thomas encounter with Brussels] I didn’t think anything of it. I never thought this to be anything other than a person coming into my life with a profound message.”

Without giving away too much of the book, the tale of Ethan Michaels/Peter Anthony is one of an unwitting messenger for a new age of spiritual consciousness that is coming in our near future. What is this new age of spiritual consciousness about? According to Anthony, the message that was shared with him is that our greatest hope for a better world lies in the force of a rising female collective consciousness that’ll be the source of great healing for our planet. During his near-death experience he had a vision about the coming feminine age. “For centuries, enlightened womanly compassion has remained dormant, eager to address its new world wide mission… Their mission of global uplifting.” In simplest terms, as imparted by Brussels to Anthony during another encounter, humanity can be healed when a new way of thinking ushers in a New Age of thinking. Brussels explains in this excerpt from Key Master, “An explosion of new thought creates a new reality. All because of each person making a difference in someone else’s life. Add another alliance of like mind. And another. Suddenly unique phrases catch on… simply put: A collective alignment of the collective consciousness creates like minded thought outcomes of similar viewpoints.” And this viewpoint is of a decidedly feminine and nurturing spiritual nature.

Collective consciousness is a term first used by the French social theorist Emile Durkheim; it refers to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes, which operate as a unifying force within society. And the coming force will be of a decidedly matriarchal energy, a necessity if we are going to save ourselves from the ravages of self-indulgence and ego, hallmarks of a decidedly more masculine collective consciousness.

Anthony’s own consciousness has been raised by life changing events that fleshed out his spiritual epiphanies. His profound near-death experience and its description in the book will literally send chills down your spine and make you look at reality in an entirely different way. He experienced more than a bright light at the end of a tunnel when he was on death’s doorstep. He states in his book, “I am mesmerized by visions I can only attempt to comprehend. My soul is housed with so much energy that mankind couldn’t contain the vocabulary necessary to decode such a gift.” But luckily Anthony has a great enough command of vocabulary to amply share with the reader his glimpse of what lies beyond death, truly an amazing chapter in his book as well as in his life.

But Anthony confesses he needed a maturity to make sense of his experiences and define the spiritual connections they produced. “I’m young, obviously at this stage of my life, and you’re having an older person sharing profound information with me and,” he pauses momentarily, “I’m an idiot.” Anthony gently smiled, softly laughing self deprecatingly. “I didn’t care, to be honest with you. I really didn’t. I mean it was interesting and I applied it to my life. What I did, and I’m looking back at my own life, I’m not going to hold shame to it, but it’s something I’m going to take responsibility for. I should have taken this message and done something with it in the very beginning. I did not. In fact, I was dedicated to my career. Dedicated to the almighty dollar. Dedicated to the TV and film industry. And when I started sharing this information that was given to me by this man people were…first of all they didn’t care. People weren’t interested at that time in the female collective consciousness. So you kind of in the back of your head go, ‘Well, you know, I don’t need to be talking about this stuff,’ so I kept it closeted.”

At the time he was firmly entrenched in the entertainment business working as an image consultant and it quickly became apparent that his story was so incredulous many people looked at him as if he was crazy when he shared it with them. Not a good image to have when you’re working with celebrities in TV and film. So he kept his amazing tale to himself, relegating it to the back burner of his mind – trying not to think about it too much.

And his story almost remained untold until his latest encounter with the enigmatic Brussels on a plane in 1998 (which will be disclosed in full detail in his as yet unnamed book two of the trilogy). “[It] made me wake up and realize, ‘Oh my God.’ I was shaken up by it so much, not in terms of it being negative, but in a ‘What the hell have you done with your life, kid?’ kind of way. It was a very profound experience that said, you need to take a look at this; you need to go back to what’s happened to you here and you need to do something with this message. Because it was one of those times in your life where it was like, ‘How much more do you need in your life?’ I’ve always been a doubting Thomas. I’ve never been a person to hold much credence, at that time in my life, to that way of thinking. First of all I wasn’t spiritual. More than anything I was anti-Catholic Church, being raised Catholic – to have this come into my life was like, ‘Pfft!’” Like many gay men, Anthony is a recovering Catholic, having struggled with its dogma and condemnation for who he is while growing up.

His enlightening encounter on the plane on his way to deliver a lecture about the entertainment industry changed his way of thinking, for good. “My last encounter forecast, not necessarily 9/11, but war and recession and horrible politics and where we were going, and that womanhood would rise. That profoundly changed my life to really push this message. And from that point on I didn’t care who thought I was crazy, I didn’t care what people thought about my message. I had to take responsibility in my own life to do something with this. It was something that needed to be shared.” It was then and there he began to write what has now become a trilogy of book; Key Master being the first installment. He walked away from his career and dedicated his time and energies to writing the book.

Getting Key Master published was an uphill battle from the beginning, a heroic quest in its own right. It doesn’t take much speculation to see why a book with such an un-mainstream spiritual message that documents true encounters with a seemingly supernatural being is met with reticence to print. He had to face a lot of skepticism at first, and he still runs into it frequently now – a natural fear response to an incredulous tale. He ran a virtual gauntlet while shopping his manuscript to various publishing houses. “I was scorned and turned away. People thought I was crazy.” But his perseverance has paid off – Dorothy Surrenders Books published his book late last year (copies are available now at Q-Trading, 606 E. Sunny Dunes, Palm Springs or online at Amazon, Borders or Barnes & Noble.com). Perhaps even more exciting is the fact that Key Master has been optioned for a movie; Anthony is finishing writing the screenplay this spring. It’s a book that was begging for a movie adaptation. “This [Key Master] is more than Ethan,” Anthony stresses. “This is about a message that’s coming from a higher being and the message here is very profound. …and if one person gets it, then thank you God, I’ve done my job.”

All Peter Anthony wants – for the people who read his book, for the people who will hopefully see the movie based on it, for the people who hear his message – is to evoke the power of his experiences into their own lives and hopefully become enlightened themselves, making a better world for us all.