The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century (12 page)

Pete said, “They fixin' to kill off the whole world.”

“But,” Paul said, “a culture is just made of people. How can it be any different from its people?”

Salome said, “If culture just reflects human nature, then all cultures would be the same. That is not the case. There have been peaceful, nurturing cultures in history. There still are today, although they're being wiped out by us. It's not human nature that is broken or sick, it's our culture, which has spread across most all of the world. The culture of domination and conquest. Of the thousands of tribes on the Earth, only one has gone so insane that they'd lock up food and make people work like slaves to earn it. And that tribe, that culture, is ours.”

Paul nodded, noticing how she shifted her accent depending on whom she was addressing. She was bilingual. And probably at least bicultural. “Then what's going on? Why are so many people acting so crazy? And how did Jesus think he could bring peace to such an insane culture as the world the Romans ruled?”

“He started a revolution,” Joshua said when Salome glanced at him as if she wanted him to answer that question.

“A revolution?” Paul said.

“Yes, exactly. And it was successful, until it was taken over from within by the very Romans he was revolting against.”

“How did he start a revolution?”

Joshua raised his left hand. “Two thousand years ago, before toilet paper was invented, people used their left hands to clean themselves. They'd then dip their fingers into a bowl of water to clean them, but their left hands were never really clean and they knew it. You know that?”

“I never thought about it,” Paul said, dizzied by the sudden change in topic.

“It's true,” Joshua said, putting his hand back on the arm of his chair. “In fact, it's still that way in most of the Third World. Today, this is how about four billion people live, without toilet paper. And in those lands today, as back then in Israel, the most terrible and vicious way you could insult a person would be to touch him with your left hand. Even gesturing with the left hand was banned in most societies. Among the Jewish Essenes, gesturing with the left hand would earn you a week's banishment from the community. And if you wanted to really insult somebody, to totally humiliate him, particularly in public, you would slap him with your left hand. You understand?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Like giving somebody the finger today.”

“More like giving them the finger and spitting in their face,” Joshua said. “Or throwing urine on them. Remember where that hand was. You'd only do that to a person you knew couldn't retaliate, right?”

“Unless you wanted your butt kicked.”

“Right. So slapping somebody with your left hand, in ancient Roman society, was both the ultimate insult, and also something that was only done to the most powerless people. The Jews whose land was occupied by the Romans, for example. There was no recourse for them, unless it was to punch that person, which would mean they'd get the death penalty for hitting a Roman citizen. You understand?”

“Yes,” Paul said.

“Unless they could get that Roman to hit them with his right hand, which meant that a fight was engaged. Then they'd be justified to fight back. But the Romans didn't hit slaves with their right hands, they insulted them by slapping them with their left hands and then laughed at the humiliated slave who couldn't slap back.”

“Got it.”

“So,” Joshua said, “which cheek would I strike you on if I wanted to humiliate you by slapping your face with my unclean left hand?”

Paul looked at Joshua's left hand, and then visualized it moving through the air, imagining where Joshua's left palm would fall. “You'd hit my right cheek if you swung with your left hand.”

“The ultimate vicious and humiliating insult, hitting your right cheek with my left hand.”

“Yes.”

“And if you then challenged me to hit you with my right hand, that would be a challenge to my authority if I was a slaveholder or a powerful person in your society, right?”

“Absolutely. You'd be saying, ‘If you have any courage, you'll start a legal fight with me where I can fight back. You'll hit me with your right hand. I dare you.'”

“And yet it would not be hitting back, it would be merely exposing the evil of the left-handed slap for what it was.”

“I understand,” Paul said.

Joshua said, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil with evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

“Wow,” Paul said as he realized what he was hearing. “He
specified
the right cheek.”

“It was no mistake,” Joshua said. “Here's another. In Roman times, the Roman soldiers and citizens were allowed by law to force a resident of an occupied country to carry something for up to one mile. But the Romans knew well that if they let their citizens and soldiers over-exploit the peoples of occupied lands, it could lead to uprisings and rebellions. So they had very severe penalties if a Roman soldier or citizen forced a slave or person in an occupied country to carry anything more than one mile. A Roman soldier or citizen would lose his citizenship for such an offense, because it could be so destabilizing. And if he lost his citizenship, then he, himself, became a slave.”

“Makes sense,” Paul said.

“So if a soldier came along and ordered you to carry his belongings for two miles, he was risking his life. If anybody even
thought
that he'd made you carry something for two miles, his life was in danger. You understand? If there were some way you could make it look like he'd forced you to carry something for two miles, you would have put his very life at risk. And if all the slaves or peoples of an occupied country could figure out how to make it look like the soldiers and Roman citizens were violating these anti-exploitation laws, it could cause the local Roman occupying government to topple. At the least, the local Roman governor would risk losing his head. Do you see what I'm talking about? Do you hear what I mean?”

“Yes, of course.”

Joshua leaned forward and dropped his voice an octave to say, “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him two.”

“It's a call to rebellion,” Paul said, astounded.

“Yes. But a passive rebellion, like Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's. Remember, fight not evil with evil.”

“This is incredible.”

“There's more. In ancient Roman times, the average person owned two pieces of clothing. There was the cloak, which cloaked the body, what today you'd call a robe or tunic or toga. And there was the coat, the warm outer-garment. In Palestine, the days are hot but the nights are cold so people slept in both pieces of clothing, whereas during the day they walked around just wearing their cloak. You with me so far?”

“Didn't most people have several pieces of clothing?”

“Not the people of an occupied country,” Joshua said. “The Romans taxed them into poverty. And remember, clothing was made by hand. Every thread was spun by hand, every inch of the garment sewn by hand or on a simple loom. Clothing was incredibly expensive, so most people had only their cloak, for daytime wear, and their coat to wear over that at night and to sleep in.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“And if you were a slave, or indentured to somebody so you were forced to work for them, during those times there was one most common way the slave-owner would assert his ownership of you. That was to keep your coat during the day while you worked, so you'd have to come back to the slave-owner at night to get it back, so you could stay warm and sleep in it.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Read the history of the times. It's there. Along with that, there's also the fact that another of the Roman anti-exploitation laws was that you couldn't take a person's cloak, his daytime garment. If you did, he'd be naked. That was both a violation of modesty laws and of public decency, which you'd be responsible for since you took his clothes. It would be an ‘over-exploitation' of the worker class, and thus destabilizing to the Empire. You can imagine how people would react if you were to go up on the streets of New York and find some homeless guy sleeping by a building and strip him of all his clothes so he was completely naked. People who never in their lives gave a hoot about the homeless would be outraged. TV reporters would come to the scene to show what a callous brute you are. People would mobilize to help the poor homeless person. Can you imagine?”

“Yes, easily.”

“So, say I'm a Roman citizen and I live in a Roman occupied land, and I see you out working in your field and think you'd make a good slave to help me build my new home. All I have to do is go to the local magistrate's office and get a lawful order that you have to work for me. The court order would stipulate that you have to give me your coat for safekeeping every morning as evidence of my ownership of you, and that at night I have to return it to you so you could sleep in it. This happened daily in ancient Roman-occupied lands like Israel was during the times of Jesus. And if you resisted my claim of ownership of you by not giving me your coat, I could have you thrown in prison or fed to the lions.”

“Pretty drastic stuff,” Paul said.

“So how would you resist?”

“I don't know.”

Joshua lowered his voice and said, “And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.”

“That's so ingenious!” Paul said, feeling a sudden burst of revelation. “If I gave you my cloak, I'd be standing naked in front of you. Everybody would think you'd broken the anti-exploitation laws. You'd be at risk of going to prison instead of me.”

“Right. And if enough people did it, you'd overthrow the dominators, the Roman government.”

“No wonder the Romans killed Him.”

“No wonder,” Joshua said softly. “And now it's time for us to step forward with the same message.”

Chapter Ten

All The Lonely Angels

“But how,” Paul said, “does this relate to the question of whether our culture is so screwed up, and whether that's because human nature is evil or we're being punished by an angry god?”

“It's at the core of that question,” Joshua said. “It points out that it's not the people who are evil. In fact, they're capable of resisting evil without ever having to resort to evil. And it's not a god who's crazy or evil, and the world wasn't created and isn't run by the Demiurge. The insanity is in the
culture
that's taken over. It's the culture that's gone crazy, not the people and not the Creator of the Universe.”

“But all the religions say that human nature is sinful, and that we're being punished for that by the One God.”

“Not all the religions. Just those religions that serve the people-dominating or slave-keeping cultures. You'll not find those notions any where in the vast majority of religions of tribal peoples. You'll
not find those notions in the history of the pre-city-building peoples. The biggest problem the missionaries had with the Indians here and the Aboriginal people in Australia was in convincing them that they were sinful and that God was angry at them, and therefore they needed the Church to save them from God. Such ideas only come along when somebody rises up and says, ‘I'm taking over and you all have to do what I say. And step one of that is that you all have to work all day to make me richer and more powerful. And if you don't pick that cotton, you'll suffer and it won't be my fault; it's because my god loves me more than you and so made me rich and you poor, or it's because it's your karma, your fault.”'

“A religion of domination.”

“Exactly. It's only natural that a culture of domination, of slave-holders, would produce religions of domination. Would sanction caste systems. Would say that people are poor because of something they, themselves, did in a past life and not because the power-holders in the culture have gone insane with greed and power. Would blame some ancient woman for the pain people experience, rather than the kings and wealth-holders.”

“But we don't have slaves today. How come this persists?”

“You don't have slaves?” Joshua said. “What is a slave, but a person who owes his life to another. In the city above you are millions of slaves. The corporations who own them even buy and sell them with their properties, just as in the old days. And when they don't need the slaves they acquire with new properties-new businesses they buy-they expel them, leaving them alone and frightened to fend for themselves, just as they did in days of old.”

“We're slaves?”

“Do you know anybody who works for a big company or government who would describe himself as free'?”

“You mean free cultures don't have religions that blame bad things on god or on the person himself?”

“No, they don't, by and large.”

“But what about people who experience supernatural things,” Paul said. “Evil things. Ghosts or the devil. Or good things, for that matter, who see angels? I thought that evil was the absence of good or love, so none of those things could be real. But it sounds like what you're saying is that evil is in the culture when it's taken over by a small number of evil people, but that it doesn't exist on a spiritual level.”

“Now you're getting close to a greater wisdom,” Joshua said. “Although instead of calling them ‘evil people,' I prefer to call them ‘sleepwalking people.” They're
still asleep in the dream of our culture. They don't yet know wisdom.

“which is?” Paul took his notebook back out. He was thinking that instead of a newspaper story, there was enough here to make a book. They gave Pulitzer Prizes for books, too.

“The Creator is the formless behind the form, encompassing everything, interfering with nothing. However, if enough people believe–or one person believes enough–it is possible to bring from the formless a ‘spiritual' form, demonic or angelic, gods or demons, spirits or sprites, angels or ancient beings. All are human creations, as they represent projections of human consciousness, but all are real, nonetheless. The Mystery is that
gods and angels and demons are the creations of humans.”

“This is getting really confusing,” Paul said. “Do you mean to say that if there were no people, there would be no angels, for example?”

“No human-like angels,” Joshua said.

“What other kinds are there?”

“What other kinds of conscious beings exist in the billion billion billion worlds of the universe?”

“I get it,” Paul said. “Do dogs have dog angels?”

Joshua smiled. “I don't know. I'm not a dog.”

“So I created Noah?”

“No,” Joshua said. “But someone-possibly he, himself, when he lived as a human-or some group of people
provided the belief that allows him to exist. Remember the power of belief.”

Paul thought back to his first encounter with Noah, and said, “I think he said something about that.”

Joshua shrugged. “He understands how it all works.”

“So, then, this means that the Demiurge, an angry god, demons, angels, fairies, the whole range of spiritual beings, that they are real? I mean, even though we made them, they exist? They're
really
real?”

“Yes. It is stated this way. It is possible–paradoxically–to ‘prove' there is an intervening spiritual realm and that there are spiritual beings, because with belief or prayer or ritual people
can
bring forth from the formless their own projected forms. And so it is real and true that people like Katherine Kuhlman could perform miracles, that Biblical stories could be true, that Hindu fakirs can be in two places at once, that the Virgin Mary can heal people who pray to her, and so on.”

“But I thought that when we attempt to envision a god, we create a man-made or man-like god.”

“These two truths do not contradict each other. People built these tunnels. It doesn't make them not-real. You can still die in a tunnel collapse, or hurt your head banging against the iron beams, or find protection and shelter here.”

“But there's such variety between cultures when they talk about their supernatural beings. I mean, the Irish
have their fairies and the Norwegians their gnomes and the Native Americans have animal spirits…”

“Each reflected the culture which created it. And, when you talk with the people of each of those cultures, they will assure you that their creations are real. And they are, just as this tunnel is real.
Gods and angels and demons and all the others are absolutely
as
real
as
any other reality.”

Paul wrote down in his notepad,
We, or our culture, can create supernatural things, but that doesn't mean they're not real, anymore than the buildings and cars we create
, and put it back in his shirt pocket. He looked around the circle and said to Pete, “Do you all understand this?”

Pete said, “I don' need to unnerstand; I just believe, ya know? I live in the love of The Creator of the Universe.”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“I mean, I seen Joshua do this stuff,” Pete continued. “I don't care how, I jes seen it, and so I believe. I feel it. Dat's 'nuf fo' me.” He pointed to Joshua with an exaggerated swinging gesture and added, “I die for dat man, you know? He my man.”

“Got it,” Paul said.

“I'm with Pete,” Matt said. “But I also understand what Joshua says. This ain't rocket science here.”

“I think it would be to most people,” Paul said. “It seems to me that most people want everything real simple, spoon-fed to them.”

“This
is
simple,” Salome interjected. “You ever try to make sense of the difference between the Baptists and the Seventh Day Adventists? I tell you, my mother was Baptist and my father Seventh Day Adventist, and there was never a moment's peace between the two of them. Talk about making the simple into something complex.”

“You want power over others,” Mark said, “you make it complicated. You put yourself between people and the Creator of the Universe or whatever gods you claim exist. You make it so only the priests can figure it all out, and they got to go through years of study to get there. You tell the common people that if they don't do it your way, they're gonna burn in hell. Then you got the church, you know? And
that's
complicated.”

Paul looked at Joshua. “What about Jesus, then? Who was he?”

Joshua sat up a bit straighter in his chair. “He is the living son of the Creator of the Universe.”

“The Messiah?”

“'Messiah' is a Hebrew word that means ‘anointed.' Every king the Jews had was anointed; it was how they were certified as the king. The high priest poured oil on his head, just like in the Twenty-Third Psalm. There were lots of messiahs before Jesus; he claimed the lineage. David was called messiah, as was Saul and Absalom and Solomon and so on. The anointed one was the king, the ruler of the Middle-Eastern tribe that called itself Jews.”

“The savior?” Paul said.

“If you believe in the Demiurge, like the Greeks, Romans, and Paul did, then the messiah's job is to save you from the Demiurge. If you want to be saved from the domination of the Caesars, then Jesus gave specific instructions about how to walk away from the kings and the Caesars. Look what he told his disciples about how they should live. That they shouldn't carry money or spend their lives trying to become rich, shouldn't store up food, should pray in private and not in public. Those lessons are still applicable today as if you want to be free of the modem kings and Caesars, although you can search this city's churches from one end to another and you will not find any preacher living as Jesus instructed. Nonetheless, in either case, I'd say the answer is a definite ‘yes.”'

“And if I don't believe in the Demiurge and I don't mind being oppressed by the modem-day kings and corporate Caesars?”

“Then you have nothing to worry about, but it's the confidence a dreaming man has when he thinks his dream is real. Remember the parable of the man who built his home on a foundation made of sand.”

“So Jesus
was
the Son of God.”

“Yes,” said Joshua. “As am I and as are you. And so we, now, must awaken people to save the world because the kings are not only oppressing the people, but they
are endangering All Life. They are tearing out the heart of our Mother Earth Herself. The stakes are even higher now than they were two thousand years ago.”

“Does that mean I'm a messiah?”

Joshua shook his head. “No. You can't imagine how difficult that would be, how much self-sacrifice is involved. The first must be last, must become the least.”

“Is this the Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century?”

“No,” Joshua said. “This is common knowledge that any scholars of ecology or Biblical times can tell you. You are not yet ready for the Secret.”

“When will I be?”

“That is not for me to know,” Joshua said. “I've given you my part.”

“Who's hungry?” Juan said as he pulled a box of mismatched plates and silverware from under his chair.