The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century (3 page)

“Well, yes, after I gave you a little bit of help”

“Help?”

“Saving that little girl.” The man's face turned serious.

“That was a noble decision, Paul, but I could see that you weren't going to make it. And I saw that you were willing to give up your life to try. That's what I saw, and I couldn't let that happen. So I decided to carry you across”

Paul took a quick sip of his wine, and the memory of the experience in the intersection washed back over him. “You're the one who shoved me?”

“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I didn't shove you.”

“Then how did you help?”

“I picked you up and carried you”

“You what?”

“You felt my arms under your chest and legs, didn't you?”

Paul paused, feeling out of breath, remembering the sensation of the strong arms holding him up and propelling him through the intersection. “But I didn't see anything.”

Suddenly the couch was empty, and Paul gasped. There was a small depression in the cushion where the man had been sitting. “Nor do you see anything now,” the man's voice came from the air.

Paul looked at the empty sofa and considered the frightening possibility that working too hard, sleeping too little, and being fired had finally pushed him over the edge into total insanity.
This must be what it's like
, he
thought.
First you hallucinate, just like those people who have voices in their heads. Then you do awful things because the voices tell you that you must…

“You're not imagining this,” the man said as he slowly reappeared. Now he had shoulder-length graying hair and a much fuller beard, and was dressed in a white toga or tunic, his legs bare, his feet in worn leather sandals. “It's very real. You saved that little girl's life, and I saved yours”

Paul downed half the glass of wine in a good-sized gulp and felt it first cool, then warm his stomach. He blinked hard, half expecting his hallucination to be gone, but the man was still there. He looked at the man's face, which was now sun-darkened and lined with age-wrinkles. His eyes were a dark brown, almost black, and his arms and legs had the ropy, muscular quality of a person who has performed decades of hard physical work.

“Who
are
you?” Paul said.

The man nodded. “An important question,” he said. “At least in your time and place” His voice was soft and reassuring, deep and rumbling as if it came from an antediluvian cistern. “But first, confirm for me that you felt me carry you through that intersection. That you know this is the truth, what I am saying.”

Paul looked at his glass, lifted it to his lips, and took another large swallow. Turbulence churned his stomach,
and the abrasions on his face and hand ached. He could hear the faint sound of traffic outside, a click and whir as the refrigerator in the kitchen cycled on, the creak of heated water expanding the radiator behind the man's sofa. Through the wall, he could faintly hear the thumping bass of Rich's stereo. “Yes,” Paul said, remembering flying through the air across the street. “Perhaps I felt something. It was you?”

“Yes. You may call me Noah.”

Paul lifted his eyebrows and said, “Like the ark?”

“The very same.”

“How'd you know my name? How did you pick me up this afternoon without my seeing you? Who are you?”

Noah stretched his arms out and put large, gnarled hands on either side of the back of the sofa. “I'm the first of your teachers. You have been accepted into the Wisdom School.”

“What is that?”

Noah ran his fingers through the hair over his ears. “The oldest Wisdom Schools go back into antiquity. They're grounded in the priestly and shamanic mentorships that exist even to this day among the world's Older Cultures. When the earliest dominators, or kings, built the city/states, the Wisdom Schools came into being as a way of preserving the Older Culture wisdom against the onslaught of the modem, or Younger
Culture. The tradition has survived in many ways. Early Christianity was a Wisdom School before one faction of it was taken over and promoted to primacy by the Roman Empire. When it became the official state religion, the Secret had to be buried, layered over with confusion. People were told that it wasn't really what Jesus said, or what the Jewish prophets before him said, that the Secret was really just some nice words.”

“What does the Wisdom School teach?”

“You know how Saint Francis and Saint John of the Cross and Martin Buber and Meister Eckhard and Rumi were all scorned by the mainstream church people of their times? They were called heretics and worse?”

“I remember something like that in college. Studying the history of the world's religions.”

“They were all mystics, as were the founders of all the world's great religions,” Noah said. “They understood the mysteries, and each one
lived
the Secret. Some mystics gain recognition in their time, others not until years after their deaths, and most are forever anonymous. But all walked through their time on Earth with an incredible power and knowledge and insight, which, to the average person, seems almost incomprehensible. This knowledge is now offered to you. I am here to begin your training.”

“Are you some kind of preacher?”

Noah shook his head. “Different people and different
cultures have different names for what and who I am. The original people of North America called us shape shifters. The ancient Greeks and Romans called us gods and goddesses, many of the Semitic tribes called us prophets, and modern Europeans and Americans call us ghosts, spirits, or angels. But you can call me ‘friend.”'

Paul's breath caught in his throat, as he remembered the feeling of the arms under him, then the sight of the bearded man vanishing and reappearing on the sofa. “You're an angel…”

Noah interrupted him with a laugh. “I prefer ghost. It better captures, at least in English, my nature. ‘Angel' implies that I'm associated with some particular religion or belief system. Ghost is more generic: every culture in the world knows about ghosts”

“You're the ghost of Noah? Like in the ark?”

Noah shrugged. “I'm most comfortable with this body, this name. I first used it during the time of the end of the last ice age, when the oceans rose and many of my people drowned. My story was told over and over again, and eventually that brought me back into this world.”

Paul jumped up from the sofa and took another swallow of his wine. “This is too weird,' he said. “I've never believed in all this supernatural stuff. I think the stress I've been under has popped my mind.”

Noah vanished again. Paul spun around, but the room was empty and this time there wasn't even the
slight depression on the brown faux-velvet fabric of the sofa. “What…”

“It's real, Paul; I'm still here,” Noah's voice came, and he appeared in a blink by the door into the kitchen. “Of course I could just as easily be in Hong Kong. Even right now as I'm here.”

“That's impossible.”

“But you went to Sunday school.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Did you think it possible that Jesus was speaking the truth when He said, ‘These things I have done, you shall do also, and even greater things than these'? In both the Old and New Testament are stories of people doing what I do. And in the Upanishads and the Vedas and the Koran, and in the oral history of every people in the world, in all of human history. Do you think that is an accident or mistake?”

“But you're a ghost or an angel or whatever…”

“That's beside the point. We'll talk about that later. I learned the Secret and once saved the world-my world—and now it's your opportunity.”

Paul sat back down on the sofa with a thud and rubbed the left side of his face that wasn't scratched up. “Me?” he said. His voice sounded faint and unreal in his own head. “You've gotta be kidding.”

“No, I'm serious. You're enrolled in the Wisdom School. You've been enrolled, in fact, since before your
birth. It's why you chose this life, this body, this time. It all led to this. And then you called out today, so now I'm here and this is your big opportunity.”

“But I'm just a reporter. I snoop out stories and break the news. I'd hardly say that qualifies me to save the world.”

“Each person has the potential. I'm here to tell you, to show you, yours. Surely you've had that intuition all your life that your destiny is a great and important one?”

Paul paused, then said, “Yes, but I also dismissed that as an ego trip. I wanted to win the Pulitzer prize.”

“It's what drew you into journalism, what draws so many other people into their lines of work. Even an office worker, a construction worker, can save the world, one person at a time. Every person can. And you chose before you were born to do this work in a very large way.”

“I chose my destiny?”

“Many people do. And your destiny is to live and share the message that will save the world.”

“How?”

“First, you must learn the Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century. Then you use the skills you've been refining all your life to tell the world, and then things will change. Think of it as the biggest scoop of your life.”

“The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century?” Paul could hear his own voice rising. The wine was calming
him, but he also knew he needed a clear head for whatever was going on, whether it was all a hallucination or was true. He put the glass on the coffee table in front of the couch. “You mean like in a hundred years, the greatest secret?”

Noah walked over to the couch and sat back down. “Actually, you could say it's the greatest secret of all time. And, it's so much
not
a secret that it's astounding. Any shaman in the world will tell you, every prophet has said it, Jesus told people about it. It's being shouted at your world every day by the few tribes remaining in the rain forests and jungles and plains, as your culture destroys their homes and your oxygen supply. Six and seven thousand years ago, the founders of Hinduism were writing about it. Five and then four thousand years ago the Hebrew prophets told it, and then Buddha almost three thousand years ago, and Jesus two thousand years ago, and Mohammed in the past thousand years, and now you have the opportunity to learn it. All over again. Every few centuries it visits us again, the same message but often cloaked in different-seeming words or metaphors. But, oddly, most people can't imagine it could be possible, or don't hear it, or the institutions that have taken over the organized religions bury it in so many layers of nonsense that it seems lost.”

It reminded Paul of the discussions he'd had with his friend, Thomas, in college.
What is the meaning of life? What is the difference between spirituality and religion? What is faith? Who made the world, and why, and how? And why are we here? Somehow those questions had all been lost in his drive to become a star reporter.

“So,” Paul said, using his reporter's tone, “What is this Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century?”

Noah smiled. “If I simply told it to you in one sentence—which I could do, because it's only four words long—you wouldn't understand, just as virtually your entire culture, the entire world, does not understand. So I am the first of three Wisdom School teachers who have been sent to give you what you must first know, so you can ultimately understand the true meaning of the Secret and become a Wisdom School teacher, yourself.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I will show you the past you must understand in order to know the present and the future. Some of these lessons may be very, very difficult for you, so, of course, you can always just say ‘no' and I'll leave.”

Paul looked around his apartment, scanning the brown carpet, the bookshelves with their pictures of his friends and family, the television and stereo, the five shelves of books. “I think I must be just imagining this,” he said, then felt embarrassed and glanced down at his jeans and loafers.

Noah stood up and lifted his left arm, holding his hand flat out about six feet above the floor. Below it the
air began to shimmer in a doorway-shaped area. Paul stared in fascination and fear, feeling his heart race. Behind the portal Paul could see a landscape of sand and scrub brush, a distant palm tree, and a sky whose deep blue held a hot and blazing sun.

Noah stepped back and the scene remained. He waved at the portal, and said, “Will you come with me?”

“I've got to get another job,” Paul blurted out, immediately realizing how stupid it sounded.

“I'm here to give you a job,” Noah said in a calm voice, his hand holding the portal open. “The world is on the brink of disaster, and you are needed.”

“Will I come back?”

“Yes,” Noah said. “You'll be back here within a few minutes.”

“Then why go?”

“Time is relative. We'll be over there for a few hours.”

Paul looked around the apartment again, searching for reality anchors; looked out the window and up Eighth Avenue to the buildings, cars, and people hurrying from normal place to normal place in an entirely normal world. He looked at the perfectly normal clock on the wall, which said it was a normal time in the early evening, 5:25. And he looked at the portal.

Chapter Three

Manmade Gods

The doorway into another world stood open, shimmering and noiseless, the ghost of Noah standing next to it, his eyes unblinking, his eyebrows knitted together, his lips a thin slit. Was the look anger, or judgement, or hope, or some unfathomable emotion? Paul couldn't guess, and he looked again at the portal, at the world beyond, which stretched off farther into vision than the buildings he could see outside his own living-room window.

“Are you coming with me?” Noah said. His tone of voice implied to Paul that to do otherwise would be a terrible mistake.

“Ok,” Paul said, making a decision one part of him feared he may regret, but other parts knew intuitively was the right choice. At the very worse, it would make a heck of a story. His mind was dizzy, but his stomach was
now calm, his heart certain, and he felt the muscles of his arms and hands and shoulders relax as the choice was made. He stood up.

Noah stepped through the portal, walked a few paces on the sand in the world beyond the doorway, stopped, turned around and gestured with his hand for Paul to follow him. Paul walked through the portal, noticing as he did that his ears were filled for a moment with a sizzling sound. He stepped onto the sand and was surprised to feel it totally solid and substantial. As he walked to where Noah stood, he looked past him at the desert, stretching from horizon to horizon, the sky so huge and deep and blue it seemed to echo with depth and vastness.

The air smelled fresh, the bright metallic taste of clean oxygen, tinged slightly with a note of distant wood-fires and a spice Paul couldn't identify. The dryness of it cut the back of his nose and throat, and for a moment his eyes watered from the sudden change in humidity and light. The sun hit him with a palpable intensity, and he knew that if he didn't find shade soon his skin would be burned. All around him was rock, sand, and scrub brush, an occasional tree that resembled the mesquite he'd seen in Arizona. On the far horizon he could make out the silhouette of what looked like several men leading heavily laden camels along a distant trail, and on the far horizon to his right what seemed like the beginning
of a vast forest. In the distance to his left, he could see the shimmer of water in what looked like irrigation canals, and green fields filled with people tending whatever was growing there. He turned around, and saw through the portal his apartment in New York, and then with a slow fade the portal became fainter and fainter until it vanished, causing Paul's heart to skip a beat.

“How will we get back?” Paul said, trying to control the panic he could hear in his own voice.

“When we need the door, I can re-open it,” Noah said.

Paul relaxed, believing him. He said: “Where are we?” Beyond the empty space where the portal had been, Paul could see a walled city of wood and stone buildings, bustling with activity, the center of the city occupied by a square fortress of tall wooden poles, over the top of which peeked a massive stone building. Men stood atop the city's walls, idly carrying bows over their shoulders and spears in their hands.

“This is the city of Nippur,” Noah said. “On the other side of the city is a large canal bringing water from the Euphrates River to our west, and in the distance to our south is the city of Ur. To the northwest is Babylon. To the east, near the Caspian Sea, is the land of Nod, where the Bible says Cain went to find his wife.”

“But that means there were other people besides Adam and Eve,” Paul said.

“Of course there were,” Noah said. “The story of Adam and Eve is not the creation story of all humans, it's the creation story of one particular tribe. Every tribe on earth has its own creation story, and every story is about the creation of
their
particular tribe, whether they came from the sun or were born from a god or fell as fruit from a tree or whatever.”

“I'd never thought of it that way,” Paul said. “But it makes sense, since the Bible says Adam and Eve started out around six thousand years ago, and archeologists tell us humans have been around for two hundred thousand years. It must have been the story of the origin of the tribe we now call the Jews or Hebrews.”

Noah shrugged as if it were self-evident, and continued. “Nod is to our east, and what was once called Eden is to our southwest. This is the land you now refer to as ancient Mesopotamia, a part of ancient Sumeria, in your time part of Iraq. It is now, at this moment as we stand here, a thousand years after the floods forced these people upland from where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers once met, and five hundred years after the invasion by the Kurgans.”

“Kurgans?”

“They were a herding people who lived north of here, in the areas around the Caucasus Mountains. When the climate changed and floods struck here, at the same time drought hit the Kurgans. Facing famine, they
took up the sword and began to move out of their homelands, looking for food. They spread here, down into India, east into China, and west and north into Europe. Everywhere they went, they assimilated themselves into the local peoples, as they had no empire of their own. They have become largely invisible even by now, five thousand years before you were born, because they have become these people, and the people of India, and of Asia, and of Europe. There has been a mixing of their languages, their ways, and their gods. They brought the alphabet, and that transformed culture, infected it with new ways. You could say it rewired people's brains, made them more ruthless, literal, abstract, and willing to dominate. The left brain, the male brain, took over, because that's the part of the brain where reading is processed.”

“We're at some turning point in history? In the past?”

“Yes. It's about 3,000 B.C., give or take a century. Five thousand years ago, from when we left your apartment.”

“Why are we here?” Paul said.

“This is your first lesson in wisdom, to prepare you for the Secret.” Noah began a brisk stride toward the city, and Paul ran and stumbled to catch up with him.

They walked in silence; Paul felt intuitively that he shouldn't speak, and Noah didn't initiate a conversation. The air was hot, but Paul noticed it was so dry he
wasn't sweating. He unbuttoned the white shirt he was wearing to expose the V-neck T-shirt underneath, keeping his sleeves rolled down to protect his arms from the sun. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the walled city. They entered through a gap in the stone wall protected by soldiers playing a game with dice made of white stones. The soldiers glanced at Noah and Paul with curiosity but didn't say anything.

“This is the Ur gate,” Noah said as they walked between tall brick pillars. Around this edge of the city, the homes were small and simple, made of sun-dried brick and wood brought from some distant forest.

People gave Noah and Paul odd looks, but didn't comment on them; Paul could sense fear in the air, and noticed that one of the guards got up and ran off into the city. The man glanced at them with a furtive look; Paul felt a dread, as if the fear in the city were contagious, and knew the man had run off to do or say something that would not be in the best interests of Paul and Noah. Perhaps there was money to be made by telling about the strange visitors. Perhaps he was intending to circle around and rob or assault them.

Paul tried to put the man—the spy, he'd decided—out of his mind as they walked down a dusty street towards the fortress in the city-center. He smelled moisture, saw trees rising above the fortress, and the closer they got to the city-center the thicker the vegetation became.

People moved in and through the city with a sense of purpose, some with long hair, dressed in beautiful robes and striding with an air of dignity, most with short-cropped hair, dressed in rags and pulling carts or carrying loads on their heads, shoulders, or backs. It reminded Paul that the Romans and many slaveholding people before them had marked their slaves by cutting their hair. Ragged children ran and played in the dirt, under the watchful eye of adults, or carried loads of sticks or baskets of what looked to Paul like barley. Paul noticed that he'd seen only men; there were no women out in public.

They passed an empty house, and Noah turned and stepped into it through an open door. Paul followed him, happy for the shade. They walked through a large room, down a short hallway, and into a smaller back room with an open window on one side. On the other outer adobe wall was a small recessed area about two feet square and six inches deep. It was positioned just slightly lower than the window and had the effect of being the center of attention of the room; as you walked in you were facing it directly. In the cutout of the wall sat a five-inch-tall figurine made of a red-brown pottery, a woman with a rounded belly, thick thighs, and large breasts that reached down nearly to her legs.

“The house goddess,” Noah said. “Before the Kurgans arrived, these people worshipped female deities in
their homes, their fields, their temples, and the forests. They understood that women bring forth life but men cannot; they believed that the greatest gods must be women, because the gods bring forth the crops, rain, and everything else in the world. The Kurgans, however, were a people who had learned to survive by conquering and killing and assimilating themselves among other peoples, so they worship life-taking instead of life-giving gods. Warrior gods. Male gods. And when those male gods gave them victory over every peaceful goddess-worshipping people they confronted, they knew their male gods were the greatest and most powerful. So now most of the people they've had contact with have male gods, or at least male gods have become the highest gods. Still, today many of the peasants of Nippur, Babylon, and most of the world worship female goddesses, although the practice will be eliminated within the next four hundred years.”

Paul looked at the strangely formed figure and said, “But it's just a statue.”

“No, she is a goddess,” Noah said, “at least to the people who lived in this house, and to about half of the other residents of this town.”

“A female god?”

“Yes. They talk to her, they bring her offerings, they pray to her for good crops, success in childbirth, and good health. But they know they cannot pray to her for
success in war, because women are life-bringers and not life-takers. They don't realize it now, but as their population grows and they resort to war to get more wood, land, and food, they will turn to the male war-gods who will usurp the female gods.”

“But it's just clay, isn't it?” Paul said, wondering if he should bow before the statue or genuflect or something.

“No, she's a goddess,” Noah said. “Not a statue of a goddess, but a goddess herself. She is Aruru, who, with Enlil was the mother of the first seven human men and women, the creator of Gilgamesh, the goddess who gave birth to this tribe, the Sumerians. Each statue in this town is Aruru, and each is she. Before the Kurgans arrived, she was also in the main temple.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Paul said, remembering what a Catholic friend had told him when he'd asked why people prayed in front of statues of Mary and others in Catholic churches and why she wore around her neck a little gold figure of Jesus on the cross. “It must be a statue that represents something larger than the statue.”

“No,” Noah said. “She is a goddess. These people are quite certain about that. She has specific powers and abilities, and when they pray to her it is to her,” he pointed at the figurine, “to that piece of clay. They are not praying to anything behind her or other than her.”

“But she was made by people!”

Noah tilted his head slightly and said, “And who made people?”

Paul felt a moment of dread, a shaking of reality. “Is she really a goddess? I mean can she make it rain and things like that?”

“No and yes,” Noah said. “She is only clay for you and me, but she is something more to these people, and that is real, too.”

Paul nodded, confused, wondering what it all meant. He felt vaguely uneasy, remembering the first commandment, which said the god of the Bible was a jealous god, and,
You shall have no other gods before me.
But how could you have other gods if no other gods existed? Why would the Bible's god be jealous of other gods if they didn't exist?

“Is this the Wisdom School?”

“There's no single place that is this Wisdom School,” Noah said. “The teaching is both outside and inside you. When you are finished, the teachings of the Wisdom School will be within you, and wherever you are they will be.”

A clatter from outside the house caught Paul's attention, and he turned as four soldiers ran into the room, the two in the front holding short iron swords and the two in the rear holding spears. All were muscular dark-haired men, dressed in skirted uniforms made of leather strips adorned with bronze medallions and bits
of red cloth. The two men in front made menacing gestures toward Paul, who stepped back and put his hands up.

“Whoa, I'm just a tourist,” he said, trying to look friendly and sincere.

The man near Noah waved his sword toward Paul, not to cut but to threaten, and an explosion of guttural syllables came from his mouth.

“He says it is against the law of Enlil to be in this place of blasphemy,” said Noah. “The family that lived here refused to destroy their goddess, so they were killed. If we stay, we shall be killed, as well.” He waved his hand at Paul. “You now have the ability to speak and understand their language. It will sound to you like they are speaking English, and when you speak English, they will understand you in their tongue.”

The soldier glared at Noah and said, “It is forbidden that you come here to worship Aruru. You have committed blasphemy!”

Noah calmly replied, “We are visiting dignitaries from a foreign land, and stopped here because we were curious about the local customs.”

The two soldiers in the front shook their heads vigorously in disagreement with Noah, and the two in the rear stood at attention, carefully following the conflict but also clearly subordinates. The first soldier who'd spoken, a huge man with black eyes and curly black
hair, muscles like rocks under his skin, glared at Noah, who smiled in response. The man shouted, “You lie!”