The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century (16 page)

“Are you saying that good is more powerful than evil?”

“Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness: He is gracious, and full of compassion and righteous.”

“Is that one of the Wisdom School teachings? That compassion is the greatest good, and good is more powerful than evil?”

“Yes,” the voice said.

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

There was silence, and Paul felt intuitively that the woman named Wisdom had left. He took out his notebook and wrote,
Compassion is the greatest good, and good is more powerful than evil
. As he finished writing, another image began to form from mist. His heart raced as he recognized Joshua standing in front of him.

“Joshua?” Paul said. “Is that you?”

Joshua was wearing the same army pants, frayed white shirt, and threadbare cardigan V-necked sweater he had been wearing when Paul met him under the street the day before. “Yes, it is I.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm here to give you the Secret. You will write it down, carry it out to the world, tell people in a way that will transform them, and thus begin the process of saving the world and all life.”

“I am ready,” Paul said, straightening his spine. “But why here?”

“This is my creation, and yours.”

“You created this?”

“Yes. As did you.”

“Me?”

Joshua's lips moved, but a deeper and more ancient voice came from his mouth. “And the Lord God, the Word, the Name, said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil.”

“One of
Us
?” Paul said. “Is that from the Bible?”

“Genesis,” Joshua said simply, speaking now in his own voice again. “Do you understand now?”

Paul looked up, down, left, right, and at the distant stars ahead of him. The universe extended into infinity. He'd heard the word many times in his life-infinity-but had never understood what it really meant. “Is that the Secret?”

“In a way. Do you now understand how it all began, how it all ends, how it all begins again?”

“I understand that it does. I'm not sure I know how.”

Joshua smiled, stepped forward through the emptiness, reached out and touched Paul's arm in a gesture of reassurance. At the touch, Paul again felt his heart flood with love. Tears welled in his eyes. “To know
how,”
Joshua said, “you would have to touch the Mind of the Creator of the Universe. That is for another time. First, you must know the Secret, and live its truth. You must take the drivenness–the ambition and drive and enthusiasm that you were born with and that you have wasted
in the world of commerce-and transform it to a higher work. Can you do that?”

“Yes, of course!” Paul said. He'd always
wanted
to be a reporter, but now he
knew
who and what he really was. Every moment of his life up to this had been a preparation for his true life's work. “I am ready.”

“When you know the Secret, you will fold that all things are possible unto you, and that the future of the planet, of all life, is in
your
hands and the hands of those you share it with.”

“And the Secret is?”

“All sprang from the One. All returns to the One. You and I are of the One, and will all dissolve back into the One.” He paused and brushed his hand across Paul's face. “Come close.”

Paul stepped forward and Joshua breathed on him, his mouth opened in an O. Paul smelled jasmine and frankincense and sandalwood.

Then Joshua said, “My son, the Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century, of every Century, is ‘
We Are All One.'”

For a long moment there was stillness through all creation, then Joshua slowly dissolved into the emptiness.

Paul searched the stars, the depths of empty space, wondering what was next. He felt himself supported, as if he were sitting in an easy chair with his feet up on a footstool. As the sensation became stronger, he noticed his body assuming a reclining posture, and then,
in a blink, he was in the tunnel under New York, around the fire, with Joshua and the others. The air was cool, and in the distance he heard a cat meow. He felt through the ground beneath his recliner chair the far distant rumble of a subway train. The distant tunnels, which during the day had shown cracks of light from above, now were a black emptiness.

Juan was stirring a pot of stew again, although this food smelled of sage, basil, green onions, and thyme, instead of curry. This wasn't a memory: it was
now
, Paul thought.

He blinked and looked around. Everybody was looking at him, as if he'd just appeared in the old velour recliner, which he assumed he had. “What time is it?” he said.

“Around three in the morning,” Salome said. “May be a little after.”

“You're all up and awake?” Paul said.

“Joshua said you'd be visiting,” Jim said.

Joshua smiled at Paul, as if they shared a secret.

“Was he gone?” Paul said to Jim, pointing at Joshua.

“No, he's been here all day,” Jim said, matter-of-factly. “You're the one who just appeared.” He smiled broadly.

Joshua leaned forward in his white plastic lawn-chair and said, “I imagine you have a question? Maybe something you're not quite sure of?”

Paul said, “That's the understatement of the century.” He sat up a bit straighter and stretched his back and legs, organizing his thoughts. “I get it that ‘We are all one' makes sense in the world of physics or metaphysics, but what does it mean in the practical world of everyday life? How can a person live this?”

“How would you live it?” Joshua said.

“Well,” Paul said, “first of all, in my everyday life, I guess it would mean that I couldn't continue to just get along and go along, to feed the machine of the multinational corporations and the kings and despots of the world, to be a wage slave. I'd want to find a way to make a living that wasn't toxic to the Earth, to other humans, to all life.”

“That's one possible ‘doing' part,” Joshua said, his tone implying there was more.

“Should I join a movement like Greenpeace or something?”

Joshua smiled. “That is the greatest challenge, Paul, for every awakened human. What to do? The answer is that there isn't one answer: there are
six billion
answers, the number of humans on Earth today. Each person must search her or his life, looking for those moments when she was most passionate about something, when he heard clearly the message of oneness-perhaps in another context, said another way-and totally understood it, if even only for a moment. In that memory, that
place, you will find what you must do. For some people it may mean joining a cause, like you mentioned. For others it will mean they continue to do exactly what they're doing now, only do it with an awakened consciousness so that their work and their contacts with others become infused with oneness. For others it will mean stepping into a world of outreach or perhaps even stepping back from the world for a while to recharge themselves spiritually and thus raise the vibration of all humans and all life.”

“So my way…”

“Is your way,” Joshua said. “Only you know that, and it may take you a minute to realize it, or maybe days or weeks or months. But you will know, and when you know you will step forward into a new life with a power and love and meaning greater than any you have ever known before.”

“Should I join you? Come live in the tunnel?”

Joshua shrugged. “Examine your life, al the way back to your childhood, and look and listen for the times when you
knew
what to do. There you will find the clues as to what you must do next, whether it is to join us for a while and chronicle our message, or go back to the newspapers, or to do something else altogether.”

“Okay,” Paul said. “I get it that if enough people took right action then governments could change, corporations could be transformed, neighborhoods revitalized,
families healed, the world saved. But how does that come from knowing that ‘we are all one'? I'm still not sure of the connection.”

Joshua nodded and looked at Salome, as if asking her to answer the question. She leaned forward in the other recliner chair in the circle, dropping her feet to the ground as the back of the chair creaked forward.

“First I gotta tell you,” she said, “it don't mean everybody in the world lives the same way, or there's some one perfect religion or lifestyle or anything like that. You understand? No one world or one way.”

“Yeah,” said Paul, realizing that she was the perfect person to know the truth of that.

“I mean, diversity is crucial,” she said. “Like in any ecosystem, it's the same with humans. We've gotta protect diversity. This notion that America is a great melting pot, for example, and that everything would be great if only the rest of the world would live just like American middle-class white folks is wrong. It's the velvet glove over the iron fist of a dominating culture. It profits the multinational corporations if everybody has the same values and consuming habits, if everybody likes the same soft drink and jeans and TV shows, but it's not good for humanity or the world.”

“I understand,” Paul said. “But if it's important that we have different and diverse tribes and clans and cultures and religions, then how are we ‘all one'?”

She smiled. “You know, when Jesus was talking with his friends—who included a couple of women…”

“Mary Magdalene and Salome?” Paul said, realizing that every person around the circle carried the modern version of a Biblical name.
Coincidence?
he wondered.

“Yeah,” Salome said. “And Mary, and Joanne, and others. Although somehow they usually get overlooked or ignored.” Her lips drew together as if she'd tasted something bitter, then relaxed. She continued, “But there was a story. Maybe you remember it, a parable, that Jesus laid on his friends. He talked about how a bunch of folks came to a king and said they wanted to hang out with him. You remember?”

“I'm not sure,” Paul said.

She glanced over at Jim. “You know the story, Jim?”

“Sure,” he said. “You want me to tell it?”

“Please,” Salome said.

“Well,” Jim said to Paul, “in the story, this divine king—the Son of Man—invited some folks to hang out with him in heaven. He told them they were invited because when he was hungry they'd fed him, when he was thirsty they'd given him something to drink, when he was a stranger they'd taken him in and helped him out, when he was naked they gave him clothes, when he was sick they visited him, and when he was in prison they came to see how he was doing.”

Jim looked at the 1-beams dancing in the flickering
light from the fire for a moment, as if checking to see that he had the list right.

Paul said, “I think I remember this. It's about doing unto others, right?”

“More like, ‘there's no such thing as
others,™
Jim said. “We really are all one! The way you treat me, you treat the whole world, and vice-versa. High and low, king and servant, man and God, even, I think, human and all other life. It's why I pick up worms on the sidewalk and put them back in the grass. 'Cuz they're part of me, too, if I'm part of all life.”

“The story, Jim?” Salome said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jim said. “So in that story, these folks told this king they didn't recall having done any of that stuff-in fact they hadn't even known he'd been hungry, or homeless, or in prison, or any of it. They'd helped out other folks, for sure, but not him. Heck, they hadn't even seen him around. So how, they asked him, could they be the ones who'd helped him out when he'd been in trouble that they didn't even know about?”

“And?” Paul said, listening carefully.

Jim stared at the ceiling for a moment and said, “Lemme get this right, I mean exactly right, because it's one of the best ‘we are all one' statements in history.” He brought his gaze back down to Paul with an expression of steeled certainty and continued: “This's it. He said to them, ‘Verily I say unto you, whatever you have
done unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.'”

The crash shook Paul awake.

He sat up straight on the sofa bed, disoriented.

What was happening? The vision had disappeared; instead of the tunnels, he was surrounded by Mary's living room. Plaster walls replaced the echoing vastness of space; the sound of a radiator creaking, traffic on the street outside, a rustling from the bedroom replaced the thundering silence.

The door to Mary's bedroom opened and she stood in the doorway, wearing a robin's-egg blue flannel nightshirt that came down to her knees. Her hair hung over the front of her left shoulder. “That's a sound I don't usually hear in the winter,” she said.

“What sound?” Paul said, hearing his pulse in his ears.

“That window slamming shut. Sometimes in the summer it'll do it, especially if there's a rapid change in humidity. If you pull it all the way up, it just sticks there, except sometimes when it gets real dry, and then it crashes down.”

“The window?”

“Yeah. That one,” she pointed to the window four feet beyond the foot of his bed. “When it was originally built there were lead weights inside the casement
and ropes that went from them to the lower windowpane. You can see the pulleys are still there, up near the top. But the ropes rotted away long ago.”

She walked over to the window and pulled the lace curtain back, looked at the glass and her plants. “Everything seems okay. Did you open the window? Are you too warm?”

“I don't know,” Paul said, grappling with reality. Mary's voice was Wisdom at a younger age: it brought back the dream in detail. “I may have. I dreamed I did.”

Igor came out of Mary's room with a “Meow?” He walked over to the sofa-bed with the leisurely gait only cats can affect, and hopped up into Paul's lap.