The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century

by Thom Hartmann

  “I’ve had a really miserable day,” Paul said, thinking the man must have gotten his name off the mailbox downstairs, probably had followed somebody into the building to get past the front-door lock. “Maybe another time.”

  “I hate to press, but if you answer these questions, there’s a real premium at the end of this. Believe me, this is not a gift you want to say ‘no’ to. Much larger than anything you can imagine.” Paul saw the man’s eyes glance over his scratched face, the dirt and tear on the collar of his white shirt, and a small smile-perhaps a smile of sympathy-came to the man’s face. “You look like you could use a gift.”

  “I’m fine…” Paul began, recognizing the old door-to-door ploy and preparing to close the door on the man. But the man’s smile reminded him of the summer he’d spent during his first year of college selling magazines door to door, paid on commission, and all the doors that were slammed in his face. How he kept trying to smile at all the fearful or angry or apathetic people who wouldn’t even listen to how he could get them their first year’s subscription for free if they’d just sign up for two years. And they almost never smiled back. It was a miserable job, and when the end of the summer came he was relieved to get back to college. It was his first solid realization of how cold and uncaring people could behave toward strangers. He felt the doorknob, cool in his hand, and pulled it further open, thinking, I was fired today; the last thing I should be doing is making somebody else’s job harder. “What the heck” he said. “Come on in.”

  The man followed Paul into the living room, closing the door behind him, and walked to the short sofa under the window that looked up Eighth Avenue. “May I sit down for a moment?” he said.

  “Sure” Paul said, sitting on the longer couch, diagonal to the man. The pizza had upset his stomach, and he was thinking of taking a couple of aspirin and letting himself turn into a TV zombie with the remote control in one hand and the glass of wine in the other. It was a rare indulgence, but sounded appealing; as soon as the salesman left. He added, “But let’s try to get this over with quickly, ok?”

  “Of course” the man said, with a glance to his clipboard. “The first question is, ‘Do you believe in God?”

  Paul remembered the evangelist on the street earlier and felt a flush of anger. “Are you from some church or cult?”

  “Oh, heavens no” the man said, his brown eyes twinkling, smile lines showing around them. “This is for the Wisdom School.”

  The smile disarmed Paul. “What’s that?”

  The man got a momentary faraway look in his eyes, then looked back at Paul. “Every hundred years or so, when the secret seems the most lost, some people will step forward and share it again with the world. That’s our work.”

  “Sounds like a cult to me,” Paul said.

  The man shrugged. “I’m not here to recruit you. You asked for this.”

  “That’s a joke.”

  “No,” the man said. “It’s serious. You asked right after you so deftly handled that evangelist on the street this morning.”

  Paul thought back and felt a moment of disorientation as he remembered his half-whispered comment that he wished he knew the answers to the spiritual questions that had haunted him since childhood. He looked at the man and heard his own voice drop as he said, “You were standing beside me on the street?”

  “After a fashion,” the man said, smiling. His smile seemed so heartfelt and genuine, like Paul, when he was a child, had imagined Santa Claus would look.

  “I don’t get it,” Paul said. “This is too weird, and I’m thinking that no matter how hard door-to-door selling is, I shouldn’t have let you in. You followed me here.”

  “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 n
ice 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 w
ith 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.