The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century

by Thom Hartmann

  “Whereas the Hindus said people suffer because of bad karma?”

  “Yes. There is a law of equality, but when India was conquered by the Indo-Europeans about four thousand years ago, the concepts of karma and reincarnation were refined into the caste system. This allowed the rich to smugly assert that they were rich because they’d lived well in a past life and the poor were wretched because they’d done something wrong in a past life.”

  “Blame the victim,” Paul said.

  “Yes, like those today who preach that people get cancer because they’re repressing anger, while ignoring the toxic chemicals in our environment. Repressed anger has been around for all of human history, but the explosion of cancer has only corresponded with the industrial revolution, the rise of corporate kings and their rape of the Earth. Similarly, the dominators of ancient times in India, the Hindu kings and priests, justified their domination with the idea of karma.”

  “So instead of blaming a god for their misery, the poor were told to blame themselves.”

  “Exactly. Notice that in both cases—the ancient Roman and the ancient Indian–the blame for the wretched lives of the poor is directed away from the dominators, away from the kings and priests and rich people. It’s not even an allowed topic of discussion, the truth that people stealing or accumulating wealth while those around them are starving could be a cause of human suffering. The dominators claim they never cause misery. It’s always either the individual’s fault, or is because of a crazed god.”

  “The Demiurge.”

  “Right. That’s who it was for the Greeks and Romans, who created the foundations of our culture. Earthquakes, famines, plagues, droughts, disease, birth defects, defeat in battle, and all that sort of thing. It was all the Demiurge, having his fun.”

  “Sounds like a nasty god.”

  “And a jealous one, which kept the attention of the people on the Demiurge and away from thinking that maybe the rich and powerful were part of the problem. The Greeks weren’t the first to have this idea, as you can guess. Because the Demiurge was so fearsome, other groups with the same idea but a different name for the Demiurge spent much of their time trying to placate him, so he wouldn’t torture them even worse. They built monuments and temples to him, made sacrifices to him, killed animals and people, all sorts of things. The more valuable something was, the more they’d want to give it to the Demiurge, in the hopes he’d realize its importance and that would keep him quiet for a few months. So things like their best animals, or their firstborn sons, were included in the sacrifice list.”

  “And this is one of those ‘created in the image of man’ gods?”

  “Yes. Created in the image of psychotic man, coming out of a psychotic culture, a culture of death and domination. Domination of women by men, of one people by another, of the planet by humans. A culture of slavery. With the Demiurge as the ultimate slave-holder and dominator.”

  “It’s still with us.”

  “Yes. But every now and then, so the Greeks and Romans thought, the Creator of the Universe, from far, far away, would have his virgin, Sophia, give birth again. And her son, a divine being or incarnated Greek god, would come to the Earth to tell people the secrets that they could use to protect themselves from the wrath of the Demiurge. He was the carrier of the secrets that mere mortals could use to deflect the tortures of the Demiurge. These secrets, or secret knowledge, came to be known by the Greek word for knowledge, which is gnosis.”

  “Is this where the Gnostic religions come from?”

  “In large part. The word has been misused for a long time.”

  “And why such religions have an emphasis on secret knowledge and rituals of initiation, and also why they are all about saving people from an angry god?”

  “Yes. If you read the words attributed to Jesus in the Bible, at least the vast majority of them, you’ll find that they’re not Gnostic. He doesn’t speak very much about how to avoid the wrath of the Demiurge, or when he seems to it’s almost like somebody tacked something onto the end of another teaching. Instead, most of his teachings are about Mysticism. How to use that highest form of consciousness or energy–love–to connect directly to the Creator of the Universe. But it appears that Gnostic beliefs heavily influenced the apostle Paul. He was born a Roman citizen, not a Jew, and therefore was raised with the Roman ideas of a Demiurge-like god. So it just made sense to him that Jesus had come along as the incarnation of the Gnosis to save people from the Demiurge; you can see it over and over again in his writings. And, of course, this was the world-view of the Romans when they took over Christianity in the third century. And those same Romans then decided what would and wouldn’t make it into the text of what we call the Bible.”

  “But,” Paul said, “the world can be a terrible place. People do have wars and plagues, and most people live what Thoreau called ‘lives of quiet desperation.’ If this isn’t because the Demiurge is sadistic, or the One God is angry with us, why is it?”

  Joshua looked around the circle. “Juan, what do you think?”

  Juan stood up and stepped back from the fire where he’d been absentmindedly stirring the pot of curry, and sat in one of the brown metal high-school gym chairs. He looked around the circle, then gestured to the grate most directly above them. “Up there, the world ees crazy, you know? People kill you. They rob you. They steal whatever you have. The kids, they hurt you for fun. I say it’s the people who are bad.”

  Pete shook his dreadlocks and spoke for the first time since he’d met Paul. “If people be so bad, man, howcome you and me be here? We ain’t bad.”

  “We brothers,” Matt added.

  Mark nodded and made a soft sound of assent through his nose.

  Salome’s leg bounced up and down a few times and she put her hand on it and said, “You guys don’t get it. It ain’t the people who’re bad, and it ain’t the one who made us. It’s that culture out there,” she waved at the grate. “That’s what’s bad. That’s what sick.”

  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 wou
ld 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.”’