The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century

by Thom Hartmann

  “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.

  “You dreamed you opened the window?” Mary said, walking over to the bed to stroke Igor’s head. The cat purred in response.

  Paul looked at the clock. Three twenty-five. “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  She sat on the bed next to him. He could smell her body, warm and female, thick with the musk of humanness. “Are you ok?”

  He leaned back onto the rear cushions of the sofa and said, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had the most incredible dream. Can I tell you about it?”

  She pulled her feet off the floor and crossed her legs on the bed, pushing the nightshirt down between them. “Sure. I’d love to hear it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Wheel Within a wheel

  Paul woke to the feeling of Mary’s breath on the side of his neck. In a rush he remembered the evening, his telling her about the dream, their discussion about its meaning. She’d spent two years immersed in Carl Jung’s work and writings, and had several different ideas about what his dream may mean. After an hour of discussion, drawing intellectually, emotionally, and physically closer and closer, he’d finally pulled her to him and they’d kissed. Later, she crawled under the blanket, saying, “This is just to keep warm,” and he’d murmured agreement. They’d looked into each others’ eyes and it was the gentlest no either had ever given or received. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, Igor above the blanket and on top of Mary’s hip, the three feeling totally One.

  He disengaged from her and got out of bed, walked around and pulled his jeans on over his underwear, and went to the bathroom. When he came out, the bed was empty, the door to her room was closed, and he could hear her opening drawers. The clock on the wall ticked its way through nine A.M.

  “Good morning!” he called through the door.

  “Good morning, Paul,” she said. She pulled the door open, still wearing her nightshirt, a pile of clothes in her hand. “I’ll take the first shower, okay? That way I can dry my hair while you’re in there.”

  “Fine with me.”

  As she headed into the bathroom, he began to put the sofa bed back together and rearrange the room the way it had been when he’d arrived the night before.

  They made breakfast together; he toasted the bread and she poached the eggs. A grapefruit and a pot of green tea rounded out the meal, that they ate together at the two-person kitchen table. Igor was so affectionate that he was distracting until Mary opened a can of cat food. Sated, he retired to the sofa to clean himself while they ate and talked.

  “My class today is abnormal psychology,” she said with a broad smile. “Maybe I should bring up your experiences the past two days. Thursday you meet an angel, Friday you meet a holy man, and in the early hours of Saturday morning you hang out in outer space with what sounds an awful lot like the Holy Ghost or the archetypal goddess. And they’re all telling you that you now have to save the world.”

  “They’d say we’re both abnormal,” Paul said with a laugh. “Me for saying it, and you for taking me seriously.” It was a bright, sunny morning and the light streamed in the tall kitchen window, making the yellow of his egg’s yolk and the red of the Tabasco he’d put over it particularly vivid. Outside the window, the city teemed with life, cars honked and screeched, a distant explosion sounded like a gunshot but, Paul knew, was probably just a firecracker. The normal sounds of the city seemed so much more alive to him, so much more real and present.

  Mary cut her egg and toast carefully, as if it were a vitally important work. She put the bite in her mouth and chewed it, looking at him with a steady gaze. He felt like he was looking into the eyes of somebody he’d shared lifetimes with. Cycles within cycles, as Wisdom had taught him. Wheels within wheels. How many times have we met before? Paul wondered, meeting her gaze as he chewed his food.

  He finished his bite and said, “I have this very strange feeling about you. Like I’ve known you forever.”

  “May be you have,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in metaphysics and religion, but I guess I never took it very seriously. Always figured it was the mind at work, somehow.”

  “Or vice-versa. what if the mind is a reflection of something much larger at work?”

  “Like?”

  “Like everything. If we are all one, I mean really we are all one, then there is nothing separating us. It’s only a dream the idea that we’re separate beings. It’s not that we have consciousness, it’s that we are expressing consciousness, the mind of the universe, of all creation, shining feebly out through our eyes, echoing in our words, shimmering in our deeds. Like the cup of water separate from the ocean, thinking it’s only a cup of water.”

  She looked in his eyes. “The ocean knows the water in the cup, but the water in the cup has no idea how vast the ocean is.”

  “Or that other cups of water are also the ocean,” he said, feeling a deep connection to her.

  “If you really extend it out,” she said, “then a lot of things that seem like mysteries start to make sense. The things that Jesus said about treating others like they were us, about not even going to church until you let go of even the smallest grudge against anybody, even his nonviolent opposition to the Roman dominators, saying that evil must not be resisted with evil.”

  “And,” Paul added, “it would mean that there is no time, no space: they’re just ideas in the living mind of the universe, of God. It’s all one, it’s all interconnected. It all sprang from love, and it all dissolves back into love. Time isn’t a straight line, it’s a continuous circle, like the Native Americans say. They didn’t fear death as frantically as we do because they knew it was just one part of the circle, the wheel that spins forever. It’s why Wisdom said her tongue was the law of kindness, because kindness is how the One loves itself. I mean, it’s
so easy to say, ‘We are all one,’ but when you really think about it, all the implications, you discover it’s incredibly deep. It’s at the original mystical core of every religion, of all the ancient teachings, and of all the indigenous cultures’ ways of life, their understandings of life. It shines a light on all the different religions, and lets you sort out the truth in the world’s scriptures from the stuff that’s just one group trying to play control games over another group.”

  She leaned forward on her elbow and said, “The Jews say a prayer, ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ I wonder how many realize that it could mean so much more than just, ‘There is one deity and He is ours’? That in the deepest sense it could mean that all is one?”

  “I suspect the Jewish mystics understand that,” Paul said, “just like the Christian mystics understand the same thing when they read Jesus’ words that, ‘I and my Father are one’ or, ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’ or ‘Is it not written in your law, “I said, Ye are gods?” ‘ It literally means that each of us is a part of God looking at Himself.”

  “Or Herself,” Mary said, smiling broadly.

  “It would be greater even that either of those,” Paul said. “Beyond gender, beyond our ability to conceive with just our thinking mind. We could only know it with our hearts.”

  “In love,” she said in a soft voice.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling his heart race. “Completely and totally in love.”

  She looked out the window. “I think if what’s happened to you is real, I want to be a part of it. It’s why I went into psychology, after all. I figured it was the best way for me to save the world, one person at a time.”

  He struggled with his emotions. Finally he blurted out, “I’d love to have you with me.”

  She looked embarrassed, as if she’d said too much, too fast. “What are your plans?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Take you down to meet Joshua, first off,” he said. “Then, while you’re at class, I’ve gotta get down to the loading dock at my apartment building and arrange to get my stuff stored until I can find a place to live. After that, I’m going to pick up a paper and make a few calls looking for a job. And I may call my older brother and ask if I can borrow some money for a while. He lives in Denver. Runs a bookstore. Anyhow, I’ve gotta find a place to live and get a job before I can think of anything else. I appreciate your letting me use the couch last night, but don’t want to abuse your hospitality.”

  She reached across the table and put her hand on his. “You’re really welcome to stay here a few days, if you want.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said, measuring his words. He wanted to say that he’d love to move in with her, to live with her, that he even had fantasies about marrying her. But they’d had one sex-free evening together, and he didn’t want to risk blowing up the relationship by moving it along too fast.

  “I mean on the couch,” she added, as if she’d read his mind.

  “I know,” he said, putting his free hand on hers. There was a moment, a beat of almost unbearable intimacy, and then they both pulled their hands back and returned to breakfast.

  An hour later, just short of noon, they walked down Madison Avenue, having already decided to walk cross-town on 34th Street; there was a bookstore there where Mary wanted to stop. At 42nd Street, she gestured to the right and mentioned that Times Square was just a few blocks over, turning them to a discussion of the changing nature of the city over the years.

  At 41st Street, they stopped for the light at the same intersection where three days before Paul had pushed the little girl out of the way. “This is where it all started,” Paul said, turning to Mary.

  She wasn’t there.

  But there was the little girl he’d rescued, sobbing in the arms of her mother. And the balding man who’d told him he’d leaped across the street.

  The world tilted on its side.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Home Again

  Paul looked up at the crowd of people standing around him, his head aching with a bright, sharp throb. He was lying on his back on the street, the top of his head resting against the curb. He tilted his head down and looked at his hands; they were scuffed and bleeding, and the side of his face felt like it had been hit with a belt sander. The woman was crying, holding her daughter, and the man in the tan coat leaned over Paul, holding his wrist as if he were taking his pulse.

  “You okay, son?” the man said.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. His voice sounded odd in his head, as if he were wearing headphones and his voice had been somehow amplified. He shook his head to try to clear the thickness he felt, but the motion shot a blinding flash of pain through his temples.

  “Easy, son,” the man said. “Somebody called 911 and there’s an ambulance on its way. Let me see your eyes.” He put his face directly in front of Paul’s, and looked at his eyes. “Even dilation. That’s a good sign. Means you probably don’t have a concussion, at least not in the back of your head.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “I was a medic in the Army,” the guy said. “In Vietnam.”

  “What happened?”

  The woman leaned over him and said, “You’re a hero. You saved my daughter’s life.”

  “What?”

  “You pushed her out of the way, and the truck hit you,” she said. “Thank God you’re still alive.”

  “The truck hit me?”

  “Knocked you ten feet through the air,” the man said. “You’re lucky. It could have run over you.”

  Paul noticed the sound of a siren, and thought of all the times he’d watched ambulances try to struggle their way through the traffic of Manhattan, sirens screaming, ignored by cars and taxis unless they opened an opportunity to sneak through a red light.

  “Look out, get back!” came a loud voice, and Paul turned to see a police officer push his way through the crowd. “How are you?” he said.

  “His pulse is regular and his pupils are both the same size,” the man in the tan coat said. “His eyes track, and he seems coherent. We haven’t moved him. I was a medic in Vietnam.”

  “Thanks,” the cop said, dropping to one knee and looking into Paul’s face. “What’s your name?”

  “Paul Abler.” He started to sit up, but the cop put his hand on his chest and said, “Stay there until the ambulance gets here. Where do you live?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Paul said. “I mean…”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “New York…”

  “What day is it?”

  “Saturday.”

  The cop shot the man a worried glance, looked back at Paul. “What month?”

  “February.”

  He looked up and said to the man in the tan coat, “Where’s the truck that hit him?”

  The man said, “Over there,” and pointed in a direction Paul couldn’t follow without sitting up.

  The cop stood up. “Keep an eye on him and don’t let him get up until the EMT says it’s ok.”

  “Got it, sir,” the man said, sitting on the curb next to Paul’s head. The cop walked over to interview the driver.

  “I think I’m okay,” Paul said. “I mean my head hurts, and I’m skinned up, but I think I’m ok.”

  “Just relax,” the man said.

  “Where’s Mary?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who was with me. Mary Robbins.”

  The man shook his head. “There was nobody I saw with you. If she was here, she’s gone now.”

  Paul lifted his right knee and felt a deep bruising pain in his hip. He realized his right shoulder and arm felt similarly injured.

  “Take it easy, son,” the man said, the sound of a nearby siren winding down behind him.

  Paul let his leg fall back to the pavement. “I feel bruised but don’t feel like anything’s broken.”

  “You’re in shock,” the man said. “You don’t even know what day it is. Here’re the EMTs
.”

  Billy gave him a wide-eyed look as he limped into the fluorescent-lit lobby of his apartment building. “You look like you been run over by a truck.”

  “I was,” Paul said with a wry grin.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Well, hit, anyway,” Paul said as he walked toward the elevators. “Spent the afternoon in the hospital getting x-rays and all.”

  Billy shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that. I ever tell you about the time I broke my back skydiving?”

  “Yeah, you have,” Paul said as the elevator door opened.

  “You’ll heal,” Billy said.

  “Physically,” Paul said as the doors closed. “I’ll heal physically.”

  Rich answered the door of his apartment wearing a blue terrycloth robe.

  “You have company?” Paul said.

  “What happened to you?” Rich said. “Mugged?”

  “Hit by a truck,” Paul said.

  “Then come right in,” Rich said, pulling the door open. “You get hit by a truck in this city, you can make a fortune. And I get half!”

  Paul stepped into the familiarity of Rich’s apartment. Black leather, glass, and chrome; it smelled of pot and shampoo and leather. Signed Dali prints adorned the walls, and the carpet was a startling pure eggshell white. A big-screen TV dominated the far corner, near the window out over the balcony, and in a chair next to it sat a stunning blonde woman, wearing only a silk bathrobe with a dragon embroidered down one side. Her hair was damp, and she looked like she was in her very early twenties.

  She looked Paul up and down quick, and turned on a professional smile, all teeth and eyes, and said, “Hi, I’m Cheryl.”

  “Hi, I’m Paul.” He turned to Rich. “I really don’t want to interrupt.”

  “It’s okay, Paul,” Rich said, his voice that of an old friend or a wise older brother. “I took the afternoon off work and we don’t have to get dressed for another half-hour. Vodka tonic?”