“Jesus didn’t have any special nuggets for his disciples.”
“No.”
“Nor did Gautama Buddha or Muhammad for theirs.”
“No.”
“You may be right, of course, but this misses the point of my story.”
“Okay. Why did the sage have two different sets of teachings?”
“One was a set of teachings that are easy to disclose, the other a set of teachings that are very difficult to disclose. The first was the public set, of course—the set to which all the novices were exposed. The second was the secret set, the set that only exceptional students can aspire to—or accept.”
“In other words …?”
“In other words: Secret teachings aren’t ones that teachers keep to themselves. Secret teachings are ones that teachers have a hard time giving away.”
I shook my head. I damn well had to shake my head, of course. I’ve never seen it spelled out, but it’s implicit in every text that—aside from forbidden (and probably illusory) lore like witchcraft and necromancy—there are no relevant secrets. There are plenty of things we don’t know and will never know, but everything we need to know has been revealed. If this isn’t the case, if Moses or Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad held something back for an inner circle, then revelation is incomplete—and by definition useless.
I said, “I’m not sure how this answers my original question. Why did you invite me here?”
“I invited you for the same reason the sage invited Monkey. I hope to make you take away some of the teachings I can never get to at the podium.”
“I don’t understand. Why can you ‘never get to them’ at the podium?”
My question seemed to defeat him. He sighed, collapsed in on himself, and looked around bleakly in a sort of pantomime of pedagogical despair. “I thought you understood what was going on here.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I did too.”
“Every time Jesus stood up to speak to a group, he was speaking to a thousand years of shared history, shared vision, and shared understanding. The people in his audiences were Jews, after all. They didn’t just speak the same language. Their thoughts had been shaped by the same scriptures, the same legends, the same worldview. He didn’t have to teach them who God was, who Abraham was, who Moses was. He didn’t have to explain concepts like prophet, devil, repentance, baptism, scripture, Sabbath, commandment, heaven, hell, and messiah. These were all commonplace notions in their culture. Whenever he spoke to them, he knew with absolute certainty that his listeners came to him prepared to understand what he had to say.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“Jesus didn’t have to lay a foundation every time he spoke. Others had done that for him through a hundred generations, literally from the time of Abraham. But I do have to do that—with every single audience I face. You’ve heard me in Munich and here in Radenau, but you haven’t heard what I have to teach. All you’ve heard so far is the foundation—and it’s far from finished.”
“But eventually …”
“Yes, I get there eventually, and that’s why crowds call me Blasphemer and Beast and Antichrist. But I never get to the end of what I have to teach—not in public.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no continuity among my listeners from one audience to the next. This means that, in each succeeding audience, fewer and fewer people have been with me from the beginning and more and more of them are getting lost. After five or six lectures it’s pointless to go on. The end is still out there, but I’ve no hope of reaching it with this audience—and even less hope of reaching it with the next audience. I have to go back and begin all over again, which is what I did in Munich.”
Then B nodded in my direction and said: “And I have to wait for the arrival of someone like you.”
I felt a pang of fear at these words, the very same pang I feel when I picture myself falling from a tall building.
The unmasking
We sipped our life-restoring drinks. We listened to Piaf and other singers of her era, all French or German. We inhaled vast quantities of secondhand smoke. After a few minutes I said, “That still doesn’t explain why you chose me in particular.”
B frowned and scratched vaguely at the corner of his right eye—a gesture I would soon get used to seeing. “This clearly troubles you,” he said at last, “and I’m trying to imagine why.” I opened my mouth to deny it, but he stopped me with a shake of his head. “You’re not a good liar, you know.”
I gawked at him.
“Not enough practice, I’d say.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?”