On the Way to Supermanhood

The secrets are simple.

Because Truth is simple. It is the simplest thing in the world-that is why we do not see it. There is but one Thing in the world, not two, as the modern physicists and mathematicians have begun to realize, and as a child well knows as he smiles at the waves on a sun-swept beach where the same foam seems to have rolled in since the beginning of time, recalling a great rhythm that wells up out of ancient memory and weaves days and sorrows into a single story, so old it feels like an unchanging presence, so encompassing in its immensity it even embraces the glides of a sea gull. And everything is contained in one second, the sum of all ages and all souls, all within one simple little point glistening for an instant on the wild foam. But we have lost that point, and that smile, and the singing second. So we have tried to restore that Oneness by addition: 1+1+1… like our computers, as if adding up all possible knowledge from every conceivable direction would finally yield the right note, the one note that brings forth song and moves the worlds and the heart of a forgotten child. We have tried to manufacture that Simplicity for every pocketbook, but the more we multiplied our clever push buttons, to simplify life, the farther away the bird flew, and the smile-even the sparkling foam is polluted by our equations. We are not even entirely sure our body is still ours-the beautiful Machine has devoured everything.

Yet that one Thing is also the one and only Power because what shines in one point shines also in all other points. Once that is understood, all the rest is understood; there is but one Power in the world, not two. Even a child knows that: he is king, he is invulnerable. But the child grows up; he forgets. And men have grown up, and nations and civilizations, each in its own way seeking the Great Secret, the simple secret-through war and conquest, through meditation or magic, through beauty, religion or science. Though, in truth, we do not know who is most advanced: the Acropolis builder, the Theban magician, the Cape Kennedy astronaut, or the Cistercian monk, for one has rejected life in order to understand it, one has embraced it without understanding it, another has left a trace of beauty, and still another, a white trail in a changeless sky-we are merely the last on the list, that’s all. And we still have not found our magic. The point, the potent little point, is still there on the open beach of the world; it shines for whoever will seize it, just as it shone before we were humans under the stars.