He studied me, while brandishing his mace in the air to mask his discomfort, but never once looked me in the eye. I told myself the man’s soul surely retained some remnant of shame. Nonetheless, he said, with the glibness of a man proficient in double-talk, “Do we know, master, anything about the stronghold of reality? Do we know, master, anything about the stronghold of falsehood? What can show us, master, that the stronghold of reality is in the homeland of falsehood? What can show us, master, that the stronghold of falsehood is in the homeland of reality?”
“Should I be surprised to hear an exposition like this from a man who claims to be a prophet?”
“On the contrary, master! My master will never hear an exposition of this from anyone except a prophet.”
“Is that so?”
The cunning strategist, however, waved his stick in the air and continued to recite his prophecy without looking me in the eye: “Absolutely! I’m not cognizant of the reality of reality nor of the reality of falsehood, because this type of knowledge is found only in the spirit world, but I do know that reality cannot be established without falsehood and that falsehood cannot be established without reality. Had this not been the case, our master would never have needed to jest one day.”
“Bravo! Bravo! Here you are talking about the jest that made you a ruler. Then you disavow this regime and its ruler.”
“I meant to say that the fraud we term ‘jest’ is the same fraud that creates reality.”
“Do you label your situation at present ‘reality’?”
“Isn’t our present situation the actual one that we can see and touch?”
“Do you take everything seen to be real?”
“What does my master consider everything seen?”
“I would have thought the reverse. I would have thought that the fraudulent is what is seen and the reality what’s not seen.”
“If my master is right, what meaning is there to all this? What meaning is there to debating? What meaning is there to loving? What meaning is there to living?”
“Yes, indeed; there is no meaning to living. The meaning is, rather, in learning to live.”
“This is the language of the law!”
“I would have thought that the master of prophetic visions would be, of all the people, the worthiest person with whom to discuss a clear exposition of the law.”
“Not so fast! Not so fast, master.”
I did not cut him any slack. I did not go slow with him, for I decided to render a verdict: “I fraudulently installed you as my replacements. Then you betrayed me to install yourselves for real. Is this legal according to your law, which celebrates what is visible?”
He replied icily, “Certainly, master. This is a legal system for what is visible. We, master, are the children of what is visible.”
“I thought I heard you discuss your affiliation with offspring of the spirit world.”
“Certainly; I am a scion of the spirit world, and it is, my master, the spirit world that has decreed that I should live according to the law of what’s visible, for there is a wisdom I do not understand in the fact that it plucked me from the hidden recesses of the spirit world to place me in the homelands of light.”
“Amazing!”
“What’s amazing, master, is that we live in the physical world according to the spirit’s laws of the private and live in spirit world according to the laws for public life.”
“From now on, I won’t be surprised if you all rule in favor of aggression and seek to enslave the members of pacific tribes. I’ve even begun to wonder if you’re the mastermind behind the schemes of aggression.”
“Yes, certainly, master; the mind plotting what you term aggression is mine and the law of visible reality is what has inspired me to spread the influence of the oasis beyond its boundaries, because the spirit world does not grant a community wealth, sovereignty, or wisdom to fool around with, the way numbskulls do, but to use in visible ways. If we don’t master the tribes of the world with our power today, they’ll enslave us tomorrow, when our powers have waned, for the spirit world’s law has hidden its secret in an endlessly revolving wheel. This is an inexorable wheel that reclaims today what it created yesterday and resurrects tomorrow what it assassinates today.”