Nowadays even those speak who have nothing to say. In the archaic age people perhaps spoke in poems; in the classical age this became the privilege of a narrower circle of poets and playwrights. Literary expression remained the daily bread of the artist caste, whereas today everyone thinks and teaches in terms of communication platforms. In vain do they wait for the gate of secrets to open; there cannot, after all, be so many enlightened ones. In the past one had to speak up for people to pay attention; today, to the same end, one ought rather to keep silent. Teachers are known who speak not a single word, and yet in their presence people arrive at insights and receive answers even to questions they have never voiced. Keeping a meaningful silence is the art of the few, while the often vacuous genre of the post spreads like a veritable epidemic.
Alongside the objective, historical, outer truth there also exists a subjective, mythic inner truth, and the two do not coincide in every detail. Many ask whether the inner truth might not be mere fancy, but fewer dare to put the question: how much reality does outer reality hold? What if the outer world is an illusion after all? What is unbelievable to one person is natural to another, and vice versa.
Sadly, even the ignorant can let the spirit out of the bottle, but it is not certain that they can also command the jinn. That is why people's accounts of their spiritual experiences so very often flow into the pathological lying of the mentally enfeebled, a kind of esoteric pseudology. Mostly they are the accounts of those who have not truly experienced anything, but only skim the surface or delude themselves with false insights. He who knows also knows how to keep silent.
And how far the world stands on its head is shown, too, by how often falsehood is taken for truth, and truth for falsehood. Countless so-called inspired writings appear, the overwhelming majority of them pseudographic forgeries that say nothing new, keep repeating trite templates and satisfy the shallow appetites of consumer spiritualism. They come not from a divine or spiritual source but are the products of contrived visions, or quite simply of fantasy. Copies, imprints of clichés that have worked once before.
Believers regard the sacred scriptures of their own religions as coming from God, or as divinely inspired, while scholars see in them rather cultural heritage, traditional sources, overlaps between civilisations, compilation. Believers, too, rightly ask how far human mediation and transmission distort them. Real reality, however, is not bound by the need for earthly documentation. Historical truth is only a projection of spiritual truths, at times an exact projection, at others an approximate one. And its task is not to report bare facts, but to impart true teaching.
For all that, genuine inspired writings do exist, since one of the channels between the divine and the human worlds is precisely pure inspiration, divine prompting, the gift of the seer. How does the one who has gone astray explain this? To suit his own taste. Yet inspired writing, and myth in general, is no lie, but the primal image of divine truth, embodied in the mystery. Intuition is the power that discovers and creates in thought, while expression in language is the power that makes criticism possible, that checks and secures the truth. As much of an inspired vision as can be put into words and handed on, the mystics do strive to convey. But surely they have heeded – even without knowing it – the counsel that he who knows ten things should teach only nine. What is more, with regard to mystical writings, teachings and truths, an effective security system is at work: like the open secret, even a teaching set down in words remains invisible and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Keeping silent is the guardian of secrets…