"What was your teacher's secret?" a smug student of a colleague asked me the other day.
"Spirit."
Blank stare.
Spirit is in fact the only secret. In a culture and civilization that founds itself on knowledge and wealth – on building structures – cathedrals and shopping malls – spirit, which cuts through such lumbering edifices like a hot knife through butter, is the great enemy, the Devil himself. When it flares up a different world becomes possible – one we call reality – a world brimming with energy and mischief, running a contrary economy to our usual one of equivalence and exchange.