Notebooks. Drawers. Twenty years of them, filled at his side.

I kept what I can only call our seminal thoughts. A great storehouse of memory: things said for contemplation, experiences given for use.

What he sealed was not the teaching. He taught in the open, in lectures and talks he organized systematically and held to a strict regularity. What I was forbidden to repeat was the private half of it: our own moments together, our dialogues, the exercises he gave me, and what I experienced doing them.

It looked like a contradiction to me at first. He had set the condition at the very beginning of our acquaintance.

Keeping it cost me. It was perhaps the hardest part of my apprenticeship at his side, and unquestionably the strongest battle I ever had to fight with myself, because I had always shared everything with the companions and fellow travelers of my life. That, for better or worse, is my nature.

I count it the greatest victory of my life that until now, no one knew.