One of the most important aspects of any esoteric teaching is that the same statement may have two or more quite different meanings – factual and allegorical, exoteric and esoteric – and may reveal different layers of meaning at different levels of learning. This explains the outsider’s impression of the apparent wilful contradictions of, for example, the eleventh-century esoteric Ismaili school in Cairo, or its adaptation in the Assassins, where at each level of initiation the student discovered that what he had learned at the previous level was false.
– A Brief History of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of Our Desire for Secret Knowledge (1997), p. 267
Seems to apply to many operations of the magician State just as well.