by Josh Emmons
Put this way, the movement against PASE seemed even smaller-minded and more troubling. Were people really so hypocritical? So ready to condemn others for normal behavior? What had happened to live and let live?
“This raises an interesting question,” Mr. Ortega said, “which is this: Why do our attackers themselves live so subserviently? Rather than to improve as human beings, they conform in order to pay their mortgage and go to Disneyworld once a year, and save up for the medical bills that are going to weigh heavier than a coffin lid on their corpse. And to have something to do with their time that prevents their feeling like deadbeats or social pariahs. And to scrape together status in their community so they can someday sit on the board of this company and the steering committee of that social club. To me, this is far more objectionable than what we’re doing.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to rant, but Monsieur Pissoud’s speech gets me mad in a hundred ways. By now, seventeen years after PASE first unveiled its message of truth and improvement and synergy with UR God, you’d think that he and those who share his tired prejudices would have learned that there is nothing puritan about PASE. We don’t talk about sex more than any other desire. And even if we did I’d have to ask whether that would be so extraordinary. The Shakers banned sex just because it was sex. Catholic and Buddhist monks and nuns are abstinent, as are priests and holy people of nearly every major religion. Millions of Christians believe sex is good only for reproduction, and they’ll often resist admitting even that.
“If you want to apply logic to it, as certain Frenchmen and other unimaginative rationalists do, why not ask if PASE’s prohibition of sex is any more senseless and arbitrary than that against eating pork in Islam or Judaism? Or against eating beef in Hinduism? For that matter, why are women prohibited from baring their breasts in public? Why can’t someone be married to more than one person? Why can’t two homosexuals be married, period? Why is alcohol legal and marijuana not? I don’t ask these rhetorical legal questions for an answer but to point out, as I did yesterday, that every belief system incorporates taboos and sets aside words and objects and actions that it deems off-limits. PASE, as the ultimate true belief system, is no different, and I am losing patience with people who criticize it on those or any other grounds. It’s time for the religious chauvinists to end their campaign against us.”
Mr. Ortega stared through the window as though a mob were about to collect on the lawn and demand that we all come out for a reckoning. Although I would have liked to pose a challenging question to him, as I had on previous days, so that he would compliment me on my inquisitive nature, none came to mind. I looked at him and felt an equal indignation toward Monsieur Pissoud and the other PASE naysayers. I saw the parallels between how corporate citizens and Pasers behaved, and I knew that to condemn one and not the other was bigotry. I thought about the accident of time that caused people in the dominant Christian tradition to consider their own idiosyncratic rituals to be normal and safe and noble, whereas, had the clock been turned back nineteen hundred years, these same people would have been imprisoned or murdered for their beliefs.
I said, “Besides Monsieur Pissoud, who is working against PASE?”
Alastair blew his nose and said, “I met people at home who were anti-PASE. A woman said to me just before I came over that I may as well commit myself to Bedlam as check into the Center. She laughed at me and this was after I’d given her my seat on the tube.”
“That’s how they return kindnesses,” averred Mr. Ortega. “The mellower ones are likely to try having you declared mentally incompetent so they can remove your children from your care. It happened to my friend Salvatore. His ex-wife filed a court order to obtain full custody of their twin girls when he converted to PASE. She failed because the judge was a wise man, but that’s the sort of thing we’re up against. And people like Salvatore’s ex are, as I said, the mellower ones. The more militant anti-PASE activists, members of what we call the religious gestapo, are determined to wipe out PASE altogether. These people, and may you never come into contact with them, aren’t above anything: character assassination, evidence planting, terrorist bombing. In the past they’ve spread lies about Montgomery Shoale, left caches of weapons at PASE buildings and then sent anonymous tips to the police, and hidden explosives at facilitators’ homes.”
“Why do they do it?” I asked.
“The short answer is that they’re sick. Maybe their mothers didn’t love them. Maybe they haven’t got any friends. I personally suspect it’s because they recognize the truth of PASE and haven’t the strength or the willpower to do what it takes to become an ursavant; they figure that if they can’t fuse into UR God, no one else should be able to, either.”
“It’s like the kid whose ice-cream cone falls to the ground and so he tries to knock yours down,” said Tonya.
Mr. Ortega leaned forward and signaled for us all to do the same. “But don’t worry. No one can erase the truth or make it not the truth by slandering it or blowing things up. It’s inside you. Make no mistake: By following Prescription for a Superior Existence you will become a part of UR God, and all the gestapo operatives in the world won’t be able to stop you. I know this is an unusual class period. We’re supposed to be discussing The Prescription and instead I’ve railed against faceless enemies, but it’s important that you understand the challenges we face as Pasers, that you see how we will meet and overcome them. Life is always hardest for people with convictions. Those who are weak hate the strong.”
He leaned back in his chair and everyone rose and I fought off the adenoidal tug of tears.
During the research period, without thinking about its political value or scoring points with Ms. Anderson and the other facilitators, I joined the discussion group with Paul, Daytona, Shang-lee, and Rema. We arranged our chairs in a circle and Paul suggested that anyone who wanted should begin.
After a cursory pause, Daytona, a twenty-two-year-old doe-eyed alcoholic from Daytona Beach—when choosing her name her parents “were not imaginary”—said she may as well go first. Becoming a savant was so hard. Giving up booze would alienate her from her best friends, make meeting new people impossible, deprive her of a stress reliever, and leave her to fry in the anxiety that sometimes heated up within her. She understood and respected the PASE mission, but she wasn’t sure she could achieve it.
“Drinking is what I do,” she said, fingercombing her long blond hair. “I can’t be around other people without it. Not to mention that no one likes the sober person in the room.”
Paul said, “It’s the same with heroin.”
“You’re around us now and you’re doing fine,” I said.
“That’s because we’re all here for the same reason. We have the same goal to become a savant.”
“When you go home, find other Pasers to be around,” I said, remembering a talk show that had given this advice to a similarly whingy young man trying to escape the party scene. “At least for a while, don’t spend time with your old friends.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry if they interpret your change as a negative commentary on their lives, because they’ll still be the same and they’ll want you to be like you used to be.”
“Yeah.”
“Remaining the same forever is not in the nature of the order of things.”
“Yeah.”
“And forgive yourself.”
“What?”
I couldn’t think of what else the talk show had said, so I switched to The Prescription. “I won’t guess all your reasons for drinking, but I’ll bet the primary one was to overcome insecurity. Forgive yourself, because now you know the truth of PASE, that insecurity is as irrelevant and superannuated as teenage acne. You’re courting the favor of UR God, not some group of lost boys and gaga girls.”
She buffed her fingernails on her knees. “I’m fine with that now since I’m three thousand miles away, but back at home everything might get confusing.”
“It won’t, beca
use your determination to stay sober and become an ur-savant is stronger than any situational difficulty you’ll face. Just remember what we learned in class—our body isn’t real or lasting or true; it changes. Even in the best of circumstances it will be gone in eighty years. Our spirit, on the other hand, is forever, and if we continue to improve it’ll fuse into the permanence of UR God.”
Shang-lee said, “Don’t think of your future behavior based on the past. The whole point of improvement is that you become superior to your old self.”
“That’s right,” I said. “A PASE pamphlet I read says it’s like driving along the highway. You might sing or clip your nails or root around for something in the backseat, but when you come to a bridge and the road narrows you need to forget your distractions and concentrate on where you’re going. The same thing is happening to us now as a species and as individuals; we’ve just crossed onto a bridge and have to get to the other side.”
When the research period ended I told Paul how helpful I’d found the meeting and how oftentimes we discover our thoughts by listening to ourselves speak. He agreed and I felt a pang of guilt, because I saw in his face the purpose and intention to find and apply PASE’s meaning to his own back-alley life. I saw that for him improvement was not a choice; it was an imperative. He had to turn around and go back to the highway he’d left a long time ago for heroin. I felt bad about being a pretender, a posturer, for the stakes were high here, and these people deserved to be around fellow travelers who supported them and their beliefs. I had no right to talk as though I were one of them. Unless—and this was just an idea—unless I decided to be a Paser for as long as I was at the Wellness Center. It might quell whatever inner chord of uneasiness the other guests heard in my presence. Yes, if I was going to be there and do everything a Paser did, there was no reason not to accept the beliefs that go along with it for the time being. I could—would—simply drop them once back on the outside, which was bound to happen even sooner if I took this step. My behavior, no longer a performance, would be a fast track to freedom. Yes.
For recreation we were given a lump of clay, a bowl of water, a throwing wheel, and a paring knife. Ms. Bentham, who’d first recognized UR God as the subject of my painting, made frequent passes by my work, each time with a pixieish grin. I built a little house that in some ways resembled a barn, with great swinging doors, shuttered windows, a gabled roof, and a water pump. I enjoyed working with the cold thick clay; the grainy residue that collected on my hands was like a slippery cousin to the sand I’d pushed into castles when I was a child and my parents had taken me and Sid to the beach in Bolinas, evidence that building something left its mark physically as well as psychologically. When I finished my clay house, Ms. Bentham noted that it was an exact scale rendering of Montgomery Shoale’s childhood home in Wisconsin. I betrayed no surprise. It was, I seemed to say by saying nothing, part of my design.
From there I went to dinner, an eight-bean soup and nonfat plain yogurt, with Mihir, Tyrone, Shang-lee, and Tonya. Everyone seemed in better spirits than they had that morning, except for Mihir, who, holding a cheese quesadilla, was preoccupied. When Tyrone asked what was the matter, he said he was, with the Last Day approaching, increasingly concerned about how his wife would handle giving up their home and comfortable middle-class luxuries when he became a functioning savant. Of course he would press PASE on her as soon as he got home and pray to UR God for her conversion, but you could lead a horse to water and not make it drink, and there was Reality Fact #32, which he’d quoted to Warren to consider (not everyone will embrace the truth). What should he do if she took legal action to prevent his giving away their house and fortune to charity?
The question wasn’t addressed to anyone specifically, but I felt moved, as a newly self-declared Paser, to answer. “Our greatest contribution to others’ salvation is the example we set.” I took a bite of soup. “If you follow PASE your wife will be moved by the power of your sacrifice and share in it. Moral truth is unassailable and in the end irresistible. Think of your countryman Gandhi, who was told that nonviolent resistance would do nothing to expel the British occupying army. Ultimately the English left without a war because in the face of Gandhi’s actions and influence, they could no longer believe in the rightness of their colonial mission. The truth is stronger than any sophistry we invent to justify our own greed. By the time you’ve become a functioning savant your wife won’t be able to resist joining your cause, because you are a Paser and in possession of the truth, marching straight toward UR God.”
Mihir, his glasses riding low on his nose, said, “I would hate to have to divorce her in order to fulfill His prescription.”
“You won’t need to.”
“I can tell you certainly that she loves our house with such intensity it’s as though she built it herself. And the furniture and art she has spent our entire marriage selecting and arranging until it’s all just so. She can be very headstrong, very inflexible.”
“We’re conformist animals,” I said. “As a result we can be moved to good or bad based on the actions of those closest to us. People are said to resemble their pets for the same reason that they resemble their longtime spouses, because when we are in sympathy with a creature we mimic their facial expressions. When they are sad we reflect that sadness, when they’re happy or consternated or intrigued we become their mirror images because that is how we show and convey love.” I took another bite of soup. “My point is that we wield influence on people who care about us and vice versa, and by modeling your best—that is, Paser—self, you will win your wife’s backing.” I scraped the bottom of my soup bowl. “My younger brother, Sid, and I are both named in our parents’ will, which doesn’t amount to much in terms of money or property, but still, when they die, if the Last Day hasn’t yet come, I’ll donate my half to the PASE Process. I won’t tell Sid that I’m doing it—I’ll just write a check and have some movers take the things to 1152 Market Street—but once he finds out about it I expect that my donation will be doubled.”
While speaking I’d kept perfectly still, as though in imitation of a Tibetan lama, but now I scratched my stomach and rubbed my face like someone who, after disturbing a hornet’s nest, has inched free to safety. Safety? Was that the state I’d entered? My speech to Mihir, unlike the ready-made confession I’d made in counseling, had come from somewhere beyond me—from somewhere else—and I could not say just then if the reception would soothe or scorch me. It was as though after years of imagining myself to be real, I felt a tug on my arms and discovered wires extending from my elbows to the sky, and as though my voice, which I’d also thought my own, really belonged to a ventriloquist.
For the group activity we returned to the Prescription Palace to hear a concert. The musical director prefaced a performance of Shostakovich’s first string quartet by saying that enjoyment of music was almost as difficult to break as appreciation of food and water, for which reason it was allowed Pasers until they became ur-savants, and that we shouldn’t upbraid ourselves if, hearing a melody, we felt a frisson of pleasure, but that we ought to work on diminishing our response to it by actively disengaging from the music.
Afterward I slept for eight uninterrupted hours and felt no pain, and thoughts of sex were as scarce in my mind as in a newborn’s.
The next morning I sprinted like a gazelle—Mr. Israel’s comparison—across Elysian Field, outperforming my teammates in the relay competition and doing three push-ups for the others’ two. Again the weather was ideal. I ran in several races, the first against Mihir and the last against a long-legged Kenyan who at home had wrested provincial power from his best friend, a two-term governor, by murdering him, and I beat all but the Kenyan. Mr. Israel said that my natural athleticism with training could develop into “something truly sensational.” When Tonya dragged a hose over and used her thumb to create a vertical spray, I took turns with the others running through the multihued rainbow that sprang to life.
The reading period was again held out
side. I took up my spot on the bench and read chapter three, a scathing indictment of desire that named and defined each of its main varieties and then gave capsule biographies of historical personages who had responded differently to them. Gourmands like Henry VIII and Ariel Sharon sought but did not find happiness through their stomachs; consider the enlightened fasts of César Chávez and Lanza del Vasto. Captains of industry like J. P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst discovered sorrow at the bottom of their bank accounts, as opposed to the succoring poverty of Jesus and Mother Teresa. Philanderers like Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy were afflicted by their sexuality, unlike the abstemious Pope John Paul II and Moses. Julius Caesar and Napoleon were undone by their lust for power; not so Benjamin Franklin and Marcus Aurelius.
After finishing chapter three, I tried but could not find fault in its argument. Having read a number of presidential biographies lately, I knew that its point about power being a Faustian bargain for those who attained it was absolutely true. Could there be a more broken man in the end than Lyndon B. Johnson? One as depressed as Abraham Lincoln? Or anyone, president or civilian, as disgraced as Richard Nixon? The other desires, the ones for which I personally had a weakness—sex, alcohol, food, drugs, money—I thought about just long enough to bemoan their abuse. It was clear that I’d been as reckless in their pursuit as a small child trying to get cookies down from the top shelf, and that I’d been lucky not to be too badly injured.
Although I should have spent the remaining reading period time taking notes and looking contemplative, instead I read chapter four, “Fables and Parables.” It included the story I’d seen on video of the woman turning into a tree, as well as one about a man wearing sackcloth to work; a queen bequeathing her empire to a blind three-legged dog; a beggar refusing to live in a mansion; two turtles debating the best recipe for turtle soup; a lonely star waiting to supernova; a tree asking a woodsman to cut him down; and a group of children who lose their sense of smell, sight, touch, taste, and hearing, and who discover, when they are completely senseless, the meaning of life. There were other affecting tales, but something about the children made my throat and eyes burn. I closed the book and my vision blurred, and after counting to ten I opened it again but didn’t get any further before it was time for counseling.