A Rage for Revenge watc-3

by David Gerrold

  And then we were birds, gliding above the trees. We sailed on the currents. We watched our leader and sailed with him. We caught the updrafts and rose lazily. We circled and dove. We wheeled and coursed across the blue and white ocean of air.

  And then we were water. It was cold and we were snowflakes drifting softly onto the grass. We tumbled gently down, one on top the other. We melted where we fell. We rolled into each other, we became one another.

  And finally, we were monkeys, naked and squatting and bouncing and making monkey noises at each other. We huddled together against the night: There was no language except pats and grunts. Words hadn't been invented yet. We were apes again. We were animals, being animals. The puppies were already curling up and falling asleep. Two of the monkeys had begun to quietly copulate. The female was old enough to be thick in the waist. She had pendulous breasts. The male was an adolescent. He mounted her eagerly and enthusiastically. I watched in appreciation.

  I was sitting next to a young female with large breasts. I reached over and patted her. She patted me back. We nuzzled. It was nice. I thought about mating with her. It would have been nice. I patted her some more. I started touching her breasts. She laughed and pushed my monkey-hands away. I shrugged and turned and looked at what was happening on the other side of the cluster. The tall monkey, our leader, was making sounds. Oh, he was inventing words. "All right, now, it's time to come back. Let's invent centuries. Let's invent a lot of them. Let's invent this one, the twenty-first one. Let's invent human beings. Let's be human beings for a while."

  I looked around. We were a group of naked human beings sitting on the grass. Some of us were too fat or too skinny. Some of us were dirty. Some of us looked unkempt. A boy with pimples on his ass was pumping away at an older woman who had no shame. I felt embarrassed. I invented embarrassment.

  I didn't like being human. I wanted to go back to being an ape. I stood up and shared it. Everybody laughed and applauded. Jason grinned proudly. "You see what happened. You went back into your judgments, your attitudes and opinions-and it automatically separated you from the rest of your family. So, what's more real: the experience of the monkey colony or the judgment about this group of human beings?"

  "They're both real," I said. "Aren't they?"

  "Inside your head, yes," he said. "But one is experience and one is the story you made up about your experience. Which gave you the most satisfaction?"

  "The experience."

  "Right. Judgments and beliefs do not produce satisfaction. So, I want you to notice, Jim, that what we are here is a colony of monkeys who have invented language and technology and a whole bunch of other stuff, including judgments and beliefs. Now, we have the choice to stay true to our experience or get lost in the machinery of our inventions. What do you want to do?"

  "I think I'll be a monkey." I jumped up and down and scratched my side and made grunty noises through my nose to emphasize the point.

  Jason laughed and led the applause. I sat down, satisfied. "That's perfect," he said. "That's a perfect example of the point I want to make here. Experience produces transformation. Look at Jim's face. He's not the same person. See the aliveness there? The self that is home is now more available to us." They cheered and applauded and I felt good.

  "That's a transformation, Jim-and you can feel it, can't you?" I nodded enthusiastically.

  "So, you see: the experience of yourself playing, creating yourself-that's the experience of yourself as cause. You have each of you now experienced yourself as the source of your own experience. That experience of source is that source of transformation. Is there anyone who doesn't get that? Because we need to talk about transformation, and until you are clear about the source of it, we can't go on.

  "So, here's the abstract. Experience of self as source produces transformation. That's how you can create your own transformations all day long. When you are the source of the experiences you create, you are the source of your transformation, and you can create any transformations you want.

  "Now. Let's talk about creation for a moment. Is there any way to control creation? In one sense, no. You can't start it. You can't stop it. You are always creating-until you stop. And when you stop, you also stop doing everything else too. We have a technical term for someone who has stopped creating. We call him a corpse.

  "But what you do have control over is what you create. You can create joy and enthusiasm every bit as easily as you create misery and despair. But most of you are experts in misery and despair and you've made it up that joy and enthusiasm are beyond your reach. Something has to happen outside you before you can have joy and enthusiasm. You say that, so you can be happy being miserable and depressed.

  "Listen," Jason said. He was totally alive and on fire now, "You are creating even when you don't know it-and that's unconscious creation, and that's creation that's separated from source. Get to your source and transformation follows naturally. It is a natural condition. It's the natural function of experience, to transform, transform, transform-and that's how you live at the extraordinary level.

  "Look, people: I'm talking about the quality of your lives. You can be like the unawakened-the people out there-or you can be like gods. Gods are responsible. Gods are sources. When you forget who you are, you know what happens? You sink. You stop transforming. You go southward!" He pointed down. "Toward anger, grief, and despair, right?"

  "Right!" we cheered back.

  "And when you're being responsible for what you create, you will transform yourself upward-toward joy. Right?"

  "Right!" we screamed joyously.

  "That's all there is," Jason said. "Joy and despair. And all the stations in between. You're either headed toward one or the other. You're either creating your life, or destroying it. So which do you want to do?"

  "Create it!" we whooped and hollered.

  He held up his hands to stop us. "Great," he said. "I got it!" We applauded and yelled and made monkey noises in appreciation.

  "Enough!" Jason screamed. He was laughing too. "I got it, I got it!"

  We calmed down.

  "All right. Now, we're getting to the punch line." "Yay, punch lines!" someone called.

  "We need to have a conversation about creation here. We've all just said that we want to create our lives, right? We want to create joyousness? Well, why?"

  I raised my hand. "Because it feels better."

  Everybody laughed. Jason said, "Yes, it does, Jim, but that's not all of it. You see, joy and despair are not just feelings. If this was all about our feelings, then we'd be nothing more than the victims of our own feelings. We'd do anything just to feel good. And in fact, a lot of people out there-in what we call the 'real world' . . ." Laughter at this. ". . . function in exactly that way. They do whatever they have to just to feel good. They use their feelings to justify a lot of very selfish and shortsighted actions-like drugs for instance.

  "Let me give you the bad news. Your feelings are not really feelings. That's just the way you experience them. Your feelings are really the points on your spiritual compass. Do you know that?

  "There's a condition-we'll call it absolute truth. We can experience it as human beings. We can't always comprehend it. In fact, we can't ever comprehend it. But we can experience it. Now: what's the word for absolute truth? Anyone?"

  "God," said Frankepstein quietly.

  "That's right. God is truth. I'll give you a very simple piece of logic. It doesn't matter if there is a God or not, by the way. If there is a God, then God would be absolute truth, wouldn't she? Right. And if there is an absolute truth anywhere in the universe then it would be congruent with God. We would experience it as God, wouldn't we? So when we have an experience of absolute truth, it's also an experience of God, isn't it?"

  I found myself nodding in agreement. It all made perfect sense to me.

  Jason went on. "And whether God exists or not doesn't matter, because in that moment, in our own experience, we are creating God, aren't we?"

  12
2DAVID GERROLD

  I picked my jaw up and kept on listening. This was important. "Such an experience-the experience of God, of absolute truth-would be the most joyous experience possible, wouldn't it?"

  Yes, of course.

  "So, you see, your feelings, your emotions, are your barometer of your relationship with God, or with the truth. Whatever word you want to use is fine. This isn't a religion. It's a discovery. You choose how you want to experience it. You're the source of your own experience, aren't you?"

  Right.

  "So, when you are creating joy, you are moving yourself closer to God-closer to the truth. The more joyous you get, the more truth you are creating."

  People were cheering now. I wanted to cheer. I started cheering.

  "And that," Jason finished with a flourish, "is why we celebrate the Revelation! Truth is the source of joyousness. Joyousness tells us when we are getting close. Despair tells us when we are moving away. Despair is the result of a lie. It is the acknowledgment of the lie. Find the lie. Acknowledge it. Tell the truth about it. It may be confronting. It may be uncomfortable, but remember: the truth is always uncomfortable. Never mind! Tell it anyway-on the other side of the discomfort is the joy. Most of us are so afraid of being uncomfortable that we pile lie on top of lie and we can't understand why we just get more and more uncomfortable.

  "Bite the goddamn bullet and tell the truth! The more truth you tell, the more joy you'll experience. The more joy you have, the closer to truth you are. We move to truth and we create ecstasy! That is the Revelation! That is the Revelation!"

  We were all standing now, a8 cheering, all hollering, all yelling, all hugging and kissing, tears streaming down our faces. We were all joyous. It was the truth. It was a revelation. I loved Jason. He was sharing the truth and he was God.

  God, I loved him.

  There was a young man from St. Loo,

  who gave his dear sister a screw.

  Said l, with aplomb,

  "You're better than Mom."

  Said she, "That's what Dad told me too!"

  15

  Conversation with the Monster

  "The minute you start to analyze why sex feels so good, it stops feeling good and starts feeling silly."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  Each night, I slept with a different person, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man. Sometimes an adult, sometimes a child. Sometimes we had sex, sometimes we didn't. There were no secrets. We were supposed to share ourselves totally.

  If there was ever a question about it, the answer was, "Jason says we should, so we can find out how we feel about it." That didn't always make sense to me, but it was something I couldn't question either. It was clear to me that Jason was doing something right and I wanted to know what that something was.

  I guessed I wanted to be a lot like him. Respected. Understanding. Compassionate. In control. Loved.

  And something else.

  Jason had a way of looking at things, looking underneath them or inside them-or maybe from another dimension. Jason said that he wasn't just looking at the thing, he was looking at the context around it as well. "Look at what's happening, Jim. Not what you think i§;happening, but what's happening. The way people behave demonstrates what game they think they have to play to win. Most people play to win, not to play; that's why they're not having any fun."

  Right. That was me.

  Jason spoke with a level of insight and certainty that was terrifying. I felt blind by comparison-and very jealous of his skill-and at the same time grateful that I was being allowed to learn from him.

  So, if Jason said, "Go ahead. Do it. Find out why it makes you uncomfortable. Find out why you're afraid of it," we did it. So, when Jason told us to go naked, I went naked. And learned about clothes. And when Jason told us to trade clothes with each other, I traded clothes with Sally for a week. And learned about nudity. And when Jason told us to sleep with each other. . . . Jason said I was afraid to let people love me, so I held them at arm's length with a combination of belligerence so they wouldn't see who was really inside, and self-pity when they did. Jason said that I was a racketeer, a snake, and a rip-off artist; I was cheating the people around me by not letting them discover how wonderful I really was and how much love I really had to offer. I wanted that to be true, so I followed his instructions.

  I wondered if Jesus had been like this. The real Jesus, not the one in the fairy tales. If he had been, I could understand how all those religions grew up around him.

  There were no marriages here. Marriages were from the old system. "That kind of pair-bonding," said Jason, "is invalid in the game we're playing now. It works against the cohesiveness of the Tribe. For the Tribe to be a unit, we must be each and every one of us bound to each and every one of us."

  As the days passed, I began to see what he was talking about. Living with the Tribe was the chance to step outside of that other agreement-the one called The United States of Americaand experience a very different agreement. It became the opportunity to discover how much of my thinking was really me, and how much of it had actually been the culture I had been immersed in expressing itself through me. A startling realization, that one. And very uncomfortable. It hurt to find out how much of what I thought was me really wasn't anyone I knew at all. I hadn't made those agreements, but they were there in my head anyway.

  "Those agreements could be you," Jason said. "If you want them, own them. But consider what the cost of those agreements will be. Consider what you will have to pay for the privilege of owning those agreements. How much of your aliveness will you have to give up? Do you really want to be an American, Jim? I don't think so.

  "You say that you want to be that thing that you think an American is supposed to be. But you don't really know what that is, do you? What is an American, Jim? No, don't play the tape. I've heard it. I helped write it. See, you've bought into a reality that's impossible to succeed in. You hold this idealized image ahead of you like a donkey holding his own carrot in front of his nose. You keep it out of reach and won't ever let yourself have it. You'll only let yourself have just enough of what you want to be miserable. You and I both know it.

  "What you really want, Jim, is larger than any nationality. You've got a whole bunch of words connected to it, like God and brotherhood and freedom and justice and peace and love-but you don't really know what's at the center or how to get there. You just keep flubbering along in all directions at once, hoping you'll stumble into it.

  "The only part of it, Jim, that any of us can ever get right is that we can recognize that place when we do find it. But the only way to recognize it is to stop trying to fit it into our pictures of the way we think it has to be. You have to let go of what you know to find out what you don't know. So, let go, Jim, and find out what's available here."

  Jason was right.

  There was something going on here. I had never experienced a context of such total love before. I had never experienced a society of human beings that was as nonjudgmental as this one. Anywhere else in the world, you were reviled for being different. Here you were applauded for taking the chance, for expressing yourself. Think of it this way. Silliness is an art form. And there are no experts in it.

  You have to invent it fresh every day. It was a startling discovery.

  I loved it.

  And I discovered. . . .

  Look, you take a person out of one set of agreements and drop him in another and then another and another, and it's like washing a dish. The agreements become transitory; you get to see the person underneath much more clearly. And once you can recognize the transitory nature of cultural agreements, you're free to reinvent those agreements in your culture that support you in the results you really want to produce.

  Myself, I began to see how I had been trapped inside the whole military mind-set.

  Old news: The mind is a computer program. Part of the program is hard-wired into the cortex; the rest is self-programmed, starting just about the time daddy rolls off mommy an
d falls asleep.

  There's no instruction book. Baby has to figure it out without help.

  And you wonder why we're all so screwed up?

  Most of us can't even communicate with each other clearly. You don't hear what I'm saying, you hear what you think you hear. I hear what I think I hear. And then we bludgeon each other to death for our misunderstandings. And because we've all worked so hard to program ourselves, we're convinced we're programmed right and everyone else is wrong.

  No wonder most of life is one long argument.

  Jason said, "What we're doing here is tuning. We all have to agree on the language we're using, we have to learn how to hear what we're really speaking. We have to agree on our larger purposes. We have to, each and every one of us, willingly be a part of the larger whole."

  We were taking a stroll around the perimeter of the camp. Jason took a meditative walk every afternoon. It was a privilege to be invited to accompany him. Today, he had asked me. Usually, it was an honor. Today it wasn't. At least, I didn't think it was. I'd done something terrible.

  Everybody knew.

  And now I was going to find out what happened when you did something terrible.

  Orrie followed thoughtfully behind, stopping occasionally to chew on a tree or examine a bush. Jason would turn around and study Orrie, or sometimes just admire him. He was filling out beautifully. Sometimes, you could hear him singing all over camp.

  It made me feel ashamed.

  I wasn't worthy of this attention. And at the same time, I was angry. He didn't have the right to punish me. I hadn't done anything wrong.

  "Jim." Jason put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to him. "What are you afraid of?"

  "Nothing. "

  "That's your military mind again, Jim. Now talk to me honestly. Do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?" I'd had a tantrum yesterday and had refused to attend the circle. It didn't matter what the tantrum had been about. What mattered was the fact that I had been unkind to Ray and Marcie and Valerie. I shook my head. "No." I stared at the ground.