A Rage for Revenge

"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?"

122DAVID 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.