There must have been some reason why he woke up in the middle of the night, but he couldn't figure out what it was or get back to sleep. He recalled an experience similar to Dancer's that he had soon after meeting Patron and Guide.
When Ogi first started visiting Patron's head office as part of his work with the foundation, Dancer had already been working for them for three years. Even then, Patron had impressed him as being quite extraordinary.
At first Patron didn't talk directly to Ogi, so it fell to Guide to explain religious matters to him whenever he had questions. Ogi's questions weren't ones he'd been musing over for a long time, just things he burst out with. Later he found it strange that he'd even said such things. And even stranger was the way Guide answered his questions so painstakingly. At any rate, their talks were less dialogues than lectures.
They began like this. One day Guide appeared in the main house car- rying two LP records, explaining that the new sound system in the annex only handled CDs. Dancer had gone out with Patron to the barbershop, and Ogi was to watch things at home while they were away. Guide listened to his two records, one after another, both performances of the same Mozart sym- phony--number 40 with Bruno Walter conducting-in one case the Berlin Philharmonic, the other the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Ogi asked him if the two performances were very different, to which Guide replied in a rather curt way that they were both recordings of Walter in his final years and of course they weren't the same, but you couldn't say they were all that differ- ent, either.
Ogi suddenly felt like asking a question that had popped into his mind many times after he'd begun his regular visits to Patron's office. Guide was sitting silently at a right angle to him, and Ogi was distinctly uncomfortable at his sitting there right in front of him. He may well have been influenced by hearing the subtle shades of difference in the two versions of the Mozart symphony by the same conductor, though he couldn't exactly put into words how this affected him.
"In your faith," he finally managed to ask, "what is salvation?"
Guide's response was no longer abrupt; he weighed each word carefully.
"When I'm asked whether I have a clear notion of salvation, I can't say that I do. Some days I feel the need for salvation very strongly, only to find that the next day I'm not so worked up about it. It's as if the weight of my heart seeking salvation makes me sink to the bottom of a tank of water. And then I rise again to break the surface. When this happens, I think that yester- day my desire for salvation was such that my mind and body were wrenched by it, yet here I am today, so calm. Doesn't this sense of calm, though, arise from the knowledge that my strong conviction that I will reach salvation is proof that indeed I will?
"I suffer sometimes, writhing in pain with the need for salvation. And because of this, I don't want to try to reach some rushed, clumsy, stillborn version. I just believe that I'm on the road to salvation and carry on from there."
"What does it feel like, to need salvation so much that you're in agony?"
Ogi asked.
Guide lifted his head and gazed at Ogi, the look in his eyes half serious, half amused. His expression oozed sincerity. What he was about to say spoke to the core of his being, and Ogi could see in him the selfless, caring teacher of old.
"This is just based on my experience," Guide began, letting his head hang again. "There comes a time in a person's life when he feels the unity of his self disintegrate and realizes he can't go on living this way. You start life as an organism that knows nothing, and when you reach a certain age (for me, it was when I was past thirty), the glue that holds you together comes undone and you have no clue how to put yourself back together. And before long you die like this, broken in bits, and that's the end of you. It's no differ- ent from a bug's life, I thought, and I suffered knowing this. Now when I think of it, though, comparing myself to a bug was bit arrogant on my part.
"You find yourself seeking salvation, and though this desire isn't always right there on the surface it never dies out and remains deep down inside you.
Just when I was feeling this way, another crisis occurred in my life and I hap- pened to run across Patron. When I began working with him later on, though it didn't take me to salvation, I did find the agony of feeling my mind and body being dismembered was, to a certain extent, alleviated.
"As time passed, I became a little independent of Patron and formed my own sect within the church. This became the reason he and I were driven to the point of doing the Somersault. Now it's just the two of us. But if you ask whether meeting Patron and having gone through hardships with him has made me reach salvation, the answer is no, it did not.
"Here you need to understand that in some basic sense Patron, too, is split in two. At one extreme there's the Patron who has mystical experiences.
Before the Somersault I helped him relate the visions he had as part of this. I clung to both of these extremes in turn.
"He'd go over to the other side, and make a connection with God quite smoothly, but those mystical experiences were, for Patron, such a trial that it was painful to be beside him and see how much it took out of him. My role was to transmit the experiences he described in that condition, and I became his closest companion.
"Once he overcame his exhaustion, though, he'd begin to consider God on his own. This was the other extreme-the fact that he didn't think of God in personified terms-which again led to suffering. I said to him, 'But you've come face-to-face with God, haven't you? You go over to the other side, and you receive your visions from something that can only be called God. Never once as I've worked as your translator have I doubted that.' But Patron was unable to agree with my words of encouragement.
"Patron enters a deep trance where he's swept away to the other side and, through this experience that's completely out of his hands, he's with God. But once he returns to this side and his mind and spirit are back under his control and he regains his identity, he insists that the personified God he'd pictured all these years is not the way things really are. And I think he suffers mightily because of it.
"Before long Patron began to think the following ideas, which formed his basic teachings before the Somersault. 'God is in the world. If that weren't true,' he explained, 'the whole world would be as scattered and pointless as the pain you feel tells you it is. Imagine another Earth existing on the outer reaches of the solar system,' he said, 'or maybe beyond the Milky Way. A world where God does not exist. Everything on that planet is in pieces, so much so that even if human beings appeared and evolved, they wouldn't be able to maintain their civilization for many centuries. Human beings would be scat- tered and die out, and the world would be bereft of people. Whether this is a kind of wilderness-as-hell or a paradise for creatures other than man, I don't know… '"On our planet, mankind hasn't self-destructed but somehow contin- ues to cling precariously to life. Somehow or other order is maintained, and it's hard to deny that this is because of God's presence. Millions of people- Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists-have personified this God, but I don't see God this way. Though I do want to construct a theory about this God who most definitely does exist.' This is what Patron said.
'"Wide awake on this side,' Patron continued, 'I want to find out exactly what it is I confront when I go over to the other side. Once I get a clear picture of this, the world shouldn't be in pieces for me anymore. Since this convic- tion that the world is not in pieces is something I've created on this side, with my eyes open, I can feel relieved about it. Once I can grasp that sense of relief, my awakened spirit can put in proper perspective the God I see in my vi- sions-and this should lead to a deep and profound sense of spiritual peace I can experience in both worlds. But if I die before I can attain that peace, then I'll be torn between the two worlds and my disintegrated body and soul will flutter down into the abyss.'