Lizard was standing there laughing, so were the waiters. I squished and squelched out of the pool toward them. "Shit! I don't care if you are a colonel, Lizard! There are some things that you just don't do!"
"Oh, are you pissed?" she asked.
"You bet your rosy-cheeked freckled ass I am!" I bellowed at her. "I'm so fucking angry I could-"
"How angry are you?" she demanded. "Show me."
Something snapped then. Something happened. I exploded. My rage filled my entire body. I began to scream. I began to bring up great howling gasps of breath. I took in great gulps of air and turned them into gutteral roars. I could feel the muscles of my face stretched into a rictus of terror. I could feel the muscles of my arms and legs tensing as if I were pushing against the weight of the entire universe. I pushed against my own rage and pushed it out of my body and out against Lizard and beyond her, out against the walls of the hotel. I could see them shattering before my screams. I pushed my rage out into the entire universe. I was hoarse with roaring.
And then I collapsed wetly to my knees in a sodden heap, gasping, sobbing out of breath.
I looked up to applause. "Huh?"
I was surrounded by a crowd of grinning appreciative people, some in uniform, some not. They were applauding and cheering. "Good job! Congratulations! Go for it!"
Lizard was offering me a hand to help me up. I took it and pulled myself up weakly. I looked at Lizard-she was beaming-then I pulled her into my arms. If I was going to be wet, so was she. I grabbed her and kissed her hard.
I wasn't surprised when she kissed me back, only by the intensity.
"That isn't the usual response," she said. "But it'll do."
64
Acceptance
"All life is barriers. All growth is the transcendence of barriers. It's the dividing line that makes everything possible. Without it, there's nothing but soup."
-SOLOMON SHORT
-and that was a curious thing.
In the middle of dying, we stopped for dinner.
I remember eating. I remember that people were willing to give me anything I wanted. I could have had every dessert in the room. I didn't want.
Curiously, food had become irrelevant. There was something else happening. . . .
After dinner, I resumed my place on the platform without any emotion that I could name.
I mean, I was feeling something, but it was something I had never felt before in my life. If I had to put a word to it, perhaps I'd call it peace. If you can believe that.
I was going to die.
And it didn't bother me any more.
Foreman had brought me through denial and anger, bargaining and depression, and now I had reached a place that he called accptance and I called peace.
How very very odd.
Was this what he meant by enlightenment?
Was this the thing he was talking about that existed on the other side of survival?
I didn't care. The explanation didn't matter. I didn't have to think about this at all. I could simply sit and watch and appreciate and experience whatever happened anywhere around me.
This is what peace feels like.
First of all, everything in the world-and I mean, everything is fascinating. You can see how things fit together. You can see things as if they are illuminated by an interior presence. Everything seems to glow with its own energy. People in particular-you can almost see what they're thinking. And when they speak, you can hear what they mean; and when you speak back to them, they turn to you with light in their eyes and listen to what you're saying. They truly listen.
This is what peace feels like.
It feels like being connected to everything in the universe, everything at once. Foreman and Lizard and the sky and the grass-and even the worms. How very curious. Even the worms. It's like the worm song.
It's a feeling I wish I could share.
And that's the only thing wrong with peace. You can't share it. You can't give it away. You can't even talk about it or they'll think you're crazy. For some reason, that thought was terribly funny. I was still giggling as I headed back into the training room.
Foreman looked at me-when I climbed back up to the platform and he nodded thoughtfully. I recognized the nod. It was his acknowledgment that something had happened.
"You can see it, can't you?" I asked.
"The whole world can see it, Jim. You're wearing a silly beatific expression on your face." He sat me down in the chair and began speaking quietly to me. "Jim, you don't look like a man who's going to die. Someone to whom this training is a totally alien experience would look at you and wonder. They'd think you're crazy; because where you are is light years beyond what most people call normal.
"I want to talk to you now about what's on the other side of survival. Do you want to know about it?"
I nodded. Yes, tell me.
"You think it's a feeling of joy or peacefulness, don't you?" Nod.
"It's not. That feeling-and I can see that you're feeling it now; the whole room can see it-that feeling is only a very small part of what I'm talking about.
"What is beyond survival, Jim, is service. Contribution. Doing something for someone else, for no other reason than to make a difference for them. Without thought of acknowledgment or reward. Without the thought of personal advantage or gain. "Service is a quality that is beyond most people on the planet. They don't even know what the word means. Most people, when they talk about service, they're talking about what they expect from others; they're talking about what they think they have a right to, or what they think they've paid for. Most people on this planet never think of service as something that they themselves might be capable of, let alone be responsible for providing. Why? Because most people don't hear the word service; they hear the word servant; and they think that to be a servant is to be at the lowest state.
"I say that service is the highest state-that there is no greater thing that you can do than serve your fellow beings. By serving, I mean doing things which benefit others, and doing them without regard for your own concerns. And I'm not talking about stopping what you're doing to become some kind of a monk or a nun. I'm talking about an operating context, where you do what you're doing not for your own good, but to produce a result for others. I'm talking about the difference between merely going through the motions and actually making a difference.
"Let me give you an example. The technicians who ready your equipment for you before you go out on a mission; they're not simply serving you, they're serving the mission. And service is a two-way street. You can serve them by making sure that they share the victory, that they know that you got the job done because the equipment worked. That contributes to their pride in the job.
"Service-" said Foreman, "comes from being clear about the larger goal and committing to that goal, first and foremost. The goal for the Core Group is a simple one: design the future of humanity. Do you see the incredible responsibility of that goal? We will not simply let the future happen to us; we will be the source, the cause of our own destiny. By the way, do you get the joke? We have to make sure that humanity survives. Yes, survival is part of service too. It's part of everything. But do you see that service is larger than survival?
"We are at service to all of humanity. That's the core of the Core Group. Our charter says that our job is to create the future. Anyone who wants to be part of the Core Group can be-if you're ready to be of service to an entire planet. That's what this training is all about.