. . . I didn't quite have the words yet. I had the feeling, but I couldn't explain it. If I tried to put the experience into words, I would probably diminish it. So, for the moment, I let myself just feel it and I would worry about communicating it later. Foreman said that worrying about the communication becomes rehearsal for a performance, and communication isn't about performance, it's about transmission of information and experience.
But the one thing I was sure of was that this was part of the Training.
We hadn't been abandoned.
Every day the room had been set up differently, and there was a purpose for that. Foreman didn't do anything without there being a purpose behind it. Therefore, the room had been set up differently every day for us to become accustomed to a daily alteration in the environment. We had been learning/experiencing a paradigm about the room.
The fact that today the room was not set up at all was not a sign that the Training had broken down-no, it was the next part of the Training.
This was another way to set up the room for the trainees: having it not set up at all!
Why?
I felt like I was almost there. We were almost through with the sweeping.
So we could set it up ourselves.
I emptied the last bit of dirt and dust into the trash and stashed the broom and dustpan back in the closet where I found them. I looked up at the others. There were seven of us here.
We were all grinning. We all knew.
We started pulling chairs out of the closet--
"Wait a minute." That was the short wiry fellow with black curly hair. He looked Pakistani. "How are we going to set them up?"
Good question. We stopped to consider.
"We're inventing this ourselves," I said. "We should invent something that represents our taking responsibility for our own training."
"Good," said the blond woman. "That makes sense."
"There shouldn't be a front and a back. Everyone should have a good view."
"Right," said the guy from Hawaii; his name was Rand. "Everybody should be equal. At least, all the chairs should be equal."
"A circle," said the woman. "A big circle."
"That sounds good," said Parent. "What do you think?" They all turned expectantly to me.
"Uh . . ." I realized something. "Why are you asking me?"
"You started the sweeping-that makes you the leader."
"Uh-uh," I said. "We're all in this together. I don't think we should have a leader. Having a leader is one of the ways we give up individual responsibility. No, this is something that has to represent all of us."
"That's why you're such a good leader," said the blond woman. I started to snap at her-then I saw her grin and realized she was joking. We laughed together.
"Okay," I said. "I like a circle. What does everyone else want?"
We all agreed. A circle. It felt right.
It didn't take that long to set up the chairs. Not with twenty of us working. And as we worked, others began to join us.
I hadn't realized how big the room really was, but it was big enough to hold a circle of nearly 500 chairs, and still have room left over.
That made me think about The Mode Training again. They knew.
They had to know.
They had to have all this space because they knew we were going to need it. They expected this.
In fact, this was very probably exactly the result they desired.
That meant they had to be watching us.
I looked up att the corneres of the room. The cameras were still in place. In fact, one of them was focused on me right now. I had no way of knowing if it was active or not, but I'd bet good money that it was. I waved at the camera and grinned.
"You do know something, don't you?" It was the worried looking woman again.
I couldn't help myself, I was still grinning. I knew she wouldn't believe me. I said, "I honestly don't know any more than you do. I'm just enjoying the joke. Okay?"
"What joke? This isn't funny!"
"Yes, it is. The whole thing is. Everything is. It's all a joke. Life's a big joke that we've played on ourselves-and we're just getting the punch line today."
She shook her head. "You're weird." And walked away.
I thought about that. She was right. I am weird. I grinned at another camera that was pointed at me and waved; then I started looking around for a seat.
Most of the seats were starting to fill up now. As we'd finished the circle, people had started to sit down. Force of habit? Peer group pressure? Herding behavior?
Or were they starting to get the joke? I didn't know.
What I did know was that we were going to have to take this one step at a time.
It was all a carefully planned process-only a process that we were inventing ourselves as we went along.
But we were supposed to invent it ourselves. That was the point.
The last few people sat down. They looked confused and uncertain, but clearly something was happening, so they sat down and waited with us.
What was happening was the last day of the Training. Only we were making it up now, because that's what we were supposed to do.
See....
Foreman had said, "You exist in modes. You shift from mode to mode to mode as you go through life. You have a parent mode, you have a child mode, you have a sexual mode, you have an aggressive mode. Each of these modes exist because at some point in your life, you discovered that you needed that mode to survive. Your personality is a collection of operating behaviors. Right now, some of you are in skeptical student mode-"
Foreman had said, "What this course is about is the transcendence of all those little modes. We're leaping out to the larger context in which those modes are created. Call it source. I know this is starting to sound like jargon; bear with me. What we're working toward here is teaching the computer to program itself.
"Your goal is to be able to create your own modes, as necessary and as appropriate. So what we're working for is a mode of no-modes, out of which you will create new modes as you need them, or want them."
Foreman had said, "What do you do when you have nothing? You create something."
Foreman had said, "Here's the point. Up till now, all your modes have been created from need. You created them because you thought they weKe linked to survival. From this moment on, you can now begin to create modes that have nothing to do With survival. You can create them because you want to create them. You choose to create them."
And now, we were choosing to create the last day of the Training. For no reason at all. There was no survival involved. Nobody had to be right. We were making it up as we went. We were making up our own training now.
That was the joke.
This is the way we lived our lives. We didn't know we could make it up the way we wanted. Instead we went through life doing what we thought we had to do-and hating ourselves for being trapped. And that was a choice too, just like this was a choice. But this was a much better choice.
Sitting in a room with 500 people who used to be strangers, grinning at each other and giggling.
We must have looked like idiots.
An outsider would have thought we were crazy. It was loony day at the asylum. Let's all sit in a circle and giggle and laugh and make faces at each other.
The laughter started to build, started to roll around the room in waves. We were all getting the joke now. We sat and looked at each other and felt good about ourselves and what we had all gone through. We were family.
We were the human family.
There weren't any outsiders any more.
It was a remarkable sensation, to finally belong to something; and that something was everything.
After the laughter died down, there was a brief period of uncomfortableness. We all looked at each other.
Okay. What happens next?
A woman stood up. She spoke with embarrassment, but her face was glowing. "I just wanted to say thank you to everybody. You're all wonderful."