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."

We applauded.

A man on the other side of the circle stood up and he began to thank people too. And after him, another man. And then another woman. There was no order to it it wasn't necessary. You spoke when you were ready. We'd trained ourselves to function this way, with respect for each other's communications. Nobody interrupted anybody. We listened to each person and applauded, and even though it seemed to go on for a terribly long time, we stayed in our seats until everybody had had a chance to say what they had to say.

The process was called completing your communications. Foreman had told us, "Most of you go through life saying, 'Here's what I should have said.' You walk around with a bag load of unfinished conversations and you wonder why you hear voices in your head. Worse-the first chance you get to complete one of those conversations, you go for the throat. You unload all that anger or grief or fear on the first poor dumb schmuck who gets in the way instead of delivering it to the person it's really intended for. And then you wonder why your relationships are so screwed up. You're walking around delivering all your communications to the wrong people. Try it sometime. Try saying what you have to say to the person who needs to hear it. Like, 'Thank you' and 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' and see what happens-"

I hadn't expected to speak. I didn't think I had anything to say to these people. But there was a lull and people were looking at me and I guess it must have showed on my face, because I stood up and looked around and flushed embarrassedly.

"Thank you," I said. "I'm sorry," I added. "I love you."

But-we had all said this, and after a while it was all just words. It was silly to pile more words on top of words.

There was something deeper that I was feeling; an emotion of such kinship and joy and connectedness that the word for it hadn't been invented yet. The sensation was extraordinary. I didn't know how to say it to these people-so I began to applaud them.

I turned around slowly, looking from one to the next, meeting their eyes and applauding them for being so human; such a silly thing, such a pitiful thing, such a proud and courageous thingpoor little naked pink monkeys challenging the universe.

We're not worm food! We're gods!

They began to applaud with me. We all applauded. The room swelled with applause. They stood up with me. We cheered and yelled and applauded together.

The Training was over! We had won! We were taking responsibility for the destiny of our whole species-and whoever didn't want to join us in this task could stay behind and get eaten by the worms. The rest of us were going to kick some hairy purple asses! I felt terrific.

But when the applause finally died away, we were still alone in the room.

We sat down and waited.

Clearly, whoever was watching us should have recognized that we were complete. The Training was over.

Whatever we were waiting for could happen now. We waited.

After a bit, it began to sink in.

Okay, we had the spirit, but the process wasn't complete. There was something else that had to happen.

We looked around at each other. We were pleased with ourselves; we had done all the right things. We had cleaned up the room, taken out the chairs, created our own Training, completed all the incomplete communications, celebrated ourselves--

-what wasn't complete?

I remembered what Foreman had told me so many years before; at least it seemed like years: "The Training is a game, Jim, but you don't play it to win. You play it to play. And you use what you learn in this game-where there are no penalties for losing-to support you in the games you play where you can't afford to lose. The trick is, in any game, to find out what the point of the game is; then you can play for that result."

The point of this game . . .

. . . was to reinvent the future of humanity. And I realized what was incomplete.

So far, everything we'd done in here had been about ourselves. Even the way we'd set up the chairs.