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.

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.

"Those agreements could be you," Jason said. "If you want them, own them. But consider what the cost of those agreements will be. Consider what you will have to pay for the privilege of owning those agreements. How much of your aliveness will you have to give up? Do you really want to be an American, Jim? I don't think so.

"You say that you want to be that thing that you think an American is supposed to be. But you don't really know what that is, do you? What is an American, Jim? No, don't play the tape. I've heard it. I helped write it. See, you've bought into a reality that's impossible to succeed in. You hold this idealized image ahead of you like a donkey holding his own carrot in front of his nose. You keep it out of reach and won't ever let yourself have it. You'll only let yourself have just enough of what you want to be miserable. You and I both know it.

"What you really want, Jim, is larger than any nationality. You've got a whole bunch of words connected to it, like God and brotherhood and freedom and justice and peace and love-but you don't really know what's at the center or how to get there. You just keep flubbering along in all directions at once, hoping you'll stumble into it.

"The only part of it, Jim, that any of us can ever get right is that we can recognize that place when we do find it. But the only way to recognize it is to stop trying to fit it into our pictures of the way we think it has to be. You have to let go of what you know to find out what you don't know. So, let go, Jim, and find out what's available here."

Jason was right.

There was something going on here. I had never experienced a context of such total love before. I had never experienced a society of human beings that was as nonjudgmental as this one. Anywhere else in the world, you were reviled for being different. Here you were applauded for taking the chance, for expressing yourself. Think of it this way. Silliness is an art form. And there are no experts in it.

You have to invent it fresh every day. It was a startling discovery.

I loved it.

And I discovered. . . .

Look, you take a person out of one set of agreements and drop him in another and then another and another, and it's like washing a dish. The agreements become transitory; you get to see the person underneath much more clearly. And once you can recognize the transitory nature of cultural agreements, you're free to reinvent those agreements in your culture that support you in the results you really want to produce.

Myself, I began to see how I had been trapped inside the whole military mind-set.

Old news: The mind is a computer program. Part of the program is hard-wired into the cortex; the rest is self-programmed, starting just about the time daddy rolls off mommy and falls asleep.

There's no instruction book. Baby has to figure it out without help.

And you wonder why we're all so screwed up?

Most of us can't even communicate with each other clearly. You don't hear what I'm saying, you hear what you think you hear. I hear what I think I hear. And then we bludgeon each other to death for our misunderstandings. And because we've all worked so hard to program ourselves, we're convinced we're programmed right and everyone else is wrong.

No wonder most of life is one long argument.

Jason said, "What we're doing here is tuning. We all have to agree on the language we're using, we have to learn how to hear what we're really speaking. We have to agree on our larger purposes. We have to, each and every one of us, willingly be a part of the larger whole."

We were taking a stroll around the perimeter of the camp. Jason took a meditative walk every afternoon. It was a privilege to be invited to accompany him. Today, he had asked me. Usually, it was an honor. Today it wasn't. At least, I didn't think it was. I'd done something terrible.