Everybody knew.

And now I was going to find out what happened when you did something terrible.

Orrie followed thoughtfully behind, stopping occasionally to chew on a tree or examine a bush. Jason would turn around and study Orrie, or sometimes just admire him. He was filling out beautifully. Sometimes, you could hear him singing all over camp.

It made me feel ashamed.

I wasn't worthy of this attention. And at the same time, I was angry. He didn't have the right to punish me. I hadn't done anything wrong.

"Jim." Jason put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to him. "What are you afraid of?"

"Nothing. "

"That's your military mind again, Jim. Now talk to me honestly. Do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?" I'd had a tantrum yesterday and had refused to attend the circle. It didn't matter what the tantrum had been about. What mattered was the fact that I had been unkind to Ray and Marcie and Valerie. I shook my head. "No." I stared at the ground.

Jason put a finger under my chin and lifted my face.

"Jim, I'm not your daddy. I'm not going to punish you. That's not what we do here. Intelligent beings don't use fear and pain and punishment to motivate results. It's counterproductive. Punishment is evidence of the failure to communicate."

"Well somebody failed to communicate with me then. . . ." I stopped myself. I sounded like a bigger asshole than usual when I tried to justify myself. I shut up.

"This is not a question of right or wrong, Jim. It's a question of being appropriate to the situation. What you did was inappropriate; something happened and your mind triggered an inappropriate response. So what? Don't beat yourself up for it. We all do that. The appropriate thing to do is apologize and get on with the real job." If en took me by the elbow then and began leading me up the garden path.

"Jim," Jason began quietly. "Do you know what the condition of life for most people is? Unconsciousness. I'm not talking about coma or catatonia; I'm talking about simply not being aware. People walk around this planet in hypnotic trances. They go through the motions. They eat, they sleep, they watch TV, they make love, and they do it like they're on rails. They're unconscious to the passion in their own lives. So what happens when something disturbing happens? Your mind gives you an uncomfortable reaction, and the automatic response is fight or flight. You know what happens when you wake people up? They get angry. You get angry.

"Guess what? We're in the business of waking people up here. It's a dangerous business. You know why? Angry people use their anger as an excuse to kill. You can get blinded by your own rage and do terrible things. Or, you can learn to recognize that the rage is a signpost that you've been unconscious about something.

"Jim, when you let go of the rage, what's left is what you've been resisting. If you're willing to confront the uncomfortable things, something wonderful will happen. You'll start to experience all those things that you've been resisting so hard-anger, fear, boredom, grief-and that's when you get the joke. You find out that resisting them hurts more than experiencing them. And then they disappear. And you get larger and more alive.

"So all that uncomfortableness that you're experiencing here, Jim, shouldn't be seen as a formidable barrier, but as an exciting challenge-because on the other side of it is your own life."

I didn't answer that. What he was asking me was to stop being mad. And I thought I had a damn good reason to be mad.

I just couldn't remember what it was.

"I guess I'm having a hard time adjusting," I said. "The rest of you make it all look so easy."

Jason laughed. "You're doing fine, Jim. Really, you are. You're right on schedule. This is part of the process too. We all love you."

"I don't know how I can look anybody in the eye again. I'm so embarrassed."

"Just go up to them and hug them, that's all that's necessary. And then you can all laugh together. You'll see."

I knew he was right. These people never let any hurt last very long. But how did they get this way? Sometimes it felt like an impossible job to me.

"Jason," I asked. "You brought in three new guests last week. Obviously, you want the Tribe to grow. But toward what? What's the vision? How can I tap into it too?"

He smiled. He put his arm around my shoulder as we walked. "I don't have a vision-and I do. I know, that sounds confusing. Let me tell you, Jim, when people speak of their visions very often they're talking about the pictures that their belief systems produce. Listen to me: your standards and ideals are your ego in disguise. Your belief system is your ego in disguise. So, to talk about that kind of vision is to not talk about what's truly possible, but about the way you think it should be done. I don't have that kind of vision.

"When I talk about my vision, I'm talking about what I've seen in the Revelations. The new gods, Jim, are a message to us." He stopped and squatted to the ground to examine something. He stood up and held out his hand. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"

I looked. He was holding out a tiny red marble of a creature. It had eight tiny legs and two black eyes. I shook my head. Jason put it back on the ground carefully. "It's a Chtorran insect. Have you ever noticed what perfect little machines insects are?"

I shrugged. "Yeah. I've always been fascinated by insects. They're so alien."

"Mm-hm," he said. "They don't have any choice, do they? They're just little biological machines. Their functioning is determined by the pattern of DNA in their chromosomes, right?"

"Right."

"Have you ever noticed what perfect little machines human beings are?"

"Uh, well, biologically, yes."

"But not mentally?"

"That's a loaded question, Jason, isn't it?"

He grinned and clapped my shoulder. "Well . . . ?"

"Jason, you know this is the stuff that makes me angry. Every time you insist that my mind is a computer program, I just go crazy."

"Wrong. You don't go crazy. Your mind does. Don't get confused, Jim. You're not your mind. You're just the place where it happens. And that 'craziness' is one of the things your mind does to keep you from hearing the bad news. It's a programmed response, Jim. Your mind is a computer program that likes to insist it's not a computer program. Very boring. And not very productive either. The only difference between you and that insect is that you are a complex enough machine that you have some choice in your programming. You are a machine that programs yourself. The insect isn't. But you have to know what you are before you can be it."

We started walking again. I wasn't sure where he was going with this train of thought.

"Think about this, Jim: everything that human beings know is a product of human experience. The human machinery only knows those things about itself that the human machinery can discover. We can't know anything that we can't know. Do you follow that?"

"Just barely."

"All right, let's try it this way. Suppose you wanted to know what was on the other side of that hill, but you couldn't go there to see. What would you do to find out?"

"Um, I don't know. Look at a map?"

"You don't have a map. You're trying to make one. That's why you want to know what's on the other side of the hill. What do you do?"

"Try and figure it out?"

"You're guessing. Figuring it out is another way of making something up. You might just as well write 'Here there be Dragons' in the space. You know that's what people do when they don't know something. They make something up instead. What's the responsible thing to do when you don't know something?"

"Ask. Ask someone who knows."

"Right. You see, there's the opportunity here. We can only know what human beings can know. That means that all our gods are human gods. They are reflections of ourselves. God an this world is a mirror of our own flaws.