When he stepped out of his room, he saw people gathering toward a part of one of the buildings he had not yet seen. A meeting? A “calling”? He felt it worth exploring. “I have no other plans for the evening, anyway. I don’t think they have a theater here. What would they watch, anyway? ‘Gone With The Wind’? No, I know — with this group, probably ‘Gandhi With The Wind’!” He laughed to himself.
From behind, a gentle hand fell upon his shoulder. “I am glad you decided to join us,” the older gentleman, who seemed to be becoming his mentor, said with a smile. “It is going to be quite a wonderful time, I am sure,” he continued.
“What do you mean,” the young man asked with great curiosity, still a bit thrown from his “first-hand experience” with the writings of a perceptive bear. “I have to be utterly insane,” he whispered to himself.
“It is learning time. Please. After you,” he gestured kindly, to allow the young man to enter a large room first.
This room was unique — it had the decorations of what looked like a small theater or church. It had a high ceiling, and the walls offered a light echo to the sounds that were being made within the room. There were what looked like comfortable cushioned chairs, but they were not in a line, like pews in a church or seats in a theater. Instead, they were arranged in three semicircular rows. In the front of this semicircular arrangement was a single, slightly larger chair, facing the other chairs. “This must be for the teacher or lecturer,” he deduced. “This might be fun! A guest speaker?”
As the two of them were appearing to be the last two entering this room, the others were just sitting down, acting as if they were about to hear some great speaker — a lecturer of great wisdom, as they were full of energy and glee. The energy of the room was of a calm excitement, like the anticipation felt before a concert — knowing something great or wonderful was coming. The mentor guided him toward the seats, but there was only one seat left, and the mentor sat in that.
“Where shall I sit,” the young man asked, looking very confused, noticing that all eyes were looking at him. He was getting used to being looked at with quick, kind glimpses, but not this experience of long, focused looks. He started hearing the pounding of blood in his ears, with that feeling of knowing something is about to happen, but not knowing what that something was.
“In your seat, please,” the mentor said, motioning toward the one larger seat in the center.
“Excuse me? Now, now, now, uh, I don’t understand this. I need to wake up or something. Wha . . . what do you mean?” A feeling of panic was beginning to engulf him. An inner heat was broadcasting from his face as if it were on fire. It was more than embarrassment. He felt weak and began to falter a bit. To state he felt ‘vulnerable’ would have been an understatement. It felt like he was about to go in front of a firing squad. But everyone was smiling! “What on earth is going on!” he thought to himself, in complete panic.
“What am I supposed to do there?” He moved toward the chair but looked at his mentor, then the others, and back to the mentor, engulfed totally now in confusion.
“Didn’t you sense it? YOU are tonight’s speaker!”
“Huh? What do I know! I am not a teacher. It is YOU folks who are teaching ME things here.” The confusion of the young man was at an all-time high at this moment. Rating himself as ‘in a panic’ would be mild, compared with the real thing going on inside his brain.
His heart was pounding furiously, like the proverbial trip-hammer. Perspiration, no, sweat, was running down his temples, off his forehead. He felt hot, yet a bit cold. His intellectual self kicked in — “mild shock — hypotension — hyperventilation — cold sweats — almost like an anaphylactic reaction. I need to sit down!”
The young lady with the glimmer in her eye, laughing gently as always, said, “Please sit down before you fall over!” She giggled.
Knowing never to argue with a lady, he sat in this big chair — at first, cautiously, looking for anything that may cause any problems. The imagination was going berserk, as he started looking for hidden restraints, arm or leg straps, electric switches, anything that may be a trap. Failing to find any, he began to settle down into the chair.
It felt comfortable, as he felt the energy begin to return to his trembling knees, his beating heart, his throbbing head, until he looked up from the chair and saw these smiling faces with twinkling eyes looking at . . . HIM! “What could I teach you folks? I am just me! I am not anyone other than myself.”
“What brought you here,” asked a young gentle man in the back.
“My car, if that is what you mean,” he replied.
Everyone laughed.
“Please let me restate the question. What I meant is ‘what brought you to the point of coming to be with us this evening?’ What was the series of events that led you to this moment,” the gentle man restated.
“Gosh, I never thought of that. Just luck, I guess,” he answered back, feeling a lack of understanding in either the question or the answer.
People smiled and giggled.
The mentor then said, “What was it in your life that you thought or felt, that made you feel your particular point of desperation, your joy, your confusion, your happiness? I hope this is not seeming much like a prying in on your life, but we ALL have our own situations which brought us to these points — your experiences were different from any of ours. We would like to learn your route, so we can understand your perceptions. Does that help you to understand what we are looking for?”
Not quite sure, the young man restated his question. “Are you saying you want to know what my beliefs and thoughts were which made me explode, or that made me see how bad off I was doing with my life?”
An older lady who was sitting in the third row, smiling in her eyes, said then, “Why do you feel that what happened to you was bad? Did these events and beliefs not bring you to us today? What a wonderful series of blessed events they must have been!”
“Well, I never thought of them like THAT, before. They were always such a hindrance to my being what I wanted to be. These ‘experiences’, which made me experience these ‘blessed events’ as you call them, seemed like hell at the time. I would never wish them on anyone,” he said vehemently.
Thinking in the silence, even though he had all of these people looking at him like he was the messiah, he felt something ‘click’ inside his ‘self-ness’ somewhere.
Without thinking, but just letting “the voice from inside himself” speak for him, he began talking in a quiet, somewhat shy and ashamed, but speaking nevertheless. “It was true that, without these experiences, I would not have been there at that moment. I would not necessarily have been any better off, but maybe just on a slower route of self destruction, maybe to explode thirty or forty years from that point.” “Interesting idea,” he thought to himself.
With a slight smile, he looked back at his ‘audience,’ not as if they were strangers, but almost like family members who seemed to understand him so well. “I guess I would not have made myself who I am without those experiences. It was those moments of grief, which, through years of eating away at me, taught me, just now, that they were necessary for me to understand the value of these experiences. They formed my moment of understanding just now. Hmmm.”
“And, as I stated before,” as his voice picked up momentum, “I do not wish anyone the experiences I had, yet, they WERE vital to my becoming who I am, good and bad, in relative terms,” he stated quickly, in a motion of self-defense, before he was again ‘lectured’ about the relativity of “good and bad”.
“What were some of these experiential lessons,” a voice from the group asked.
“The verbal and physical abuse I experienced as a child was a lesson in compassion – I could have chosen to hate and pass on that confusion and frustration to others, but decided, instead, to NOT be that way. I wanted to be appreciated, to feel special. One does not teach that by abusing and hating others. So, I learned that it is more important to love someone than to hurt them. But, I . . .” He paused. “Strike that . . . not but, AND,” he emphasized, “I would not have been who I am today, whatever and whomever that may be, without those experiences of abuse.”
“I learned, because of experiences of being kind to others with sincerity, that some others, for whatever reason, did not trust my being sincere. Many took it as being manipulative, a user, ‘wanting something,' ‘kissing butt,' whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I got resentful because people would not know I was being honest — lovingly honest — with them, by just being giving, honest and open. Hmmm. Interesting phrase.
Giving, honest and open. These, even though I met resistance living by these words, were my “agreement with myself” — my ‘chemistry’ — which works with my personality. They were three qualities, which make my life feel ‘right’.
A feeling of warmth and acceptance welled up in him, realizing that he had been more than hard on himself. In fact, he had been most brutal to his being, yet knowing what he did now, realized that any other route would not have accomplished this “awakening”.
Just then, the audience stood up and applauded him, as if he had just played a solo performance of the Minute Waltz in less than 55 seconds. Somehow, they knew what he was realizing. He was feeling a sense of “rebirth” — a sense of revealing of his true self — that he was not such a bad guy after all, and had much to offer himself and others, whatever that would be. That was going to have to develop along the way.
Tears started flowing down his face like a downpour in summer. They were not tears of pain or great distress, but rather those tears of relief. He felt as if, with the realizations he had just made with himself, that he had pushed off boulders from his shoulders and, for the first time, since maybe his birth, felt light, exhausted, relieved, full of joy, extremely vulnerable without being defensive. In essence, it was a bit like being “born again” — a new start to a new life.
He continued for another hour or more, sharing his experiences and how these experiences, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad,' made him who he was today. He talked about how he felt that all forms of life are sacred, not just people. He spoke in depth about how he felt that even plants, he felt, are just as important as the human animal, and yes, the human being IS an animal, by definition. He talked extensively about his experiences of conditional love he had experienced, about the people around him who would treat him with suspicion, not accepting him as he really was, and realizing as he spoke that it was THEIR problem, not his, that they did not trust him. It was them who lost out on the experience of him, not his missing out on their experiences. When he ran out of ideas to share, he just stopped.
His mentor stepped toward him as the applause died down and the others sat.
“Thank you for the lesson.” The mentor then hugged him with gentle reassuring that he was, for the first time in a long time, ‘okay.’