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Groups can also destroy us, of course, but that's part of life and the human condition--living with other people. And anyone who's failed to develop an instinct for survival has understood nothing of what the Mother is saying.
You're lucky. A group has just asked you to teach them something, and that will make you a teacher.
HERON RYAN, JOURNALIST
Before the first meeting with the actors, Athena came to my house. Ever since I published the article on St. Sarah, she'd been convinced that I understood her world, which wasn't true at all. I simply wanted to attract her attention. I was trying to come round to the idea that there might be an invisible reality capable of interfering in our lives, but the only reason I did so was because of a love I didn't want to believe I felt but which was continuing to grow in a subtle, devastating way.
I was content with my universe and didn't want to change it at all, even though I was being propelled in that direction.
"I'm afraid," she said as soon as she arrived. "But I must go ahead and do what they're asking of me. I need to believe."
"You've had a lot of experiences in life. You learned from the gypsies, from the dervishes in the desert, from--"
"Well, that's not quite true. Besides, what does learning mea
n: accumulating knowledge or transforming your life?"
I suggested we go out that night for supper and to dance a little. She agreed to supper but rejected the dancing.
"Answer me," she said, looking around my apartment. "Is learning just putting things on a shelf or is it discarding whatever is no longer useful and then continuing on your way feeling lighter?"
On the shelves were all the books I'd invested so much money and time in buying, reading, and annotating. There were my personality, my education, my true teachers.
"How many books have you got? Over a thousand, I'd say. But most of them you'll probably never open again. You hang on to them because you don't believe."
"I don't believe?"
"No, you don't believe, full stop. Anyone who believes will go and read up about theater as I did when Andrea asked me about it, but after that, it's a question of letting the Mother speak through you and making discoveries as she speaks. And as you make those discoveries, you'll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader's imagination. And when you fill in the spaces, you'll start to believe in your own abilities.
"How many people would love to read those books but don't have the money to buy them? Meanwhile, you sit here surrounded by all this stagnant energy, purely to impress the friends who visit you. Or is it that you don't feel you've learned anything from them and need to consult them again?"
I thought she was being rather hard on me, and that intrigued me.
"So you don't think I need this library?"
"I think you need to read, but why hang on to all these books? Would it be asking too much if we were to leave here right now, and before going to the restaurant, distribute most of them to whomever we happened to pass in the street?"
"They wouldn't all fit in my car."
"We could hire a truck."
"But then we wouldn't get to the restaurant in time for supper. Besides, you came here because you were feeling insecure, not in order to tell me what I should do with my books. Without them I'd feel naked."
"Ignorant, you mean."
"Uncultivated would be the right word."
"So your culture isn't in your heart, it's on your bookshelves."
Enough was enough. I picked up the phone to reserve a table and told the restaurant that we'd be there in fifteen minutes. Athena was trying to avoid the problem that had brought her here. Her deep insecurity was making her go on the attack, rather than looking at herself. She needed a man by her side and, who knows, was perhaps sounding me out to see how far I'd go, using her feminine wiles to discover just what I'd be prepared to do for her.
Simply being in her presence seemed to justify my very existence. Was that what she wanted to hear? Fine, I'd tell her over supper. I'd be capable of doing almost anything, even leaving the woman I was living with, but I drew the line, of course, at giving away my books.
In the taxi, we returned to the subject of the theater group, although I was, at that moment, prepared to discuss something I never normally spoke about--love, a subject I found far more complicated than Marx, Jung, the British Labour Party, or the day-to-day problems at a newspaper office.
"You don't need to worry," I said, feeling a desire to hold her hand. "It'll be all right. Talk about calligraphy. Talk about dancing. Talk about the things you know."
"If I did that, I'd never discover what it is I don't know. When I'm there, I'll have to allow my mind to go still and let my heart begin to speak. But it's the first time I've done that, and I'm frightened."
