It was time for class to begin. One of us, in the far right row by the windows (as you face the teacher), was explaining his idea to three or four of us seated in the rows to his left. He held a hand up just above his head, palm down, as if that demonstrated his meaning. Michael was always serious. Actually, he wasn’t always serious, but he was never frivolous. Much unlike me. He was one of the four kids who invariably had the highest grade-point average every marking period (also much unlike me). “The game,” he said, “is to become conscious of the images, scenes, and personal emotions that flash through the mind so fast and so faint that you don’t even notice them – and when you do learn to notice them, you still can’t identify them.”

         We were more or less speechless at the odd idea, and he continued to hold his hand in the air.

         “What’s that supposed to prove?” That was from Hugh.

         “It proves that you know what’s going on in your own head.”

         “I know what’s going on in  my own head,” Hugh replied, giving him a challenging look.

         MP lowered his hand and stared back. Not in response to the challenge, though. More like as if he was trying to see what was going on in Hugh’s mind. They just stared at each other for half a minute. Or a second. I don’t know how long, but the tableau was memorable. Finally Michael said, “You’ll be surprised at what you find.”

         “No doubt,” Hugh agreed.

         “You have to make the mind silent and attentive. And then you learn to put it in the frequency where protothoughts, or protoawareness, appears. We can call such mental activity ‘primary awareness’, or limina.”

         “That’s those little fish, right?” Now Hugh was in his mocking mode.

         “You’re thinking of sardines,” I said, trying to mediate.

         Michael was not distracted. “Limina are the images, scenes, and feelings that come to you when the mind is empty and alert. Limen – threshold. Like when Aeneas arrives at the threshold of the cave, and the Sibyl tells him it’s time to seek the oracle.”

         “So what’s your point?”

         “What come to you are images, scenes and feelings from another place,” Michael said, patiently. “They don’t have anything to do with your body’s wants or fears. They are other messages.”

         “How do you know?”

         “How do you know they aren’t?”

         “Why should I care?”

         MP took a loud, patient breath. “You just said you know what’s going on in your mind. I’m telling you that you will discover a world inside that you are unaware of, if you know how to look.”

         That stopped the conversation again; and before we could think it through, the noisy door handle turned and Miss Glaukevna entered for third period Latin. We turned around to the front of the room, reaching for our books. But Michael had to finish what he’d started: “These are the messages that determine what you think and do and believe. It’s called ‘the subconscious’, but the zone game is about making the subconscious conscious.”

         “How can I do that?!” I blurted out, not entirely in jest; but Miss G’s stern look prevented any response. Baby Jesus coughed as if apologizing for me. He was the third of the four with perennial highest grade-point averages, and he was always polite. Michael looked down and opened his textbook. Miss G turned her back to us and snatched a piece of chalk.

         “All right! You guys ready for some parsing!?” she said enthusiastically, helping to build positive energy in the room. She did a good job of making syntax something that got you worked up. In this instance, the grammar of Book VI of the Aeneid, in all its supernatural ambiguity. And then she wrote the following on the greenboard:

DICAM EQUIDEM NEC TE SUSPENSUM, NATE TENEBO[¹]

The Green table

Latin was the last class before lunch, and several of us who didn’t eat in the cafeteria gathered for lunch at a shiny, garish lincoln green picnic table under an old honey locust between the chapel and the parking lot. There might be ten who could show up, but a few were always missing. I brought my lunch in a huge tan leather bookbag. It was, without exaggeration, the size of a small suitcase. Maybe a bit bigger. I assumed Da was impressed by the private school, and felt that it merited a fancy accoutrement. It embarrassed me, but Padraic had one similar to mine, so that made it bearable.

         He and I had gone to grade school together, although he’d been in the other class. We never spoke in grade school, but I admired his mature manner. He was more or less perfect: one of the guys, ready to laugh at himself or with others: one of the brains, but physical activities came so easy to him that he was the first baseman for the team as well as a ribbon winner on the swimming team. So good looking: coffee-colored skin. Horn-rimmed glasses the same shade of black as his sleek hair. One of the few good-looking persons I’ve known who look even better in glasses. And that tan. We lived in different worlds.

         Padraic was one of our group, though he didn’t hang out with any of us. I got the sense that he didn’t have anything against us, there were just other obligations in his life, young as he was. He could be somewhat abstracted, his mind elsewhere. A very confident young man. One for whom the thought of even questioning whether there was such a thing as confidence would be strange, so confident was he. His status wasn’t something he was proud of or displayed. That wouldn’t have occurred to him either, I’m sure. It was just the way things were, and he respected everyone as equal to himself despite their being of different, and almost always inferior, status.          

         He was a delightful person, and he ‘hit it off’ with a lot of people. It seemed he hung out with an unusual bunch: a couple of the outsiders, like Clyde, and even the jocks. The sport he was really interested in was sailing, but being in the desert Magna Mater didn’t have a sail boat team.

         I didn’t know much more about him. He attracted me, but I wasn’t the type to consider initiating a relationship with anyone. Certainly not at that level of savoir faire. Relationships just happened, as far as I knew, they weren’t something you made happen. It never occurred to me there was any other way.

A lot went on around our cheap industrial oilpaint table, so this may be a good time to describe the layout more fully. Gone now, but siempre en mi alma. The thornless honey locust was close to the northeast end of the table, convenient for leaning against. A couple feet to the west was a long row of large bougainvillea – we could pluck off blossoms and leaves from where we stood between them and the benches at which those who sat on them faced either south or north. Most of us usually stood, glad to be outdoors and not at a desk. Baby Jesus (BJ) was seated at the moment, having just unfolded his neatly wrapped egg sandwich. Usually I wouldn’t notice what kind of sandwich one of my peers was eating, but egg-yolks and egg-whites are somehow highly conspicuous. Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, he was facing north and when I dropped my suitcase on the bench across from him he bounced up a bit. At the same time, the sandwich at his mouth, he pushed a neatly wax paper-wrapped stack of cookies over to me.

         “Thanks!” I lifted it up to my nose. “Your Mom makes the best peanut butter cookies. Don’t tell her thanks for me, she might not give you any if you’re just going to give them away.”

         “She’d be happy to make some for you.” He had a dot of mayonnaise on the right side of his mouth, which was cute, because he was always so neat. That’s not why he was called Baby Jesus. Scottie gave him that name, probably because his initials were BJ. However, they fit too. For one thing, the teachers only called on him when no-one else knew the answer, because he always knew the answer. And BJ was so shy – you could barely hear what he said.

         Before I could get started on the cookies, Aura and Michael joined us. Aura, like me one of the second-level honors students, was wearing a midi-length white dress with little yellow flowers surrounded and connected by green leaflets. She was taller than I and a bit thinner, but not bony, with silvery-blond hair just below her shoulders. I wiggled my fingers at her.

         “Hi Jem. MP said he was telling you all about the zone game.”

         I nodded, and held out a cookie to her, but she shook her head (she and Michael ate in the cafeteria). “Yeh. Up to the part where I asked how to do it. At that point Miss G inopportunely interrupted. What poor timing! It makes me question her attunement to the vibes.”

         “Maybe you should have a talk with her,” Aura suggested. I nodded seriously to let her know it was about time for me to intervene.

         “Okay,” Michael said. “To answer your interrupted question. How can you do what?”

         Clyde, who had been standing by the bougainvilleas to the left of BJ, cut in: “You said, ‘There is an undiscovered world inside we can become aware of.’ How do I do that?”

         “I knew that would get you,” Michael said, with a businesslike look. “What is it about an undiscovered world that connected?”

         He shrugged. “I can’t imaging not being intrigued.”

         Michael nodded, twice. “Right. It’s like the world unfolds and you perceive that there’s another world inside the external appearances.”

         “Uh-huh. Ok, how do I perceive that?”

         “By being attentive to what appears in a quiet mind.”

         “I have no idea what a quiet mind is, or what you mean by a quiet mind.”

         “I should have known. But in the first place, what I’m talking about is a game. A sporting event.”

         Clyde shrugged again. “Sure. Whatever.”

         “Ok. Are you ready? Close your eyes and take a breath.” Clyde did.

         “Now take another breath, without anything going on in the mind. Just attentive.”

         “Okay.”

         A couple seconds later, he burst out, “You expect me to keep my mind quiet?!” raising his voice, slightly outraged at the ridiculous suggestion, putting his hands around his poor head. “Thirty seconds and I’m already traumatized. I could sue.” He looked around the group for support.

         “That’s the game,” Michael said. “You can do it. It’s like golf – you are playing to get your score down. That is, with fewer thoughts that capture your attention and carry it down thought-ruts made by dusty habit.”

         “Get my score down.”

         “Yeh. Every time a thought breaks your focus scores one point. You can count the times it happens. You don’t have to, but it makes the game more interesting, and it’s a significant learning tool, or can be.”

         “If I do that, all I’ll be doing is counting.”

         “You get better with practice,” Aura said.

         “You do this?” he said, looking her up and down, as if she was the last person in Milky Way Galaxy Sector 4 he would suspect of training her mind.

         “Every day. It’s fun!” she swung her arms out at forty-five degree angles from her body, with typical exuberance. Then she added, “Very frustrating.”

         “That sounds like fun.”

         BJ said ‘E pluribus unum – from a multitude of thoughts to a focus on one thing.”

         I looked at him, not comprehending.

         “From random thoughts to the zone,” he explicated, to aid my homing in to the topic.         

         “Uh-huh,” I replied, as if comprehending. “I must still be at the ex una plures stage.

         “Maybe unum et plures,” Michael suggested. “But by all means, unum’s in there somewhere.”

         I nodded, hoping that by agreeing we could move on to a different topic. Something like last night’s Steve Lester Comedy Hour. I looked at Michael, and he was looking directly into me. Slightly self-conscious, I added, “Or where we are simply found wanting.”

         “It might be difficult at first,” he conceded, “but making progress gives you a real sense of accomplishment. And you’ll have insights that will change your life for the better.”

         BJ said, “People don’t want to know what’s going on in their mind. My aunt, for example, told me she keeps the radio on when she’s alone because otherwise she starts to think.”

         “Jem was interested,” Michael pointed out to counterbaance his exemplum. “Don’t you think people would be interested in knowing what’s going on in their own mind? Especially when it’s pointed out that by controlling their mind they control their reality?”

         Padraic looked skeptical. “I think a lot of people have traumas they can’t escape. It goes with the short, nasty and brutish part of life. They get stuck in trauma when they’re infants and that’s the old ballgame.”

         “Well, maybe it’s the old ballgame to some people, but I still have two peanut butter cookies,” I pointed out.

         Clyde said, “I just want to be able to describe what it’s like to be a human and be alive.”

         “Anyway,” Padraic went on, “I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell a person suffering from unbearable trauma that they can quiet-mind it out of existence.” He looked thoughtfully at Michael. “Maybe you can. I wouldn’t be surprised. Not something I can do.” He added, “I don’t see why eliminating intrusive thoughts is theoretically impossible by any means. I’ll grant you that.”

         “In any case,” Michael answered, “anyone can get better at controlling their own thoughts, and that –” he paused for effect – “is the shell under which lies the pea. As Clyde would say. The real problem is that if we don’t control our thoughts, they control us.”

         “No doubt about it,” Padraic agreed. “But emotions are so deep, they’re far more difficult to change than, say, attitude. At least humans haven’t gone far in overcoming clinical depression by changing thought patterns.”

         Michael nodded. “Definitely. Humans have barely started to explore the inner world. Think about it. Ever since the first clear signs of human inner life appear, although not much can be inferred from the red ochre paint and perforated shells of a hundred thousand years ago – say two hundred thousand. Ever since then, there has been a continuing increase in human interiority. Humans still –.” He broke off his sentence and looked back at Clyde. “If you’re interested, I’ll help you learn zoning. That goes for you guys too.” He ran his eyes over all of us. “It improves your ability to concentrate and focus – and opens a door to insights and intuition.”

         I squeezed my lips together and made a face. Picking up on that, he said, “When you master this, you will perceive the nature of reality. Or do you know it already?”

         I shook my head from side to side and looked sad.

         “That’s alright – a lot of people don’t. Okay, I’ll tell you so you will know.” He looked at Padraic and BJ and said, “Is that okay? I don’t mean to monopolize the conversation.”

         BJ, who had a full mouth, looked at him over his sandwich and nodded. Padraic just made a grand gesture of rolling his eyes.

         Michael took a deep breath and was quiet for a moment. “Okay. Let’s start here: Consciousness comes first.”

         That stopped conversation, and I could sense a ton of boredom around me. “You didn’t pick that up from the Comedy Hour, did you?” I asked.

         “Shmock! Schmock!” Padraic made Jerry Lester’s seagull imitation, in a noisy falsetto, and the associations from the Comedy Hour were enough to change the topic and get me off the hook. As always, I was left feeling he knew something I didn’t.

[¹] I will tell you, child, nor make you wait.