Could it really be our final session together?
I had spent the morning, for the first time ever, successfully dividing all my sets of client files; each has now been categorized and aligned at the start of these new notes to be typed up with the rest upon completion.
The result will be a single, massive volume fit for reference and sale—the magnum opus of my Method, if you will.
Yet reading this, of course, would mean that you are already aware.
In fact, just to know that someone could one day come to follow the entire process and sequence of my life’s work is itself beautifully humbling and inspiring.
The sight of my desk and cabinets newly laid bare had been as the sound of perfect resolution to an old perplexing melody—perhaps like finally picking up on words long-heard but missed in dreams.
Thanks to Ray, I can now tell even my Normals apart.
Yet I must cease referring to clients (or people) as Normals and Outliers.
Have I not, on some level, always understood that my Method’s very existence was set to ultimately render irrelevant such clumsy, imperfect devices?
Yes, questions of why still persist as if worthwhile.
Why Ray?
Why Bing?
Why Rolman?
Why any of it?
Could each client have been sent or given just to speak to a unique aspect of my own life and psyche?
What reality might they (or I) be meant to represent?
Could they all be imagined—only pieces of myself, which my Method teaches me to regulate between?
And would gaining a holistic enough perspective to choose in real time between various Outlier extremities not be the exact and necessary predicted outworking of my particular Sticking Point?
In truth, as has been shown, I have always felt so fixated on Normal.
Yet coming to find there is no Normal allows me to see everyone for exactly who and what they are.
And this allowance is what brings me to my next conclusion, which is but another “why” question (this one even more rhetorical): Why might a person be driven to regulate between identities?
In the case of every client I have ever met with, such regulation serves to uncover and reveal that which never need be regulated from—to fully explore the merits and weaknesses of all traits and pursuits so as to differentiate the truly fundamental and innate from the merely forced or wished for.
My Method unveils an eternal search for that which exists all on its own, beyond choice or control—as Ray put it: “Something ordinary . . . something locked away…”
These words will surely fail to show my astonishment at how unphased I feel in the face of such discoveries.
For within whatever deeper, unchanging (real) core of my own being I find no surprise at all.
Losing control of my perspective has proven fantastically superior to pretending I am a psychologist deathly afraid of being discovered as an unlicensed, self-adulating fraud.
In my utter brokenness, Ray was “used” to fix me by showing me there had never really been any such thing as broken after all—and also that lies based in needless fears had both stemmed from and perpetuated my need for personas packed with directions to be spun off in.
Again, there is such tranquility in arriving at a life shown capable of sorting itself out on its own.
Thank you, Ray.
Thank you, Method.
My view of time has completely changed.
For I am now sure that there is space enough for every accomplishment and enjoyment left, even if my entire career happens to be taken away in an instant by some new technology or other reality, etc.
So, back to today.
Ray sat across from me for this, our final session; would its ending signal the conclusion of my allotment in this world?
Regardless, I wanted to glean as much as I could from being with him.
Yet there was a definite sense that we had already reached our big conclusions, and that what remained would be a rather fun time spent simply filling in loose ends.
ME:
“Ray, we have been talking a lot about life, and religion, and church, and society…
“Let me just ask you plainly: What do you actually believe?”
As has been the case perhaps half the time, Ray did not pause at all to consider his response.
RAY:
“Why am I a person? I think I’d rather be a tree. I could talk all day about why trees are better. Trees don’t kill bears.”
I don't know anything 