Volume 8, Issue 8, page 8

number the pages until he finished, and then he'd number them in
pencil.

Going back to "The Book", I don't remember how long it was. It
probably was under 70,000, which is
considered an average book. He told me what he wanted to do with
it - it was going to revolutionize everything: the
world, people's attitudes toward one another. He thought it was
somewhat more important. and would have a greater
impact upon people, than the Bible.

After I'd read the manuscript, we got to arguing over different
titles. I asked him what he wanted to accomplish.
He wanted to make changes. He wanted to reach inside people and

eally work them over, and he had to have a title that would be
attractive. I am the one who suggested "Excalibur",
because Excalibur was King Arthur's sword. This had a certain
mystical meaning that suited Ron, and so "The
Book" became "Excalibur".

As I remember "Excalibur", it started-in the introduction
only-with a king who got all his wise men together and
told them to prepare and bring to him all the wisdom of the world
contained in 500 books. In the course of time,
they succeeded, and the king was very pleased and said so. Then
he told them to go away and cut down these 500
books into 100 books. It took them a bit longer this time, but
they did it and came back and insisted all the wisdom
of the world was contained in these 100 books. He said, "Now, do
it over again, and bring it to me in one book."

This was quite a trick, but they did it, and came back some years
later and they had, indeed, reduced all the
wisdom of the world into one book.

Then he really gave them an assignment. He said, "Now go away and
bring to me all the wisdom of the world in
one word."

What was the one word? I don't know how many times we argued, Ron
and I, to discover what this one word
was. It may have been the creative fiat, it mmght have just been
the word "Bell, it might have been the word
"Survive". I don't think we ever settled it. But the book
"Excalibur" from there on had to do with survival.

I'll try to remember some of it, chapter by chapter, and to
explain why it was so squirmy. For example, he
started with the very first life-the very first cells-how they
struggled for survival-how they tried to be and be"it" the
whole time. In order to do it, gradually thru the ages
theyassociated with other cells, one with another, and they
reached the place where they could divide so they would become
bigger. This is strictly science as far as it's gone.

After awhile, this conglomeration of cells
that would reach down a stream of warm water,
would bend its way back in order to catch more
-it would extend across the stream, or across
a little rill or something like that - and all
the time it was gaining more sensitivity and
ways of the world in which it finds itself. It
finds out ' that by working together, it can ac-
complish a great deal more: it can find more to
eat - it can eat more and grow faster. So the
idea is to survive and reproduce - and this is
what the early cell does.

Held begin to picture the ocean and the seas and ponds as having
the life cells growing on them like scum. These
are ourselves, our beginnings, our own beginnings because in the
womb we start in this very way.

Away back then, we began to develop motives for things. Now, itis
seldom that what we tell somebody our
motive is, is the real one -and

8 The ABERRE

this is where YOU Start to Squirm. Somebody will say, "Well, I 'd
like to do a certain thing, " " I would 1 ike to do
this with you, " o r something or other, and you look at this
person and realize, "I wonder why he ' s doing that."
And you look into yourself and think if you were doing that, what
would your motive be and whether you would
hide it. You think that perhaps he's hiding his real motive and
trying. to get you to do something because he's
giving you to understand that his motive is thus and so because
that appeals to your vanity-and of course this makes
you look at yourself to see about this business of vanity - and
why you're likely to do that. All the time, looking at
this other person, you can see squirmy things in him. You can see
squirmy things in him that make him look like
an entity peering at you thru gauze, or around a corner. You
don't see all of him. He'slike the iceberg that's
seveneighths submerged -you can't tel 1 anything about him.

As these things are pointed out to you by Ron in the ftrst
chapter, or thereabouts, you begin to see that the cells
in any body that you're looking at are all endowed with this
ability to survive - a determination to survive - and with
motives to survive that are sometimes extremely questionable.
When you look at a person, the lips may say one
thing, the eyes may say something else, or nothing, and the flesh
may say something entirely different. Literally,
your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing. You
shake hands, and this is a friendly gesture, but
behind your back you may be holding a knife to plunge into him
and he may be holding one for you. You can't tell
just by looking at people. One of the things Ron intended to do
with "Excalibur" was to make it possible to see and
look into this.

Other things I remember isRon's explanation as to why there is no
such thing as a crowdthat a group of people
actually still consisted of individuals - but a crowd could get
out of hand and do things other people wouldn't. He
showed how that could happen by explaining the relationship of
people to each other in the same way that he
explained the relation of cells to each other before they were
people away back when life was developing into
different shapes. He would take two persons, for example, and put
them side by side, and show how the two of them
were both less and more than one person, and yet each one was an
individual. Each individual could think of himself
as being individual, but being somewhat "crutched 11, as it were,
or held up by the other person. These two people
were very wary of each other, like a couple of bantam roosters
running around waiting to get in a thrust, but they
knew that they needed each other, and each one felt that he
needed the other more and that he didn't wish to be taken
advantage of, and so there was always this pulling and hauling
between two people that kept them at razor's edge all
the time.

Each one, to some extent, gradually-a )ittle bit at a time - gave
away some of his sovereignty to the other. In
other words, he let the other fellow lean, provided the other
fellow would let him lean, and the two people became
somewhat less than they would have been if they had stayed apart.
The relationship between the two people became
something that would really get you.

Then he moved in with these two people a third person-could beof
the same sex-and you still have all the
difficulties, all the problems, and all the squirminess-the
questioning

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E DECEMBER, 1961