MOTS Chapter 8: Turning In and Tuning On

Enjoying the five fruits, such as beauty,

mounted on a foul-smelling gun and evasively flying back and forth

are five birds; having brought them down, through an inversion,

that radiant inner awareness should fill one’s entire being.

         Free translation:

This body is like a foul-smelling gun. In it reside one’s senses, which are like five birds always looking for the opportunity to feed on chance gains. With right understanding and discernment one should break away from their enchantment, and should resolutely aspire to the good instead of being ensnared by the pleasurable. Then alone will one’s inside be filled with the radiance of the unsurpassed bliss of the Absolute, which will foil all distractions generated by sensual attraction.

         A whiff of current events at the time of writing can be detected in both the title and the subject matter of chapter 8. In 1972, the world was still pondering (and tripping out) to Tim Leary’s mantra “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” which means take LSD, discover the inner reality of the universe, and separate yourself from the cult of crime and death that is at the basis of so-called polite society. It was a high-minded invitation, if you’ll pardon the pun, but many people, without guidance, either stopped at the first stage and simply took a lot of indiscriminate drugs, or skipped the middle term and dropped out without any value vision to enlighten their new paradigms. The results were sometimes tragic, and the paranoid side of polite society was eager to inflate them hysterically while utterly ignoring, if not denigrating, those who experienced the trifecta: tuning in to their heart-depths as the central and most essential element.

         Nitya, being strongly anti-drug, reversed the terminology of the first two for his title. He might have added “drop in” to his revised mantra, as he and his lineage have always felt that becoming awake to the inner reality made you more effective in horizontal considerations, possibly by bypassing the ego and incorporating the full range of human capabilities into your personal development. Narayana Guru stands as proof of the pudding: amazingly effective while remaining inactive—neutrally balanced—within every activity. Simply dropping out includes a negative bias, a pushing away of impinging actualities leading to limbo or ineffectiveness, whereas dropping in opens doors to thrilling, transformative endeavors. As Nitya puts it:

It is not a turning away but a turning in, a turning toward the source of my happiness. I am turning to the cause of all attractions. If beauty attracts me, goodness attracts me, and truth attracts me, it means I have within me a normative notion of beauty, goodness and truth. It is to this inner norm that I turn in.

         Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are the modern world’s most powerful stimulants of choice, for the youthful set especially. Rather than the drugs implied in the title, sex interest forms the basis of the chapter’s subject matter, which was perhaps due to Nitya’s many supplicants in their teens and twenties whose main obsession was just that. At least they were less inclined to discuss music and dope with him than the longings in their hearts for a mate. As a dedicated sexual renunciate, he was always trying to suggest alternative behaviors to sublimate our sex drives, and he must have felt it was like trying to hold back the tide with a tennis racket. Fortunately, as a well-grounded seer Nitya kept any frustration he felt about this pretty well under control. I think he was baffled that people thought renunciates could give good sex advice.

         While trying to affirm sexuality as a healthy activity, Nitya wanted to point out that it runs the risk of projecting the source of happiness on an outside factor and forgetting its true source within. This could be the very definition of infatuation, and it brings the potential for great misery when the object of your affections doesn’t respond in the way you crave. To quote the text: “Infatuation invariably ends in bitterness and dissolution.” By contrast, if you can “turn in” and rediscover the source of the excitement within you, it can be related with all sorts of things (why not everything?) in addition to a loving partner: the many intricate and delightful incarnations of goodness, truth and beauty. Nitya sums it up in relation to the third term:

The experience of beauty can come from a variety of objects,

in different places, on different occasions…. However varied the expressions are, the experience of beauty is always within me.

We of course know that one man’s meat is another mans’ poison, which gives a nod to the fact that satisfaction resides in the person and not in the object, but we don’t always really, really get it.

         In her opening talk, Deb emphasized that there is nothing here about turning away from objects in which you see beauty, and that is a somewhat revolutionary attitude. We are directed to recognize that beauty, persistent and stable, is within every person, including us. Once we are grounded in that awareness, we aren’t so easily distracted and are better capable of sharing it with the world around us.

         Nitya passionately advocated for us to allow the beauty in life to evoke the source within. Knowing the perceiver and the perceived are one single thing brings true ananda: the inextinguishable bliss of dwelling in the original virgin beauty of existence.

         Andy offered a concrete example. One time at the LA County Museum of Art he was wandering through the galleries and came upon a work that knocked him out, as the saying goes. It was Georges de la Tour’s The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, circa 1635, which you can see here: https://collections.lacma.org/node/238963. According to Andy, who is an art historian as well as the artist we all know and love, De la Tour could paint human psychology like no one else. Here Mary Magdalene is looking at a flame, yet the artist has captured the gaze of someone who is actually looking within herself. As he gazed at the painting the same thing happened to him. He was inspired by the impact of the image to turn inward. He soon realized he was inhabiting the same relationship with the painting as Mary was having with the candle, and he was profoundly moved, to put it mildly.

         Andy has also been in a Yoga Shastra of Patanjali online class with Nancy Y, and the notion of the cessation of mental modifications, the way the mind can be stabilized, strikes him as the same thing. The beauty you are experiencing is a reflection of the pure ananda of the Absolute. In a way, then, the painting is a portrayal of the state of samadhi.

         Andy’s delight in recounting the tale reminded me of a time when he and his first wife Suellen Johnson, another visual artist, were with us in Ooty. Nitya proposed a salon of art discussions, with those three as the hub. Deb and I and some others made up the audience. I mentioned it because it was another dimension Nitya was adding to the “aesthetic arrest” of experiencing art. Art elicits our inner beauty, but so does meaningful conversation. All this knowledge is sitting in the dark within our friends, and we will never know it unless it is shared in some form. Words, like Andy’s last night about the De la Tour, educate, they bring out what is in us that we may not even know yet. They hold up and reveal to us aspects of beauty we hadn’t yet considered. Each time you dive into the depths the experience is new and enlightening. I feel this is an underappreciated aspect of spiritual voyaging. Maybe it’s so common as to be ignorable, or maybe it’s tarnished by trite imitations of knowledge sharing, but it’s a high value nonetheless. Additionally, a group interchange tends to produce serendipitous ramifications. A friend recently asked Deb what the point of our class was, and that was along the lines of part of her response: when we sit with intention together, new ways of understanding emerge. I think long ago it was more acceptable to admit you didn’t already know everything, so listening and responding to others broadened your knowledge and perhaps eventually made the claim of all-knowingness slightly more plausible. It’s considered old-fashioned now, in the Information Age. And the Expert Age, where only experts should weigh in on issues, which is the opposite of democratic ideals. Our class remains democratic, inviting everyone to share their thoughts.

         Andy also drew the connection with yantra, the form version of mantra, where an image is gazed upon to evoke mystical depths of being. Again, the image is an “other,” but it is being used with the express knowledge that it is resonating with your inner being. As always, we should remind ourselves that everything we experience is a confection put together from a welter of stimuli by the inner controller, the Self, and perceivable as we see it only to us. The next person has their own version. Amazingly all the visions hold together somehow, but they are by no means identical. Knowing this makes me thirsty to hear what the other person has to say, how they think, what they can teach me, and all sincere people make a substantial impression on me. They’re amazing!

         Deb put this in terms of one of our guests, Susan Plum, whose artwork graces our house in a number of places. Deb told her she has a unique sense of beauty that she can embody and share. Instead of it just being a momentary sensual pleasure, she has profoundly deepened it through communicating it in her artwork. She didn’t say, but we well know, that now and again her works jump out of the background we take for granted to once again zap us with their beauty and unexpectedness.

         Jan and Susan P shared the joy of unanticipated beautiful moments, as igniting their inner beauty. Jan feels those moments are such a gift, and Susan feels they are a gift of nature. For Jan they fill a place in her that nothing else does, and she is tempted to call it divine. Susan emphasized the value of being receptive: if you aren’t receptive you won’t notice it, and the surprise gift will pass you by. She also offered her own “concrete” example—walking around her city over endless miles of concrete, to suddenly come upon a flower pressing up through it shocks her with beauty and its indomitable urge to manifest.

         I suspect this is a common occurrence. If you miss enough of the gifts nature is bestowing on you, you are likely to become cynical and negative. Soon it becomes an article of faith that there are no gifts. I think we naturally avoid such unhappy souls

         Susan and our other honored visitor Fred Cantor had talked about Nada Yoga before class, and she reprised an idea Nitya had shared with her, that nada is all sound before it is perceived. It needs to touch the heart, and that is the moment of awareness. She extrapolated that everything is secretly in the mind until it touches the heart, and then we know it, or at least become aware of it.

         The class talked a lot about the inversion idea, which is in stark contrast to the gunshot element in the verse. By the way, Baiju quotes Nataraja Guru’s astute observation in Part II about the heterogeneous imagery of the verse—check it out. There is at once an intensity and a gentle redirection of interest implied in the inversion. Where the simplistic framing of spiritual endeavor is to turn away from the world to find yourself, here and in the Gita it is right in the midst of life that it can be discovered. Nitya expresses this especially well here:

Anything that pleasantly tickles my senses can turn my mind in to my own Self, to have a glimpse of a chip of the existential, sat, coming into grip with a value, ananda, that was until then lying buried in my heart. This “turning in” does not mean that I should cynically turn away from the world of formal beauty, or the object of sensuous pleasure. Luxuriant nature in its promise of abundance in life can go on parading her variety shows. It will surely help me to visualize an equally rich and abundant reciprocity that I myself can hold out to each such form of beauty, to each such item of goodness, and to each such phase of truth that I am fortunate to witness in this wonderful world.

Andy again was inspired to reminisce about his Yoga Sutras study, as to the cessation of mental modifications. He has had the insight that in reality our whole world started as a modification, a vritti. For it to occur it needs a matrix of space. Every modification is formal because it occupies space, which is a warp and weft meeting in this single point of where we are, and that’s where it all comes from. He exulted that if you could be stopped enough to watch that, that would be so cool.

         I reminded the class of Nataraja Guru’s important refinement about restraint, which I will copy in Part II. So crucial! Basically, restraint is to be applied to horizontal distractions, but the vertical inquiry needs to be fostered. Sadly, Patanjali has been taken too literally for millennia, and the common belief is that all modifications are to be restrained. That would definitely undercut spiritual effort, which is probably the appeal. Most of us would prefer for realization to just come and envelop us while we laze at our ease.

         But our very inquiry lies in the field of yoga, the synthesis of impossible contraries. We have to make an intense effort of nothing happens. As Nitya affirms “All religious and spiritual teachers place self-discipline and control of the mind and senses above everything else.” At the same time, there is a mysterious, undisciplined quality that has to be allowed. Nitya puts this perfectly in his work on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. After extolling intuition as the name for the inner controller’s intrusion into waking consciousness, he reminds us:

We have no means to bring intuition at our own will and pleasure. Intuition has to come of its own accord, but a preparatory discipline can be taken by disciplining the mind to make it less and less cluttered by irrelevant information. (II.203)

We have to clean out the junk to make room for intuition to tiptoe in and nudge us in more optimal directions. The biggest pile of junk is our expectations of what that intuition will look like, which places the whole effort within the purview of the ego. The ego is the master of irrelevant information, as it tries to construct a meaningful world-view out of the garbage that has been fed into it. Politely waiting for it to stumble across an escape hatch is pretty much a guarantee of our spirit remaining imprisoned. That is very much worth restraining.

         This truly fascinating chapter ends with a couple of caveats. The first is “The joy of seeing beauty is a private experience in my bosom, which I need not necessarily share with the beautiful person, object or event I enjoy.”

         Jan was puzzled that Nitya wouldn’t want to share his joys, but that isn’t quite what he means. He doesn’t necessarily have to share them, but he very often did. The idea is that some people are not appreciative of what your experience is, no matter how cool you think you are, and it’s important to know when to share and when not to.

         Susan was reminded of her longtime friend Daryl, who would tell her things about her that were really wonderful and positive. Susan being a somewhat critical person was really touched by this, and it imparted in her a resolve to be more that way with others, acknowledging their strengths and downplaying their weaknesses. Daryl now has an avocation of taking pictures of people with their own cameras, telling them how beautiful they look, and walking away, leaving behind a drop of happiness and a legacy she doesn’t have to carry with her. Still, there are people who resent even being asked if she can take their picture, so you never know.

         We’re all more or less well behaved with strangers as far as our sex fantasies go, and naturally keep those under wraps, as Nitya and the nuns do in the chapter’s lead-in story. But when the inner realm opens up to you, there is a tendency to get explosively excited and want to include everyone you meet in your vision. This is when you discover that people prefer to find their own way to it, if they aren’t downright uninterested in your version. It takes some adjustment, some real restraint. We all have met religious enthusiasts who are the most off-putting of people, because they don’t take your side into consideration. It’s all about moving to their position. Intolerance is flourishing, and even creeping into politics….

         I recalled the guy, right around the time Nitya was writing this chapter, in 1972, who burst into a house we were hanging out in. Wearing only a loincloth, bug eyed, wild haired and dirty, he raved, “I’ve been everywhere and done everything, and now I’m ready to talk about it!” My friends and I made our excuses, got to our feet, and rushed for the exit. Hopefully he eventually learned a more subtle opening line. At least it was a classic.

         Nitya leaves his last caveat for our imagination to fill in:

It is a good, beautiful and truthful world that I have been privileged to be born in and in which I have the pleasure of living. The same world can, however, turn out to be a dark and dismal dungeon of horror if I don’t know how to “turn in” and tune my mind to the song of my soul’s silence.

This is much more than an interesting option, it’s a lifesaving practice. We can bring beauty or ugliness, peace or contention into our world. This is a rich area for us to correct ourselves. The idea of the gun aimed at the fidgety birds, as Baiju correctly notes below, is to bring knowledge to bear: “Resolutely hold on to the shining pure knowledge within, the senses will surrender by themselves.”

         This was the way Fred thought of the verse. His own class in Florida spent a lot of time on it, as it is rather like modern art: disjointed and evocative rather than straightforward. The image suggests hunting, and they felt the smelliness meant the gun had already been fired. The inversion meant the birds should settle down on the barrel of the gun, which is curiously where they are safest. You can’t be shot if you are perched on the barrel. So that is a truer form of satisfaction than flying around looking for action all the time. Their conclusion was to stop the wanting process—we can have the fruits of everything we’ve been hunting for when we stop hunting.

         We are currently being basted in politicians and their followers who aren’t looking for the beauties of each individual. They are preemptively lumping whole classes of people into subhuman categories or worse, and the guns they fire are the ugliest imaginable. They really stink! The popular psyche is busy constructing yet another dismal dungeon of horror—as if the last one wasn’t bad enough for all eternity—abetted by unconscionable religious and business leaders. There is no point in listing the types of horrors—we know them all too well. What we can do is insure that when the little shutters of prejudice in our own mind close against something or someone alien to our comfort zone, we must prize them open again and take a peek at who or what is really out there. Don’t rely on preconceived notions! It takes a positive bias to be willing to make that kind of effort. We aren’t just letting the birds fly where they wish and gobble up their favorite berries, which can lead to trouble, we are reining them in and giving them a “time out” to gather their best instincts back together. We will only meet the enemy and discover it is friendly if we turn off the faucet spewing our own derangements.

         This chapter is to be paired with the next, where the contemplative is sitting under the (vertical) tree, taking care not to be ensnared by the creeping vines that threaten to capture them. These are based on the Upanishadic story of two birds sitting on a (presumably horizontal) branch, one eating the fruits and one watching: the actor and the witness. Here Narayana Guru has verse 8 addressing the eating bird, and verse 9 depicting the quiet one. In the process the horizontal branch is converted to the vertical tree—a nice symbolic touch that nature too seems prone to promote.

         Once again our group sharing took us places we never anticipated, and touched us in ways we have never quite been touched before, though there are similarities…. And now, on to Gurupuja! A moment of appreciation for all the riches we have been freely given by the gurus.

Part II

         Baiju’s contribution is particularly excellent this time, even by his already high standards:

Nataraja Guru at the very beginning of his commentary of this verse says, “There is a radical note struck in this verse. It aims at giving the would-be contemplative an indication of the drastic, uncompromising attitude involved in getting started on the path of real contemplative life.” All vedantic texts suggest the same to the seekers of the Absolute. Modern man often wants to have the cake and eat it too! The clear indication the Guru gives in this verse is that it would not work that way. That explains why only one in many millions truly experience the everlasting saccidananda! The verse says:

There are five unruly birds that incessantly seek pleasure by switching among five varieties of fruit, not ever satisfied with any one of them. These birds dwell in a foul-smelling pipe. Inside there is also the radiant pure knowledge.

[The Guru uses a Malayalam word velivuru = velivu + uru; velivu = knowledge, uru = form; so velivuru = in the form of knowledge; also, note that Narayana Guru mostly refers to Atman as pure knowledge.

Velivu also means absence of darkness, means light, which is the characteristic of pure knowledge.

A figurative meaning of velivu is the realization of the difference (i.e.: discrimination) between the transitory and the eternal. We could meditate on the verse in light of all these possibilities.]

The five unruly birds have to be decimated with no further delay; and that can be done only by (with the help of) that radiant pure knowledge (velivuru) within. You should hold steadfastly to the velivuru which keeps the inside brilliantly illuminated, then it will get rid of the five birds. Continue in that state.

Five birds = five senses

Five varieties of fruit = the objects of the five senses

Foul-smelling pipe = alimentary canal or even better is to think of the body itself.

The Guru seems to suggest the seeker to use his body (like a gun) to shoot down the five birds, only because the body has inside the most effective fire-power to eliminate those birds; it is the pure knowledge which we usually do not take cognizance of. Resolutely hold on to the shining pure knowledge within, the senses will surrender by themselves. And when the senses are thus withdrawn from their objects, the pure knowledge shines brilliantly and the seeker will see all illumination within himself. This is the state one should aim to reach; do not wait any more.

The idea of the fire-power referred to may be further enhanced to be the discrimination between the transitory sense objects of mere fractional, ephemeral value and the eternal, i.e.:  the Absolute, which is for ever of infinite value. Such discrimination is inseparable from the pure knowledge within.

The question that could arise then is whether or not one can bring that discrimination (viveka) which is hidden deep inside (because all the focus stays with the uncontrolled sense activities – the unruly birds) to the surface of the mind. Maybe it is difficult. As already mentioned, most often we are not conscious of the pure knowledge within ourselves, let alone its infinite value. It is now a chicken-and-egg situation—only if we realize the value of the Self, we can effectively be free from the gallivanting of the five senses; and to realize the value of the Self we need the senses to be won over.

Then what is the way out? The simple answer is shraddha. That is the starting point. The ordinary meaning of the word is attention. However in vedantic context shraddha means unquestioned faith in sruti (such as the Upanishads) as well as in the Guru’s words of wisdom. In the previous verse when Narayana Guru instructed us to be devoted to the service of a Self-realized muni, the need to have unquestioned faith in the muni goes without saying.

The way I paraphrased the meaning of the present verse may be a little different from what everybody would have seen. While chanting the verse several times this is how the Guru’s words revealed themselves to me. Then I realized that I could lean on Nataraja Guru for support. He clarifies, “A mixed allegorical and parabolic style is adopted here, so that many factors may be understood as covered in a suggestive rather than in a discursive manner. The reader is left to guess freely and to fill in the gaps where they are purposely left to be implied. This concentrated cryptic way is compatible with what was already pointed out in the beginning of the work itself when, in the first verse, we were told that this composition was meant to be a chant rather than a discourse. This is reminiscent of the suggestive style of the Upanishads.”

Thus for a serious seeker, as Nataraja Guru indicates, Atmopadesa Satakam contains the required wisdom words, directly from the Guru, which may be followed with the shraddha as defined. The present verse is a crucial one where a seeker can begin applying shraddha.

We discussed earlier the upanishadic formula, quoted by Guru Nitya in the preface to the MOTS, for the realization of the Self - listen to a wise teacher or guru, meditate on their words of wisdom, and live the truth revealed in fruitful meditations. We now have also seen that Nataraja Guru is categorical, citing the first verse of Atmo, that this composition is the wisdom words to meditate on (to do manana). Many a time the topic to meditate on, for the purpose of Self-realization, is not clear to the seekers. The Guru points them to these verses and asks to chant them and meditate on all the possible imports of the verses.

In That Alone, Guru Nitya scientifically explains the possibility of the inversion of energy -- an object of interest will cause the release of energy from the incipient memory and in the normal case that energy is dissipated outwardly towards the object, causing a loss of energy. There is a possibility of directing that energy to the Self. The Guru also quotes the example of Sri Ramakrishna who went into a state of samadhi at the sight of a few beautiful birds in the sky. It may not be easily achieved by an ordinary person like me. Notwithstanding I kept meditating on the words of Guru Nitya and it became clear to me how the energy inversion happens – the prerequisite for that to happen is my ability as a seeker to see the Self in everything in the world; the objects of interests or disinterest are non-different from the Self; the beauty of the things that attract me is but the beauty of the Self; and I am the Self; I am the beautiful; and finally, I am beauty myself. The energy has now no way to flow outward. Certainly it is the most desirable state. Freeing oneself from the forgetfulness that the universe and its contents are non-different from the Self is a great leap for a seeker to cherish. Can it happen without practice of any discipline or at least certain practices?

The word discipline does contain a negative connotation of control and compulsion. A seeker may have to make an inversion in the matter of discipline too. Let’s think of a young boy who is madly in love. It thrills him to do any task, however painful, which is often referred to as ‘sacrifice’, for the sake of his love.  If that is the case, the seeker whose central goal in life is to realize the Self and who devotes his life to the service of his chosen Guru will have only pleasurable experiences in following any discipline his Guru advocates! Thus I tend to conclude for myself that to make any headway my starting point has to be but shraddha.

Borrowing Guru Nitya’s words (in ‘That Alone 1-8 as it really happened’), I shall repeat that the ordinary people involuntarily get committed themselves “to simple objects and be attracted by them, get bound to them and live a very limited life full of obligations and duty, with a very narrow horizon of value, having the enjoyment of whatever little value or meaning those objects might bring.” Yoga Vasistha corroborates this: “Supreme Bliss cannot be experienced through contact of the senses with their objects. The supreme state is that in which the mind is annihilated through one-pointed inquiry. Abandoning the ideas of seer, seen and sight along with latent desires (vasanas) of the past we should meditate on that Self which is the primal light that is the basis of sight”

It is imperative that the seeker must decide once and for all (or that’s how the tone of the present verse is) – do I want a life of a narrow horizon of value, bound by the biological needs and the material interests? On the other hand, if I want absolute freedom, I must be uncompromising in obviating my attachment to the body and its temptations and cravings for the transient objects of the world. Once decided, the Guru’s words of wisdom is all what I need to live up to.          

*         *         *

yogas-cittavritti-nirodhah

Yoga is restraining (the outgoing) activities of the mind.

This sutra is meant to define Yoga as a whole. The keyword is nirodha (to hinder, obstruct or control). Many people fall into the error of thinking that one must control all psychic activities,

because citta-vritti means ‘the activity of the mind’. Here a subtle distinction and a clarification have to be made. Narayana Guru makes this in the first verse of the Yoga-Darsanam. The verticalized activities of the mind should not be obstructed but instead must be allowed free scope, with vitarka (criticism) and vichara (inquiry) as functions. It is the outgoing tendencies or horizontal activities of the mind that produce dissipation of interest. It is only on the horizontal level that control is necessary. Mere brute unilateral control is not to be thought of either. One has to respect the reciprocity of counterparts, whereby an ascending effort to unite with the higher Self is reciprocally understood as being met by the descent of the soul, from the opposite pole of the total Yoga situation. This delicate distinction is also clarified by Narayana Guru in the Yoga-Darsanam. Yoga is a bilateral and not a unilateral process. (103)

Part III

         Later, after I finished the class notes, my evening reading began with a passage related to the ideas from the session about the value of group participation. I’m reading Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow (Tor Books, New York, 2017). Funny how things hang together—call it meta-randomness. Two people have been resurrected from death as computer files and are talking with living friends. And yes, they all have weird names:

         “Technically, I’m part of you.”

         “How do you figure?”

         “You are you because of how you react to me. If you reacted to me in a completely different way to how you’d reacted back when you were, uh—“

         “Made of meat.”

         “If you did, you wouldn’t be the same person anymore. This conversation we’re having, it defines you in part.”

         “Do I stop being me if you die?”

         “Kind of.”

         Kersplebedeb made a rude noise.

         “No, listen.”

  ….          She swallowed. “When someone important is gone, you can’t react the way you would if they were there. Like when”—she swallowed—“when Iceweasel was around. I’d get angry, but she’d cool me out. She was part of my cognition, an outboard prosthesis for my emotions. She kept me on even kilter, the way lookahead routines do.... Now she’s gone, I’m not the person I was. Our identities exist in combination with other people.”

         Kersplebedeb looked at her funny. “I’ve never thought about it that way, but it’s true. Other people make you better or worse.” (298)