Marilyn Gustin is the author of Companion Guide to The Awakening Tales, available for purchase by clicking here. This interview was conducted by email. Here is Part 4, the final part of the interview:
 
TheIndigoWizard.com: You're the author of Companion Guide to The Awakening Tales. How do you see the Companion Guide as being useful to people reading The Awakening Tales?
 
Marilyn Gustin: The Tales are evocative and somewhat cryptic. They have multiple levels and don’t instruct directly very much. Yet they are full of meaning, each one around a cluster of ideas related to spiritual life. The stories are almost entirely a right-brain experience.
 
The Guide was written so that our left brains could also be involved in our growth process. It brings straight-forward expression of some of the ideas in the Tales, to complement the stories. The Guide offers understandings to be found in another form in the Tales, and reflection on those ideas. It offers questions and possible practices so that readers can more fully and consciously integrate what they are learning. The Guide is an adult approach to the Tales, not a child’s approach, and is most useful when a person really wants to deepen their spiritual understanding with the Tales as a springboard.
 
TheIndigoWizard.com: Can the Tales be read at different levels? And if so, can the Guide also be useful in different ways to different people?
 
MG: Of course the Tales can be read and cherished at different levels. Children love them, adults love them. Each story has multiple levels of meaning: the plain or obvious, then lots of symbols and analogies that we can learn from. This learning, though, is not so much informational learning to be spit back on a test. It is learning about living and spiritual possibility in ways that have to be experimented with in order for them to bring us their best results. The Tales are multi-dimensional in this way, but that’s hard to describe in the abstract. If a person chooses to work with the Tales, the work will be full of “aha!” and “wow—I didn’t see that before!” – which makes it wonderful fun.
 
And yes, of course the Tales are useful in different way s to different people. People bring their own experience, wisdom, learning and living to the Tales and enter into dialogue with them. What comes out of it will likely have some commonalities, but people will get what they need from the Tales. If they come back another round, they’ll get what they need then.
 
TheIndigoWizard.com: If you had to summarize the message of The Awakening Tales into a single sentence, what would it be?
 
MG: Sorry about this one! There is no single message to be had from the Tales – unless it’s something like, “Come on! This is a great game we’re playing! Come! Join in!”