Stalking the Average Man: Fulfilling Prophecy by J. Roger Axelson - HTML preview

"It follows that when you find yourself aware that you are in a dream, and want to practice control in Dreaming, you have to stop thinking as if you are in the First Attention— stop doing. I’ll give you some exercises before the day is over."

"I don’t always become aware that I’m dreaming."

"Before you go to sleep, you can remind yourself that your subjective experiences are so involved with word thinking that it is almost impossible to conceive of any experience that is not thought-word oriented. And yet you in particular have had many experiences of knowing and visions that communicated information perfectly well without the need for language. In fact, you’ve discovered that trying to put words to some of these experiences wasn’t possible. Correct?"

"Yes."

“The initial mind-set you’re after is to become aware that you in a non-physically oriented experience, which you can control if you discard descriptions, and keep your thoughts focused in and on the new circumstance. " She shrugged a minute affair. "You can create and walk through walls as the not-doing of the First Attention." Tugging my sleeve to slow our pace, she said, "Here’s the good part: it’s possible to stop your First Attention inventory from swirling around your head while you’re awake, by practicing other not-doings."

"Huh?"

"Stopping the internal dialogue creates a state of mental quietness, which is the not-doing of maintaining the internal dialogue."

"Every word sounded reasonable," I quipped.

"I’ll try it this way," she said as if to herself. "You cannot examine your true circumstance from a moving platform; this is the train of time you ride alongside the memory of your experiences, which manifest in the momentum of your thoughts. Do you recall when we were discussing the phenomenon of the double, or the self, that I said we experience a memory of the events we perceive?"

"I do."

"In other words," she said smoothly, "your thoughts move all of the time, and you are so used to allowing this that you have forgotten how to stop them." She looked away. "Problematic to stopping our thoughts is that their speed-of-light momentum provides our world of reason with a linear framework within which to interact with physical reality. Without this recognizable pattern of thought, apparent randomness would result... like being subject to events in a dream. This means that stopping the world is to find a neutral psychological position—the world you know has no influence. Do you see?"

"Kind of."

"Meaning no?" With a shake of her head, Jeanette said, "Time is simultaneous. This means all events are happening in the grand present of Now. What you perceive is a consequence of your senses being conformed to focus strictly on an infinitesimally small bandwidth of events that are in part isolated by the speed at which you can process what you sense. Compared to simultaneity, the speed of light is laughably slow, but our vibratory speed and synaptic response allows us to perceive only physically manifest events. So far?"

"So good."

"In effect, your moment to moment circumstances are a blurred vision until you twist your head to match the rate of speed at which the station names are whizzing by. At the precise moment when the station sign is readable, there is no relative motion between the question of "Where am I?" and the sign; the world of doing has stopped, and you can read the sign correctly. It says not doing."

Pointing toward Granville Island, she said, "Doing is a result of our entire perceptual conformation to physical experience being engaged like a carrier wave from which we recognize and order our perceptions into events. Doing is what makes you perceive the way you do, and me perceive you the way I do."

"With you on that."

Swinging her arm a few degrees, she said, "Doing is what makes that bridge a bridge; to just look at the bridge is doing." She lowered her aim to point at the water of False Creek.

"To look at its shadow on the water, not as a consequence of light being blocked by the physical object—that’s the doing of light—but as an independent image is the not-doing of the bridge’s physical existence."

"Hmm," I shrugged.

Grinning at her own first contact with the concept, she said, "The world is the world to you because you know the doing involved in making it a world. However, by breaking free from those rules of conformity, like you did through acts of seeing and knowing, you now know that the world is far more than what it appears to be. Correct?"

"A lot more."

"Is there any reason to think that a shadow is an exception?"

"There’s more to the shadow… hmm," I mused.

"Your entire inventory exists as you perceive it because you know what to do with it. A chair is a chair because of all the things you know about chairs. If you didn't know the doing of your world, there would be nothing familiar in your surroundings; you would be awake in a dream without apparent control or direction, thereby alternately creating elephants and safe places. If you were to gaze at that shadow with the same focus of intention you give to the bridge you would be introducing a dissonant element in your inventory, because you have no idea what "more" there might be to a shadow."

"Why didn’t you just say that? ‘More’," I parenthesized with my fingers, "lies outside of my inventory."

Sighing, Jeanette explained some of the practices of not-doing to help me become aware when I was dreaming, so that I could Dream. She also gave me specific exercises aimed at maintaining my focus within an initial dreamscape, so this circumstance would not take on an apparent life of its own—following my thoughts into their physically oriented metaphors.

During this discussion, I told her that I had often become aware I was dreaming inside a London cityscape, but the roads and buildings were not where they should be. I interacted with this circumstance to the extent of searching for my former girlfriend’s apartment on Eton Road, off Haverstock Hill, only to find myself standing outside the Washington Pub, on England’s Lane. When I walked through the open door, I found myself in Trafalgar Square. Turning north to go back, I bumped into a Victoria Embankment sign. The saying, "You can’t get there from here," defined my experience.

Jeanette said these dreams reflected my feelings of being lost, and my determination to find my way, but not back to the world I once knew.

⁽¹¹⁾I told Jeanette of an extended job that ended in a hotel room when I awoke to voices speaking a language I did not understand. Instant panic swept through my pores, because I was sure we had left the final country of torment, and I was in Paris. With this thought, I recognized that the chambermaids in the hallway were speaking French, and I almost passed out with relief.

An all-day flight later, I unlocked my apartment door on Carlton Street, in Toronto, and stood there looking around the unfamiliar place. I had been away for months, the only comfort being the knowledge that a thoroughly professional crew was sleeping in their own temporary sanctuaries down the hall. It was an illusion of safety, to be sure, but you grab what you can.

I felt so displaced that I checked into the Ramada Hotel, across the street.

Chapter 73 - The Debacle of Truth

At our next meeting in her house, Jeanette again formally defined the influences of self-image I was supposed to be on the lookout for. I.e. self-importance causes us to think we are the center of the universe, and we are therefore affronted at every turn that challenges our majesty, or perceived subservience. This drain on our energy can cause us to fall into the warming arms of self-absorption where everything is about us, and we grasp for the illusionary prizes dictated by our cultural agreements to aggrandize functionally useless things. This is exhausting because the prizes are ever changing according to the fads of culture, and we end up indulging our fears about not having what others have.

With these categories firmly reestablished she equated common behaviors, such as pride to self-importance, gluttony to self-absorption, and jealousy to self-indulgence, so that I could better recognize similar circumstances in my behavior earlier than I might otherwise see them. All of this was old news, but I did not ask why she felt the need to go over it; I was feeling "delicate" about my apparent lack of progress with her evolving stalking scenarios, and my morning jogs had some times become painful… my hip was acting up. The totality of my days seemed to be about enduring one kind of pain or another, my only refuse from which was Bear, and the praise I received from giving readings.

About stalking lessons: as it had been with buying tomatoes after renting a video, for the past month she had regularly presented me with a choice between doing something for us, for her, or for another person, disguised in casual conversations. As I spontaneously found excuses to do nothing I did not benefit from, she offered more drastic suggestions than she had begun with when she first brought a poor behavior to my attention. To combat my penchant for cheapness hidden under the banner of prudence, for example, Jeanette tasked me with giving away everything I did not need. I found this difficult to do, because I had no basis upon which to determine what I might need down the road. To this she said I could not distinguish between need and want, the remedy to which was to practice random generosity until giving freely replaced "prudence" as the way things were for me: to undo a crappy habit, one had to practice its opposite action until that new act became their spontaneous way of living.

Having little to give made my every journey into the world with her a trial: if I gave $1 to a homeless man, it was not enough. If I gave $5.00 to serving staff, why didn’t I give $5 to the homeless man? The most difficult lesson I had to deal with was Jeanette’s claim that I was cruel: she said my inner rage was constantly at the edge of explosion because I had not come to terms with the deep-seeded fears that fuelled it. It was all I could do to accept that I was secretly angry, let alone cruel: so deep was my disguise as an affable man that I ignored her assertion.

Overall, as she got better at applying the principles of How to Teach she instigated second and third lessons into her original scenarios just when I seemed to be catching on. The effect was like walking up the down escalator blindfolded. Then when I reached the peak of my frustration, she’d bond with me by telling me about her difficulties with teaching—difficulties that were the other side of the coin apprentices had with learning.

Joking, but not, she said I had to get my self-importance in check, and she had to kick-start her ruthlessness because she was robbing me of learning opportunities. Also joking, but not, I said I couldn’t imagine how she could be more "ever-present" in my days. Suddenly more intimate, she said she could have been more efficient. For example, although the second phase of my apprenticeship was ninety-percent about eliminating self-image from my decision making, it also served to ready me to attempt to Hear and Channel Phillip. For this reason she had often asked me what was on my mind or, "Where were you just then?" when I had drifted and created a break in our conversation. She knew that Phillip was working with me at these times, and she was trying to have me make that connection. What she only later realized, poignantly as I began learning how to channel, was that letting go of my awareness of self was far more difficult than she had expected from someone who had experienced the virtual absence of it on a number of occasions while covering conflicts. In retrospect, she said she should have made a game of my drifting—a relentless game—to cause me to focus on those moments without inhibition; she had not applied the Economy of Action principle to those lessons. There was more she seemed to regret—all petty things to my way of thinking—that she tried to make up for by drilling the minutiae of her teaching errors into me as if I would ever need to know them.

Now, as we sat on her couch reviewing her efforts to help me see myself, she reiterated that she was teaching a condensed version of my evolutionary lessons in behavior, so all I really needed to do was “let go.” I had nothing to hide from her, and she was worried about me. I was not performing as well as I could because I still did not appreciate the potential damage I was programming for myself down the road. I was embracing, as second hand convictions only, that I needed to change, which would eventually lead me to the same place that making no effort at all would take me—a deep, dark hole.

Thusly refocused, and with my sincere promise to pay closer attention to my behavior, for days on end Jeanette returned to pointing out my simple verbal slips, and incongruous acts of neglect. Predictably, this led to her explaining how frustration, as a manifestation of self-importance, turns people into lunatics; I redoubled my efforts to not say things like "Uh huh," and to put my lemonade glass in the sink, not on the kitchen counter next to it. But she always found something to comment on… until she didn’t: wary during a joking exchange, it crossed my mind that I was anticipating events that were not happening. Jeanette had stopped saying anything about my behavior, not a word for three or four days. This felt so strange that I began mentioning my own slip-ups, to which she said she appreciated that I was trying.

A week of this relative quiet passed, and I was much less on edge about everything when we went food shopping in a large chain store. Normally, this was the single most irritating circumstance in my life, and she knew it because I had said so during our first meeting to smooth over a bump in our conversation. My point was that people stopped to chat, side by side in the middle of the aisle, while loners parked their carts kitty-corner at intersections thereby restricting access to all-but the thinnest pedestrian, whereas moving someone’s cart was akin to attempted theft.

I told Jeanette that not ranting about our circumstance being one of commerce was a trial that sometimes leaked out in a toneless explanation about how ten items or less did not mean fifteen items. Yes, Lilith—five cans of the same soup counts as five—use your fingers as an example—while having to listen to customers ahead of us exchange bitterness through Solomon-like pronouncements about their husbands and kids. Then came the checkout clerk; transparently disinterested in whether I was really feeling well, or if I had found everything I was looking for, I often said that my eyesight was failing but it didn’t matter because I had only a few months to live... have a nice day.”

On this day, Jeanette joined a conversation in the middle of a blocked aisle about the weather we had all experienced in the parking lot. Then she did it again in the milk aisle with a pair of fertile women whom had each borne hockey teams, members of which were ‘shopping’ independently of their mother’s wishes. At the check-out, Jeanette preemptively declared herself to be healthy enough to have found even more than what she came for.

The queue enjoyed her immensely; the confused clerk maybe not so much.

The entire ordeal took about twenty-minutes, and I was murderously speechless as we left the store.

Tittering through her explanation, she said that although food shopping is a necessity, it was often the only form of social contact stay-at-home mothers had during the day. Without the respite, and therapy from endlessly expressing their monosyllabic desires to the disinterested, their lives would be far more difficult whereas mine would be only slightly more convenient. She then drew threads to my judgmental nature, intolerance, and impatient self-importance, tying that bundle of observations neatly into a package of eventual cruelty I had yet to recognize, but all of the elements were there for me to view. All I needed was a catalyst.

I didn’t see it.

I also didn’t see Jeanette the next day: my old CBC cameraman, Dave Wilson, now semi-retired and living on Bowen Island, had called to ask for help moving his cousin and his wife from North Vancouver to Bowen Island. He didn’t warn me that it would be a hard move until I arrived the next morning; there were over one hundred stairs to climb from the bottom of his cousin’s driveway to the hilltop house.

Loading the cube van, I tweaked my hip as badly as I ever did nowadays—two days on medication, and no running for at least a week. Holding the sidewall of the van for support, as a wave of pain passed, I said out loud, "Not now," dejectedly thinking about how it would look. I really did want to help, because Dave and Leone had taken me in after my British work visa debacle.

I looked up and thought, as a legitimate request, "If you guys can fix this for the day, I’ll never question you, or fight Jeanette again. I’ll find the apprentice’s point of view. Just get me through this."

The pain immediately passed. I tentatively shifted a few heavy boxes—nothing.

"Thanks…. really, thank you," I said out loud.

The move went smoothly, the four of us each making between fifteen and twenty sweat-soaked trips up and down the stairs. I was stiff and sore in the morning, but my hip did not hurt; nor did it ever again.

A week later, during which Jeanette gleefully pummeled me with lessons about my continuing poor behavior, Ski me to work with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the interior of British Columbia. Prompted by a pile of beer while flying back from that shoot, I casually mentioned to our producer what I was up to with Jeanette, in an unconscious effort to repair my damaged self-image. What I did not see coming was being summarily dismissed with a sneer he did not know had slipped out before his polite, "Really?" masked it.

This caused me to escalate my claims, from experiencing simple knowings to include the experiences I had with seeing how people gave themselves away. When the producer condescendingly dismissed these ideas through his unguarded expressions, I escalated my grand ‘insights’ to giving away what Jeanette’s channels had said about this time in mankind’s history. To be fair, the producer controlled his disbelief well, possibly from fear for my sanity as I continued to freely speak about manifestations of Spirit.

As it happened, I had learned more than I appreciated about reading people, so I was not fooled by a simple sniffle portending a prelude to a cold. Nor was his measured look of deep interest about an unusual intellectual foray with a soundman, as the next days would corroborate…

Dave didn’t take my call the next day, or the next, the immediate circumstance meaning he would not work with me again. As he was well known and highly regarded, the producer aside, this effectively meant the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would not hire me either. In the weeks to come, not surprisingly but painfully all the same, no one at the CBC would speak with me without trepidation washing through their voices before they blew me off. In little time, I learned that this banishment of my own making applied nationwide; it was the nature of the business to spread the word, regardless of who actually knew me, and so ended my association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

My only source of potential income from television news was now CTV, and they rarely used me. The commercial film and industrial video market were awash with freelancers who had experience on movie sets in Hollywood North, so a lot of people would have to die before a news tech got a shot at their work.

It happened that I was spending hours reading the books Jeanette had recommended, trying to piece together how specific stalking practices made one better off, notwithstanding that only an idiot would talk about them. Of these, and from early on, I was interested in exploring the one that had become the bane of my life within layers of exquisitely refined personal camouflages—it was called Losing Self-importance. Officially, to tackle this task apprentices employed three disciplines, Erasing Personal History, using Death as an Adviser, and Assuming Responsibility.

Erasing Personal History appealed greatly to me now, because I had experienced its positive effects in what became my last year as a staffer at the CBC: I had been severely embarrassed by my fiancé leaving me, my own inexplicable (to me) penchant for unremitting profanity, and utter hubris in thinking that I was a shoe-in for a job I was not qualified for.

When the unlikely opportunity to move to England appeared, (I now knew) my version of erasing my history had been a full-out retreat from my tattered self-image, which is why I loved my time in England. No one knew me; I had cash coming out the whazoo, and my first freelance stints were borderline heroic through no effort of my own. I was as free as I had ever been.

Smarting from the loss of all my CBC relationships and income, not to mention that Jeanette had warned me to lay low on a number of occasions, I decided that I should erase myself by the numbers this time, and for the right reason.

Following the official guidelines for Erasing Personal History included not revealing what I’m really doing to anyone—no more talking about Jeanette, or my experiences in warfare. Instead, I would tell people only what I wanted them to know, which would be nothing of consequence because it would have nothing to do with self-aggrandizement. What don Juan called "the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, as the core of all human interactions," would cease to exist for me.

Moreover, knowing the core behaviors that gave away what people are really like opened the vast playground of their self-interests, within which I could easily pass unnoticed. In this way, people would have no real reason to be a friend or an enemy, because I would not be stacking my opinions or accomplishments against theirs. Unchallenged and uninterested, they would be polite and leave me alone because I wouldn’t matter to them.

Reciprocally, as self-importance is the primary bane to mankind’s happiness I might claim as my own knowledge how personally expensive is any sense of ‘self’ that requires constant feeding. Hell, I might even experience a moment of happiness… stranger things had happened.

The second technique of undermining self-importance is to adopt a stark philosophy called using Death as an Advisor. In this practice, one is constantly aware that death is the only active force that matters—life is the arena in which it constantly stalks us, and because our time is limited we have none to spend on manipulations, regret—anything to do with self-esteem. In other words, I had to be willing to commit to that which I deemed to be worthy of effort to its full and proper completion, or not do it. The advisor makes one’s decisions appear to be stark, if not sometimes arbitrary, and so they can baffle people.

According to Kha-lib’s channels and don Juan’s teachings, I could think of death as a constant companion that stood close by, always within reach. Anytime I felt like something was so important as to suck up any part of my limited time on earth, by reacting to it as if it somehow mattered, I should look to my left and say, "Is today the day?" If I didn’t drop dead on the spot, I had spent a golden moment of precious time wisely by not reacting, and thereby making the better choice—usually doing nothing.

The third technique to Losing Self-Importance, Assuming Responsibility, is to both physically and metaphorically look back whenever you leave any circumstance to see if there is any trace of you having been there. This includes leaving an unmade bed, trash on the ground, or having personally trashed someone, thereby leaving a trail for someone to potentially follow into my world and disrupt it.

I was confident about this one, because I had learned from that bloody green pillow to keep a sharp lookout for any evidence of my uncaring or neglect. Because of this, I also better understood how a specific effort—be it sincere or just acting until it becomes sincere—becomes a discipline, a habit, and finally an assumption of everyday living. The trick, as Jeanette had relentlessly pointed out to me, was in the early recognition of slovenly practices before one created a crappy momentum that was more difficult to stop.

So far so good, I thought, but there were things I needed to work out before I dove headlong into another vat of stupid.

In practice, these are not independent disciplines; they need to be integrated as one becomes better at any aspect of them. If, for example, I erased my personal history without losing my sense of self-importance, I would not be calculating in my actions so much as evasive with others. The momentum of this would lead me to doubting my actions, and self-aggrandizing would become more difficult to keep at bay. More than this, what I could already deduce from people’s words—primarily sucking the life out of each other as they designed the accolades they wanted to hear—all-but demanded that I bless them with my wisdom: I needed to ask Jeanette how she dealt with this inclination.

Or was it as simple and difficult as shutting the hell up, again?

Then there was the present: I had a personal history with a few people.

At first, I considered redefining them—changing the old agreements upon which we had become, and maintained our relationships. Then I realized this would be like trying to resolve the geometry problem of squaring the circle. It looked possible only because we had conceived of the problem, but circles don’t change into squares; most people don’t allow peers to change unless they can seem them as worse off.

The answer seemed to be to let them drift—certainly my brothers—we didn’t know each other anyway. They’d assume my growing lapses in communication were a consequence of my traumatic life, which they never asked about anyway.

I dearly wanted my mother to know that I was not nuts; to the contrary, I was in the best hands possible. But telling a nurse who had done rotations in mental health institutions about spirit-guides and voices in my head? Maybe not.

This left Ed, a friend I loved—my only real friend. I couldn’t just quit him.

Clever bugger that I am, I reasoned that although he knew my past intimately we could continue being friends under the condition that I never again mentioned it, or what I was doing with Jeanette. If he came to think my current life embarrassed me, and the past had scared me so deeply that I was hiding from both, he would not mention either. That was who he was.

The plan to let him know I was no longer interested in speaking about my past was simple: I was an accomplished bar-talker, and he was good-looking with a razor sharp mind. Together, we were an excellent hunter-gatherer team of shallow relationships, the rewards of which he no longer cared about, because he was with Jayne. But he would play for the fun of it.

I decided to "redefine" these agreements at our next beer outing when, out of habit, Ed would try to lead me into telling an intriguing war tale to a cutie with a limited vocabulary, and I would leave him flat-footed by saying, "I don’t want to talk about that anymore."

This is precisely what happened. I never did and he never asked.

As it worked out, the metaphysical issue took care of itself. I simply never mentioned Jeanette, other than as my destinat