"Things are already in place; they’re just not here. They’re over there," she said, pointing imprecisely toward Stanley Park, across the inlet. "You have to cross the bridge of reason to understand what is awaiting everyone who makes that trek."
"Uh huh," I said, as the puzzled cashier handed me a fiver, three one dollar coins, two quarters, and a nickel. I put a dollar in the tip jar.
"So what’s the assumption specifically about?"
"That’s for you to discover, like you did with the entitlement lesson," she said, taking two quick steps to hold the door open for me, "but nice try."
"Thanks," I mumbled, passing by to the outside. "Where we going now?"
"We go big road to many square huts," she deadpanned.
"Sorry, where are we going now?"
Coming along side me, she said, "A walk along the Denman Street shops, then into the park should work for us today. We’ll see." Jeanette looped her arm through mine, looking up at the ragged edge of clouds creeping over the western horizon of Vancouver Island.
"Are you ready?" she said, looking my way.
"Go for it."
"All of this training is designed to make you ready to access true power. This power is knowledge of energy you cannot handle in any other way but impeccably, otherwise it might kill you. That wouldn’t be helpful."
"I can see that."
"Handling power properly is not something that can be reasoned; it can only be understood after you understand who, what, and where you really are. Right now, you reason who you think you are, so we have to neuter your personality’s influence and redefine yourself—what you are—according to energetic rules. Where you really are is what we will discuss today. Without these understandings, handling the knowledge of true power is akin to a child playing with matches in a dynamite factory." She took a deep breath.
"Just curious, why are you beginning with where I am?"
"You didn’t notice that we began your formal lessons the moment you stood up from the couch—a lesson you reacted poorly to instead of embracing it as a monumental event."
"A monumental pillow?"
"Some people might think that the first formal lesson, on the first day of knowingly being taught Spirit’s ways, was special."
"The lesson wasn’t new." I shrugged. "I was pissed at myself because of that. Anyway," I said as the thought occurred to me, "yesterday you said my first lesson would be about how cheap I am?"
"I said it could be, and this is probably part of it: I don’t get to choose what I teach—not the way you think I do. So you know," she exhaled, "I have to go through your lessons ahead of you, and one of my first was to assess the moment—every moment—to see what it tells me. This morning, your actions chose the lesson on knowing where you are."
"How do you figure that?"
"You were with a teacher of Universal knowledge, and you acted like you were in kindergarten." Squeezing my arm, she said, "Knowing where you also are entails understanding your overall conditioning to physical reality, and how you shaped your beliefs into a self-image from which you draw conclusions that you call your personality." She shifted her grip to my elbow, as I mouthed, "Conditions, shape, conclude… "yup—everything you said was in English."
She looked at me quizzically.
"Your statement was complex," I said, confused that she didn’t catch my meaning.
"Be that as it may, the essence of your comment was that you didn’t grasp the relationship between handling power, and the elements you must understand so that it doesn’t kill you. Instead of taking this seriously, you tried to disguise your ignorance in humor." She stopped short. "The essence of your obfuscation was an attempt to manipulate my view of your intelligence which, again, did not take into account where you really are; or who you really are, for that matter."
"With a teacher, and I’m a student, got it."
"This could be a very long day," she muttered. Then to me, "You must ask me questions as soon as they come to mind. I already know that you’re a reasonable man," she said smiling.
"I suddenly have more questions," I said amiably, as Jeanette nudged us to one side to allow a mother with a double stroller room to pass by.
"Go ahead," she said, winking at the infants.
"You said, examine events through the reasoning of the average person, and through logic." We started walking again. "Are you saying reasoning isn’t logical?"
She looked my way, staring vacantly.
"Really," I said, ‘One second the distinction is clear to me and the next... not so much."
"Reason is a tool through which you funnel beliefs that help you develop logic."
"Is logic the Stalker’s cognition?"
"Logic is the beginning point for clearly accessing other senses—like knowing, seeing, and controlled dreaming." She paused, formulated an analogy, and said, "You were conformed to see this world as a solid, stable construction, when it is your perceptions that literally create this apparently seamless physical continuity from an intricate energy illusion. In the same way, you have shaped your beliefs into seamless assumptions from which you have drawn your conclusions about who you think you are. These conclusions are an entanglement of beliefs about you. They are not you; they represent how you feel about yourself, and/or how you want to be perceived by others.
"Is my personality an energetic flaw in a physical body?"
Shaking her head in mock frustration, Jeanette said, "You are ignorant; your beliefs are flawed, so acting them out with the best of intentions can wreak havoc." Seeing that I was having trouble making this distinction, she said, "Consciousness is not Spirit; it’s a tool—a light that Spirit focuses in endless ways to experience and explore all that it can, because it can. In a similar way, your personality is a tool of self-exploration the elements of which you focus in particular ways to develop understandings that go beyond the need for those elements, and finally the tool itself."
"Elements such as being greedy, for example?"
"Yes—you focus on greed until it proves to be a bad idea, then the reasoning behind not being greedy becomes a logical conclusion. At this point, you’ve shed that aspect of your reason, and so of your personality. Overall, your personality is that light of conscious awareness when you know yourself. Stalkers literally use their personality as a tool for more advanced development, no different than other’s might use greed for the same purpose, or they can discard it entirely."
"Discard their personality?"
"Yes… we’ll get to that."
"Uh huh, so I shape beliefs into conclusions about who I think I am?"
"Correct."
"What are they?"
"The point of stalking is to discover them."
"You can’t just tell me; I mean do you know how Phillip put me together?"
"I already have told what you are like, but you had no reason to believe me. Now that spirit has introduced themselves directly to you, you do. Unfortunately it’s still only a reason, so we have to make my claims undeniable convictions, and finally knowing."
"You’ve lost me."
"To have you understand the nature of the average person’s confusion, and gain some semblance of clarity, we had to dissect the elements of confusion. Through practice, we separated you from them; practice is what made them undeniable and easily recognizable thereafter. In the same way, we have to dissect your self-image, and through practice render its elements moot. These elements are beliefs you hold about yourself, most of which are inaccurate... for now."
"So if I’ve got this right, my personality is a conclusion drawn from an entanglement of inaccurate beliefs?" Before she could reply, I said, "That explains why you’re so big on teaching me essences."
"I am not teaching you essences; I am teaching you how to lose your reason, so that you can see them for yourself."
"Lose my mind is more like it."
"It amounts to the same thing," she said, as we reached the intersection of 14th Street and Bellevue. A red neon hand flashed that the traffic lights were about to change.
"For our purposes," she carried on, "the essential elements of all personalities are chosen before birth to suit particular challenges. We shape these proclivities through our interactions with the outside world, which we funnel through three mechanisms of self-perception; I literally mean your perception of self. We’ve talked about them."
"I remember that self-importance, self-indulgence, and self-absorption form our self-image, but I don’t recall their characteristics."
"We’ll cover those as they come up again. For now, know that they are the mechanisms through which you shape and express your views, and therefore from which you draw your conclusions about whom you think you are," she said as we began crossing the street. "Self-image is the singularly most formidable assumption of self-corroborating beliefs a human can have. Nevertheless, like all temporary beliefs, a self-image will eventually bring you to experiences that no longer bear out your views, and the image changes. Eventually, you don’t need a self-image either—you will know yourself."
"An example of changing my image would be what?"
"You might be confronted with a dilemma you thought you were steadfast on, like the fight or flight response, and surprise yourself. Personal attributes need the same kind of dose of reality to be corroborated."
"Personal attributes such as?" I said, as Jeanette’s nudge led us toward the park benches on the other side of the railway tracks, near the Ferry building.
"Such as you not realizing you are cheap, but we’re taking care of that." She motioned the example aside. "The point is there comes a time in everyone’s evolution when their beliefs have outlived their usefulness, as is their design. This is when a teacher…"
"Sorry… beliefs outlive their usefulness as what, again?" I said as we came to a bench. We sat down facing Burrard Inlet.
"Beliefs guide us toward knowledge through trial, error, and assessment; they have no substance of their own. They are directions to consider, and possibly explore by acting on them. Fighting for them is as stupid as defending north."
"Over what else?"
"Over any other idea; it’s just a direction?" she said, raising her brow.
"Right, but we use magnetic north more."
"Do you want to kill me over it?"
It took me a moment to realize I had defended magnetic north, which created the turning point Jeanette wanted me to grasp: beliefs are only ideas until we bestow upon them the false substance of our self-image, then they become a cause as artificial as the self-image that created it.
"Point made," I said.
"Excellent—what is it?" she said, surprising me. Before I could respond, Jeanette said, "This isn’t a test; it’s to cement your gains, and add them to the assumption we’re ultimately after."
Nodding, I said, "Beliefs guide us to and through our experiences so that we can examine, modify, discard, and essentially solidify convictions based on logic."
"Correct, then a teacher arrives to dismantle them all, beginning with your personality."
"Just so we’re on the same page, essentially your lessons are about dismantling all of the elements; these are my beliefs, the assumptions and conclusions they formed, the personality I formed from these, and the mode by which I formed all of these things—reason?"
"You’ve got it."
"Leaving me with what?"
"Not with—without."
‘Without what?"
"The continuity that makes you human... don’t worry about it," she said, casually. You’ll understand when we get there."
Apparently editing her thoughts, she slowly said, "Dismantling our vision of ourselves is an excruciating process, but the reward is what don Juan called the single most important achievement in everyone’s development." Looking into my eyes, she said, "It’s called a Conditional Death. This is the moment in which you embrace, as your own knowledge, the concoction of beliefs and conditions upon which you constructed your personality, and dismiss them in their entirety. In that moment you are euphorically free—an essence upon which you have to replace the void with the disciplines that brought you to seeing what you are really like. Otherwise, the elastics of a lifetime of poor programming will draw you back to the person you once were. I think I mentioned this earlier."
"Is this what you called surrendering your self-image?"
"It is; I didn’t want to use words that might scare you." She grinned.
"And losing the continuity that makes me human is calming?"
"I’m not perfect."
"What happens if I don’t have one of those conditional things?"
"You need to stop focusing on the negative, as a reactive response to information that intimidates you," she said, shaking her head. "A Conditional Death occurs at the behest of Spirit moving your point of awareness to the position where what you are really like envelopes you." She pursed her lips. "That’s not precisely correct, because you intellectually have to be aware of what you are really like to recognize the elements of the moment you are being freed from." No matter," she flicked her wrist. “Without this event," she answered my question, "access to more advanced knowledge is blocked."
"Meaning I’m doomed to be stupid?"
"Meaning you’re not responsible with what you think you know, so you’re not ready for more," she grinned, "until you are."
"When would that be?"
"We demonstrated that moment first thing this morning: by condensing the elements of what you knew so far, you created an assumption that was more than the sum of its parts, because you’re constructing the framework of essences."
"Like you did with the elements of entitlement?"
"Correct, and as you said essences easily and instantly attach to each other. So doing this now would make you ready to learn more of the unreasonable assumption we’re after, because you are getting rid of reasoned information, and crushing the remainder into knowledge." She grinned. "Start with the idea that we are energy: if you think of the elements of your personality as a cone of focuses that are always interacting to appear to be consistent, it’ll flow more easily."
And it did: After a moment, I said, "From the tip of the cone; we are energy living by energetic rules. We condense this energy, and its rules, into physical translations. Moving down the cone, physical experience indoctrinates us to the affects of the first set of rules as assumptions we never have to consider. These include weight, distance, time, pain, and so on." I motioned the physical laws aside. "The second set of assumptions comes from interacting with people, and they infiltrate all of our personal experiences: we compartmentalize these experiences in the three cores of self-image, according to the personalities we have chosen. Collectively, the beliefs we form from embracing all of these assumptions design our experiences."
"You’re almost there: what holds all of these influences together to make our perceptions seamless?"
"I know the answer, but I’m not sure I can explain it because your goal is to have me transcend it: reason is the glue."
"Is it fair to say that your problem is with defining reason?"
"It is, sorry."
"Reason," Jeanette said academically, "is typically thought to be the capacity to comprehend events in a rational way. However, rationality is dependent upon how we view our experiences within familiar environments and conditions, and we initially have no choice but to adopt certain values until experiences customize our view." She paused to allow me to bring our previous conversations to bear.
I grunt-nodded, ready for more.
She carried on: "The process of customization is multi-layered. As we’ve discussed, our first assumptions about physical reality, such as weight and distance, are interpretations of psychological and energetic conditions that exist in our natural state. These root assumptions are literally forced upon our form causing us to perceive physical reality in the way that we do, while our interactions with others create social assumptions that conform our behavior to suit our culture. Taken together, these influences form a consensus about not just what we see, but all of our perceptions in and to the world at large. Stalkers call this level of perception our inventory, and it includes all of the average person’s experiences. For practical purposes, if you can perceive it or conceive of it, it belongs to your inventory." She paused again.
I nodded to signal that I intellectually understood my inventory included everything real and imagined.
"In a nutshell, the world has been incessantly described to us until we are capable of perceiving it as it has been described, then we color it to suit our beliefs."
"That makes sense."
"This process creates an internal dialogue that maintains the description. This dialogue includes the person you think you are standing in the time and place you think you exist, believing the things you were told to believe, when all of these ideas are borrowed and shared translations of our underlying reality." Nodding to herself, she said, "You have agreed with the root assumptions of a physical experience, such as the three dimensions and gravity. If you had not, you couldn’t function. You’d probably be dead. Correct?"
"Yes."
"You have also agreed with the consensus assumptions of proper conduct. If you had not, you’d be in prison."
"Correct."
"These conformations create the apparent continuity of our existence: our perceptions literally assemble the world we know, but we need a way to get from point A to point B safely. Otherwise, we would all stare at the four-way stop sign and do nothing. Do you see how that would be?"
"I do."
"To simplify this circumstance, all of the intricate influences of perception we have discussed create your personally reasoned arena of should. These same influences apply to the other three drivers, but we all interpret circumstances uniquely so we need a basis of agreement upon which to interact with others in a coherent way. Reason is our operating system. It’s the way we assess our experiences as we navigate through our days. That said, as you know from your clarity lessons, there is only the assumption of continuity: the process of reasoning is full of personal gaffs and gaps, but our self-image fills them." She took a thoughtful breath.
"Still with you," I said.
"The point you’re struggling with is that reason is a tool—a transitional stage in our development, the same way that learning the alphabet is the forerunner to communicating in sentences. The next stage for everyone is learning how to see through the beliefs and illusions that reason uses, foremost of which is to lose self as the focal point through which we see the world—losing that filter is to lose reason is to gain logic."
She took a breath. "Again, everyone’s developmental quest is to see past their literal physical perceptions, recognize the metaphors that physicality represents, and untangle their beliefs to break the trance of their conformations. Doing this reveals the illusions they held about the world, and their place in it. This is true knowledge, and as knowledge increases speed it brings one closer to the pure perceptions of Spirit."
"Got it."
"Not yet: we have to deal with the first barrier you have to learning an unreasonable assumption—doubt."
Chapter 42 - Enemies of Learning
"I don’t doubt you: I know Spirit exists, so it’s only logical that I believe everything you—and they say."
"Doubt is reasoned, so it is a barrier to comprehending what we’re after, which is setting you up to experience the assumption directly. Blind acceptance is also reasoned, so it would stand in the way as well, would it not?" She paused.
"Other than I believe you, sure." I said.
"The most prevalent flaw in the average person’s reasoning process is a ditch where they park their second-hand convictions, and call them logical conclusions. It happens like this," she said, holding up her hand to forestall my question. "Like most people, you change your ways one severe event at a time, while your ego and intellect combine to convince you that the original experience will cause you to avoid it again. This makes you feel safe, and you quickly ignore the potential of similar things happening by way of not assessing the contributing elements, or by molding them into rules you are convinced is knowledge. You subsequently demonstrate that this is a lie by not incorporating that knowledge into your way of living: you pay it the lip service of a belief, and not act on the conviction that your life might depend on your knowledge some day. So while your out-of-body experience provided you with a single conviction, you have yet to develop a new way of thinking from it, because doubt and suspicion are so much a part of you."
"They were earned."
"But not fully learned; you adapted to higher levels of danger in Lebanon so that, during the nightly Beirut car bombings, you didn’t even bother to drop to the floor. Correct?"
"Being on the floor wouldn’t have changed much if a car flew through the wall."
"So you metaphorically stood on the outside of the branch to get a better view of someone cutting it off, instead of applying your new knowledge to all circumstances?" She gathered her breath. "A minute ago, you took an hours-old incident—proof of Spirit’s existence—which created a true conviction from which you claimed you believe everything I say. The problem with your claim is that, not an hour ago, you demonstrated it’s a lie." Chuckling at my constipated look, she said, "You couldn’t graciously accept a simple lesson." Miming fluffing a small pillow, Jeanette whispered, "Shit," under her breath. "How shallow is that comment on the conviction that you believe everything I say?"
"I didn’t call you a liar," I said petulantly.
"My point is that you have not integrated your knowledge into a conviction. If you had, you would have believed me when I said there are no small things in the Stalker’s world, that nothing comes from nothing, and to stop any poor practice is to not neglect the power you wield. You didn’t appreciate these things, because you filtered your neglect through your self-image."
"The true circumstance being that I was with a teacher… I know that now."
"But you don’t: the true circumstance was that this lesson is very difficult to master, that my constant reminders should cause you to focus on what you’re really doing, and where you really are at all times. The true circumstance was that these lessons are designed to enhance your energy by always doing the proper thing. Getting pissed at yourself, or anyone, is a waste of time, which fails to take into account that you will die. It is also a waste of energy, which fails to take into account that you need all you can earn to endure the training leading up to your Conditional Death, without which you can’t go further than the average man’s ego allows."
"But I really do believe you," I said stoically.
"You just think you do."
"How is thinking I believe you and believing you not the same thing?" I said, perplexed.
Exhaling a substantial puff of patience through her nostrils, she said, "Your claim is missing a decisive element." She cleared her throat. "As an average person, true conviction arrives as a consequence of feeling that your life is at stake. Without this, you are indulging your reasoning on what you deem to be critical beliefs, like sincerely concluding that you believe everything I say. Your claim is an off-shoot of the main event, and it is certainly reasonable, but like most people you do nothing with it but make promises to yourself." She shrugged. "The missing word in your conclusion is that you should believe everything I say, because it would be unreasonable not to. This makes your sincerity a second-hand conviction reasoned through the aspect of your self-image that deals with the appearance of rationality. But our goal is to get you to cross that line."
"What put my survival at stake about spirit’s existence?"
"You were nearly scared to death on the way up to the ceiling. Speaking of which," she said, as if I might argue the point, "you had a dream that provided you with the conviction to keep going with me, when it was not reasonable to do so, before you had your out-of-body experience—the wraith?"
"Right."
"From a life threatening situation," she said, "you gained the conviction that you were safe. Because it was delivered in the dream state, it also took away your fear of the unknown in general, and the unknowable in particular—that being Spirit." Jeanette leaned forward, stood, and stepped toward home.
I did the same.
"Another example occurred," she said, taking my arm, "after the first channel from Kha-lib. You had to decide whether I was crazy or that, according to Kha-lib, the world was crazy and I was actually one of the saner people in it. Correct?"
"Uh huh," I said, though we'd never discussed this.
"To do this, you had to deal with the apparent incongruity your reason created between my intellect and my foolish beliefs, until you had your out-of-body experience." We stepped off the grass onto Argyle Street.
"What difference did that make?"
"It was a definitive event that made my sanity a reasonable conclusion, because you had a new framework within which to view an otherwise unreasonable event. However, you did nothing more with that knowledge than you did with your extreme combat experiences." She gestured laconically. "You proselytized about the rules to others—facts that begged you to make the next logical leap and employ them all of the time. Claiming that you believe everything I say, based on one conviction, is indulging your reason in the same way because you’re really not sure that you’re not nuts."
"What? I know what happened, and I didn’t make it up."
"But you have yet to make the next logical leap."
"Which is?"
"Which is that you don’t understand this world; you literally left it behind. Your continuity has taken a huge blow, and you’re pretending otherwise."
"I hadn’t thought about that."
"Precisely my point," she said tapping her temple. "You can’t help but challenge some of my assertions when your reason hasn’t accepted that it is inadequate for dealing with the way things really are. It’s defending familiar turf—like the importance of magnetic north, because it has run into the first natural enemy of learning, fear."
"Of what?"
"No quest is ever what we thought it would be, and as you have amp