"Good man," Bonnie said, but we both knew she was talking about
me accepting that I had been conformed to the ways of conflict. In what
specific ways was yet to come.
"From now on," Bonnie continued dealing with my overt
accomplishment, "if you hear anyone speak about the underlying elements
of those girl‘s comments, you‘ll know what they‘re really saying. In a
short while, that understanding will attract other relevant information,
such as the connection you just made with your combat experiences
conforming you in specific ways, and your assumption about entitlement
will expand to include broader conformations to other kinds of events. In
time, it will spontaneously deal with behavioural cause and effect—be that
from self- importance, greed, need, or abuse—all of which will qualify you
for even more intricate episodes of knowing things less apparently related
to entitlement, because everything is connected."
"And so on; I get it."
"For you, the goal is to make connections to what you are really like,
which will qualify you for a massive knowing. I‘ll get to that," she waived
the point aside…
Through these preliminary procedures and crisp exchanges, I came to
delineate assumptions in three terms: We form unconscious assumptions
directly through experiences we never have to assess for validity, because
they are ever-present for everyone. Throw a ball into the air and it will
always come down. We also form opinion-based assumptions indirectly
through the building of beliefs that evolve as circumstances warrant.
Sharing these requires that people agree on particular interpretations of
events in a moment that may change.
A Stalker‘s assumption is something else entirely: they are
deliberately sought and taught, and deal with precise knowledge based on
understanding the essences of the events that construct it. These essences
never change—they are pure understandings that effortlessly attach to all
other essences, as one discovers these in an ever-broadening effort to
reach a more encompassing awareness than that of the average person. As
such, sharing a Stalker‘s assumption about any topic or circumstance
could replace volumes of knowledge with a glance, as is their design.
What makes them different from those of a room full of recombinant DNA
PhDs, for example, is that they can see, with utter detachment, that which
others can only examine according to rules they made, and which
determine the parameters of the outcome.
I also understood, but did not voice, the more Stalker‘s assumptions
Bonnie and I might share—even at the apprenticeship level—the more
