"Well?" she said.
The lack of names and obvious effort to entice the stranger made it easier to deal with the subtext of the scene, as per her request to look between the lines.
"Your theme seems to be that there are times when doing nothing is best, and that offering help can be premature." I glanced down. "Reviewing the past is also important to understand what to do the next time around, because things might not be what they seemed to be at the time. For that matter, things might not be what they appear to be in the moment."
"I know it’s choppy," she said, acknowledging that I had avoided commenting on the quality of her work.
"Why did these people plot to help the guy?"
"To have him realize he had arrived at a place he didn’t know he was looking for." Her gaze lingered on me, before she said, "As for these people?" She dipped her head in anticipation.
"The woman is Aleena grown up?" I said.
"Correct."
"The elders would be the baker and... another merchant?" I guessed.
"What about the traveler?" Jeanette said, taking the pages from beneath my hand.
I didn’t have a clue.
"It’s not in the chapter," Jeanette said to help me.
I shrugged, and she said no more about it. Instead, she reached into her bag to present me with another short scene, beginning on page 340.
I held my tongue about this annoying practice and dutifully read the extract…
The same characters had convened a council to discuss what to do about the unnamed traveler’s practice of extracting praise and favors in exchange for his cooperation; he had not recognized that the elder was talking about him at their first meeting. The council’s dialogue pointed out that people who place this tax on relationships can never fulfill the demands of their self-image, and that this fog of self-deception inevitably leads to a betrayal, so they were searching for ways to make the need to change his behavior apparent without damaging anyone.
I followed their plan this far—you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken—before Jeanette lost me: the elder Tartuu said they should focus on the traveler’s romance to come with the minstrel, and the ensuing discussion revealed that the council was a cabal of psychics.
For pure disappointment, this machination surpassed resurrecting dead characters in dream sequences because, my specific objections aside, Jeanette’s writing style generated an undercurrent of suspense by alluding to there being ‘more’ to everything her characters said. I had caught on to that much from her role-playing.
I didn’t get it. She was miles smarter than this.
When I looked up to comment, Jeanette preemptively said, "Teachers focus on the subtext of physical events, so when a stranger happened upon a group of people who were celebrating the change of seasons they didn’t have to discuss why he was there."
"I got that - or would have. I’m thinking there’s no depth to your plot if your guys know what’s going to happen."
"By the time the audience gets to this scene they’ll know the council can read the momentum of events, which is to say that some events may not have passed the point of change to become inevitable."
"Thereby making a thin gimmick arbitrary?" I said, shaking my head.
"Thereby creating drama, you’ll see."
"Or not," I mumbled under my breath.
We paid our bill, and in silence headed toward the park for two city blocks before Jeanette said, "Every scene in my work has underlying circumstances, not unlike how you came to understand where you really were in the Middle East. I think you’re frustrated with my manner of presentation because your imagination hasn’t grasped the potential dangers of daily life here. You’re still far more aware of the overt manifestations of conflict."
"What kind of dangers am I missing?" I chuckled.
"Let’s see if we can find something that’ll get your attention." She looked feverishly up and down Davie Street; it took me a moment to realize she was making a joke.
Chuckling, I said, "When I was in the Navy, Campbell and I were standing an outside watch on the bridge wings in a dead calm, when we passed a large log. A moment later, an officer cadet opened the bridge hatch and shouted for the benefit of the captain standing inside, ‘Did you see that log, Campbell?’
‘Yes sir. It was brown, long, and round.’
‘Why didn’t you report it?’ the cadet said coldly.
‘It didn’t seem important.’
‘Sir!’ the officer cadet admonished him. Then he sternly explained, ‘There may have been a man holding onto it!’ "
I told Jeanette that for the rest of our watch we scanned the horizon for shipping, the mid-distances for Russian periscopes, and the near distances for anything people could hang on to. Nearing the end of our watch, without comment to me Campbell flung the hatch open and shouted, "Officer of the watch...sir! Port lookout reporting shit hawk bearing red one five, angle of elevation thirty degrees, range half a mile, closing fast!" Before the cadet could ask why Campbell had reported a seagull, he said, "There may be a plane behind it. Sir!"
Expelling a rush of appreciation through her nostrils, Jeanette said, "Are you making fun of me?"
"To the contrary, I am acknowledging that there could be danger anywhere."
"Umm."
We walked the rest of the way to the park in a comfortable silence, before Jeanette suddenly became animated. Like a child making discoveries, she pointed to an ancient tree, a tide rip, then a cloud formation, saying things like, "It’s elegant," and, "Watch the swirl," then, "Look at it change shape and still be a cloud."
I was envious. She didn’t have to work hard at creating the older characters in her commune.
Chapter 9: Beauty, and the Beast
While Jeanette probed and punctured my beliefs, she simultaneously offered alternative views about “the way things are,” often in a speculative manner because her initial goal was to orient me to other possibilities. At her own pace, she then extended the complexity of these views into larger so-called facts and philosophies that most reasonable people would dismiss, but she knew how to challenge me.
Superficially, she might appear to be a cult leader recruiting followers by causing them to reason their lives with a different set of values. However, her goal was not to have me exchange one set of beliefs for another, but to have me abandon all beliefs to embrace new convictions by way of directed experiences: because our beliefs include the cultural influences and unconscious assumptions upon which our sense of identity, and so our sanity depend, teachers are as meticulous at explaining and then setting up the student to experience a new way of thinking, as they are at unearthing the student’s views and demonstrating their flaws. Without this delicate balance in play, the student could lose their mind when their beliefs crumble.
Beauty, and the Beast.
Look, look!" she shouted as if my eyes required separate commands.
With exaggerated concern, I scanned the horizon for a tornado then the sea for a tsunami, before I followed her finger pointing toward a rotund man dressed in a multicolored pullover; he was playing with a retriever mixed-breed wearing a matching bandana.
"The dog could have rabies?" I ventured a guess.
"This is important. Tell me what you see."
"I see a fashion-challenged guy playing with his dog."
"That’s what our culture taught you to see. Try it my culture’s way, and assess the nature of their interactions." Jeanette pulled me off the walkway to watch the duo work a cycle of heel, sit, down, and stay commands. At the completion of their routine, I had nothing ‘advanced’ to add to my initial observation.
"Would you agree she has been trained using appropriate methods?" Jeanette prompted me.
"No," I said definitively.
"Why do you say that?"
"She has a penis."
Jeanette managed her laugh into a distorted, "What tells you that his training has been appropriate?"
"Bozo’s commands are calm, the dog obeys hand signals right away—maybe too fast because he anticipates them, which means it’s a very familiar game."
At that moment, the dog issued a plaintive, diminishing howl that sounded like a blues horn refrain. "Otis is tired of basic training; he’s asking for something to chase," I said.
"There’s hope for you." Jeanette inhaled audibly, slowly released the air through her mouth, and in a normal tone said, "Otis responds happily even when he doesn’t get an immediate reward, because his behavior is governed by how his trainer conditioned him to respond beyond the command." She mimicked the dog’s antics at the foot of his owner, taking skipping half-steps around me before stopping at close quarters. "He has faith that his actions will benefit him," she said with a satisfied huff.
"I don’t think dogs are plagued by abstractions," I said, taking her arm in mine.
"I didn’t say he thought about it," Jeanette replied, "which is the point; he doesn’t know how he has been conditioned any more than we understand the roots of our behavior."
"That may be, but people can choose to act in different ways to identical circumstances. Dogs repeat a behavior until they get a better offer." I thought about this for a moment, chuckled, and said, "Maybe that’s not the best example."
"We’re certainly capable of making other choices," Jeanette said, stopping to look back, "but our unrealized assumptions shrink those possibilities until we end up doing versions of the same thing in similar circumstances." She looked at me. "Enslavement to our illusions about the way things are continues until we stop to assess the consequences of our beliefs, in the context of the true nature of both." She nodded at Otis. "Set your version of the world aside, and look at them as if you’re from another planet."
"Huh?"
"We’re talking about illusions; just do it, and you’ll discover something."
A moment of mental adjustment: I focused on a bipedal humanoid moving his limbs in a repetitious way. At Jeanette’s direction, I closed my eyes and opened them to focus on the four-legged creature moving his entire body in various ways.
"Switch roles," she whispered. "Assume the smaller creature is the initiator, and you’ll see that the big one is not as smart or nearly as agile. Look: Otis stands on all fours in a commanding position, but all the man can do is lower his hand. The little one rests his body on the ground, but all the big one can do is raise his hand. Otis gives the human a break by patiently sitting in front of him. The human is happy for the rest so he rewards the little fellow with a cookie."
These actions happened as she spoke, and for a brief moment Jeanette’s phrasing caused me to experience the incongruous perception that Otis was training a physically, and possibly intellectually inferior creature to feed him. I laughed at the illusion, then at the cliché—people are trained by their pets in just this way.
"You’ve got it!" Jeanette said bobbing in front of me like Otis at his master’s feet. "Our predilections," she said, settling down, "are shaped by the commands of our culture, which we filter through how we view ourselves, and the risks we’re willing to take to maintain that view. Our freedom to respond to identical circumstances in different ways is an illusion, like the one you just experienced."
Grasping my hand, Jeanette took skipping steps trying to pull me along. "It takes discipline to break old patterns, and to see what we’re really capable of, because we’ve designated our self-image to be the guardian of our assumptions."
I let go of her hand, and began walking at a pace too fast for her to maintain her frolicking. Stopping on the grass a few steps behind me, she triumphantly said, "And there it is!"
"There what is?" I said, turning to face her.
"You could have chosen to play with me, but your male upbringing dictated that you should be embarrassed. That’s not manly either, so you became superior and distanced yourself from me."
"Not that I agree, but one point at a time: my action was one choice of many possible choices."
"But it was one you would make nine times out of ten. It’s the tenth variation of the same thing that creates your misconception about free will." She closed the distance between us. Still catching her breath, she said, "Otis came into this world without ulterior motives. He has no abstractions to ponder, or images to maintain, so everything that’s not a potential adversary in his world is a potential mate, food, a scent to explore, or a circumstance of play. It doesn’t occur to him to become nasty in new situations, or when he has to work, because his faith has been focused on inevitable success. He’s happy!" she said, mimicking a dog chasing a bouncing ball.
Five paces ahead of me, Jeanette stopped as if she had hit an electronic fence. "Some dogs are trained through cruelty," she said, catching her breath, "which appears to work because the animal’s choices are basically limited to survival, pleasure, or pain."
"I’m not advocating cruelty," I said, coming alongside her, "but you get the same result."
"You can’t use inappropriate methods to create appropriate behavior with any creature. Obedience based on fear is submission, and that will always emerge in rebellion. Free will is like truth—like a falcon on prey—it will always present itself, and unexpectedly."
"Doggie Uprising Ends Leash Laws!" I jested.
"The point I’m trying to have you entertain," she said wryly, "is that Otis sees the world in the way he was conformed to it, no different than normal people can become hooligans under the right conditions, and conditioning. Obeying his owner is not about hunger, power, or sanctuary. It’s a pleasurable game he’ll play with everyone, because his actions faithfully generate circumstances in keeping with his focus of play. This constantly validates his conditioning, and creates a positive cycle of play." Jeanette circled her finger as she spoke. "Kindly train a dog and it may corner a trespasser, and bark as a greeting, for attention, or to warn his pack, but his conditioning tells him that he’s safe; there’s no need to protect anything. A cruelly trained animal will take a piece out of a stranger, because the animal has learned that its safest place in the world is still hazardous. You’ve seen this kind of thing often enough."
"I have?"
Thinking I was being sarcastic, Jeanette gave me a sharp look, only to realize I was legitimately clueless.
Touching my hand in apology, she said, "You‘ve worked with artists who believed their own press, politicians who indulged personal goals ahead of representing their constituents, and religious leaders absorbed by their status, haven’t you?"
"All of the above, sure."
"The underlying threat is that none of them could act like that, and maintain their status, unless the public shared their assumptions."
"You’re saying that everywhere," I waved my arm to cover all that we could see, "the tail is wagging the dog?"
"I’m saying our tales are wagging our dogmas, and that good people derive their behaviors from harmfully acceptable practices, which they evolve into personal convictions that camouflage the essence of their actions. Our society is at the point where even clearly outrageous practices fly over our heads, or confuse us if they manage to get our attention."
"An example of that would be helpful," I said, thinking it would be about me. Still…
"You’ve been tracking acceptable scientific, religious, and cultural beliefs to the grave for years, and I’ll bet you lunch and a beer that you’re still mystified when spectators celebrate a victory by destroying other people’s property."
"You’re not?"
"Trillion dollar contact sports, relentless and pointless violence on television, and arcade games based on brutality and death, condition our children to think that destruction is part of the entertainment package."
"Isn’t it an outlet for pent up aggression?"
"The demands of our social conformation put a lid on the free expression of our natural aggression,
which is not damaging—it’s the force behind our creativity—until there’s a mass agreement to say screw it. That’s when we emulate the celebrity players who are paid millions to take cheap shots and cheat."
"The courts don’t hold game makers culpable when kids mimic them."
"Nor should they; that responsibility lies with the parents, and society as a whole."
"My head might explode," I said, trying to organize my thoughts.
"Just say what’s there," Jeanette prompted me. "You know I won’t judge it."
Tentatively, because the ducks hadn’t all landed yet, I said, "We don’t appreciate what our true circumstances are, because we share common assumptions about our world?"
"Yes."
"Which has what to do with danger, here and now?"
"Do you not find it the least bit scary that two reasonably intelligent people can view the same scene, at the same time, in the same place, and see entirely different things?"
"I don’t find it scary that we’ve got different opinions."
"Opinions are a lesson for another time," Jeanette said, apparently giving up on trying to make clear whatever I was supposed to be afraid of—a fit man living in Canada, in the daytime, in Stanley Park, with witnesses everywhere. Really?
"I think any Otis-like conformation analogy will be too much for a movie to work through," I said, moving on. "You’ll have to state it in the dialogue, and that’s that."
"We will simplify the idea, which we couldn’t have done until you understood the connections between what we see, believe, and what we do. Great job. Thank you."
"You’re welcome, but I was just piecing things together out loud."
"Has a single experience ever changed something you believed?"
"Sure. That happens to everyone. Why?"
"Do you think it’s logical to form a cogent philosophy for life from that experience?"
"Probably not."
"Because the event would color an entire world view, when it doesn’t always apply?"
"I guess… yes."
"Look around you!" she shouted.
"At what?" I mimicked her exuberance.
"At the world!" she said, as her arm swept the misty meridian where sapphire sky dissolved into a crown of indigo ice atop late spring mountains.
I did a 360-degree turn at the completion of which Jeanette examined my expression. Finding no ridicule etched in my thin grin, she focused on the distant landscape.
Playing along, I followed her gaze into the darkened hollows of a descending forest, tracking pinpoints of light as they slashed through explosions of vital greenery where the sun punctured the canopy of clouds and conifer. I re-examined this vista for anything remotely relevant to her exuberant request, but like the outgoing tide grasping for rocks it had been polishing for millennia, I found no point of purchase.
"What do you see?" she said.
"Trees, water, and some shit hawks feeding," I replied honestly.
Sighing with pretentious sorrow, she said, "That’s my point: your world view has been so severely tainted by select events that you see nothing but endless days of competing for the survival of your self-image."
"I don’t understand how what I see is competing with your view. We just don’t agree on what lies beneath the canopy. What’s the big deal?"
We began walking, before Jeanette said, "Disillusionment and mistrust create the cynicism that’s blinding you to all of this, as it is—not what lies beneath," she waved her arm as if to sweep the horizon free of my jaded view. "It caused you to see a clown where a free spirit was giving a dependent creature a good life, and because you don’t grasp how you have been conformed you think it’ll take too long to explain it to others. It won’t; that’s your burden."
"You were talking about everyone’s conformation."
"To someone special, yes."
"Special because I didn’t see it?" I said, slowing to grasp what she meant.
"Exactly; it could be no other way."
Jeanette chirped an emotion, and she was suddenly three strides ahead: the sounds of water lapping at the foot of the sea wall marked off the next twenty yards, as I made up the distance casually... I had no idea what I had done, but she obviously wanted some alone time.
Not until I was lying in bed that night did I put her apparent disappointment in me into perspective: Jeanette was trying to convince me that I should be afraid of the way things are in our world because, as she had stated, her characters had to be wary of where they were at all times. So I must have created a run in the fabric of her intricate plot by responding as her audience would—not being afraid of people having different opinions. This must have caused her to glimpse the inevitability of having to restructure a key aspect of her story.
It was all I had to go on, but it made sense. I felt genuinely sorry for her; I knew what that was like.
Mystics throughout the ages have taught that humans know far more than we think we know, because we either dismiss, or have not been made aware of our resources and abilities. Teachers in the stalking realm, and all emissaries, can access both their own silent resources and those of others. Their techniques include facilitating the student’s entrance into a state of heightened awareness where complex knowledge can be more easily assimilated, teaching in lucid dreaming where metaphors replace words to create comprehensive understandings, and aiding the student with accessing an energy point in their being called the assemblage point, which stores the memory of every event they have experienced—and much more. When Spirit facilitates these experiences the physical teacher becomes the interpreter of events, including the omen of Spirit’s direct participation.
On the morning of our fourth consecutive day together, we met outside a fashionable bakery-cafe in West Vancouver; contagiously chipper, Jeanette began telling me about her night of lucid dreaming. Two steps through the broad glass doors, Brandi greeted us with an orthodontist’s smile, and expansively declared that we could sit anywhere, before her youthful charm collapsed at the sound of a soft chime.
I looked for a remote spot in case Jeanette felt like dancing.
Taking in the ambiance, two of the twenty-foot high light tan walls were accented by slashes of green neon, under which stood snowflake arrays of plastic tables surrounded by petals of tub chairs flaunting red slashes down to a Mexican tile floor. The impression of Christmas in Cabo San Lucas suggested that patrons should spend freely in the name of Christ. The other walls of full-length glass provided excellent lighting for customers to peruse the large print while wearing Ray Bans.
We headed toward a shaded spot in the back corner, ordered coffee, then to calm her I told her about an innocuous dream I had when was twelve years old, and still remembered.
I was standing on a dirt roadway that bisected two rolling fields of calf high grass through which masses of translucent people were slowly walking. I knew that the ones coming toward me from my left were returning from a physical life, and the ones walking away on my right were heading into one, not that I believed it, but it was a dream. Ten yards in front of me stood an elderly man dressed in an off-white and tan stripped robe. Quietly, he said, "Come with me."
We walked a short distance over the crest of a low rise, stopping on a tree-lined roadside where young men and women, none of them looking more than twenty-five years old, were sitting under a canopy of broad leaves. The group exuded an aura of tranquil pleasure, but there was an underlying power within their casual countenance. Impish glances at me, then each other, made me want to check my fly as the elder introduced us.
That was it.
Nodding to herself, Jeanette reflectively said, "You got a pass between life and death, to meet some very important people in your future."
"Not to be argumentative, but I met half a dozen at most."
"It was clearly enough."
"For what?"
"For now," she grinned, and we got down to business.
Her latest offering of only four pages opened with a display of uncommon linguistic dexterity for a boy of Mihaleh’s limited years, telling his roommates what they could do with their suggestion that he bath more frequently. When the usual merchants gathered to discuss the problem, a commotion in a monkey cage created a moment of grinning consent, and they assigned Mihaleh the responsibility of taking care of the animals.
He had no problem working for his keep—he expected worse when he first came to the commune—but he discovered that cleaning the cage properly didn’t always last long enough to pass inspection by the keeper. Upon hearing this legitimate complaint, the understanding man said Mihaleh was in charge; he could change the animal’s feeding time, camp out to observe their processing cycle, then schedule his duties accordingly. Mihaleh took his advice, which worked well other than the keeper noting an unpleasant smell lingered. Mihaleh rightfully argued that monkeys always had an odor, to which the keeper replied they couldn’t help it, as he locked the cage with Mihaleh still inside. Jeanette’s scene ended on day three of his incarceration, when he finally grasped what it was like to live with him.
"To the point," I said, handing her the pages before she could snatch them from my grasp.
"Flat?" she said, with a tilt of her head.
"Not at all. It rides the edge of sparse nicely; if you described every little thing like you do with your dreams," I quipped, "It would probably dull the impact."
"What do you think about how they decided to treat the problem?"
"You’ve established that kind of decision making process, and your audience would get it anyway, but I’m not sure they’ll agree with it. By the way, signs or omens weren’t one of the decision making options you gave me when we met."
"I said there were five common processes, common being generally acknowledged. This one isn’t considered common, but do you agree with what they did?"
"It made the point when talking to him didn’t work."
"That’s your standard—talk first then do what has to be done?"
"If you have to. Kind of."