Post by Gav on Jan 1, 2006 12:57:44 GMT -5
Hi all,
Thought I would post the following which is basicly a chapter of my book un-edited and verbatim. It relates to stalking and this seems to be an increasing topic here on the forum now.
Incidently this chapter has been dropped from the book, so please feel free to print this off and keep it.
The Shackles on Experience
There is an emotion common within the thoughts of people that causes a state of non-action. It prevents us achieving what we desire and brings exploration and progress to a stand still. This emotion is fear, the mind killer. Fear presents itself in many ways, as it has a multi faceted nature. Fear has many attributions in life; in it’s most raw form it is an instinctual reflex, a process of the natural desire to survive.
Our fears have been used against us since the beginning of society in a bid to control and manipulate the masses with religion and tyrannical dictatorships springing immediately to mind. One thing is clear; a nation in fear is a predictable nation as the options of its citizens are restricted by the dogma enforced by its imposing dictator.
We once again come to the problem of dogma, dogma tells us what we may and may not do on many levels. Take a look at Catholicism promising us on one hand the eternal paradise of an after life in heaven, then on the other threatening to condemn us to eternal damnation if we fail to follow its dictation; a dogma enforced through the principles of fear.
In centuries past the church was ruthless in it’s pursuit of money and property and to extend its caption of taxable Christians; usually converted at force from peaceful pagans and so called heretics. The burning of witches for their participation in black magic and worse for the worship of Satan is an ignorance and atrocity beyond imagination.
“About the close of the fifteenth century, so great was the excitement with regard to the existence of witchcraft that Pope Innocent VIII. issued a bull directing the inquisitors to be vigilant in searching out and punishing all guilty of this crime. Forms for the trial were regularly laid down in a book or a pamphlet called the "Malleus Maleficorum" (Hammer of Witches), which was issued by the Roman See. Popes Alexander, Leo, and Adrian, issued like bulls. For two hundred and fifty years the church was busy in punishing the impossible crime of witchcraft; in burning, hanging and torturing men, women, and children. Protestants were as active as Catholics, and in Geneva five hundred witches were burned at the stake in a period of three months. About one thousand were executed in one year in the diocese of Como. At least one hundred thousand victims suffered in Germany alone: the last execution (in Wurtzburg) taking place as late as 1749. Witches were burned in Switzerland as late as 1780.” (The Ghosts, Robert Green Ingersoll 1877.)
The pagans did not recognise god in its Christian form, so they most certainly held no fervour with the Christian devil. In recent years the church has been removed from a position of power within the western world, so it’s dogma and greed can no longer be enforced through pain, murder and torture, but the Christian ideal still holds a fear for many of its followers. A fear that anything within the occult is wrong and a fear of demons and the influence of the devil.
Our perception of the world is a state of mind, a state of mind governed by the influence of our beliefs. If we believe in a world populated by demons and evil then that is the world we shall experience, especially when we enter somewhere so reactive to subjective influence as the Astral.
In the western hemisphere we are generally lucky enough not to have to fear for our lives each and every day, for which we should remain grateful. But we still live with so much fear. What freedom we have been granted by the installation of governments and law and order to protect our lives and arguably our interests, has been shadowed in many cases by a fear of living.
Too much freedom appears to be available to us and many are scared to tread out of the realms of the known and trodden path into the realms of new experience. It could be argued that our national protection has a reductive affect on the spirit of exploration, as we forget about the true meanings of existence and instead get lost in the narrow and man made paradigm of society.
Society is of course the playground of western man, and we cannot afford to ignore this unless we are very wealthy or totally care free. Most of us have responsibilities that stretch beyond our own, but how much of this responsibility that we accept into our lives is really ours to bear? How much of it do we take on because we have a fear of looking weak, or cold or selfish? There is every good in generosity but how often do we let the people around us take us for granted? Or find we are doing work that adds endless stress to our lives simply because we fear to tell people no? Fear is in action within our lives in many ways.
The limitations we believe exist on our reality do not always come as a self-learned process of experience. Most of what we know about reality and what is and is not possible has been taught to us through our education or dictated to us through religion or science. Many of the so-called ‘facts’ we learn from these systems of thought are constructive and will help better us in some way, but many of them are erroneous and only serve to convince of us of the inaccuracy or futility of things that really should have been better explored.
Dogma restricts free will, which in turn closes down the availability of experience. It is only by freeing ourselves from both dogma and fear that we can begin to live our lives for ourselves and with the energy and conviction to succeed at what we do. We can take this statement as an extreme and really go flat out to change the way we live, or we can take it more steadily and instead of radically diverting our beliefs we can just be more critical of them and often take them with a pinch of salt.
Our personal energy is tied up in many areas of our lives and it is important to know how to take that energy back. In doing so we can strengthen our intention and slowly remove the mould of both our self and externally imposed dogmas. Our self-imposed dogma is evident in all of our daily rituals such as the way we walk to work and the way we clean our teeth, seemingly simple things that have become life’s little rituals that for some reason or another we feel must be performed in a certain way. Breaking this mould and intentionally acting out of sync to our usual routine will help to make us truly free. It starts with the little things but ends with a vast increase in personal power and a much more mutable dynamic method of living.
With this new acquisition of free will we will remove ourselves from autopilot and really take control of our lives. This expanded awareness of our power of choice and the ability to deviate from the pre-programmed path will help us immensely during our astral experiences as we are better able to keep an experience objective due a freeness from the influence of subconscious programming.
For the purposes of raising personal power, overcoming fear and diminishing dogma we will look at the shamanic principles of stalking and recapitulation.
Stalking
When a shaman speaks of stalking they refer to a process that leads to a psychological transformation. Many things can be stalked but generally we stalk the things that place restriction upon our lives in an attempt to better understand them and free ourselves from any influence.
We can stalk our fears, our death and ourselves. Aversion therapy is where a person with a phobia is introduced to that phobia in a ploy to overcome it. When we stalk it is a similar process, only the things that we stalk are not always so well defined as a phobia. The desired outcome of stalking is freedom and the reunification of personal power.
Personal power to the shaman is the life essence, the energy that facilitates everything we do. Only so much personal power is available to us and everything we do takes a piece of our stockpile. In psychological terms the personal power could be likened to the libido or psychic energy as defined by Carl Jung, every memory, every association within our lives and everything we do takes an amount of this personal energy.
Imagine the memory as a huge relational database; each and every entry that we have made in this database has a value key. That value key is enumerated on the amount of energy we project into that particular entry. The more energy fed to a memory the closer that memory comes to the surface of our thought and the more influence that memory exerts upon everything we are and everything we perceive.
A person truly absorbed in a religious dogma will primarily and foremost consider everything within the confines of that dogma. The worst and most narrow minded of these points of view will not even consider anything outside of that dogma period. Everything within this individual’s life will be explained to others and self perceived as cause and effect relating specifically to their own god, or their own religious handbook.
The stout Christian will explain everything within their lives as either acts of god or an act of the devil. No one not of his faith may even hold an opinion, as they are believed to be spreading the devils work. The dogma has become the foremost and most energised part of that person’s life, they have in effect fallen victim to that dogma and become enslaved to its dictation. These dogmas must be removed else the process of rational thought will fall prey to the comprehension poisoning ideals of narrow minded, broken dogmatic philosophy.
We may not even begin to rationalise with any degree of balanced judgement whilst our every thought and move is held prisoner by our faith, often a faith that’s only validation is that another person told you it was so. Faith must be considered within the confines of the rational, not the rational within the confines of faith.
It is very possible in this day and age to belong to a strong religious faith without being the victim of dogma, but only with care that we give rational thought the credence and the faith fits within those confines. Many of the more modern Christian faiths welcome a diverse mix of people to celebrate spirituality with them and have adopted the principle of modernisation, so that the church of the faith better represents the faith of the people. This is clearly a big step forward, giving the opening for people holding such a belief to share in their worship without being outcast due to their wise refusal to be shackled by the associated dogma.
A huge amount of personal power can be regained by breaking our dogmas, and will ultimately lead to an increase in free will and a balancing of perception.
Dogmas are by no means the only tie to our personal power; memories and aspirations are also high consumers. We all have memories and most of us aspirations. In the daily running of life we need them to function and as such in their usual form they present us no problems. The troubles arise when one is unhealthily obsessed by a particular memory or a particular aspiration; a huge amount of energy is afforded to this particular segment of thought. Cherishing a time now past or endlessly stacking the odds on something you want to happen in the future are common ways of diminishing personal power and negating balance.
On a much more difficult level we have the huge amount of energy afforded to life’s negative experiences; an influencing psychosis that seemingly nothing can break through, a wall of fear, anger or sorrow. All of these highly energised memories will affect directly the way we think and the way we are. They may also be of a very sensitive nature and so must be approached with care and reverence.
By stalking we are hoping to regain a natural state of balance, so that we are no longer drawn to the dependencies of the world. The only time we live is now. To remain living for now is to live with balance. This is not an excuse to live our lives as we choose without consideration. The future still deserves an amount of planning but it is important not to afford too much energy on the things that might happen or those that already have. Live for now and be happy for the life we have. Live every day of your life as if it is your only day. Be happy with what you do, to act in contempt of the self is to act without intention. To act without intention is to plant the seeds of apathy and failure.
The strength of intention we require to really be in control of our lives is to be gained by recovering all of our personal power from the places it gathers. The process is twofold. The energy that previously laid dormant in our lives will return to us allowing us more fervour in our will and strength of conviction, second we will be released from the psychological effects permeated through our consciousness by our tie to that particular faith, dream or memory. The result is to allow our very being to re-balance, no longer will we be pulled in any direction by our faith or our materialism, our past or our possible future. We will be able to judge everything from a position of balance and cast a fair view of comparison over all that we perceive.
A value is still to be gained by viewing and applying speculation to the world through the views and ideals of it’s various philosophies. We can use the templates of a philosophy to good effect under the correct circumstances and its mastery may serve us well and so long as we can return from that philosophy to a state of balance we will remain in personal control. We must always bare in mind that we should use a philosophy not become it.
So how would we begin a process of stalking?
There are several variations but basically stalking can be broken down into two realms, that of matter and that of the mind. We can stalk some things within our waking world and others through visualisation, dreams or astral experience. Usually we would use a combination.
Stalking The Self
We briefly touched on the ideas of stalking the self within the introduction to this chapter. When we are stalking the self we are learning all about the ways we function, not only the obvious things but also the things that arise from our subconscious programming. Through stalking the self we seek to alleviate the dictation of personal dogma. To alleviate that dictation we must first know of its existence and be familiar with how it operates within our lives.
Countless things we do within our lives are completed as though we are on autopilot.
We need look no further than our routines to see our dogma. Many of our responses to situations are predetermined and automatic, based purely on how we have acted in the past, rather than a thought out strategy based on the current situation. This autopilot mechanism has within its clutches a vast amount of our personal power in two ways. Firstly it withholds us from acting with intention; we do not really intend to do something as it just happens automatically, albeit we act half-heartedly. Secondly the autopilot robot, whose intrinsic function is to perform within situations automatically based on memory, constantly energises these memories with our precious personal power.
We need to turn down the scope of this autopilot robot. The robot performs some useful functions such as reactions that often help to keep us alive, but no action will ever be performed so adeptly as one that we are in complete control of. So we need to shut the robot down to a level of handling our often life saving instinctual reactions, but regain from this subconscious mechanism all the reactions that involve the way we interact within our daily world. We need to once again take control of those things, which the robot was handling, for us. Responsibility for our actions should lie within the realm of conscious thought, not subconscious reaction.
Stalking Exercise 1 (Stalking The Self)
Plan to begin this exercise when you wake in the morning on a day when you do not have any serious work related commitments, a holiday would be best. Follow the basic guidelines below as to how you should structure your thought throughout the day.
1) Slow down, think about everything you do, do not act on impulse.
2) Think outside of the box, do not follow your daily dogma, do everything you can differently.
Throughout the day, and starting with your rise from bed question your reasons for doing what you are doing. We are looking for simple things here, which leg you put into your trousers first? What side of the bed you climb out of? What order you complete your morning routine? If you are not completing the action by free will, don’t do it, or do it differently.
Even if some of the things that you do on this day will be obviously stupid, harder or inefficient, do them anyway. The idea of the exercise is to break down the autopilot robot, and operate outside of the confines of our normal routine. We can change things back to how they are more efficient or more useful once we are sure that we are making those decisions for ourselves and not running to pre-programming.
Change it all, instead of brushing your teeth with your right hand use you left. Don’t get up at 8.00am get up at 8.30am. Instead of washing the dishes after breakfast leave them till lunch. If you usually shower, take a bath instead. If someone asks you a question, stop! And think, consider it and then reply by your own free will, don’t simply say no because that is what you would usually say, and equally don’t automatically agree.
This is your day of free will, use it to break down your daily routine and consider all the places in your day that the autopilot robot takes control, and act in defiance of that automated response, tell the autopilot robot no! I will control my own life.
At the end of the day reflect on how much of your seemingly personal choice daily routine was actually under the control of the robot.
The above exercise may seem extreme as we are acting perhaps in a manner which may be perceived as strange or inefficient, but the purpose of the exercise is not to maximise your daily efficiency or un-clutter your day. The desired result is for you to see how much of your life you are really in control of, or more to the point not in control of.
Once we have established how dogma is in action within our lives we can begin to take action to remove it. It really is as simple as slowing down and thinking about what we do and what we say. We will not have to continue idling at a slow pace, as soon the idea of taking control for ourselves becomes second nature. Hold back that reflex response, say what you really mean, and do what you really ‘intend’ to do.
The ideal situation would allow us to completely remove society based responsibly from our lives, but for the most of us jet setting away to a new life in the middle of the rain forest or a log cabin in the wilderness is an unreachable existence. For this reason we have to get used to the idea of rebalancing ourselves when we require it. Often we will find that we start making snap judgements or we have taken on to much pressure simply to be able to say yes. We have to remain self-critical and see these situations arise, act on them and regain the state of balance we need to remain free and empowered.
This ideal of detaching from our dogma is what is often termed in the spiritual traditions detachment. Many of the practitioners within the various spiritual traditions that seek a state of detachment do not really understand the concept. They believe that to detach is to detach from the material world of objects and science and become self-absorbed in a spiritual dogma. This is an unhealthy detachment, better described as an unbalance. It is important not to detach from one dogma and sacrifice yourself to another. The process of detachment actually requires us to remove from both poles equally.
It is important to consider that each of the points on the scale of Fig 5.1 would simply represent the epicentre of a cone. The breadth of this cone would represent the amount of knowledge and the flexibility of viewpoint of the person whose ideas it was describing.
As we detach from a viewpoint we are better able to define and understand it so long as we retain a position of balance and are not blinded by emersion within a contradictory viewpoint. To achieve this state of balanced detachment we must move away from the opposing poles uniformly. To detach from these poles is not to ignore their associated philosophies but to understand them thoroughly without being governed by them so that our personal power is no longer tied up within them.
When we are born we occupy an energetically enviable state of void, we are attached to nothing beyond our maternal dependency. If it were possible for us to continue through our lives in a non-experiential fashion then we would have a high yield of personal power throughout our existence, albeit a high yield of personal power that we could never use effectively due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of our environment.
To be in a central position of balance with little or no awareness or knowledge of environment would be reminiscent of ignorance or innocence rather than a preferred state of detachment. If we can understand the conflicting views within our environment and detach from them we will be in a much better position as we can change and metamorphose our awareness into a favourable philosophy as and when required without having our personal power tied up in and shackled by it’s dogma.
The diagrams we have used to detail a spiritual detachment are perfectly valid within any method of detachment that we seek. Whilst we are becoming aware of the dogmas restricting our lives and stalking ourselves in an effort to remove them we can consider ourselves to be moving further and further back as we detach. Our minds still contain the memories and knowledge of all that we know and have learnt but the memories and knowledge no longer contain us.
We could quite easily change the labels on the scale to pessimism and optimism, or past and future; seemingly endless are the energies that have a pull on our lives. Regardless of the labels, the optimum point of awareness is one centred on the middle balancing point, with a breadth that allows for as much vision and understanding of reality as possible.
This balanced detachment is to be obtained through actively stalking ourselves so that we can truly become aware and in control of our own existences and the choices that we make within them. We must control our own lives and make decisions rather than respond to a situation with a pre-defined response.
Take the principle of stalking the self and apply it within your life, know yourself and the dogmas within which you operate. Regain as much of your personal power as is salvageable and become an empowered and wise creature of intention. Begin to break the shackles on your scope of experience and empower yourself with free will.
Thought I would post the following which is basicly a chapter of my book un-edited and verbatim. It relates to stalking and this seems to be an increasing topic here on the forum now.
Incidently this chapter has been dropped from the book, so please feel free to print this off and keep it.
The Shackles on Experience
There is an emotion common within the thoughts of people that causes a state of non-action. It prevents us achieving what we desire and brings exploration and progress to a stand still. This emotion is fear, the mind killer. Fear presents itself in many ways, as it has a multi faceted nature. Fear has many attributions in life; in it’s most raw form it is an instinctual reflex, a process of the natural desire to survive.
Our fears have been used against us since the beginning of society in a bid to control and manipulate the masses with religion and tyrannical dictatorships springing immediately to mind. One thing is clear; a nation in fear is a predictable nation as the options of its citizens are restricted by the dogma enforced by its imposing dictator.
We once again come to the problem of dogma, dogma tells us what we may and may not do on many levels. Take a look at Catholicism promising us on one hand the eternal paradise of an after life in heaven, then on the other threatening to condemn us to eternal damnation if we fail to follow its dictation; a dogma enforced through the principles of fear.
In centuries past the church was ruthless in it’s pursuit of money and property and to extend its caption of taxable Christians; usually converted at force from peaceful pagans and so called heretics. The burning of witches for their participation in black magic and worse for the worship of Satan is an ignorance and atrocity beyond imagination.
“About the close of the fifteenth century, so great was the excitement with regard to the existence of witchcraft that Pope Innocent VIII. issued a bull directing the inquisitors to be vigilant in searching out and punishing all guilty of this crime. Forms for the trial were regularly laid down in a book or a pamphlet called the "Malleus Maleficorum" (Hammer of Witches), which was issued by the Roman See. Popes Alexander, Leo, and Adrian, issued like bulls. For two hundred and fifty years the church was busy in punishing the impossible crime of witchcraft; in burning, hanging and torturing men, women, and children. Protestants were as active as Catholics, and in Geneva five hundred witches were burned at the stake in a period of three months. About one thousand were executed in one year in the diocese of Como. At least one hundred thousand victims suffered in Germany alone: the last execution (in Wurtzburg) taking place as late as 1749. Witches were burned in Switzerland as late as 1780.” (The Ghosts, Robert Green Ingersoll 1877.)
The pagans did not recognise god in its Christian form, so they most certainly held no fervour with the Christian devil. In recent years the church has been removed from a position of power within the western world, so it’s dogma and greed can no longer be enforced through pain, murder and torture, but the Christian ideal still holds a fear for many of its followers. A fear that anything within the occult is wrong and a fear of demons and the influence of the devil.
Our perception of the world is a state of mind, a state of mind governed by the influence of our beliefs. If we believe in a world populated by demons and evil then that is the world we shall experience, especially when we enter somewhere so reactive to subjective influence as the Astral.
In the western hemisphere we are generally lucky enough not to have to fear for our lives each and every day, for which we should remain grateful. But we still live with so much fear. What freedom we have been granted by the installation of governments and law and order to protect our lives and arguably our interests, has been shadowed in many cases by a fear of living.
Too much freedom appears to be available to us and many are scared to tread out of the realms of the known and trodden path into the realms of new experience. It could be argued that our national protection has a reductive affect on the spirit of exploration, as we forget about the true meanings of existence and instead get lost in the narrow and man made paradigm of society.
Society is of course the playground of western man, and we cannot afford to ignore this unless we are very wealthy or totally care free. Most of us have responsibilities that stretch beyond our own, but how much of this responsibility that we accept into our lives is really ours to bear? How much of it do we take on because we have a fear of looking weak, or cold or selfish? There is every good in generosity but how often do we let the people around us take us for granted? Or find we are doing work that adds endless stress to our lives simply because we fear to tell people no? Fear is in action within our lives in many ways.
The limitations we believe exist on our reality do not always come as a self-learned process of experience. Most of what we know about reality and what is and is not possible has been taught to us through our education or dictated to us through religion or science. Many of the so-called ‘facts’ we learn from these systems of thought are constructive and will help better us in some way, but many of them are erroneous and only serve to convince of us of the inaccuracy or futility of things that really should have been better explored.
Dogma restricts free will, which in turn closes down the availability of experience. It is only by freeing ourselves from both dogma and fear that we can begin to live our lives for ourselves and with the energy and conviction to succeed at what we do. We can take this statement as an extreme and really go flat out to change the way we live, or we can take it more steadily and instead of radically diverting our beliefs we can just be more critical of them and often take them with a pinch of salt.
Our personal energy is tied up in many areas of our lives and it is important to know how to take that energy back. In doing so we can strengthen our intention and slowly remove the mould of both our self and externally imposed dogmas. Our self-imposed dogma is evident in all of our daily rituals such as the way we walk to work and the way we clean our teeth, seemingly simple things that have become life’s little rituals that for some reason or another we feel must be performed in a certain way. Breaking this mould and intentionally acting out of sync to our usual routine will help to make us truly free. It starts with the little things but ends with a vast increase in personal power and a much more mutable dynamic method of living.
With this new acquisition of free will we will remove ourselves from autopilot and really take control of our lives. This expanded awareness of our power of choice and the ability to deviate from the pre-programmed path will help us immensely during our astral experiences as we are better able to keep an experience objective due a freeness from the influence of subconscious programming.
For the purposes of raising personal power, overcoming fear and diminishing dogma we will look at the shamanic principles of stalking and recapitulation.
Stalking
When a shaman speaks of stalking they refer to a process that leads to a psychological transformation. Many things can be stalked but generally we stalk the things that place restriction upon our lives in an attempt to better understand them and free ourselves from any influence.
We can stalk our fears, our death and ourselves. Aversion therapy is where a person with a phobia is introduced to that phobia in a ploy to overcome it. When we stalk it is a similar process, only the things that we stalk are not always so well defined as a phobia. The desired outcome of stalking is freedom and the reunification of personal power.
Personal power to the shaman is the life essence, the energy that facilitates everything we do. Only so much personal power is available to us and everything we do takes a piece of our stockpile. In psychological terms the personal power could be likened to the libido or psychic energy as defined by Carl Jung, every memory, every association within our lives and everything we do takes an amount of this personal energy.
Imagine the memory as a huge relational database; each and every entry that we have made in this database has a value key. That value key is enumerated on the amount of energy we project into that particular entry. The more energy fed to a memory the closer that memory comes to the surface of our thought and the more influence that memory exerts upon everything we are and everything we perceive.
A person truly absorbed in a religious dogma will primarily and foremost consider everything within the confines of that dogma. The worst and most narrow minded of these points of view will not even consider anything outside of that dogma period. Everything within this individual’s life will be explained to others and self perceived as cause and effect relating specifically to their own god, or their own religious handbook.
The stout Christian will explain everything within their lives as either acts of god or an act of the devil. No one not of his faith may even hold an opinion, as they are believed to be spreading the devils work. The dogma has become the foremost and most energised part of that person’s life, they have in effect fallen victim to that dogma and become enslaved to its dictation. These dogmas must be removed else the process of rational thought will fall prey to the comprehension poisoning ideals of narrow minded, broken dogmatic philosophy.
We may not even begin to rationalise with any degree of balanced judgement whilst our every thought and move is held prisoner by our faith, often a faith that’s only validation is that another person told you it was so. Faith must be considered within the confines of the rational, not the rational within the confines of faith.
It is very possible in this day and age to belong to a strong religious faith without being the victim of dogma, but only with care that we give rational thought the credence and the faith fits within those confines. Many of the more modern Christian faiths welcome a diverse mix of people to celebrate spirituality with them and have adopted the principle of modernisation, so that the church of the faith better represents the faith of the people. This is clearly a big step forward, giving the opening for people holding such a belief to share in their worship without being outcast due to their wise refusal to be shackled by the associated dogma.
A huge amount of personal power can be regained by breaking our dogmas, and will ultimately lead to an increase in free will and a balancing of perception.
Dogmas are by no means the only tie to our personal power; memories and aspirations are also high consumers. We all have memories and most of us aspirations. In the daily running of life we need them to function and as such in their usual form they present us no problems. The troubles arise when one is unhealthily obsessed by a particular memory or a particular aspiration; a huge amount of energy is afforded to this particular segment of thought. Cherishing a time now past or endlessly stacking the odds on something you want to happen in the future are common ways of diminishing personal power and negating balance.
On a much more difficult level we have the huge amount of energy afforded to life’s negative experiences; an influencing psychosis that seemingly nothing can break through, a wall of fear, anger or sorrow. All of these highly energised memories will affect directly the way we think and the way we are. They may also be of a very sensitive nature and so must be approached with care and reverence.
By stalking we are hoping to regain a natural state of balance, so that we are no longer drawn to the dependencies of the world. The only time we live is now. To remain living for now is to live with balance. This is not an excuse to live our lives as we choose without consideration. The future still deserves an amount of planning but it is important not to afford too much energy on the things that might happen or those that already have. Live for now and be happy for the life we have. Live every day of your life as if it is your only day. Be happy with what you do, to act in contempt of the self is to act without intention. To act without intention is to plant the seeds of apathy and failure.
The strength of intention we require to really be in control of our lives is to be gained by recovering all of our personal power from the places it gathers. The process is twofold. The energy that previously laid dormant in our lives will return to us allowing us more fervour in our will and strength of conviction, second we will be released from the psychological effects permeated through our consciousness by our tie to that particular faith, dream or memory. The result is to allow our very being to re-balance, no longer will we be pulled in any direction by our faith or our materialism, our past or our possible future. We will be able to judge everything from a position of balance and cast a fair view of comparison over all that we perceive.
A value is still to be gained by viewing and applying speculation to the world through the views and ideals of it’s various philosophies. We can use the templates of a philosophy to good effect under the correct circumstances and its mastery may serve us well and so long as we can return from that philosophy to a state of balance we will remain in personal control. We must always bare in mind that we should use a philosophy not become it.
So how would we begin a process of stalking?
There are several variations but basically stalking can be broken down into two realms, that of matter and that of the mind. We can stalk some things within our waking world and others through visualisation, dreams or astral experience. Usually we would use a combination.
Stalking The Self
We briefly touched on the ideas of stalking the self within the introduction to this chapter. When we are stalking the self we are learning all about the ways we function, not only the obvious things but also the things that arise from our subconscious programming. Through stalking the self we seek to alleviate the dictation of personal dogma. To alleviate that dictation we must first know of its existence and be familiar with how it operates within our lives.
Countless things we do within our lives are completed as though we are on autopilot.
We need look no further than our routines to see our dogma. Many of our responses to situations are predetermined and automatic, based purely on how we have acted in the past, rather than a thought out strategy based on the current situation. This autopilot mechanism has within its clutches a vast amount of our personal power in two ways. Firstly it withholds us from acting with intention; we do not really intend to do something as it just happens automatically, albeit we act half-heartedly. Secondly the autopilot robot, whose intrinsic function is to perform within situations automatically based on memory, constantly energises these memories with our precious personal power.
We need to turn down the scope of this autopilot robot. The robot performs some useful functions such as reactions that often help to keep us alive, but no action will ever be performed so adeptly as one that we are in complete control of. So we need to shut the robot down to a level of handling our often life saving instinctual reactions, but regain from this subconscious mechanism all the reactions that involve the way we interact within our daily world. We need to once again take control of those things, which the robot was handling, for us. Responsibility for our actions should lie within the realm of conscious thought, not subconscious reaction.
Stalking Exercise 1 (Stalking The Self)
Plan to begin this exercise when you wake in the morning on a day when you do not have any serious work related commitments, a holiday would be best. Follow the basic guidelines below as to how you should structure your thought throughout the day.
1) Slow down, think about everything you do, do not act on impulse.
2) Think outside of the box, do not follow your daily dogma, do everything you can differently.
Throughout the day, and starting with your rise from bed question your reasons for doing what you are doing. We are looking for simple things here, which leg you put into your trousers first? What side of the bed you climb out of? What order you complete your morning routine? If you are not completing the action by free will, don’t do it, or do it differently.
Even if some of the things that you do on this day will be obviously stupid, harder or inefficient, do them anyway. The idea of the exercise is to break down the autopilot robot, and operate outside of the confines of our normal routine. We can change things back to how they are more efficient or more useful once we are sure that we are making those decisions for ourselves and not running to pre-programming.
Change it all, instead of brushing your teeth with your right hand use you left. Don’t get up at 8.00am get up at 8.30am. Instead of washing the dishes after breakfast leave them till lunch. If you usually shower, take a bath instead. If someone asks you a question, stop! And think, consider it and then reply by your own free will, don’t simply say no because that is what you would usually say, and equally don’t automatically agree.
This is your day of free will, use it to break down your daily routine and consider all the places in your day that the autopilot robot takes control, and act in defiance of that automated response, tell the autopilot robot no! I will control my own life.
At the end of the day reflect on how much of your seemingly personal choice daily routine was actually under the control of the robot.
The above exercise may seem extreme as we are acting perhaps in a manner which may be perceived as strange or inefficient, but the purpose of the exercise is not to maximise your daily efficiency or un-clutter your day. The desired result is for you to see how much of your life you are really in control of, or more to the point not in control of.
Once we have established how dogma is in action within our lives we can begin to take action to remove it. It really is as simple as slowing down and thinking about what we do and what we say. We will not have to continue idling at a slow pace, as soon the idea of taking control for ourselves becomes second nature. Hold back that reflex response, say what you really mean, and do what you really ‘intend’ to do.
The ideal situation would allow us to completely remove society based responsibly from our lives, but for the most of us jet setting away to a new life in the middle of the rain forest or a log cabin in the wilderness is an unreachable existence. For this reason we have to get used to the idea of rebalancing ourselves when we require it. Often we will find that we start making snap judgements or we have taken on to much pressure simply to be able to say yes. We have to remain self-critical and see these situations arise, act on them and regain the state of balance we need to remain free and empowered.
This ideal of detaching from our dogma is what is often termed in the spiritual traditions detachment. Many of the practitioners within the various spiritual traditions that seek a state of detachment do not really understand the concept. They believe that to detach is to detach from the material world of objects and science and become self-absorbed in a spiritual dogma. This is an unhealthy detachment, better described as an unbalance. It is important not to detach from one dogma and sacrifice yourself to another. The process of detachment actually requires us to remove from both poles equally.
It is important to consider that each of the points on the scale of Fig 5.1 would simply represent the epicentre of a cone. The breadth of this cone would represent the amount of knowledge and the flexibility of viewpoint of the person whose ideas it was describing.
As we detach from a viewpoint we are better able to define and understand it so long as we retain a position of balance and are not blinded by emersion within a contradictory viewpoint. To achieve this state of balanced detachment we must move away from the opposing poles uniformly. To detach from these poles is not to ignore their associated philosophies but to understand them thoroughly without being governed by them so that our personal power is no longer tied up within them.
When we are born we occupy an energetically enviable state of void, we are attached to nothing beyond our maternal dependency. If it were possible for us to continue through our lives in a non-experiential fashion then we would have a high yield of personal power throughout our existence, albeit a high yield of personal power that we could never use effectively due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of our environment.
To be in a central position of balance with little or no awareness or knowledge of environment would be reminiscent of ignorance or innocence rather than a preferred state of detachment. If we can understand the conflicting views within our environment and detach from them we will be in a much better position as we can change and metamorphose our awareness into a favourable philosophy as and when required without having our personal power tied up in and shackled by it’s dogma.
The diagrams we have used to detail a spiritual detachment are perfectly valid within any method of detachment that we seek. Whilst we are becoming aware of the dogmas restricting our lives and stalking ourselves in an effort to remove them we can consider ourselves to be moving further and further back as we detach. Our minds still contain the memories and knowledge of all that we know and have learnt but the memories and knowledge no longer contain us.
We could quite easily change the labels on the scale to pessimism and optimism, or past and future; seemingly endless are the energies that have a pull on our lives. Regardless of the labels, the optimum point of awareness is one centred on the middle balancing point, with a breadth that allows for as much vision and understanding of reality as possible.
This balanced detachment is to be obtained through actively stalking ourselves so that we can truly become aware and in control of our own existences and the choices that we make within them. We must control our own lives and make decisions rather than respond to a situation with a pre-defined response.
Take the principle of stalking the self and apply it within your life, know yourself and the dogmas within which you operate. Regain as much of your personal power as is salvageable and become an empowered and wise creature of intention. Begin to break the shackles on your scope of experience and empower yourself with free will.
Hehe! About the only routine thing about me is I never do anything on a schedule, not even eating and sleeping times. I eat when I'm hungry and sleep when I get sleepy. Even when I used to worked out of home I had a job that wasn't routine. ;D I never plan my day before they get there, unless I promise someone to do something the next day, then I have to sort of. 
