Shootik Read online

  Shootik

  Aleksya Sokol

  Austin Macauley Publishers

  Shootik

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Copyright Information ©

  Acknowledgements

  ForewordFirst Picture

  Chapter 1Where Have You Come From?Second Picture

  Chapter 2There Is a River Running…Third Picture

  Chapter 3A Turning PointFourth Picture

  Chapter 4Distances

  Fifth Picture

  Chapter 5Holding On…Sixth Picture

  Chapter 6Who Was ‘A’?Seventh Picture

  Chapter 7AnnaEighth Picture

  Chapter 8The SymposiumNinth Picture

  Chapter 9At the Clinic

  Chapter 10Waking Up…Tenth Picture

  Chapter 11The Code…Eleventh Picture

  Chapter 12The Ascent

  Chapter 13The ArrivalTwelfth Picture

  Chapter 14“All in the Name of Science”Thirteenth Picture

  Chapter 15The Soulway, the Way of the HeartFourteenth Picture

  Chapter 16The Happening…Fifteenth Picture

  Chapter 17Coming Back — Come-Back

  Afterword

  Pictorial ConnectionsThe Wrecked Boat

  Holding On

  Power Cut Off

  Nothing to Stand On…

  Gaping Hole

  Frayed Moorings

  The Patch Did Not Hold

  Nobody at the Wheel

  Corroded Connections

  On the Rocks

  Rounding Off

  About the Author

  The author was born in Russia, lived in Brazil, Switzerland and in the Netherlands; is a world citizen at heart, artist and therapist; has written several textbooks on the subject of self-development through art, published in Dutch. At present, she is engaged in a new style of writing, of which this book is the first of its kind. In her own words:

  It reconnects me with my early childhood and a wish I cherished when still an adolescent to become a storyteller, a comedian or, even more, a clown. No chance, of course, to get real about it at the time. But now, and maybe ‘Shootik’ had a hand in this, a chance occurrence brought me to the point where I am at this stage of my life and happy to be in the flow of energy…of my river perhaps!

  About the Book

  Two men lying in a hospital, as a result of a car accident, relive and remember in the short expanse of 72 hours the vastness of a much-greater time. Past events, for both of them, assemble themselves into an order which connects them on a different level of reality, beyond one-dimensional, rational thinking. The expansion of time, and its self-annihilation, opens the mind’s eye directly into space, immaterial and yet of a subtle ethereal substance, a formless no-thing from which all life begins… Shootik, in this story, is a being who lives fully in the present. He has the capacity of appearing in different forms and at different times, some of them most inappropriate according to our views. Not having an ordinary, personal story, Shootik is never born and never dies. He simply is. And he is very, very curious!

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to all those grown-ups whose living spirit has not quietened down yet and stopped disturbing them with questions to which the rational mind and generally accepted ideas have not given them convincing answers.

  Copyright Information ©

  Aleksya Sokol (2019)

  The right of Aleksya Sokol to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781528956352 (ePub e-book)

  www.austinmacauley.com

  First Published (2019)

  Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

  25 Canada Square

  Canary Wharf

  London

  E14 5LQ

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank, posthumous, Peter, my second partner in life, whose love and care has never failed me, for his empathic proofreading of the emerging manuscript. It was his support and challenging counterpart to my way of living and thinking which made this writing possible.

  First wings are only lent to us. We need to lose them, to grow our own. The first happiness is only transitory. It must fade so that we can reach for the other. Defying our early dreams, it lies beyond the need to be happy.

  Foreword

  There is a field of experience which expands beyond what is thought to be possible. It is a metaphysical reality which can be observed if one is ready to step out of the realm of ordinary thinking and look at it from a distance. Look at oneself. Make a descent into past events, enabling them to ascend into consciousness. Stand still. Re-connect with the pictorial level of life experiences and find its meeting point with ordinary reality. The world is not and never will be a finished product.

  The story to be told has never happened, although it may be happening…Right now.

  All characters are fictitious.

  © Aleksya Sokol

  First Picture

  They have come at last…to the point of no return. The Old Wise Man sighed with relief, watching the words appearing on the blank page of the book he had just opened to read. The words were appearing in symbols which only he knew how to translate into a language which humans can understand. The preceding pages of the book, more than a thousand, were already filled with records of two personal histories interconnecting on a variety of levels with other people’s histories and other historic periods of life on Earth. Allowing his clear memory to flash back to the track marked by the protagonists in this particular version of the relationship-odyssey, the Old Man had just closed his eyelids when a zooming sound penetrated his field of awareness and made him open them again.

  A little star came spiralling down, sparkling all over the place and landed in front of him, carrying, mounted as if on horseback on one of its points, a tiny fellow who jumped on the floor with a flourishing bow to the Old Man.

  “I really should have known it would be you, disturbing me exactly at this moment!” said the Old Man.

  The little fellow, Shootik was his name, took a seat on the floor at the Old Man’s feet.

  “Well, I was just passing by when I heard there was something going on which I thought I should know…!”

  “Which you thought that you should know? Can’t you wait until it’s your time to hear it?”

  “No, no! Then it might be too late!”

  “You think you know everything, don’t you?”

  “Oh no, it’s you who are supposed to know everything. You’re the bookkeeper! I know nothing, that’s why I need to be sure I miss nothing of what’s going on, before it gets to be filed into a book!”

  The Old Man enjoyed these little disputes with his friend. Without him, appearing à propos nothing from nowhere, so it seemed, his task was likely to pull him down into too serious divagations about human destinies and the ever-returning question: What if…people fail to understand the messages which are being addressed to them? What if…they don’t even notice that a message is being sent? He knew quite a number of such cases. There were many books on his shelves no longer vibrating with energy, nothing being sent or received through them. This state of affairs made him sad. Yet he knew that
in one way or another, life went on, also for those who walked blindfolded by their own hands, refusing to see, to hear or to consider any reality other than that which their rational mind was suggesting was the only one. What could he do? Nothing. And sometimes this nothing was quite unbearable.

  People have to be wounded to be enabled to give birth to their own ‘self’, that entity which comes into this world dressed in temporary skins, which will have to be torn to release the other ‘being’ inside them…Like a frog’s skin hiding the prince inside, or the princess! Yes…but most people identify themselves with being frogs, or even worse. The wounding of their skins opens channels through which they re-connect with the cosmos and their real beings. They become sensitive to energy-streams, which make them vulnerable, of course, in normal life…What they call normal. After being wounded a number of times, they stop being normal…and by being disturbed in their supposed normality as frogs or other creatures, they have a chance to evolve…

  The Old Wise Man put a bookmark between two pages of the book which he had held open in front of him and then closed it. Then he paid attention to his little visitor.

  “Now, what’s today’s question?”

  “Tell me about human life.”

  "Well…there is a short story and a long story of people’s lives. The short story starts apparently with a baby’s birth and ends with an old person’s death. It is sequential; the events are joined, so it seems, by cause and effect.

  “The longer story is disjointed, illogical, fragmented. It doesn’t appear like a story at all. It is made of scattered pieces like a huge Chinese vase which has been broken, its pieces scattered all over the world. The connections between them exist, but they have to be found. The body of knowledge has to be reconstructed. Sometimes what happens later appears as though it has happened before. Each piece found is a little story in itself…”

  Staretz, the Old Man, paused to take another dip into his thoughts.

  “The human mind wants to connect events, make sense of bits and pieces of information. A person likes to think that every effect must have its cause and be explainable in those terms. The mind rejects the idea of a happening out of nothing, a creation without a plausible reason, just energy taking form, just like that…with nobody pulling strings.”

  Shootik, the Little Fellow, was listening whilst playing with his fingers.

  “A chance? A plain coincidence?”

  “Perhaps, but not without a resonance.”

  “How did that vase break?”

  “It just fell apart. It had to break when people first took the chance to be free, because freedom, you see, means breaking out of prescribed and predictable existence.”

  “Was that the Big Bang?”

  The Old Man smiled enigmatically.

  “You’ve been going around mounted on stars and listening to people talking, haven’t you? Yes, that’s fun! That’s what they teach their kids at school, how the world began with a Big Bang, they say. Bummm! And that was it.”

  Even the little star was shaking with laughter, jumping up and down.

  “Well, really, they need a plausible explanation to make them feel better. The not-knowing makes them afraid. They need knowledge collected and preserved.”

  “Like in a vase?”

  “Like in a vase…yes. Now go and play some more. I have work to do.”

  The Old man patted the Little Fellow’s head, putting an end to this conversation. Mounted on the star, his vehicle for the day, Shootik bowed, waved and disappeared into the blue, leaving a twinkling light on the Old Man’s face. What would he do without these unpredictable appearances?

  Chapter 1

  Where Have You Come From?

  Lying in the hospital bed all bandaged and with one leg suspended in the air, Jurij, the patient, was doing exactly this: turning around in his mind to see where he had come from. Unsuccessfully, he tried to move his body, being held back by a pain in his chest. With several ribs broken, his left arm also, contusions all over the place and that leg of his hanging there…he felt quite disjointed as a being.

  Unable to ease his physical discomfort, his mind switched back to his past. The middle part of it, especially, when he was engaged with those people, their enterprise, and how he got into it. His meeting that charming fellow in the first place, who introduced himself as A. “Just A?”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s easy, isn’t it?” It was, and no longer to be questioned. A was A from then onwards, and it took him no time at all to recruit the unemployed young lad Jurij for a job in an organisation for which he would be trained, A assured him, and be well paid as well. Provided he acquainted himself with their policy and further reaching goals…Oh yes! This recruitment was conducted very pleasantly in a nonchalant, friendly manner. Like a drug, it made him feel good and important, like someone being selected, if not called, to serve a quite noble cause. The drug came from a branch of knowledge which this organisation kept under cover. To be revealed in due course, so it was told him, when the general public would be prepared to accept it. The same would apply to him; hence the training he would need to undergo. As he did…

  Eighteen years…Jurij tried to straighten his spine, which didn’t quite obey his effort, feeling the load of all that happened in those eighteen years, and afterwards. He had been their very enthusiastic servant for quite a while. Knowledge was a power tool, they said, and the bug got him as well. More and more of it was never enough…He tried to move his other leg, the one which was not injured, only to find out that it responded with a pain too. All his parts, not only physical, were connected. As was every part of his mental and emotional experience. Like the parts of the mechanism operated by the organisation which pulled people into its field of power. Quite inconspicuously, really, with no coercion whatsoever, one was simply invited to come in…and join them. After the bait had been laid. This happened in a most gracious manner, of course. “You can’t choose the best, the best chooses you,” they said. Except that they turned this statement into the suggestion that they, naturally, represented the best. Quite cunningly, they made you believe that by being found by them, you could regard yourself as being one of the lucky few to be at its service. Their service.

  That is how his involvement and brainwashing had started: by allowing his mind to be invaded by powers which appeared to be most generous and upright in their intentions. Including when they provided him with information which he must share with nobody else, a strict condition: not even with his wife. *“Least of all with her,” they said, “the less she came to know,* the better.” Women were also part of that organisation. Quite a number of them, but they were engaged for secondary tasks. Men were the ones on the leading edge. Like him, Jurij, their most dedicated servant in the first years of his career. Then it was so far and he was gradually introduced to the hidden parts of the life of that organisation and those of his friend and benefactor A.

  Jurij’s chest was bandaged and still aching, his head feeling like a coconut filled with water, but his mind was fully alert, watching the film coming straight out of his past. All pictures were extremely clear, much clearer than those involving the actual accident of some days before and the period of time which had led towards it. His involuntary introspection was interrupted when a male nurse entered the room, greeting him with a friendly smile and asking how was he today.

  “I need to change my position,” the patient responded.

  “And you can’t,” the nurse replied, “I’m sorry but there is not much I can do for you at the moment. However,” he added, looking at his watch, “the doctor will be seeing you soon.”

  “Meanwhile…” Jurij hesitated. “If you have a moment to spare, I would like to ask you something.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “Yesterday…or was it the day before, when they brought me in…you were at my side, right from the very beginning and then later when I woke up. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, that is correct. I was on duty.”r />
  Jurij closed his eyes as though looking for something else, invisible though. “When I saw you, you seemed to be someone I knew…Have we met before?”

  The young nurse looked, without a smile now, into the patient’s eyes and for a moment both of them were silent.

  “You must rest now. Do not worry, all will be well,” the nurse said as he left the room.

  Jurij closed his eyes. Somehow it felt good not to have received a clear answer to his question. Answers tend to close doors, while unanswered questions leave all doors open; the thought rushed through his mind. Somehow this question had been answered. The young man did not deny his feeling that they knew each other. Behind his closed eyelids, Jurij felt as though he was being led down a memory path far back into a history not only of his most personal past. But no, he realised, this was only his awareness of things happened, whilst memory itself was coming up to meet his awareness. Most unusual, this thought. Memory was not in him, it was he who was underway to meet his memory!

  On this mental path he was going up and down, suspended in space as it were, with stillness in between, whilst his consciousness was floating on top of everything which had comprised the story of his life so far. And there it was: his first escape from truth…

  He shivered. The memory was as clear as the light of the sky that night. A night still warm from the setting sun. A night going over already into day. The summer night in the north…And there he saw himself as a youth of nearly twenty, walking on the banks of the river. Their river, as Solveig used to call it. His girlfriend, his soulmate, almost a part of himself. His first love? It was clear to everybody in the village that they belonged together. They shared everything, except the bed. Not yet…He respected that. One day…not the wedding day, that was not the main reason. They both thought far beyond this tradition. And this was their secret too. It held them together in a way which nobody could guess. One day they would just decide to be a pair, as they already were in spirit, they thought. And with this decision, bringing their bodies together was to be their way of celebrating their union. For life, they said. This felt good and worth waiting for. It would not be long, they would both be twenty-one soon, and they had made a plan. One day they would leave the village. To follow the river…But then…something happened. Had to happen? Was it avoidable?