The teachings of Don Juan Matus

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

At various times I've attempted to name my knowledge for your benefit. I've said that the most appropriate name is nagualism, but that that term is too obscure. Calling it simply "knowledge" makes it too vague, and to call it "witchcraft" is debasing. "The mastery of intent " is too abstract, and "the search for total freedom" too long and metaphorical. Finally, because I've been unable to find a more appropriate name, I've called it "sorcery." You consider if it is accurate or not.

I've given you different definitions of sorcery, but I have always maintained that definitions change as knowledge increases. Now you are in a position to appreciate a clearer definition.

From where the average man stands, sorcery is nonsense or an ominous mystery beyond his reach. And he is right--not because this is an absolute fact, but because the average man lacks the energy to deal with sorcery.

Human beings are born with a finite amount of energy, an energy that is systematically deployed, beginning at the moment of birth, in order that it may be used most advantageously by the modality of the time.

The modality of the time is the precise bundle of energy fields being perceived. I believe man's perception has changed through the ages. The actual time decides the mode; the time decides which precise bundle of energy fields, out of an incalculable number, are to be used. And handling the modality of the time--those few, selected energy fields--takes all our available energy, leaving us nothing that would help us use any of the other energy fields.

The average man, if he uses only the energy he has, can't perceive the worlds sorcerers do. To perceive them, sorcerers need to use a cluster of energy fields not ordinarily used. Naturally, if the average man is to perceive those worlds and understand sorcerers' perception he must use the same cluster they have used. And this is just not possible, because all his energy is already deployed.

Think of it this way. It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields which are inaccessible to you now. And that is sorcery: the ability to use energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness. Sorcery is the ability to perceive something which ordinary perception cannot.

Everything a teacher puts his apprentice through, each of the things he shows him is only a device to convince him that there's more to us than meets the eye.

We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange paradox! Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.

I'm trying to convince you that you can reach that power. I went through the same thing. And I was as hard to convince as you are. Once we have reached it, it will, by itself, make use of energy fields which are available to us but inaccessible. And that, as I have said, is sorcery. We begin then to see --that is, to perceive--something else; not as imagination, but as real and concrete. And then we begin to know without having to use words. And what any of us does with that increased perception, with that silent knowledge, depends on our own temperament.

Now, I'm going to give you a different and more precise definition of sorcery.
In the universe there is an unmeasurable, indescribable force which sorcerers call intent. Absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link. Sorcerers, warriors, are concerned with discussing, understanding, and employing that connecting link. They are especially concerned with cleaning it of the numbing effects brought about by the ordinary concerns of their everyday lives. Sorcery at this level could be defined as the procedure of cleaning one's connecting link to intent.

The task of sorcery is to take this seemingly incomprehensible knowledge and make it understandable by the standards of awareness of everyday life.

The guide in the lives of sorcerers is called "the nagual." The nagual is a man or a woman with extraordinary energy, a teacher who has sobriety, endurance, stability; someone seers see as a luminous sphere having four compartments, as if four luminous balls have been compressed together. Naguals are responsible for supplying what sorcerers call "the minimal chance": the awareness of one's connection with intent .

Naguals school their apprentices toward three areas of expertise: the mastery of awareness , the art of stalking , and the mastery of intent . These three areas of expertise are the three riddles sorcerers encounter in their search for knowledge.

The mastery of awareness is the riddle of the mind; the perplexity sorcerers experience when they recognize the astounding mystery and scope of awareness and perception.

The art of stalking is the riddle of the heart; the puzzlement sorcerers feel upon becoming aware of two things: first that the world appears to us to be unalterably objective and factual, because of peculiarities of our awareness and perception; second, that if different peculiarities of perception come into play, the very things about the world that seem so unalterably objective and factual change.

The mastery of intent is the riddle of the spirit, or the paradox of the abstract--sorcerers' thoughts and actions projected beyond our human condition.

The art of stalking and the mastery of intent depend upon instruction on the mastery of awareness, which consists of the following basic premises:

The universe is an infinite agglomeration of energy fields, resembling threads of light.

These energy fields, called the Eagle's, or the Indescribable Force 's emanations, radiate from a source of inconceivable proportions metaphorically called the Eagle--the Indescribable Force .

Human beings are also composed of an incalculable number of the same threadlike energy fields. These Indescribable Force 's emanations form an encased agglomeration that manifests itself as a ball of light the size of the person's body with the arms extended laterally, like a giant luminous egg.

Only a very small group of the energy fields inside this luminous ball are lit up by a point of intense brilliance located on the ball's surface.

Perception occurs when the energy fields in that small group immediately surrounding the point of brilliance extent their light to illuminate identical energy fields outside the ball. Since the only energy fields perceivable are those lit by the point of brilliance, that point is named "the point where perception is assembled" or simply "the assemblage point."

The assemblage point can be moved from its usual position on the surface of the luminous ball to another position on the surface, or into the interior. Since the brilliance of the assemblage point can light up whatever energy field it comes in contact with, when it moves to a new position it immediately brightens up new energy fields, making them perceivable. This perception is known as seeing .

When the assemblage point shifts, it makes possible the perception of an entirely different world--as objective and factual as the one we normally perceive. Sorcerers go into that other world to get energy, power, solutions to general and particular problems, or to face the unimaginable.

Intent is the pervasive force that causes us to perceive. We do not become aware because we perceive; rather, we perceive as a result of the pressure and intrusion of intent .

The aim of sorcerers is to reach a state of total awareness in order to experience all the possibilities of perception available to man. This state of awareness even implies an alternative way of dying.



A level of practical knowledge is included as part of teaching the mastery of awareness. On this practical level are taught the procedures necessary to move the assemblage point. The two great systems devised by the sorcerer seers of ancient times to accomplish this are dreaming , the control and utilization of dreams; and stalking , the control of behavior.
Moving one's assemblage point is an essential maneuver that every sorcerer has to learn.

Sorcerers consult their past in order to obtain a point of reference. Establishing a point of reference means getting a chance to examine intent and nothing can give sorcerers a better view of intent than examining stories of other sorcerers battling to understand the same force.

In sorcery there are abstract cores, and then, based on those abstract cores, there are scores of sorcery stories about the naguals of our lineage battling to understand the spirit.



The only way to know intent is to know it directly through a living connection that exists between intent and all sentient beings. Sorcerers call intent the indescribable, the spirit, the abstract.



Every act performed by sorcerers, especially by the naguals, is either performed as a way to strengthen their link with intent or as a response triggered by the link itself. sorcerers, and specifically the naguals, therefore have to be actively and permanently on the lookout for manifestations of the spirit. Such manifestations are called gestures of the spirit or, more simply, indications or omens.

When a sorcerer interprets an omen he knows its exact meaning without having any notion of how he knows it. This is one of the bewildering effects of the connecting link with intent . Sorcerers have a sense of knowing things directly. How sure they are depends on the strength and clarity of their connecting link.

The feeling everyone knows as "intuition" is the activation of our link with intent . And since sorcerers deliberately pursue the understanding and strengthening of that link, it could be said the they intuit everything unerringly and accurately. Reading omens is commonplace for sorcerers--mistakes happen only when personal feelings intervene and cloud the sorcerers' connecting link with intent . Otherwise their direct knowledge is totally accurate and functional.

The spirit manifests itself to a sorcery, especially to a nagual, at every turn. However, this is not the entire truth. The entire truth is that the spirit reveals itself to everyone with the same intensity and consistency, but only sorcerers, and naguals in particular, are attuned to such revelations.


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

sorcerers speak of sorcery as a magical, mysterious bird which has paused in its flight for a moment in order to give man hope and purpose. Sorcerers live under the wing of that bird, which they call the bird of wisdom, the bird of freedom. They nourish it with their dedication and impeccability.
The bird of freedom can do only two things, take sorcerers along, or leave them behind. Don't forget, even for an instant, that the bird of freedom has very little patience with indecision, and when it flies away, it never returns.

When you have been afraid or upset, don't lie down to sleep, sleep sitting up on a soft chair. To give your body healing rest take long naps, lying on your stomach with your face turned to the left and your feet over the foot of the bed. In order to avoid being cold, put a soft pillow over your shoulders, away from your neck, and wear heavy socks, or just leave your shoes on. Follow my suggestions to the letter without bothering to believe or disbelieve me.



Intent creates edifices before us and invites us to enter them. This is the way sorcerers understand what is happening around them.
I want you to understand the underlying order of what I teach you. It means two things: both the edifice that intent manufactures in the blink of an eye and places in front of us to enter, and the signs it gives us so we won't get lost once we are inside.



At a certain stage, an apprentice enters into heightened awareness all by himself. Heightened awareness is a mystery only for our reason. In practice, it's very simple. As with everything else, we complicate matters by trying to make the immensity that surrounds us reasonable.



The Manifestations of the Spirit is the name for the first abstract core in the sorcery stories. Sorcerers know this as the edifice of intent , or the silent voice of the spirit, or the ulterior arrangement of the abstract.
Ulterior means knowledge without words, outside our immediate comprehension, not beyond our ultimate possibilities for understanding. The ulterior arrangement of the abstract is knowledge without words or the edifice of intent . The ulterior arrangement of the abstract is to know the abstract directly, without the intervention of language. The abstract is the element without which there could be no warrior's path, nor any warriors in search of knowledge.



Warriors are incapable of feeling compassion because they no longer feel sorry for themselves. Without the driving force of self-pity, compassion is meaningless.

For a warrior everything begins and ends with himself. However, his contact with the abstract causes him to overcome his feeling of self-importance. Then the self becomes abstract and impersonal.



Dreaming is a sorcerer's jet plane. They can create and project what sorcerers know as the dreaming body , or the Other, and be in two distant places at the same time.
The spirit makes adjustments in our capacity for awareness. That's a statement of fact. You can say that it's an incomprehensible fact for the moment, but the moment will change.

While we dream the assemblage point moves very gently and naturally. Mental balance is nothing but the fixing of the assemblage point on one spot we're accustomed to. Dreams make that point move, and dreaming is used to control that natural movement.

There are two different issues. One, the need to understand indirectly what the spirit is, and the other, to understand the spirit directly.
Once you understand what the spirit is, the second issue will be resolved automatically, and vice versa. If the spirit speaks to you, using its silent words, you will certainly know immediately what the spirit is.

The difficulty is our reluctance to accept the idea that knowledge can exist without words to explain it. Accepting this proposition is not as easy as saying you accept it. The whole of humanity has moved away from the abstract. It takes years for an apprentice to be able to go back to the abstract, that is, to know that knowledge and language can exist independent of each other.

The crux of our difficulty in going back to the abstract is our refusal to accept that we can know without words or even without thoughts. Knowledge and language are separate.

I told you there is no way to talk about the spirit because the spirit can only be experienced. Sorcerers try to explain this condition when they say that the spirit is nothing you can see or feel. But it's there looming over us always. Sometimes it comes to some of us. Most of the time it seems indifferent.

The spirit in many ways is a sort of wild animal. It keeps its distance from us until a moment when something entices it forward. It is then that the spirit manifests itself.

For a sorcerer an abstract is something with no parallel in the human condition. For a sorcerer, the spirit is an abstract simply because he knows it without words or even thoughts. It's an abstract because he can't conceive what the spirit is. Yet without the slightest chance or desire to understand it, a sorcerer handles the spirit. He recognizes it, beckons it, entices it, becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts.

Think about the proposition that knowledge might be independent of language, without bothering to understand it.
Consider this. It was not the act of meeting me that mattered to you. The day I met you, you met the abstract. But since you couldn't talk about it, you didn't notice it. Sorcerers meet the abstract without thinking about it or seeing it or touching it or feeling its presence.

The second abstract core of the sorcery stories is called the Knock of the Spirit. The first core, the Manifestations of the Spirit, is the edifice that intent builds and places before a sorcerer, then invites him to enter. It is the edifice of intent seen by a sorcerer. The Knock of the Spirit is the same edifice seen by the beginner who is invited--or rather forced--to enter.

A nagual can be a conduit for the spirit only after the spirit has manifested its willingness to be used--either almost imperceptibly or with outright commands.

After a lifetime of practice, sorcerers, naguals in particular, know if the spirit is inviting them to enter the edifice being flaunted before them. They have learned to discipline their connecting links to intent . So they are always forewarned, always know what the spirit has in store for them.

Progress along the sorcerers' path is, in general, a drastic process the purpose of which is to bring one's connecting link to order. In order to revive that link sorcerers need a rigorous, fierce purpose--a special state of mind called unbending intent .

An apprentice is someone who is striving to clear and revive his connecting link with the spirit. Once the link is revived, he is no longer an apprentice, but until that time, in order to keep going he needs a fierce purpose which, of course, he doesn't have. So he allows the nagual to provide the purpose and to do that he has to relinquish his individuality. That's the difficult part.

Volunteers are not welcome in the sorcerers' world, because they already have a purpose of their own, which makes it particularly hard for them to relinquish their individuality. If the sorcerers' world demands ideas and actions contrary to the volunteers' purpose, volunteers simply refuse to change.

Reviving an apprentice's link is a nagual's most challenging and intriguing work. And one of his biggest headaches too. Depending, of course, on the apprentice's personality, the designs of the spirit are either sublimely simple or the most complex labyrinths.



The power of man is incalculable. Death exists only because we have intended it since the moment of our birth. The intent of death can be suspended by making the assemblage point change positions.



I have given you different versions of what the sorcery task consists. It would not be presumptuous of me to disclose that, from the spirit's point of view, the task consists of clearing our connecting link with it. The edifice that intent flaunts before us is, then, a clearinghouse, within which we find not so much the procedures to clear our connecting link as the silent knowledge that allows the clearing process to take place. Without that silent knowledge no process could work, and all we would have would be an indefinite sense of needing something.

The events unleashed by sorcerers as a result of silent knowledge are so simple and yet so abstract that sorcerers decided long ago to speak of those events only in symbolic terms. The manifestations and the knock of the spirit are examples.

For instance, a description of what takes place during the initial meeting between a nagual and a prospective apprentice from the sorcerers' point of view, would be absolutely incomprehensible. It would be nonsense to explain that the nagual, by virtue of his lifelong experience, is focusing something we couldn't imagine, his second attention--the increased awareness gained through sorcery training--on his invisible connection with some indefinable abstract. He is doing this to emphasize and clarify someone else's invisible connection with that indefinable abstract.

Each of us is barred from silent knowledge by natural barriers, specific to each individual. The most impregnable of my barriers was the drive to disguise my complacency as independence.

We as average men do not know, nor will we ever know, that it is something utterly real and functional--our connecting link with intent --which gives us our hereditary preoccupation with fate. During our active lives we never have the chance to go beyond the level of mere preoccupation, because since time immemorial the lull of daily affairs has made us drowsy. It is only when our lives are nearly over that our hereditary preoccupation with fate begins to take on a different character. It begins to make us see through the fog of daily affairs. Unfortunately, this awakening always comes hand in hand with loss of energy caused by aging, when we have no more strength left to turn our preoccupation into a pragmatic and positive discovery. At this point, all there is left is an amorphous, piercing anguish, a longing for something indescribable, and simple anger at having missed out.

The third abstract core is called the trickery of the spirit, or the trickery of the abstract, or stalking oneself, or dusting the link.



Perception is the hinge for everything man is or does, and perception is ruled by the location of the assemblage point. Therefore, if that point changes positions, man's perception of the world changes accordingly. The sorcerer who knows exactly where to place his assemblage point can become anything he wants.


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

The art of stalking is learning all the quirks of your disguise. To learn them so well no one will know you are disguised. For that you need to be ruthless, cunning, patient, and sweet.

Stalking is an art applicabl[center]e to everything. There are four steps to learning it: ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and sweetness. Ruthlessness should not be harshness, cunning should not be cruelty, patience should not be negligence, and sweetness should not be foolishness. These four steps have to be practiced and perfected until they are so smooth they are unnoticeable.

Knowing what intent is means that one can, at any time, explain that knowledge or use it. A nagual by the force of his position is obliged to command his knowledge in this manner.



A warrior needs focus. Heightened awareness is like a springboard. From it one can jump into infinity. When the assemblage point is dislodged, it either becomes lodged again at a position very near its customary one or continues moving on into infinity.
People have no idea of the strange power we carry within ourselves. At this moment, for instance, you have the means to reach infinity.



Egomania is a real tyrant. We must work ceaselessly to dethrone it. You can learn to be ruthless, cunning, patient, and sweet. Ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and sweetness are the essence of stalking . They are the basics that with all their ramifications have to be taught in careful, meticulous steps.



sorcerers' behavior is always impeccable. Sorcerers, though, have an ulterior purpose for their acts, which has nothing to do with personal gain. The fact that they enjoy their acts does not count as gain. Rather, it is a condition of their character. The average man acts only if there is the chance for profit. Warriors say they act not for profit but for the spirit. We have no thought of personal gain. Our acts are dictated by impeccability--we can't be angry or disillusioned.

The two masteries: stalking and intent , are the crowning glory of sorcerers old and new. Stalking is the beginning. Before anything can be attempted on the warrior's path, warriors must learn to stalk ; next they must learn to intend , and only then can they move their assemblage point at will.



Words are tremendously powerful and important and are the magical property of whoever has them. Sorcerers have a rule of thumb: they say that the deeper the assemblage point moves, the greater the feeling that one has knowledge and no words to explain it. Sometimes the assemblage point of average persons can move without a known cause and without their being aware of it, except that they become tongue-tied, confused, and evasive.



The very first principle of stalking is that a warrior stalks himself. He stalks himself ruthlessly, cunningly, patiently, and sweetly.

Stalking is the art of using behavior in novel ways for specific purposes. Normal human behavior in the world of everyday life is routine. Any behavior that brakes from routine causes an unusual effect on our total being. That unusual effect is what sorcerers seek, because it is cumulative.

The sorcerer seers of ancient times, through their seeing , first noticed that unusual behavior produced a tremor in the assemblage point. They soon discovered that if unusual behavior was practiced systematically and directed wisely, it eventually forced the assemblage point to move.

The real challenge for those sorcerer seers, was finding a system of behavior that was neither petty nor capricious, but that combined the morality and the sense of beauty which differentiates sorcerer seers from plain witches.

Anyone who succeeds in moving his assemblage point to a new position is a sorcerer. And from that new position, he can do all kinds of good and bad things to his fellow men. Being a sorcerer, therefore, can be like being a cobbler or a baker. The quest of sorcerer seers is to go beyond that stand. And to do that, they need morality and beauty.

For sorcerers, stalking is the foundation on which everything else they do is built. It is the art of controlled folly.



sorcerers say that heightened awareness is the portal of intent . And they use it as such. Think about it.

You must reach the point where you understand what intent is. And, above all, you must understand that that knowledge cannot be turned into words. That knowledge is there for everyone. It is there to be felt, to be used, but not to be explained. One can come into it by changing levels of awareness, therefore, heightened awareness is an entrance. But even the entrance cannot be explained. One can only make use of it.

The natural knowledge of intent is available to anyone, but the command of it belongs to those who probe it.

sorcerers believe that until the very moment of the spirit's descent, any of us could walk away from the spirit; but not afterwards.

The fourth abstract core is called the descent of the spirit or being moved by intent . It is the full brunt of the spirit's descent. The fourth abstract core is an act of revelation. The spirit reveals itself to us. Sorcerers describe it as the spirit lying in ambush and then descending on us, its prey. Sorcerers say that the spirit's descent is always shrouded. It happens and yet it seems not to have happened at all.

There is a threshold that once crossed permits no retreat. Every sorcerer should have a clear memory of crossing that threshold so he can remind himself of the new state of his perceptual potential. One does not have to be an apprentice of sorcery to reach this threshold, and the only difference between an average man and a sorcerer, in such cases, is what each emphasizes. A sorcerer emphasizes crossing this threshold and uses the memory of it as a point of reference. An average man does not cross the threshold and does his best to forget all about it.

sorcerers say that the fourth abstract core happens when the spirit cuts our chains of self-reflection. Cutting our chains is marvelous, but also very undesirable, for nobody wants to be free.

What a strange feeling: to realize that everything we think, everything we say depends on the position of the assemblage point.
The secret of our chains is that they imprison us, but by keeping us pinned down on our comfortable spot of self-reflection, they defend us from the onslaughts of the unknown.

Once our chains are cut, we are no longer bound by the concerns of the daily world. We are still in the daily world, but we don't belong there anymore. In order to belong we must share the concerns of people. And without chains we can't.

What distinguishes normal people is that we share a metaphorical dagger: the concerns of our self-reflection. With this dagger, we cut ourselves and bleed; and the job of our chains of self-reflection is to give us the feeling that we are bleeding together, that we are sharing something wonderful: our humanity. But if we were to examine it, we would discover that we are bleeding alone; that we are not sharing anything; that all we are doing is toying with our manageable, unreal, man-made reflection.

sorcerers are no longer in the world of daily affairs because they are no longer prey to their self-reflection.



The universe is made up of energy fields which defy description or scrutiny. They resemble filaments of ordinary light, except that light is lifeless compared to the Indescribable Force 's emanations, which exude awareness.

Normal perception occurs when intent , which is pure energy, lights up a portion of the luminous filaments inside our cocoon, and at the same time brightens a long extension of the same luminous filaments extending into infinity outside our cocoon. Extraordinary perception, seeing , occurs when by the force of intent , a different cluster of energy fields energizes and lights up. When a crucial number of energy fields are lit up inside the luminous cocoon, a sorcerer is able to see the energy fields themselves.

Awareness takes place when the energy fields inside our luminous cocoon are aligned with the same energy fields outside.

Only a very small portion of the total number of luminous filaments inside the cocoon are energized while the rest remain unaltered. The filaments do not need to be aligned to be lit up, because the ones inside our cocoon are the same as those outside. Whatever energizes them is definitely an independent force. We can't call it awareness because awareness is the glow of the energy fields being lit up. The force that lites up the fields is named will .

Will is the force that keeps the Indescribable Force 's emanations separated and is not only responsible for our awareness, but also for everything in the universe. This force has total consciousness and it springs from the very fields of energy that make the universe. Intent is a more appropriate name for it than will . In the long run, however, the name proves disadvantageous, because it does not describe its overwhelming importance nor the living connection it has with everything in the universe.

Our great collective flaw is that we live our lives completely disregarding that connection. The busyness of our lives, our relentless interests, concerns, hopes, frustrations, and fears take precedence, and on a day-to-day basis we are unaware of being linked to everything else.

Being cast out from the Garden of Eden sounds like an allegory for losing our silent knowledge, our knowledge of intent . sorcery, then, is a going back to the beginning, a return to paradise.

The spirit is the force that sustains the universe. Intent is not something one might use or command or move in any way--nevertheless, one could use it, command it, or move it as one desires. This contradiction is the essence of sorcery. To fail to understand it has brought generations of sorcerers unimaginable pain and sorrow. Modern-day naguals, in an effort to avoid paying this exorbitant price in pain, have developed a code of behavior called the warrior's way, or the impeccable action, which prepares sorcerers by enhancing their sobriety and thoughtfulness.

sorcerers concern themselves exclusively with the capacity that their individual connecting link with intent has to set them free to light the fire from within.

All modern-day sorcerers have to struggle fiercely to gain soundness of mind. Sorcery is an attempt to reestablish our knowledge of intent and regain use of it without succumbing to it. The abstract cores of the sorcerer stories are shades of realization, degrees of our being aware of intent .


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

It does not matter what our specific fate is as long as we face it with ultimate abandon.

Sorcerers constantly stalk themselves. The sensation of being bottled up is experienced by every human being. It is a reminder of our existing connection with intent . For sorcerers this sensation is even more acute, precisely because their goal is to sensitize their connecting link until they can make it function at will.

When the pressure of their connecting link is too great, sorcerers relieve it by stalking themselves. Stalking is a procedure, a very simple one. Stalking is special behavior that follows certain principles. It is secretive, furtive, deceptive behavior designed to deliver a jolt. And, when you stalk yourself you jolt yourself, using your own behavior in a ruthless, cunning way.

When a sorcerer's awareness becomes bogged down with the weight of his perceptual input, the best, or even perhaps the only, remedy is to use the idea of death to deliver that stalking jolt.

The idea of death therefore is of monumental importance in the life of a sorcerer. I have shown you innumerable things about death to convince you that the knowledge of our impending and unavoidable end is what gives us sobriety. Our most costly mistake as average men is indulging in a sense of immortality. It is as though we believe that if we don't think about death we can protect ourselves from it.

Not thinking about death protects us from worrying about it. But that purpose is an unworthy one for average men and a travesty for sorcerers. Without a clear view of death, there is no order, no sobriety, no beauty. Sorcerers struggle to gain this crucial insight in order to help them realize at the deepest possible level that they have no assurance whatsoever their lives will continue beyond the moment. That realization gives sorcerers the courage to be patient and yet take action, courage to be acquiescent without being stupid.

The idea of death is the only thing that can give sorcerers courage. Strange, isn't it? It gives sorcerers the courage to be cunning without being conceited, and above all it gives them courage to be ruthless without being self-important.

sorcerers stalk themselves in order to break the power of their obsessions. There are many ways of stalking oneself. If you don't want to use the idea of your death, you can use poems to stalk yourself.
I stalk myself with them. I deliver a jolt to myself with them. I listen, and shut off my internal dialogue and let my inner silence gain momentum. Then the combination of the poem and the silence delivers the jolt.

See if you can feel what I'm talking about with this poem by José Gorostiza.

...this incessant stubborn dying,
this living death,
that slays you, oh God,
in your rigorous handiwork,
in the roses, in the stones,
in the indomitable stars
and in the flesh that burns out,
like a bonfire lit by a song,
a dream,
a hue that hits the eye.

...and you, yourself,
perhaps have died eternities of ages out there,
without us knowing about it,
we dregs, crumbs, ashes of you;
you that still are present,
like a star faked by its very light,
an empty light without star
that reaches us,
hiding
its infinite catastrophe.

As I hear the words, I feel that that man is seeing the essence of things and I can see with him. I care only about the feeling the poets longing brings me. I borrow his longing, and with it I borrow the beauty. And marvel at the fact that he, like a true warrior, lavishes it on the recipients, the beholders, retaining for himself only his longing. This jolt, this shock of beauty, is stalking .

Death is not an enemy, although it appears to be. Death is not our destroyer, although we think it is.
Sorcerers say death is the only worthy opponent we have. Death is our challenger. We are born to take that challenge, average men or sorcerers. Sorcerers know about it; average men do not.

Life is the process by means of which death challenges us. Death is the active force. Life is the arena. And in that arena there are only two contenders at any time: oneself and death.

We are passive. Think about it. If we move, it's only when we feel the pressure of death. Death sets the pace for our actions and feelings and pushes us relentlessly until it breaks us and wins the bout, or else we rise about all possibilities and defeat death.

Sorcerers defeat death and death acknowledges the defeat by letting the sorcerers go free, never to be challenged again. Death stops challenging them. It means thought has taken a somersault into the inconceivable.

A somersault of thought into the inconceivable is the descent of the spirit; the act of breaking our perceptual barriers. It is the moment in which man's perception reaches its limits.
Sorcerers practice the art of sending scouts, advance runners, to probe our perceptual limits. This is another reason I like poems. I take them as advance runners. But poets don't know as exactly as sorcerers what those advance runners can accomplish.



As the energy that is ordinarily used to maintain the fixed position of the assemblage point becomes liberated, it focuses automatically on that connecting link. There are no techniques or maneuvers for a sorcerer to learn beforehand to move energy from one place to the other. Rather it is a matter of an instantaneous shift taking place once a certain level of proficiency has been attained.

The level of proficiency is pure understanding. In order to attain that instantaneous shift of energy, one needs a clear connection with intent , and to get a clear connection one needs only to intend it through pure understanding.

Pure understanding is a sorcerer's advance runner probing that immensity out there.


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

As I have said, the fourth abstract core of the sorcery stories is called the descent of the spirit, or being moved by intent . In order to let the mysteries of sorcery reveal themselves it is necessary for the spirit to descend. The spirit chooses a moment when a man is distracted, unguarded, and, showing no pity, the spirit lets its presence by itself move the man's assemblage point to a specific position. This spot is known to sorcerers as the place of no pity. Ruthlessness becomes, in this way, the first principle of sorcery.

The first principle should not be confused with the first effect of sorcery apprenticeship, which is the shift between normal and heightened awareness.

To all appearances, having the assemblage point shift is the first thing that actually happens to a sorcery apprentice. So, it is only natural for an apprentice to assume that this is the first principle of sorcery. But it is not. Ruthlessness is the first principle of sorcery.

What we need to do to allow magic to get hold of us is to banish doubt from our minds. Once doubts are banished, anything is possible.



Stop thinking by intending the movement of your assemblage point. Intent is beckoned with the eyes.



The place of no pity is the site of ruthlessness. Let's say that ruthlessness, being a specific position of the assemblage point, is shown in the eyes of sorcerers. It's like a shimmering film over the eyes. The eyes of sorcerers are brilliant. The greater the shine, the more ruthless the sorcerer is.

When the assemblage point moves to the place of no pity, the eyes begin to shine. The firmer the grip of the assemblage point on its new position, the more the eyes shine.

A recapitulation of their lives, which sorcerers do, is the key to moving their assemblage points. Sorcerers start their recapitulation by thinking, by remembering the most important acts of their lives. From merely thinking about them they then move on to actually being at the site of the event. When they can do that--be at the site of the event--they have successfully shifted their assemblage point to the precise spot it was when the event took place. Bringing back the total event by means of shifting the assemblage point is known as sorcerers' recollection.

Recollecting is not the same as remembering. Remembering is dictated by the day-to-day type of thinking, while recollecting is dictated by the movement of the assemblage point.

Our assemblage points are constantly shifting; imperceptible shifts. In order to make our assemblage points shift to precise spots we must engage intent . Since there is no way of knowing what intent is, sorcerers let their eyes beckon it.



What you feel and interpret as longing is in fact the sudden movement of your assemblage point.
Ruthlessness makes sorcerers' eyes shine, and that shine beckons intent . Each spot to which their assemblage points move is indicated by a specific shine of their eyes. Since their eyes have their own memory, they can call up the recollection of any spot by calling up the specific shine associated with that spot.

The reason sorcerers put so much emphasis on the shine of their eyes and on their gaze is because the eyes are directly connected to intent . Contradictory as it might sound, the truth is that the eyes are only superficially connected to the world of everyday life. Their deeper connection is to the abstract.

Man's possibilities are so vast and mysterious that sorcerers, rather than thinking about them, have chosen to explore them, with no hope of ever understanding them.

The only advantages sorcerers may have over average men is that they have stored their energy, which means a more precise, clearer connecting link with intent . Naturally, it also means they can recollect at will, using the shine of their eyes to move their assemblage points.



Be a paragon of patience and consistency by fighting for impeccability. Transform yourself daily, restraining yourself with the most excruciating effort.

It is a rare opportunity for a warrior to be given a genuine chance to be impeccable in spite of his basic feelings. The act of giving freely and impeccably rejuvenates you and renews your wonder.



The eyes of all living beings can move someone else's assemblage point, especially if their eyes are focused on intent . Under normal conditions, however, peoples eyes are focused on the world, looking for food... looking for shelter...

For sorcerers to use the shine of their eyes to move their own or anyone else's assemblage point they have to be ruthless. That is, they have to be familiar with that specific position of the assemblage point called the place of no pity. This is especially true for the naguals.

Each nagual develops a brand of ruthlessness specific to him alone. Naguals mask their ruthlessness automatically, even against their will. I'm not a rational man, I only appear to be because my mask is so effective. What you perceive as reasonableness is my lack of pity, because that's what ruthlessness is: a total lack of pity.

Move your assemblage point to the precise spot where pity disappears. That spot is known as the place of no pity. The problem that sorcerers have to solve is that the place of no pity has to be reached with only minimal help.

Everything sorcerers do is done as a consequence of a movement of their assemblage points, and such movements are ruled by the amount of energy sorcerers have at their command.

Inside every human being is a gigantic, dark lake of silent knowledge which each of us could intuit. Sorcerers are the only beings on earth who deliberately go beyond the intuitive level by training themselves to do two transcendental things: first, to conceive the existence of the assemblage point, and second, to make that assemblage point move.

The most sophisticated knowledge sorcerers possess is of our potential as perceiving beings, and the knowledge that the content of perception depends on the position of the assemblage point.



Enjoy things with no expectation.



When the assemblage point moves and reaches the place of no pity, the position of rationality and common sense becomes weak.

Silent knowledge is something that all of us have, something that has complete mastery, complete knowledge of everything. But it cannot think, therefore, it cannot speak of what is know.

sorcerers believe that when man became aware that he knew, and wanted to be conscious of what he knew, he lost sight of what he knew. This silent knowledge, which you cannot describe, is, of course, intent --the spirit, the abstract. Man's error was to want to know it directly, the way he knew everyday life. The more he wanted, the more ephemeral it became.

Man gave up silent knowledge for the world of reason. The more he clings to the world of reason, the more ephemeral intent becomes.



The origin of the anxiety that overtakes an apprentice with the speed of wildfire is the sudden movement of his assemblage point. Get used to the idea of recurrent attacks of anxiety, because your assemblage point is going to keep moving.

Any movement of the assemblage point is like dying. Everything in us gets disconnected, then reconnected again to a source of much greater power. That amplification of energy is felt as a killing anxiety. When this happens, just wait. The outburst of energy will pass. What's dangerous in not knowing what is happening to you. Once you know, there is no real danger.

Ancient man knew, in the most direct fashion, what to do and how best to do it. But, because he performed so well, he started to develop a sense of selfness, which gave him the feeling that he could predict and plan the actions he was used to performing. And thus the idea of an individual "self" appeared; an individual self which began to dictate the nature and scope of man's actions.

As the feeling of the individual self became stronger, man lost his natural connection to silent knowledge. Modern man, being heir to that development, therefore finds himself so hopelessly removed from the source of everything that all he can do is express his despair in violent and cynical acts of self-destruction. The reason for man's cynicism and despair is the bit of silent knowledge left in him, which does two things: one, it gives man an inkling of his ancient connection to the source of everything; and two, it makes man feel that without this connection, he has no hope of peace, of satisfaction, of attainment.

War is the natural state for a warrior, and peace is an anomaly. But war, for a warrior, doesn't mean acts of individual or collective stupidity or wanton violence. War, for a warrior, is the total struggle against that individual self that has deprived man of his power.

Ruthlessness is the most basic premise of sorcery. Any movement of the assemblage point means a movement away from the excessive concern with the individual self.

Self-importance is the force generated by man's self-image. It is that force which keeps the assemblage point fixed where it is at present. For this reason, the thrust of the warrior's way is to dethrone self-importance. And everything sorcerers do is toward accomplishing this goal.

sorcerers have unmasked self-importance and found that it is self-pity masquerading as something else. It doesn't sound possible, but that is what it is. Self-pity is the real enemy and the source of man's misery. Without a degree of pity for himself, man could not afford to be as self-importance as he is. However, once the force of self-importance is engaged, it develops its own momentum. And it is this seemingly independent nature of self-importance which gives it its fake sense of worth.

sorcerers are absolutely convinced that by moving our assemblage points away from their customary position we achieve a state of being which could only be called ruthlessness. Sorcerers know, by means of their practical actions, that as soon as their assemblage points move, their self-importance crumbles. Without the customary position of their assemblage points, their self-image can no longer be sustained. And without the heavy focus on that self-image, they lose their self-compassion, and with it their self-importance. Sorcerers are right, therefore, in saying that self-importance is merely self-pity in disguise.


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

A nagual in his role as leader or teacher has to behave in the most efficient, but at the same time most impeccable, way. Since it is not possible for him to plan the course of his actions rationally, the nagual always lets the spirit decide his course.



The position of self-reflection forces the assemblage point to assemble a world of sham compassion, but of very real cruelty and self-centeredness. In that world the only real feelings are those convenient for the one who feelings them.
For a sorcerer, ruthlessness is not cruelty. Ruthlessness is the opposite of self-pity or self-importance. Ruthlessness is sobriety.

sorcerers' increased energy, derived from the curtailment of their self-reflection, allows their senses a greater range of perception.

The only worthwhile course of action, whether for sorcerers or average men, is to restrict our involvement with our self-image. What a nagual aims at with his apprentices is the shattering of their mirror of self-reflection.

Each of us has a different degree of attachment to his self-reflection. And that attachment is felt as need.

It is possible for sorcerers, or average men, to need no one, to get peace, harmony, laughter, knowledge, directly from the spirit--to need no intermediaries. For you and for me, its different. I'm your intermediary and my teacher was mine. Intermediaries, besides providing a minimal chance--the awareness of intent --help shatter peoples mirrors of self-reflection.

The only concrete help you ever get from me is that I attack your self-reflection. If it weren't for that, you would be wasting your time. This is the only real help you've gotten from me.

I've taught you all kinds of things in order to trap your attention. You'll swear, though, that that teaching has been the important part. It hasn't. There is very little value in instruction. Sorcerers maintain that moving the assemblage point is all that matters. And that movement depends on increased energy and not on instruction.

Any human being who would follow a specific and simple sequence of actions can learn to move his assemblage point. The sequence of actions I am talking about is one that stems from being aware. The nagual provides a minimal chance, but that minimal chance is not instruction, like the instruction you need to learn to operate a machine. The minimal chance consists of being made aware of the spirit.

The specific sequence I have in mind calls for being aware that self-importance is the force which keeps the assemblage point fixed. When self-importance is curtailed, the energy it requires is no longer expended. That increased energy then serves as the springboard that launches the assemblage point, automatically and without premeditation, into an inconceivable journey.

Once the assemblage point has moved, the movement itself entails moving from self-reflection, and this, in turn, assures a clear connecting link with the spirit. After all, it is self-reflection that has disconnected man from the spirit in the first place.

As I have already said to you, sorcery is a journey of return. We return victorious to the spirit, having descended into hell. And from hell we bring trophies. Understanding is one of our trophies.
Our difficulty with this simple progression is that most of us are unwilling to accept that we need so little to get on with. We are geared to expect instruction, teaching, guides, masters. And when we are told that we need no one, we don't believe it. We become nervous, then distrustful, and finally angry and disappointed. If we need help, it is not in methods, but in emphasis. If someone makes us aware that we need to curtail our self-importance, that help is real.

sorcerers say we should need no one to convince us that the world is infinitely more complex than our wildest fantasies. So, why are we dependent? Why do we crave someone to guide us when we can do it ourselves? Big question, eh?

The spirit moves the assemblage point. I have insisted to the point of exhaustion that there are no procedures in sorcery. There are no methods, no steps. The only thing that matters is the movement of the assemblage point. And no procedure can cause that. It's an effect that happens all by itself.

The nagual entices the assemblage point into moving by helping to destroy the mirror of self-reflection. But that is all the nagual can do. The actual mover is the spirit, the abstract; something that cannot be seen or felt; something that does not seem to exist, and yet does. For this reason, sorcerers report that the assemblage point moves all by itself.

Because the spirit has no perceivable essence, sorcerers deal rather with the specific instances and ways in which they are able to shatter the mirror of self-reflection.

The world of our self-reflection or of our mind is very flimsy and is held together by a few key ideas that serve as its underlying order. When those ideas fail, the underlying order ceases to function.

Continuity is the key idea. Continuity is the idea that we are a solid block. In our minds, what sustains our world is the certainty that we are unchangeable.



I've described to you in the past the concept of stopping the world and that it is as necessary for sorcerers as reading and writing are for the average man. It consists of introducing a dissonant element into the fabric of everyday behavior for purposes of halting the otherwise smooth flow of ordinary events--events which are catalogued in our minds by our reason.

The dissonant element is called not-doing , or the opposite of doing . Doing is anything that is part of a whole for which we have a cognitive account. Not-doing is an element that does not belong in that charted whole.

sorcerers, because they are stalkers , understand human behavior to perfection. They understand, for instance, that human beings are creatures of inventory. Knowing the ins and outs of a particular inventory is what makes a man a scholar or an expert in his field.

sorcerers know that when an average person's inventory fails, the person either enlarges his inventory or his world of self-reflection collapses. The average person is willing to incorporate new items into his inventory if they don't contradict the inventory's underlying order. But if the items contradict that order, the person's mind collapses. The inventory is the mind. Sorcerers count on this when they attempt to break the mirror of self-reflection.


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf


Intent is intended with the eyes. I know that it is so. Yet, just like you, I can't pinpoint what it is I know. Sorcerers resolve this particular difficulty by accepting something extremely obvious: human beings are infinitely more complex and mysterious than our wildest fantasies.

All I can say is that the eyes do it. I don't know how, but they do it. They summon intent with something indefinable that they have, something in their shine. Sorcerers say that intent is experienced with the eyes, not with the reason.



Continuity is so important in our lives that if it breaks it's always instantly repaired. In the case of sorcerers, however, once their assemblage points reach the place of no pity, continuity is never the same.

You are dealing with a new type of continuity. It takes time to get used to it. Warriors spend years in limbo where they are neither average men nor sorcerers. The difficulty is that the mirror of self-reflection is extremely powerful and only lets its victims go after a ferocious struggle.



There is something called a silent protector. It is a lifesaver, a surge of inexplicable energy that comes to a warrior when nothing else works. Sorcerers' options are silent protectors. They are positions of the assemblage point. The infinite number of positions which the assemblage point can reach. In each and every one of those shallow or deep shifts, a sorcerer can strengthen his new continuity.

The effect of those shifts of the assemblage point is cumulative. It weighs on you whether you understand it or not.



Don't wish for death, just wait until it comes. Don't try to imagine what it's like. Just be there to be caught in its flow.



The sorcerers' struggle for assuredness is the most dramatic struggle there is. It's painful and costly. Many, many times it has actually cost sorcerers their lives.
In order for any sorcerer to have complete certainty about his actions, or about his position in the sorcerers' world, or to be capable of utilizing intelligently his new continuity, he must invalidate the continuity of his old life. Only then can his actions have the necessary assuredness to fortify and balance the tenuousness and instability of his new continuity.

The sorcerer seers of modern times call this process of invalidation the ticket to impeccability, or the sorcerers' symbolic but final death.



sorcerers have a peculiar bent. They live exclusively in the twilight of a feeling best described by the words "and yet..." When everything is crumbling down around them, sorcerers accept that the situation is terrible, and then immediately escape to the twilight of "and yet..."



Warriors do their utmost, and then, without any remorse or regrets, they relax and let the spirit decide the outcome. The decision of the spirit is another basic core. Sorcery stories are built around it.



A sorcerer's ticket to freedom is his death. I myself have paid with my life for that ticket to freedom, as has everyone else in my household. And now we are equals in our condition of being dead.

You too are dead. The sorcerers' grand trick, however, is to be aware that they are dead. Their ticket to impeccability must be wrapped in awareness. In that wrapping, sorcerers say, their ticket is kept in mint condition.

Explanations are never wasted, because they are imprinted in us for immediate or later use or to help prepare our way to reaching silent knowledge.

Silent knowledge is a general position of the assemblage point. Ages ago it was man's normal position, but, for reasons which would be impossible to determine, man's assemblage point moved away from that specific location and adopted a new one called "reason."

The place of no pity, being another position of the assemblage point, is the forerunner of silent knowledge, and yet another position of the assemblage point called "the place of concern," is the forerunner of reason.



Death is painful only when it happens in one's bed, in sickness. In a fight for your life, you feel no pain. If you feel anything, it's exultation.

One of the most dramatic differences between civilized men and sorcerers is the way in which death comes to them. Only with sorcerer-warriors is death kind and sweet. They could be mortally wounded and yet would feel no pain. And what is even more extraordinary is that death holds itself in abeyance for as long as the sorcerers need it to do so. The greatest difference between an average man and a sorcerer is that a sorcerer commands his death with his speed.

In the world of everyday life our word or our decisions can be reversed very easily. The only irrevocable thing in our world is death. In the sorcerers' world, on the other hand, normal death can be countermanded, but not the sorcerers' word. In the sorcerers' world decisions cannot be changed or revised. Once they have been made, they stand forever.



For a seer human beings are either oblong or spherical luminous masses of countless, static, yet vibrant fields of energy, and only sorcerers are capable of injecting movement into those spheres of static luminosity. In a millisecond they can move their assemblage points to any place in their luminous mass. That movement and the speed with which it is performed entails an instantaneous shift into the perception of another totally different universe. Or they can move their assemblage points, without stopping, across their entire fields of luminous energy. The force created by such movement is so intense that it instantly consumes their whole luminous mass.



Possibly every human being under normal living conditions has had at one time or another the opportunity to break away from the bindings of convention. I don't mean social convention, but the conventions binding our perception. A moment of elation would suffice to move our assemblage points and break our conventions. So, too, a moment of fright, ill health, anger, or grief. But ordinarily, whenever we have the chance to move our assemblage points we become frightened. Our religious, academic, social backgrounds come into play. They assure our safe return to the flock; the return of our assemblage points to the prescribed position of normal living.

All the mystics and spiritual teachers you know of have done just that: their assemblage points moved, either through discipline or accident, to a certain point; and then they returned to normalcy carrying a memory that lasted them a lifetime.

The average man, incapable of finding the energy to perceive beyond his daily limits, calls the realm of extraordinary perception sorcery, witchcraft, or the work of the devil, and shies away from it without examining it further.

Turn everything into what it really is: the abstract, the spirit, the nagual . There is no witchcraft, no evil, no devil. There is only perception.

Your assemblage point can move beyond the place of no pity into the place of silent knowledge. To manipulate it yourself means you have enough energy to move between reason and silent knowledge at will. If a sorcerer has enough energy--or even if he does not have sufficient energy but needs to shift because it is a matter of life and death--he can fluctuate between reason and silent knowledge.

At this stage in your development, any movement of your assemblage point will still be a mystery. Your challenge at the beginning of your apprenticeship is maintaining your gains, rather than reasoning them out. At some point everything will make sense to you.

You have to be able to explain knowledge to yourself before you can claim that it makes sense to you. For a movement of your assemblage point to make sense, you will need to have energy to fluctuate from the place of reason to the place of silent knowledge.

Your assemblage point can move by itself. You can intend the movement by manipulating certain feelings and in so doing your assemblage point can reach the position of silent knowledge.

One way to talk about the perception attained in the place of silent knowledge is to call it "here and here."



Intending the movement of the assemblage point is a great accomplishment. But accomplishment is something personal. It's necessary, but it's not the important part. It is not the residue sorcerers look forward to. The idea of the abstract, the spirit, is the only residue that is important. The idea of the personal self has no value whatsoever. Every time I've had the chance, I have made you aware of the need to abstract. You have always believed that I meant to think abstractly. No. To abstract means to make yourself available to the spirit by being aware of it.

One of the most dramatic things about the human condition is the macabre connection between stupidity and self-reflection.

It is stupidity that forces us to discard anything that does not conform with our self-reflective expectations. For example, as average men, we are blind to the most crucial piece of knowledge available to a human being: the existence of the assemblage point and the fact that it can move.

For a rational man it's unthinkable that there should be an invisible point where perception is assembled.

For the rational man to hold steadfastly to his self-image insures his abysmal ignorance. He ignores, for instance, the fact that sorcery is not incantations and hocus-pocus, but the freedom to perceive not only the world taken for granted, but everything else that is humanly possible.

Here is where the average man's stupidity is most dangerous; he is afraid of sorcery. He trembles at the possibility of freedom. And freedom is at his fingertips. It's called the third point. And it can be reached as easily as the assemblage point can be made to move.

This is another of the sorcerers' contradictions: it's very difficult and yet it's the simplest thing in the world. I've told you already that a high fever could move the assemblage point. Hunger or fear or love or hate could do it; mysticism too, and also unbending intent , which is the preferred method of sorcerers.

Unbending intent is a sort of single-mindedness human beings exhibit; an extremely well-defined purpose not countermanded by any conflicting interests or desires; unbending intent is also the force engendered when the assemblage point is maintained fixed in a position which is not the usual one.

The distinction between a movement and a shift of the assemblage point is that a movement is a profound change of position, so extreme that the assemblage point might even reach other bands of energy within our total luminous mass of energy fields. Each band of energy represents a completely different universe to be perceived. A shift, however, is a small movement within the band of energy fields we perceive as the world of everyday life.

sorcerers see unbending intent as the catalyst to trigger their unchangeable decisions, or as the converse: their unchangeable decisions are the catalyst that propels their assemblage points to new positions, positions which in turn generate unbending intent .

Trying to reason out the sorcerers' metaphorical descriptions is as useless as trying to reason out silent knowledge.

The world of daily life consists of two points of reference. We have for example, here and there, in and out, up and down, good and evil, and so on and so forth. So, properly speaking, our perception of our lives is two-dimensional. None of what we perceive ourselves doing has depth.

A sorcerer perceives his actions with depth. His actions are tridimensional for him. They have a third point of reference.

Our points of reference are obtained primarily from our sense perception. Our senses perceive and differentiate what is immediate to us from what is not. Using that basic distinction we derive the rest.

In order to reach the third point of reference one must perceive two places at once.
Normal perception has an axis. "Here and there" are the perimeters of that axis, and we are partial to the clarity of "here." In normal perception, only "here" is perceived completely, instantaneously, and directly. Its twin referent, "there," lacks immediacy. It is inferred, deduced, expected, even assumed, but it is not apprehended directly with all the senses. When we perceive two places at once, total clarity is lost, but the immediate perception of "there" is gained.


Love Always
mudra

The Power of Silence

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_power_of_silence.pdf

A sorcerer, because he has a connecting link with intent , sees an oddity as a vehicle to perceiving--not an oddity, but a source of awe.



Only sorcerers can turn their feelings into intent . Intent is the spirit, so it is the spirit which moves their assemblage points.

The misleading part of all this is that I am saying only sorcerers know about the spirit, that intent is the exclusive domain of sorcerers. This is not true at all, but it is the situation in the realm of practicality. The real condition is that sorcerers are more aware of their connection with the spirit than the average man and strive to manipulate it. That's all. I've already told you, the connecting link with intent is the universal feature shared by everything there is.

Being in two places at once is a milestone sorcerers use to mark the moment the assemblage point reaches the place of silent knowledge. Split perception, if accomplished by one's own means, is called the free movement of the assemblage point.

Every apprentice must consistently do everything within his power to encourage the free movement of his assemblage point. This all-out effort is cryptically called "reaching out for the third point."

The third point of reference is freedom of perception; it is intent ; it is the spirit; the somersault of thought into the miraculous; the act of reaching beyond our boundaries and touching the inconceivable.

To discover the possibility of being in two places at once is very exciting to the mind. Since our minds are our rationality, and our rationality is our self-reflection, anything beyond our self-reflection either appalls us or attracts us, depending on what kind of persons we are.

In terms of his connection with intent , a warrior goes through four stages. The first is when he has a rusty, untrustworthy link with intent . The second is when he succeeds in cleaning it. The third is when he learns to manipulate it. And the fourth is when he learns to accept the designs of the abstract.

Your disadvantage in the sorcerers' world is your lack of familiarity with it. In that world you have to relate yourself to everything in a new way, which is infinitely more difficult, because it has very little to do with your everyday life continuity.

The specific problem of sorcerers is two-fold. One is the impossibility of restoring a shattered continuity; the other is the impossibility of using the continuity dictated by the new position of their assemblage points. That new continuity is always too tenuous, too unstable, and does not offer sorcerers the assuredness they need to function as if they were in the world of everyday life.

sorcerers don't resolve this problem. The spirit either resolves it for us or it doesn't. If it does, a sorcerer finds himself acting in the sorcerers' world, but without knowing how. This is the reason why I have insisted from the day I found you that impeccability is all that counts. A sorcerer lives an impeccable life, and that seems to beckon the solution. Why? No one knows.

Impeccability, as I have told you so many times, is not morality, it only resembles morality. Impeccability is simply the best use of our energy level. Naturally, it calls for frugality, thoughtfulness, simplicity, innocence; and above all, it calls for lack of self-reflection. All this makes it sound like a manual for monastic life, but it isn't.

sorcerers say that in order to command the spirit, and by that they mean to command the movement of the assemblage point, one needs energy. The only thing that stores energy for us is our impeccability.

We do not have to be students of sorcery to move our assemblage point. Sometimes, due to natural although dramatic circumstances, such as war, deprivation, stress, fatigue, sorrow, helplessness, men's assemblage points undergo profound movements. If the men who find themselves in such circumstances are able to adopt a sorcerer's ideology, they would be able to maximize that natural movement with no trouble. And they would seek and find extraordinary things instead of doing what men do in such circumstances: crave the return to normalcy.

When a movement of the assemblage point is maximized, both the average man or the apprentice in sorcery becomes a sorcerer, because by maximizing that movement, continuity is shattered beyond repair.

You maximize that movement by curtailing self-reflection. Moving the assemblage point or breaking one's continuity is not the real difficulty. The real difficulty is having energy. If one has energy, once the assemblage point moves, inconceivable things are there for the asking.

Man's predicament is that he intuits his hidden resources, but he does not dare use them. This is why sorcerers say that man's plight is the counterpoint between his stupidity and his ignorance. Man needs now, more so than ever, to be taught new ideas that have to do exclusively with his inner world--sorcerers' ideas, not social ideas, ideas pertaining to man facing the unknown, facing his personal death. Now, more than anything else, he needs to be taught the secrets of the assemblage point.



The spirit is indefinable. One cannot even feel it, much less talk about it. One can only beckon it by acknowledging its existence.



The position of silent knowledge is called the third point because in order to get to it one has to pass the second point, the place of no pity.

Every human being has a capacity for that fluidity. For most of us, however, it is stored away and we never use it, except on rare occasions which are brought about by sorcerers, or by dramatic natural circumstances, such as a life-or-death struggle.

Only a human being who is a paragon of reason can move his assemblage point easily and be a paragon of silent knowledge. Only those who are squarely in either position can see the other position clearly. That was the way the age of reason came to being. The position of reason was clearly seen from the position of silent knowledge.

The one-way bridge from silent knowledge to reason is called "concern." That is, the concern that true men of silent knowledge have about the source of what they know. And the other one-way bridge, from reason to silent knowledge, is called "pure understanding." That is, the recognition that tells the man of reason that reason is only one island in an endless sea of islands.

A human being who has both one-way bridges working is a sorcerer in direct contact with the spirit, the vital force that makes both positions possible.



The spirit only listens when the speaker speaks in gestures. And gestures do not mean signs or body movements, but acts of true abandon, acts of largesse, of humor. As a gesture for the spirit, sorcerers bring out the best of themselves and silently offer it to the abstract.

sorcerers count their lives in hours. In one hour it is possible for a sorcerer to live the equivalent in intensity of a normal life. This intensity is an advantage when it comes to storing information in the movement of the assemblage point.

The assemblage point, with even the most minute shifting, creates totally isolated islands of perception. Information, in the form of experiences in the complexity of awareness can be stored there. But how can information be stored in something so vague? The mind is equally vague, and still you trust it because you are familiar with it. You don't yet have the same familiarity with the movement of the assemblage point, but it is just about the same.

The information is stored in the experience itself. Later, when a sorcerer moves his assemblage point to the exact spot where it was, he relives the total experience. This sorcerers' recollection is the way to get back all the information stored in the movement of the assemblage point.

Intensity is an automatic result of the movement of the assemblage point. Intensity, being an aspect of intent , is connected naturally to the shine of the sorcerers' eyes. In order to recall those isolated islands of perception sorcerers need only intent the particular shine of their eyes associated with whichever spot they want to return to.

Because his intensity rate is greater than normal, in a few hours a sorcerer can live the equivalent of a normal lifetime. His assemblage point, by shifting to an unfamiliar position, takes in more energy than usual. That extra flow of energy is called intensity.

Beware of a reaction which typically afflicts sorcerers--a frustrating desire to explain the sorcery experience in cogent, well-reasoned terms.

The sorcerers' experience is so outlandish that sorcerers consider it an intellectual exercise, and use it to stalk themselves with. Their trump card as stalkers , though, is that they remain keenly aware that we are perceivers and that perception has more possibilities than the mind can conceive.

In order to protect themselves from that immensity, sorcerers learn to maintain a perfect blend of ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and sweetness. These four bases are inextricably bound together. sorcerers cultivate them by intending them. These bases are, naturally, positions of the assemblage point.

Every act performed by any sorcerer is by definition governed by these four principles. So, properly speaking, every sorcerer's every action is deliberate in thought and realization, and has the specific blend of the four foundations of stalking .

sorcerers use the four moods of stalking as guides. These are four different frames of mind, four different brands of intensity that sorcerers can use to induce their assemblage points to move to specific positions.

Our tendency is to ponder, to question, to find out. And there is no way to do that from within the discipline of sorcery. Sorcery is the act of reaching the place of silent knowledge, and silent knowledge can't be reasoned out. It can only be experienced.

sorcerers, in an effort to protect themselves from the overwhelming effect of silent knowledge, developed the art of stalking . Stalking moves the assemblage point minutely but steadily, thus giving sorcerers time and therefore the possibility of buttressing themselves.

Within the art of stalking there is a technique which sorcerers use a great deal: controlled folly. Sorcerers claim that controlled folly is the only way they have of dealing with themselves--in their state of expanded awareness and perception--and with everybody and everything in the world of daily affairs.

Controlled folly is the art of controlled deception or the art of pretending to be thoroughly immersed in the action at hand--pretending so well no one could tell it from the real thing. Controlled folly is not an outright deception but a sophisticated, artistic way of being separated from everything while remaining an integral part of everything.

Controlled folly is an art. A very bothersome art, and a difficult one to learn. Many sorcerers don't have the stomach for it, not because there is anything inherently wrong with the art, but because it takes a lot of energy to exercise it.

By the time we come to sorcery, our personality is already formed and all we can do is practice controlled folly and laugh at ourselves.



Stalkers who practice controlled folly believe that, in matters of personality, the entire human race falls into three categories. Sorcerers long age learned that only our personal self-reflection falls into one of the categories.

The trouble with us is that we take ourselves seriously. Whichever category our self-image falls into only matters because of our self-importance. If we weren't self-important, it wouldn't matter at all which category we fell into.



The basic cores reveal themselves extremely slowly, erratically advancing and retreating. I can't repeat often enough that every man whose assemblage point moves can move it further. And the only reason we need a teacher is to spur us on mercilessly. Otherwise our natural reaction is to stop to congratulate ourselves for having covered so much ground.



Self-importance is a monster that has three thousand heads. And one can face up to it and destroy it in any of three ways. The first way is to sever each head one at a time; the second is to reach that mysterious state of being called the place of no pity, which destroys self-importance by slowly starving it; and the third is to pay for the instantaneous annihilation of the three-thousand-headed monster with one's symbolic death.

Consider yourself fortunate if you get the chance to choose. For it is the spirit that usually determines which way the sorcerer is to go, and it is the duty of the sorcerer to follow.



The place of no pity is a position of the assemblage point, a position which renders self-pity inoperative.



Appearance is the essence of controlled folly, and stalkers create appearances by intending them. Intending appearances is exclusively an exercise for stalkers .
Stalkers call intent . The indispensable part of the act of calling intent is a total concentration on what is intended .



Man has a dark side. It's called stupidity. In the same measure that ritual forced the average man to construct huge churches that were monuments to self-importance, ritual also forced sorcerers to construct edifices of morbidity and obsession. As a result, it is the duty of every nagual to guide awareness so it will fly toward the abstract, free of liens and mortgages.

Ritual can trap our attention better than anything I can think of. But it also demands a very high price. That high price is morbidity; and morbidity could have the heaviest liens and mortgages on our awareness.

Human awareness is like an immense haunted house. The awareness of everyday life is like being sealed in one room of that immense house for life. We enter the room through a magical opening: birth. And we exit through another such magical opening: death.

sorcerers, however, are capable of finding still another opening and can leave that sealed room while still alive. A superb attainment. But their astounding accomplishment is that when they escape from that sealed room they choose freedom. They choose to leave that immense, haunted house entirely instead of getting lost in other parts of it.

Morbidity is the antithesis of the surge of energy awareness needs to reach freedom. Morbidity makes sorcerers lose their way and become trapped in the intricate, dark byways of the unknown.

Stalkers who intend appearances are performers who are being coached by the spirit itself. The teacher's reason for training an apprentice as he does is freedom. He wants their freedom from perceptual convention. And he teaches them to be artists. Stalking is an art. For a sorcerer, since he's not a patron or a seller of art, the only thing of importance about a work of art is that it can be accomplished.



Think about the basic cores of the sorcery stories. Or rather, don't think about them, but make your assemblage point move toward the place of silent knowledge. Moving the assemblage point is everything, but it means nothing if it's not a sober, controlled movement. So, close the door of self-reflection. Be impeccable and you'll have the energy to reach the place of silent knowledge.


Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf

Sorcery is the act of embodying some specialized theoretical and practical premises about the nature and role of perception in molding the universe around us.

Our world is only one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of an onion. Even though we have been energetically conditioned to perceive solely our world, we still have the capability of entering into those other realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our own world is.

For us to perceive those other realms, not only do we have to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. Their existence is constant and independent of our awareness, but their inaccessibility is entirely a consequence of our energetic conditioning. In other words, simply and solely because of that conditioning, we are compelled to assume that the world of daily life is the one and only possible world.

Believing that our energetic conditioning is correctable, sorcerers of ancient times developed a set of practices designed to recondition our energetic capabilities to perceive. They called this set of practices the art of dreaming . It's the gateway to infinity.

Through dreaming we can perceive other worlds, which we can certainly describe, but we can't describe what makes us perceive them. Yet we can feel how dreaming opens up those other realms. Dreaming seems to be a sensation--a process in our bodies, an awareness in our minds.

Dreaming instruction is divided into two parts. One is about dreaming procedures, the other about the purely abstract explanations of these procedures: an interplay between enticing one's intellectual curiosity with the abstract principles of dreaming and guiding one to seek an outlet in its practices.



The human psyche is infinitely more complex than our mundane or academic reasoning has led us to believe.



The second attention is an energetic configuration of awareness.

In order to appreciate the position of dreamers and dreaming , one has to understand the struggle of modern-day sorcerers to steer sorcery away from concreteness toward the abstract.
Concreteness is the practical part of sorcery. The obsessive fixation of the mind on practices and techniques. And the unwarranted influence over people.

The abstract is the search for freedom, freedom to perceive, without obsessions, all that's humanly possible. Present-day sorcerers seek the abstract because they seek freedom; they have no interest in concrete gains.

After lifelong discipline and training, sorcerers acquire the capacity to perceive the essence of things, a capacity they call seeing .

To perceive the energetic essence of things means that you perceive energy directly. By separating the social part of perception, you'll perceive the essence of everything. Whatever we are perceiving is energy, but since we can't directly perceive energy, we process our perception to fit a mold. This mold is the social part of perception, which you have to separate.

You have to separate it because it deliberately reduces the scope of what can be perceived and makes us believe that the mold into which we fit our perception is all that exists. For man to survive now, his perception must change at its social base.

This social base of perception is the physical certainty that the world is made of concrete objects. I call this a social base because a serious and fierce effort is put out by everybody to guide us to perceive the world the way we do.

Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy. Then we would have both alternatives at our fingertips.

To train people in such a fashion is possible and this is precisely what I am doing with you. I am teaching you a new way of perceiving, first, by making you realize we process our perception to fit a mold and, second, by fiercely guiding you to perceive energy directly. This method is very much like the one used to teach us to perceive the world of daily affairs.

Our entrapment in processing our perception to fit a social mold loses its power when we realize we have accepted this mold, as an inheritance from our ancestors, without bothering to examine it.

To perceive a world of hard objects that had either a positive or a negative value must have been utterly necessary for our ancestors' survival. After ages of perceiving in such a manner, we are now forced to believe that the world is made up of objects.

It is unquestionably a world of objects. To prove it, all we have to do is bump into them. We are not arguing that. I am saying that this is first a world of energy; then it's a world of objects. If we don't start with the premise that it is a world of energy, we'll never be able to perceive energy directly. We'll always be stopped by the physical certainty of the hardness of objects.

Our way of perceiving is a predator's way. There is another mode, the one I am familiarizing you with: the act of perceiving the essence of everything, energy itself, directly.
To perceive the essence of everything will make us understand, classify, and describe the world in entirely new, more exciting, more sophisticated terms. Terms that correspond to sorcery truths, which have no rational foundation and no relation whatsoever to the facts of our daily world but which are self-evident truths for the sorcerers who perceive energy directly and see the essence of everything.

For such sorcerers, the most significant act of sorcery is to see the essence of the universe. The essence of the universe resembles incandescent threads stretched into infinity in every conceivable direction, luminous filaments that are conscious of themselves in ways impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

From seeing the essence of the universe, sorcerers go on to see the energy essence of human beings and depict human beings as bright shapes that resemble giant eggs and call them luminous eggs.

When sorcerers see a human being they see a giant, luminous shape that floats, making, as it moves, a deep furrow in the energy of the earth, just as if the luminous shape had a taproot that was dragging.

The decisive finding of the sorcerers of antiquity and the crucial feature of human beings as luminous balls, is a round spot of intense brilliance, the size of a tennis ball, permanently lodged inside the luminous ball, flush with its surface, about two feet back from the crest of a person's right shoulder blade.

The luminous ball is much larger than the human body. The spot of intense brilliance is part of this ball of energy, and it is located on a place at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's length from a person's back. The old sorcerers named it the assemblage point after seeing what it does. It makes us perceive. In human beings, perception is assembled there, on that point. Seeing that all living beings have such a point of brilliance, the old sorcerers surmised that perception in general must take place on that spot, in whatever pertinent manner.

What they saw that made them conclude that perception takes place on the assemblage point was first, that out of the millions of the universe's luminous energy filaments passing through the entire luminous ball, only a small number pass directly through the assemblage point, as should be expected since it is small in comparison with the whole.

Next, they saw that a spherical extra glow, slightly bigger than the assemblage point, always surrounds it, greatly intensifying the luminosity of the filaments passing directly through that glow.

Finally, they saw two things. One, that the assemblage points of human beings can dislodge themselves from the spot where they are usually located. And, two, that when the assemblage point is on its habitual position, perception and awareness seem to be normal, judging by the normal behavior of the subjects being observed. But when their assemblage points and surrounding glowing spheres are on a different position than the habitual one, their unusual behavior seems to be the proof that their awareness is different, that they are perceiving in an unfamiliar manner.

The conclusion the old sorcerers drew from all this was that the greater the displacement of the assemblage point from its customary position, the more unusual the consequent behavior and, evidently, the consequent awareness and perception.

Notice that when I talk about seeing , I always say "having the appearance of" or "seemed like." Everything one sees is so unique that there is no way to talk about it except by comparing it to something known to us.

The most adequate example of this difficulty is the way sorcerers talk about the assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it. They describe them as brightness, yet it cannot be brightness, because seers see them without their eyes. They have to fill out the difference, however, and say that the assemblage point is a spot of light and that around it there is a halo, a glow. We are so visual, so ruled by our predator's perception, that everything we see must be rendered in terms of what the predator's eye normally sees.

After seeing what the assemblage point and its surrounding glow seemed to be doing, the old sorcerers advanced an explanation. They proposed that in human beings the assemblage point, by focusing its glowing sphere on the universe's filaments of energy that pass directly through it, automatically and without premeditation assembles those filaments into a steady perception of the world.

How those filaments are assembled into a steady perception of the world, no one can possibly know. Sorcerers see the movement of energy, but just seeing the movement of energy cannot tell them how or why energy moves.

Seeing that millions of conscious energy filaments pass through the assemblage point, the old sorcerers postulated that in passing through it they come together, amassed by the glow that surrounds it. After seeing that the glow is extremely dim in people who have been rendered unconscious or are about to die, and that it is totally absent from corpses, they were convinced that this glow is awareness.

The assemblage point and its surrounding glow are the mark of life and consciousness. The inescapable conclusion of the sorcerers of antiquity was that awareness and perception go together and are tied to the assemblage point and the glow that surrounds it.

I can't explain to you why, but there is no way sorcerers can be mistaken about their seeing . Now the conclusions they arrive at from their seeing might be wrong, but that would be because they are naive, uncultivated. In order to avoid this disaster, sorcerers have to cultivate their minds, in whatever form they can.

It certainly would be infinitely safer for sorcerers to remain solely at the level of describing what they see , but the temptation to conclude and explain, even if only to oneself, is far too great to resist.

When the assemblage point is displaced to another position, a new conglomerate of millions of luminous energy filaments come together on that point. The sorcerers of antiquity saw this and concluded that since the glow of awareness is always present wherever the assemblage point is, perception is automatically assembled there. Because of the different position of the assemblage point, the resulting world, however, cannot be our world of daily affairs.

The old sorcerers were capable of distinguishing two types of assemblage point displacement. One was a displacement to any position on the surface or in the interior of the luminous ball; this displacement they called a shift of the assemblage point. The other was a displacement to a position outside the luminous ball; they called this displacement a movement of the assemblage point. They found out that the difference between a shift and a movement was the nature of the perception each allows.

Since the shifts of the assemblage point are displacements within the luminous ball, the worlds engendered by them, no matter how bizarre or wondrous or unbelievable they might be, are still worlds within the human domain. The human domain is the energy filaments that pass through the entire luminous ball. By contrast, movements of the assemblage point, since they are displacements to positions outside the luminous ball, engage filaments of energy that are beyond the human realm. Perceiving such filaments engenders worlds that are beyond comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace of human antecedents in them.

This business of the assemblage point is an idea so farfetched, so inadmissible that there is only one thing for you to do. See the assemblage point! It isn't that difficult to see . The difficulty is in breaking the retaining wall we all have in our minds that holds us in place. To break it, all we need is energy. Once we have energy, seeing happens to us by itself. The trick is in abandoning our fort of self-complacency and false security.

It is just a matter of having energy. The hard part is convincing yourself that it can be done. For this, you need to trust the nagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every sorcerer has to prove everything with his own experience. I am telling you about the principles of sorcery not with the hope that you will memorize them but with the hope that you will practice them.

Our link is with the spirit itself and only incidentally with the man who brings us its message.
The assemblage point has nothing to do with what we normally perceive as the body. It's part of the luminous egg, which is our energy self.

It is displaced through energy currents. Jolts of energy, originating outside or inside our energy shape. These are usually unpredictable currents that happen randomly, but with sorcerers they are very predictable currents that obey the sorcerer's intent .

Every sorcerer feels them. Every human being does, for that matter, but average human beings are too busy with their own pursuits to pay any attention to feelings like that.

When the assemblage point moves outside the energy shape it pushes the contours of the energy shape out, without breaking its energy boundaries.

The end result of a movement of the assemblage point is a total change in the energy shape of a human being. Instead of a ball or an egg, he becomes something resembling a smoking pipe. The tip of the stem is the assemblage point, and the bowl of the pipe is what remains of the luminous ball. If the assemblage point keeps on moving, a moment comes when the luminous ball becomes a thin line of energy. What makes mankind homogeneous is the fact that we are all luminous balls.

Another topic of our explanations is the indispensability of energetic uniformity and cohesion for the purpose of perceiving. Mankind perceives the world we know, in the terms we do, only because we share energetic uniformity and cohesion. We automatically attain these two conditions of energy in the course of our rearing. They are so taken for granted we do not realize their vital importance until we are faced with the possibility of perceiving worlds other than the world we know. At those moments, it becomes evident that we need a new appropriate energetic uniformity and cohesion to perceive coherently and totally.

Man's energetic shape has uniformity in the sense that every human being on earth has the form of a ball or an egg. And the fact that man's energy holds itself together as a ball or an egg proves it has cohesion. An example of a new uniformity and cohesion is the old sorcerers' energetic shape when it became a line: every one of them uniformly became a line and cohesively remained a line. Uniformity and cohesion at a line level permitted those old sorcerers to perceive a homogeneous new world.

The key to acquiring uniformity and cohesion is the position of the assemblage point, or rather the fixation of the assemblage point.

Those old sorcerers could have reverted to being egglike but they did not. And then the line cohesion set in and made it impossible for them to go back. What really crystallized that line cohesion and prevented them but making the journey back was a matter of choice and greed. The scope of what those sorcerers were able to perceive and do as lines of energy was astronomically greater than what an average man or any average sorcerer can do or perceive.

The human domain when one is an energy ball is whatever energy filaments pass through the space within the ball's boundaries. Normally, we perceive not all the human domain but perhaps only one thousandth of it. If we take this into consideration, the enormity of what the old sorcerers did becomes apparent; they extended themselves into a line a thousand times the size of a man as an energy ball and perceived all the energy filaments that passed through that line.

Make a giant effort to understand the new model of energy configuration I am outlining for you.

To understand all this certainly isn't an exercise for your reason. I have no way of explaining what sorcerers mean by filaments inside and outside the human shape. When seers see the human energy shape, they see one single ball of energy. If there is another ball next to it, the other ball is seen again as a single ball of energy. The idea of a multitude of luminous balls comes from our knowledge of human crowds. In the universe of energy, there are only single individuals, alone, surrounded by the boundless. You must see that for yourself.

To rearrange uniformity and cohesion means to enter into the second attention by retaining the assemblage point on its new position and keeping it from sliding back to its original spot.

The old sorcerers called the result of fixing the assemblage point on new positions the second attention. And they treated the second attention as an area of all-inclusive activity, just as the attention of the daily world is. Sorcerers really have two complete areas for their endeavors: a small one, called the first attention or the awareness of our daily world or the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual position; and a much larger area, the second attention or the awareness of other worlds or the fixation of the assemblage point on each of an enormous number of new positions.

Every time anyone enters into the second attention, the assemblage point is on a different position. To remember that experience, then, means to relocate the assemblage point on the exact position it occupied at the time those entrances into the second attention occurred. Not only do sorcerers have total and absolute recall but they relive every experience they had in the second attention by this act of returning their assemblage point to each of those specific positions. Sorcerers dedicate a lifetime to fulfilling this task of remembering.

Learning something in the second attention is just like learning when we were children. What we learn remains with us for live.

Entering into the second attention forces you to sustain, for long periods of time, new positions of your assemblage point and to perceive coherently in them, that is to say, it forces you to rearrange your uniformity and cohesion.

The assemblage point becomes very easily displaced during sleep. Dreams are totally associated with that displacement. The greater the displacement, the more unusual the dream or vice versa: the more unusual the dream, the greater the displacement.

sorcerers view dreaming as an extremely sophisticated art; the art of displacing the assemblage point at will from its habitual position in order to enhance and enlarge the scope of what can be perceived.

The art of dreaming is anchored on five conditions in the energy flow of human beings.

1/ Only the energy filaments that pass directly through the assemblage point can be assembled into coherent perception.

2/ If the assemblage point is displaced to another position, no matter how minute the displacement, different and unaccustomed energy filaments begin to pass through it, engaging awareness and forcing the assembling of these unaccustomed energy fields into a steady, coherent perception.

3/ In the course of ordinary dreams, the assemblage point becomes easily displaced by itself to another position on the surface or in the interior of the luminous egg.

4/ The assemblage point can be made to move to positions outside the luminous egg, into the energy filaments of the universe at large.

5/ Through discipline it is possible to cultivate and perform, in the course of sleep and ordinary dreams, a systematic displacement of the assemblage point.

As a preamble to the first lesson in dreaming , I will talk about the second attention as a progression: beginning as an idea that comes to us more like a curiosity than an actual possibility; turning into something that can only be felt, as a sensation is felt; and finally evolving into a state of being, or a realm of practicalities, or a preeminent force that opens for us worlds beyond our wildest fantasies.

Being a by-product of a displacement of the assemblage point, the second attention does not happen naturally but must be intended, beginning with intending it as an idea and ending up with intending it as a steady and controlled awareness of the assemblage points displacement.

The first step to power is to set up dreaming . To set up dreaming means to have a precise and practical command over the general situation of a dream.

This control is no different from the control we have over any situation in our daily lives. Sorcerers are used to it and get it every time they want or need to. In order for you to get used to it yourself I taught you to look at your hands while dreaming .


Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf

Explanations always call for deep thought. But when you actually dream, be as light as a feather. Dreaming has to be performed with integrity and seriousness, but in the midst of laughter and with the confidence of someone who doesn't have a worry in the world. Only under these conditions can our dreams actually be turned into dreaming .





I selected your hands as something to look for in your dreams because they will always be there. Looking for anything else is just as valid provided that you pick one thing in advance and stay with it night after night until you succeed in finding it. The goal of the exercise is not finding a specific thing but engaging your dreaming attention.

The dreaming attention is the control one acquires over one's dreams upon fixating the assemblage point on any new position to which it has been displaced during dreams. The dreaming attention is an incomprehensible facet of awareness that exists by itself, waiting for a moment when we would entice it, a moment when we would give it purpose; it is a veiled faculty that every one of us has in reserve but never has the opportunity to use in everyday life.

There are seven gates and dreamers have to open all seven of them, one at a time. There are entrances and exits in the energy flow of the universe. In the specific case of dreaming , there are seven entrances, experienced as obstacles, which sorcerers call the seven gates of dreaming .

The first gate is a threshold we must cross by becoming aware of a particular sensation before deep sleep. A sensation which is like a pleasant heaviness that doesn't let us open our eyes. We reach that gate the instant we become aware that we're falling asleep, suspended in darkness and heaviness. There are no steps to follow. One just intends to become aware of falling asleep.

Intent or intending is something very difficult to talk about. I or anyone else would sound idiotic trying to explain it. Bear that in mind when you hear what I have to say next: sorcerers intend anything they set themselves to intend , simply by intending it.

For sorcerers, because the statement I made pertains to intent and intending , understanding it pertains to the realm of energy. Sorcerers believe that if one would intend that statement for the energy body, the energy body would understand it in terms entirely different from those of the mind. The trick is to reach the energy body. For that you need energy.

The energy body would understand that statement in terms of a bodily feeling, which is hard to describe. You'll have to experience it to know what I mean.

Intending is a subject not for your reason but for your energy body. At this point, you can't yet comprehend the import of all this, not only because you don't have sufficient energy but because you're not intending anything. If you were, your energy body would comprehend immediately that the only way to intend is by focusing your intent on whatever you want to intend .

The goal of dreaming is to intend the energy body. In this particular instance, since we're talking about the first gate of dreaming , the goal of dreaming is to intend that your energy body becomes aware that you are falling asleep. Don't try to force yourself to be aware of falling asleep. Let your energy body do it. To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without doing.

Accept the challenge of intending . Put your silent determination, without a single thought, into convincing yourself that you have reached your energy body and that you are a dreamer . Doing this will automatically put you in the position to be aware that you are falling asleep.

When you hear that you have to convince yourself, you automatically become more rational. How can you convince yourself you are a dreamer when you know you are not? Intending is both: the act of convincing yourself you are indeed a dreamer , although you have never dreamt before, and the act of being convinced.

I don't mean you have to tell yourself you are a dreamer and try your best to believe it. It isn't that.

Intending is much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex than that. It requires imagination, discipline, and purpose. In this case, to intend means that you get an unquestionable bodily knowledge that you are a dreamer . You feel you are a dreamer with all the cells of your body.

You must reach your energy body on your own. Intending the first gate of dreaming is one of the means discovered by the sorcerers of antiquity for reaching the second attention and the energy body.
to ask a dreamer to find a determined item in his dreams is a subterfuge. The real issue is to become aware that one is falling asleep. And, strange as it may seem, that doesn't happen by commanding oneself to be aware that one is falling asleep but by sustaining the sight of whatever one is looking at in a dream.

Dreamers take quick, deliberate glances at everything present in a dream. If they focus their dreaming attention on something specific, it is only as a point of departure. From there, dreamers move on to look at other items in the dream's content, returning to the point of departure as many times as possible.

All that is required is your awareness of falling asleep. Dreaming has to be a very sober affair. No false movement can be afforded. Dreaming is a process of awakening, of gaining control. Our dreaming attention must be systematically exercised, for it is the door to the second attention.

The difference between the dreaming attention and the second attention is that the second attention is like an ocean, and the dreaming attention is like a river feeding into it. The second attention is the condition of being aware of total worlds, total like our world is total, while the dreaming attention is the condition of being aware of the items of our dreams.



The dreaming attention is the key to every movement in the sorcerers' world. Among the multitude of items in our dreams, there exist real energetic interferences, things that have been put in our dreams extraneously, by an alien force. To be able to find them and follow them is sorcery.

Dreams are, if not a door, a hatch into other worlds. As such, dreams are a two-way street. Our awareness goes through that hatch into other realms, and those other realms send scouts into our dreams.

Those scouts are energy charges that get mixed with the items of our normal dreams. They are bursts of foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as items familiar or unfamiliar to us.

Dreams are a hatch into other realms of perception. Through that hatch, currents of unfamiliar energy seep in. Then the mind or the brain or whatever takes those currents of energy and turns them into parts of our dreams.

sorcerers are aware of those currents of foreign energy. They notice them and strive to isolate them from the normal items of their dreams.

They isolate them because they come from other realms. If we follow them to their source, they serve us as guides into areas of such mystery that sorcerers shiver at the mere mention of such a possibility.

sorcerers isolate them from the normal items of their dreams by the exercise and control of their dreaming attention. At one moment, our dreaming attention discovers them among the items of a dream and focuses on them, then the total dream collapses, leaving only the foreign energy.

I'm going to repeat what you must do in your dreams in order to pass the first gate of dreaming . First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you glance only briefly, then the images don't shift. Then go back to your hands.

To pass the first gate of dreaming means that, first of all, we have reached the first gate of dreaming by becoming aware that we are falling asleep, or by having a gigantically real dream, and second, that we have crossed it by being able to sustain the sight of any item of our dreams.

In order to offset the evanescent quality of dreams, sorcerers have devised the use of the starting point item. Every time you isolate it and look at it, you get a surge of energy. As soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control, go back to your starting point item and start all over again.

The most astounding thing that happens to dreamers is that, on reaching the first gate, they also reach the energy body.

The energy body is the counterpart of the physical body. A ghostlike configuration made of pure energy. The physical body also is made out of energy.

The difference is that the energy body has only appearance but no mass. Since it's pure energy, it can perform acts that are beyond the possibilities of the physical body; such as transporting itself in one instant to the ends of the universe. And dreaming is the art of tempering the energy body, of making it supple and coherent by gradually exercising it.

Through dreaming we condense the energy body until it's a unit capable of perceiving. Its perception, although affected by our normal way of perceiving the daily world, is an independent perception. It has its own sphere.

That sphere is energy. The energy body deals with energy in terms of energy. There are three ways in which it deals with energy in dreaming : it can perceive energy as it flows, or it can use energy to boost itself like a rocket into unexpected areas, or it can perceive as we ordinarily perceive the world.

To perceive energy as it flows means to see . It means that the energy body sees energy directly as a light or as a vibrating current of sorts or as a disturbance. Or It feels it directly as a jolt or as a sensation that can even be pain.

Since energy is its sphere, it is no problem for the energy body to use currents of energy that exist in the universe to propel itself. All it has to do is isolate them, and off it goes with them.
sorcerers isolate in their dreams scouts from other realms. Their energy bodies do that. They recognize energy and go for it. But it isn't desirable for dreamers to indulge in searching for scouts. I was reluctant to tell you about it, because of the facility with which one can get swayed be that search.

Reaching, with deliberate control, the first gate of dreaming is a way of arriving at the energy body. But to maintain that gain is predicated on energy alone. Sorcerers get that energy by redeploying, in a more intelligent manner, the energy they have and use for perceiving the daily world.

We all have a determined quantity of basic energy. That quantity is all the energy we have, and we use all of it for perceiving and dealing with our engulfing world. There is no more energy for us anywhere and, since our available energy is already engaged, there is not a single bit left in us for any extraordinary perception, such as dreaming .

That leaves us to scrounge energy for ourselves, wherever we can find it.
sorcerers have a scrounging method. They intelligently redeploy their energy by cutting down anything they consider superfluous in their lives. They call this method the sorcerers' way. In essence, the sorcerers' way is a chain of behavioral choices for dealing with the world, choices much more intelligent than those our progenitors taught us. These sorcerers' choices are designed to revamp our lives by altering our basic reactions about being alive.

Those basic reactions are the two ways of facing our being alive. One is to surrender to it, either by acquiescing to its demands or by fighting those demands. The other is by molding our particular life situation to fit our own configurations.

One's particular life situation can be molded to fit one's specifications. Dreamers do that. A wild statement? Not really, if you consider how little we know about ourselves.

My interest, as a teacher, is to get you thoroughly involved with the themes of life and being alive; that is to say, with the difference between life, as a consequence of biological forces, and the act of being alive, as a matter of cognition.

When sorcerers talk about molding one's life situation they mean molding the awareness of being alive. Through molding this awareness, we can get enough energy to reach and sustain the energy body, and with it we can certainly mold the total direction and consequences of our lives.



Don't merely think about what I have told you. Turn my concepts into a viable way of life by a process of repetition. Everything new in our lives, such as the sorcerers' concepts I am teaching you, must be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it. Repetition is the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily world.



As we tighten the control over our dreams, we tighten the mastery over our dreaming attention. The dreaming attention comes into play when it is called, when it is given a purpose. Its coming into play is not really a process, as one would normally understand a process, that is as an ongoing system of operations or a series of actions or functions that bring about an end result. It is rather an awakening. Something dormant becomes suddenly functional.

A dreaming teacher must create a didactic synthesis in order to emphasize a given point. In essence, what I wanted with your first task was to exercise your dreaming attention by focusing it on the items of your dreams. To this effect I used as a spearhead the idea of being aware of falling asleep. My subterfuge was to say that the only way to be aware of falling asleep is to examine the elements of one's dreams.

Exercising the dreaming attention is the essential point in dreaming . To the mind, however, it seems impossible that one can train oneself to be aware at the level of dreams. The active element of such training is persistence. The mind and all its rational defenses cannot cope with persistence. Sooner or later, the mind's barriers fall, under its impact, and the dreaming attention blooms.

As you practice focusing and holding your dreaming attention on the items of your dreams your entering into the second attention. This calls for even more sobriety on your part. Go slowly, but don't stop, and about all, don't talk about it. Just do it.

If one takes short glances at everything in a dream, the images do not dissolve. The difficult part is to break the initial barrier that prevents us from bringing dreams to our conscious attention.

This barrier is in part a psychological one created by our socialization, which puts a premium on disregarding dreams. But the barrier is more than socialization. It's the first gate of dreaming . The first gate of dreaming has to do with the flow of energy in the universe. It's a natural obstacle.

The energy needed to release our dreaming attention from its socialization prison comes from redeploying our existing energy. The emergence of our dreaming attention is a direct corollary of revamping our lives. Since we have no way to plug into any external source for a boost of energy, we must redeploy our existing energy, by any means available.

The sorcerers' way is the best means to oil, so to speak, the wheels of energy redeployment. Of all the items in the sorcerers' way, the most effective is losing self-importance . This is indispensable for everything sorcerers do, and for this reason I put an enormous emphasis on guiding all my students to fulfill this requirement. Self-importance is not only the sorcerer's supreme enemy but the nemesis of mankind.

Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance. This is most obvious in our endless worry about the presentation of the self, about whether or not we are admired or liked or acknowledged. If we are capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things happen to us. One, we free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and, two, we provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into the second attention to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.

The capability of examining the contents of one's dreams is the product of a natural configuration of our being, similar to our capability of walking. We are physically conditioned to walk only in one manner, bipedally, yet it takes a monumental effort for us to learn to walk.


We are not alone in this world. There are other worlds available to dreamers , total worlds. From those other total worlds, energetic entities sometimes come to us.
You can't explain dreaming by way of things you know or suspect you know. Believe me, the most extravagant feature of sorcery is that configuration called out of this world.


Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf

You reach the second gate of dreaming when you wake up from a dream into another dream. You can have as many dreams as you want or as many as you are capable of, but you must exercise adequate control and not wake up in the world we know.

I'm not saying that you should never wake up in this world. But I have to tell you that that is an alternative. The sorcerers of antiquity used to do that, never wake up in the world we know. It certainly can be done, but I don't recommend it. What I want is for you to wake up naturally when you are through with dreaming , but while you are dreaming , I want you to dream that you wake up in another dream.

This control is no different from the control we have over any situation in our daily lives.

There's one problem with the second gate. It's a problem that can be serious, depending on one's bent of character. If our tendency is to indulge in clinging to things or situations, we are in for a sock in the jaw.

Imagine yourself going from dream to dream, watching everything, examining every detail. It's very easy to realize that one may sink to mortal depths. Especially if one is given to indulging.

Wouldn't the body or the brain naturally put a stop to it? Yes, if it's a natural sleeping situation, meaning normal. But this is not a normal situation. This is dreaming . A dreamer on crossing the first gate has already reached the energy body. So what is really going through the second gate, hopping from dream to dream, is the energy body.

The implication is that on crossing the second gate you must intend a greater and more sober control over your dreaming attention: the only safety valve for dreamers .

You will find out for yourself that the true goal of dreaming is to perfect the energy body. A perfect energy body, among other things of course, has such a control over the dreaming attention that it makes it stop when needed. This is the safety valve dreamers have. No matter how indulging they might be, at a given time, their dreaming attention must make them surface.

Crossing the second gate is a very serious affair; it requires a most disciplined effort.

I told you that one has to wake up in another dream, but what I meant is that one has to change dreams in an orderly and precise manner.

There are two ways of properly crossing the second gate of dreaming . One is to wake up in another dream, that is to say, to dream that one is having a dream and then dream that one wakes up from it. The alternative is to use the items of a dream to trigger another dream; that is, zoom from a definite item accessible to your immediate dreaming attention to another one, not quite accessible. Or gaze at any item of a dream, maintaining the gaze until the item changes shape and, by changing shape, pulls you into another dream.



Life and consciousness, being exclusively a matter of energy, are not solely the property of organisms. Sorcerers have seen that there are two types of conscious beings roaming the earth, the organic and the inorganic. In comparing one with the other, they have seen that both are luminous masses crossed from every imaginable angle by millions of the universe's energy filaments. They are different from each other in their shape and in their degree of brightness. Inorganic beings are long and candlelike but opaque, whereas organic beings are round and by far the brighter. Another noteworthy difference sorcerers have seen , is that the life and consciousness of organic beings is short-lived, because they are made to hurry, whereas the life of inorganic beings is infinitely longer and their consciousness infinitely more calm and deeper.

Sorcerers find no problem interacting with them. Inorganic beings possess the crucial ingredient for interaction, consciousness.

For sorcerers, having life means having consciousness. It means having an assemblage point and its surrounding glow of awareness, a condition that points out to sorcerers that the being in front of them, organic or inorganic, is thoroughly capable of perceiving. Perceiving is understood by sorcerers as the precondition of being alive.

The inorganic beings must also die. They lose their awareness just like we do, except that the length of their consciousness is staggering to the mind.

It's very difficult to tell what is what with them. Let's say that those beings are enticed by us or, better yet, compelled to interact with us.

The proper thing to do is to suspend judgment and let things take their course, meaning that you let the inorganic beings come to you.

The difficulty with inorganic beings is that their awareness is very slow in comparison with ours. It will take years for a sorcerer to be acknowledged by inorganic beings. So, it is advisable to have patience and wait. Sooner or later they show up. But not like you or I would show up. Theirs is a most peculiar way to make themselves known.

sorcerers entice them in dreaming . What's involved, though, is more than enticing them; by the act of dreaming , sorcerers compel those beings to interact with them.

Dreaming is sustaining the position where the assemblage point has shifted in dreams. This act creates a distinctive energy charge, which attracts their attention. It's like bait to fish; they'll go for it. Sorcerers, by reaching and crossing the first two gates of dreaming , set bait for those beings and compel them to appear.

By going through the two gates, you make your bidding known to them. Then, you must wait for a sign from them; possibly the appearance of one of them, or simply some interference in your dreaming .

You must gauge your expectations. Our normal expectation when engaging in interaction with our fellow men or with other organic beings is to get an immediate reply to our solicitation. With inorganic beings, however, since they are separated from us by a most formidable barrier--energy that moves at a different speed--sorcerers must gauge their expectations and sustain the solicitation for as long as it takes to be acknowledged.

The solicitation is the same as the dreaming practices. But for a perfect result, you must add to your practices the intent of reaching those inorganic beings. Send a feeling of power and confidence to them, a feeling of strength, of detachment. Avoid at any cost sending a feeling of fear or morbidity. They are pretty morbid by themselves; to add your morbidity to them is unnecessary, to say the least.

They do, at times, materialize themselves in the daily world, right in front of us. Most of the time, though, their invisible presence is marked by a bodily jolt, a shiver of sorts that comes from the marrow of the bones.

In dreaming we have the total opposite. At times, we feel them as a jolt of fear. Most of the time, they materialize themselves right in front of us. Since at the beginning of dreaming we have no experience whatsoever with them, they might imbue us with fear beyond measure. That is a real danger to us. Through the channel of fear, they can follow us to the daily world, with disastrous results for us.

Fear can settle down in our lives, and we would have to be mavericks to deal with it. Inorganic beings can be worse than a pest. Through fear they can easily drive us raving mad.

What sorcerers do with the inorganic beings is mingle with them. They turn them into allies. They form associations, create extraordinary friendships. I call them vast enterprises, where perception plays the uppermost role. We are social beings. We unavoidably seek the company of consciousness.

With inorganic beings, the secret is not to fear them. And this must be done from the beginning. The intent one has to send out to them has to be of power and abandon. In that intent one must encode the message "I don't fear you. Come to see me. If you do, I'll welcome you. If you don't want to come, I'll miss you." With a message like this, they'll get so curious that they'll come for sure.

Why should they come to seek you, or why on earth should you seek them? Dreamers , whether they like it or not, in their dreaming seek associations with other beings. This may come to you as a shock, but dreamers automatically seek groups of beings, nexuses of inorganic beings in this case. Dreamers seek them avidly. Why would dreamers do that? The novelty for us is the inorganic beings. And the novelty for them is one of our kind crossing the boundaries of their realm. The thing you must bear in mind from now on is that inorganic beings with their superb consciousness exert a tremendous pull over dreamers and can easily transport them into worlds beyond description.

The sorcerers of antiquity used them, and they are the ones who coined the name allies. Their allies taught them to move the assemblage point out of the egg's boundaries into the nonhuman universe. So when they transport a sorcerer, they transport him to worlds beyond the human domain.

Think about dreaming in these terms: dreaming is perceiving more than what we believe it is possible to perceive.
The second attention is available to all of us, but, by willfully holding on to our half-cocked rationality, some of us more fiercely than others, we keep the second attention at arm's length. Dreaming brings down the barriers that surround and insulate the second attention.

If the inorganic beings single a dreamer out by reappearing over and over again in his dreaming , it means that they seek an association. I've mentioned to you that sorcerers form bonds of friendship with them. Such a friendship consists of a mutual exchange of energy. The inorganic beings supply their high awareness, and sorcerers supply their heightened awareness and high energy. The positive result is an even exchange. The negative one is dependency on both parties. Once they have singled a dreamer out the dreamer can summon them in his normal daily awareness, size them up, and then decide himself what to do.

You summon them by holding your dream view of them in your mind. The reason they would saturate a dreamer with their presence in his dreams is that they want to create a memory of their shape in his mind.
You can then use that memory by closing your eyes and visualize their shape until they are just like they are in your dreams. When you have them in focus, open your eyes, then get up and grab one of them and don't let go, no matter how it shakes you. You drop it and you're done for!

If you feel the inorganic being's energy like water you are not going to have helping friends among the inorganic beings, but relationships of annoying dependency. Be, in that case, extremely careful. Watery inorganic beings are more given to excesses. The old sorcerers believed that they were more loving, more capable of imitating, or perhaps even having feelings. As opposed to the other kind, the fiery ones, who were thought to be more serious, more contained than the others, but also more pompous.

My recommendation is that you vanquish fear from your dreams and from your life, in order to safeguard your unity.
In matters of the inorganic beings, I am nearly a novice. I refused that part of the sorcerers' knowledge on the ground that it is too cumbersome and capricious. I don't want to be at the mercy of any entity, organic or inorganic.

By means of their dreaming contacts with inorganic beings, the old sorcerers became immensely well-versed in the manipulation of the assemblage point, a vast and ominous subject.

The inorganic beings have never been my cup of tea. My reason for that is the best reason in the world: we are antithetical. They love slavery, and I love freedom. They love to buy, and I don't sell.

The best thing to do with inorganic beings is deny their existence but visit with them regularly and maintain that you are dreaming and in dreaming anything is possible. This way you don't commit yourself.

If one is to accept that inorganic beings are as real as people, where, in the physicality of the universe, is the realm in which they exist? That realm exists in a particular position of the assemblage point. Just like our world exists in the habitual position of the assemblage point.

Upon crossing the first or second gate of dreaming , dreamers reach a threshold of energy and begin to see things or to hear voices. Not really plural voices, but a singular voice. Sorcerers call it the voice of the dreaming emissary.

The dreaming emissary is alien energy that has conciseness. Alien energy that purports to aid dreamers by telling them things. The problem with the dreaming emissary is that it can tell only what the sorcerers already know or should know, were they worth their salt. It's alien energy. An impersonal force that we turn into a very personal one because it has a voice. Some sorcerers swear by it. They even see it.

We see it or hear it because we maintain our assemblage points fixed on a specific new position; the more intense this fixation, the more intense our experience of the emissary.

This force is capable of materializing itself. It all depends on how fixed the assemblage point is. But, rest assured, if you are capable of maintaining a degree of detachment, nothing happens. The emissary remains what it is: an impersonal force that acts on us because of the fixation of our assemblage points.

Is its advice safe and sound? It cannot be advice. It only tells us what's what, and then we draw the inferences ourselves.

It's just like I said, the emissary doesn't tell you anything new. Its statements are correct, but it only seems to be revealing things to you. What the emissary does is merely repeat what you already know.

You know now infinitely more about the mystery of the universe than what you rationally suspect. But that's our human malady, to know more about the mystery of the universe than we suspect.

The emissary tells me anything I focus my intent on, things I don't want to take the trouble of following up myself.
Let's say that the dreaming emissary is a force that comes from the realm of inorganic beings. This is the reason dreamers always encounter it. Every dreamer hears or sees the emissary though very few see it or feel it. I don't have any explanation for this, besides, I really don't care about the emissary. At one point in my life, I had to make a decision whether to concentrate on the inorganic beings and follow in the footsteps of the old sorcerers or to refuse it all. My teacher helped me make up my mind to refuse it. I've never regretted that decision.

The whole realm of inorganic beings is always poised to teach. Perhaps because inorganic beings have a deeper consciousness than ours, they feel compelled to take us under their wings. I didn't see any point in becoming their pupil--their price is to high--their price is our lives, our energy, our devotion to them. In other words, our freedom.

They teach things pertinent to their world. The same way we ourselves would teach them, if we were capable of teaching them, things pertinent to our world. Their method, however, is to take our basic self as a gauge of what we need and then teach us accordingly. A most dangerous affair.

If someone was going to take your basic self as a gauge, with all your fears and greed and envy, et cetera, et cetera, and teach you what fulfills that horrible state of being, what do you think the result would be?

The problem with the old sorcerers was that they learned wonderful things, but on the basis of their unadulterated lower selves. The inorganic beings became their allies, and, by means of deliberate examples, they taught the old sorcerers marvels. Their allies performed the actions, and the old sorcerers were guided step by step to copy those actions, without changing anything about their basic nature.

Involvements of this nature curtail our search for freedom by consuming all our available energy.
If a sorcerer wants to live in the realm of the inorganic beings, the emissary is the perfect bridge; it speaks, and its bent is to teach, to guide.

I neither approve of that realm nor like it. It belongs to another mood, the old sorcerers' mood. Besides, its teachings and guidance in our world are nonsense. And for that nonsense the emissary charges us enormities in terms of energy.


Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf

Just because we haven't been taught to emphasize dreams as a genuine field for exploration doesn't mean they are not one. Dreams are analyzed for their meaning or are taken as portents, but never are they taken as a realm of real events.

To my knowledge, only the old sorcerers did that. But at the end they flubbed it. They got greedy, and when they came to a crucial crossroads, they took the wrong fork. They put all their eggs in one basket: the fixation of the assemblage point on the thousands of positions it can adopt.

Out of all the marvelous things the old sorcerers learned exploring those thousands of positions, only the art of dreaming and the art of stalking remain. The art of dreaming is concerned with the displacement of the assemblage point. Stalking is the art that deals with the fixation of the assemblage point on any location to which it is displaced.

To fixate the assemblage point on any new spot means to acquire cohesion. An apprentice does just that in his dreaming practices. He is perfecting his energy body. He is doing that and much more; he is learning to have cohesion. Dreaming does it by forcing dreamers to fixate the assemblage point. The dreaming attention, the energy body, the second attention, the relationship with inorganic beings, the dreaming emissary are but by-products of acquiring cohesion; in other words, they are all by-products of fixating the assemblage point on a number of dreaming positions .

A dreaming position is any new position to which the assemblage point has been displaced during sleep. We fixate the assemblage point on a dreaming position by sustaining the view of any item in our dreams, or by changing dreams at will.

Through his dreaming practices, an apprentice is really exercising his capacity to be cohesive; that is to say, he is exercising his capacity to maintain a new energy shape by holding the assemblage point fixed on the position of any particular dream he is having. While exercising his capacity to maintain a new energy shape, he isn't really maintaining a new energy shape yet, not exactly, and not because he can't but only because he is shifting the assemblage point instead of moving it. Shifts of the assemblage point give rise to minute changes, which are practically unnoticeable. The challenge of shifts is that they are so small and so numerous that to maintain cohesiveness in all of them is a triumph.

We know we are maintaining cohesion by the clarity of our perception. The clearer the view of our dreams, the greater our cohesion.

I'm going to tell you about a practical application of what an apprentice learns in dreaming . He focuses his attention, as if he is in a dream, on the foliage of a tree. He doesn't just gaze at it; he does something very special with the foliage. Remember, I've said that in dreaming , once you are able to hold the view of any item, you are really holding the dreaming position of your assemblage point. So then, an apprentice gazes at the leaves of a tree as if he is in a dream, but with a slight yet most meaningful variation: he holds his dreaming attention on the leaves of the tree in the awareness of our daily world.

By staring at the foliage, he accomplishes a minute displacement of his assemblage point. Then, by summoning his dreaming attention through staring at individual leaves, he actually fixates that minute displacement, and his cohesion makes him perceive in terms of the second attention. The process is so simple it is ridiculous.

Our speech faculty is extremely flimsy and attacks of muteness are common among sorcerers who venture this way, beyond the limits of normal perception.

It is not possible for one to rely on one's rationality to understand such an experience as summoning one's dreaming attention through staring at individual leaves. Not because our rationality is in any way impaired but because what takes place is a phenomenon outside the parameters of reason.

Reason is only a by-product of the habitual position of the assemblage point; therefore, knowing what is going to, being of sound mind, having our feet on the ground--sources of great pride to us and assumed to be a natural consequence of our worth--are merely the result of the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual place. The more rigid and stationary it is, the greater our confidence in ourselves, the greater our feeling of knowing the world, of being able to predict.

What dreaming does is give us the fluidity to enter into other worlds by destroying our sense of knowing this world. Dreaming is a journey of unthinkable dimensions, a journey that, after making us perceive everything we can humanly perceive, makes the assemblage point jump outside the human domain and perceive the inconceivable.

We are back again, harping on the most important topic of the sorcerers' world; the position of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers' curse, as well as mankind's thorn in the side. I say that because both, mankind in general and the old sorcerers, fell prey to the position of the assemblage point: mankind, because by not knowing that the assemblage point exists we are obliged to take the by-product of its habitual position as something final and indisputable. And the old sorcerers because, although they knew all about the assemblage point, they fell for its facility to be manipulated. You must avoid falling into those traps.

Different worlds exist in the position of the assemblage point. You will have two choices. One, to follow mankind's rationales and be faced with a predicament: your experience will tell you that other worlds exist, but your reason will say that such worlds do not and cannot exist. The other, to follow the old sorcerers' rationales, in which case you will automatically accept the existence of other worlds, and your greed alone will make your assemblage point hold on to the position that creates those worlds. The result would be another kind of predicament: that of having to move physically into visionlike realms, driven by expectations of power and gain.




The dreaming emissary's voice is an impersonal but constant force from the realm of inorganic beings; thus, every dreamer experiences it, in more or less the same terms. And if we choose to take its words as advice, we are incurable fools.

My interest in telling you about the old sorcerers is not to bad-mouth them but to pit them against you. Sooner or later, your assemblage point will be more fluid, but not fluid enough to offset the facility to be like them: righteous and hysterical.

There is only one way to avoid all that. Sorcerers call it sheer understanding. I call it a romance with knowledge. It's the drive sorcerers use to know, to discover, to be bewildered.

Seeing children's assemblage points constantly fluttering, as if moved by tremors, changing their place with ease, the old sorcerers came to the conclusion that the assemblage points habitual location is not innate but brought about by habituation. Seeing also that only in adults is it fixed on one spot, they surmised that the specific location of the assemblage point fosters a specific way of perceiving. Through usage, this specific way of perceiving becomes a system of interpreting sensory data.

Since we are drafted into that system by being born into it, from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to adjust our perceiving to conform to the demands of this system, a system that rules us for life. Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly right in believing that the act of countermanding it and perceiving energy directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.

I am in wonder at the greatest accomplishment of our human upbringing: to lock our assemblage point on its habitual position. For, once it is immobilized there, our perception can be coached and guided to interpret what we perceive. In other words, we can then be guided to perceive more in terms of our system than in terms of our senses. Human perception is universally homogeneous, because the assemblage points of the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.

Sorcerers prove all this to themselves when they see that at the moment the assemblage point is displaced beyond a certain threshold, and new universal filaments of energy begin to be perceived, there is no sense to what we perceive. The immediate cause is that new sensory data has rendered our system inoperative; it can no longer be used to interpret what we are perceiving.

Perceiving without our system is, of course, chaotic. But strangely enough, when we think we have truly lost our bearings, our old system rallies; it comes to our rescue and transforms our new incomprehensible perception into a thoroughly comprehensible new world. Just like what happens to an apprentice when he gazes at the leaves of a tree and his dreaming attention comes forth. His perception is chaotic for a while; everything comes to him at once, and his system for interpreting the world doesn't function. Then, the chaos clears up and there he is, in front of a new world.

That world exists in the precise position of his assemblage point at that moment. In order to perceive it, he needs cohesion, that is, he needs to maintain his assemblage point fixed on that position. The result is that he totally perceives a new world for a while.

Others would perceive that same world if they had uniformity and cohesion. Uniformity and cohesion is to hold, in unison, the same position of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers called the entire act of acquiring uniformity and cohesion outside the normal world "stalking perception."

The art of stalking , as I have already said, deals with the fixation of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers discovered, through practice, that important as it is to displace the assemblage point, it is even more important to make it stay fixed on its new position, wherever that new position might be.

If the assemblage point does not become stationary, there is no way that we can perceive coherently. We would experience then a kaleidoscope of disassociated images. This is the reason the old sorcerers put as much emphasis on dreaming as they did on stalking . One art cannot exist without the other, especially for the kinds of activities in which the old sorcerers were involved.

The old sorcerers called them the intricacies of the second attention or the grand adventure of the unknown. These activities stem from the displacements of the assemblage point. Not only had the old sorcerers learned to displace their assemblage points to thousands of positions on the surface or on the inside of their energy masses but they had also learned to fixate their assemblage points on those positions, and thus retain their cohesiveness, indefinitely. We can't talk about the benefits of that, we can talk only about end results.

The cohesiveness of the old sorcerers was such that it allowed them to become perceptually and physically everything the specific position of their assemblage points dictated. They could transform themselves into anything for which they had a specific inventory. An inventory is all the details of perception involved in becoming, for example, a jaguar, a bird, an insect, et cetera, et cetera. It is possible, not so much for you and me, but you them. For them, it was nothing.

The old sorcerers had superb fluidity. All they needed was the slightest shift of their assemblage points, the slightest perceptual cue from their dreaming , and they would instantaneously stalk their perception, rearrange their cohesiveness to fit their new state of awareness, and be an animal, another person, a bird, or anything.

Sorcerers bring order to the chaos. Their preconceived, transcendental purpose is to free their perception. Sorcerers don't make up the world they are perceiving; they perceive energy directly, and then they discover that what they are perceiving is an unknown new world, which can swallow them whole, because it is as real as anything we know to be real.

What happens as an apprentice gazes at the leaves of a tree is that he began by perceiving the energy of the tree. On the subjective level, however, he believes he is dreaming because he employs dreaming techniques to perceive energy. To use dreaming techniques in the world of everyday life was one of the old sorcerers most effective devices. It made perceiving energy directly dreamlike, instead of totally chaotic, until a moment when something rearranged perception and the sorcerer found himself facing a new world. The scenery one views in that case is not a dream, nor is it our daily world.

I've been saying this to you over and over, and you think that I am merely repeating myself. I know how difficult it is for the mind to allow mindless possibilities to become real. But new worlds exist! They are wrapped one around the other, like the skins of an onion. The world we exist in is but one of those skins.

So then, is the goal of my teaching to prepare you to go into those worlds? No. I don't mean that. We go into those worlds only as an exercise. Those journeys are the antecedents of the sorcerers of today. We do the same dreaming that the old sorcerers used to do, but at one moment we deviate into new ground. The old sorcerers preferred the shifts of the assemblage point, so they were always on more or less known, predictable ground. We prefer the movements of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers were after the human unknown. We are after the nonhuman unknown. You haven't gotten to that yet. You are only beginning. And at the beginning everyone has to go through the old sorcerers' steps. After all, they were the ones who invented dreaming .

When dreaming is too easy for you it can be a damnation if you don't watch it. It leads to the human unknown. As I said to you, modern-day sorcerers strive to get to the nonhuman unknown; that is, freedom from being human. Inconceivable worlds that are outside the band of man but that we still can perceive. This is where modern sorcerers take the side road. Their predilection is what's outside the human domain. And what are outside that domain are all-inclusive worlds, not merely the realm of birds or the realm of animals or the realm of man, even if it be the unknown man. What I am talking about are worlds, like the one where we live; total worlds with endless realms.

Those worlds are in different positions of the assemblage point. But positions sorcerers arrive at with a movement of the assemblage point, not a shift. Entering into those worlds is the type of dreaming only sorcerers of today do. The old sorcerers stayed away from it, because it requires a great deal of detachment and no self-importance whatsoever. A price they couldn't afford to pay.

For the sorcerers who practice dreaming today, dreaming is freedom to perceive worlds beyond the imagination. Freedom is an adventure with no end, in which we risk our lives and much more for a few moments of something beyond words, beyond thoughts or feelings.

What can be the driving force to do all this? To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.

To suspend judgment and let the inorganic beings come, was in fact, the very procedure used by the sorcerers of antiquity to attract them. It is very difficult to make the self give up its strongholds except through practice. One of the self's strongest lines of defense is indeed our rationality, and this is not only the most durable line of defense when it comes to sorcery actions and explanations but also the most threatened. The existence of inorganic beings is a foremost assailant of our rationality.

From time to time a projection from the realm of the inorganic beings, a current of foreign energy, a scout, will be injected into your dreams. So after you have crossed the first gate of dreaming , adjust your dreaming attention and be on the alert.

Scouts are more numerous when our dreams are average, normal ones. The dreams of dreamers are strangely free from scouts. When they appear, they are identifiable by the strangeness and incongruity surrounding them. Their presence doesn't make any sense.

Only in average dreams are things nonsensical. I would say that this is so because more scouts are injected then, because average people are subject to a greater barrage from the unknown.

In my opinion, what takes place is a balance of forces. Average people have stupendously strong barriers to protect themselves against those onslaughts. Barriers such as worries about the self. The stronger the barrier, the greater the attack.

Dreamers, by contrast, have fewer barriers and fewer scouts in their dreams. It seems that in dreamers ' dreams nonsensical things disappear, perhaps to ensure that dreamers catch the presence of scouts.

In dreaming , some items are of key importance because they are associated with the spirit. Others are entirely unimportant by reason of being associated with our indulging personality.

The first scout you isolate will always be present, in any form. Incongruous items are foreign invaders of your dreams. Upon isolating them, your dreaming attention always focuses on them with an intensity that does not occur under any other circumstances.

At that point in your dreaming , scouts are reconnoiterers sent by the inorganic realm. They are very fast, meaning that they don't stay long.

They come in search of potential awareness. They have consciousness and purpose, although it is incomprehensible to our minds, comparable perhaps to the consciousness and purpose of trees. The inner speed of trees and inorganic beings is incomprehensible to us because it is infinitely slower than ours.

Both trees and inorganic beings last longer than we do. They are made to stay put. They are immobile, yet they make everything move around them. Inorganic beings are stationary like trees. What one sees in dreaming as bright or dark sticks are their projections. What one hears as the voice of the dreaming emissary is equally their projection. And so are their scouts.

Trees also have projections like that. Their projections are, however, even less friendly to us than those of the inorganic beings. Dreamers never seek them, unless they are in a state of profound amenity with trees, which is a very difficult state to attain.

Remember, the realm of inorganic beings was the old sorcerers' field. To get there, they tenaciously fixed their dreaming attention on the items of their dreams. In that fashion, they were able to isolate the scouts. And when they had the scouts in focus, they voiced their intent to follow them. The instant the old sorcerers voiced that intent , off they went, pulled by that foreign energy.


Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf


Only follow the dreaming emissary's guidance when it refers to dreaming .



The dreaming attention comes from behind the roof of the mouth. Feel in dreaming that you are pressing the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue.



By living up to my standards of self-examination with no indulgence, the emissary's voice and what it says will become a superchallenge for you. You have to avoid, at all cost, succumbing to the temptation of the emissary's promise of knowledge, and you have to do this all by yourself.

The diabolical nature of the inorganic beings' realm is that it might very well be the only sanctuary dreamers have in a hostile universe.

It really is a haven for some dreamers . Not for me. I don't need props or railings. I know what I am. I am alone in a hostile universe, and I have learned to say, So be it!



Under the influence of dreaming , reality suffers a metamorphosis. Two options are faced by all dreamers : either we carefully revamp or we completely disregard our system of sensory input interpretation.

To revamp our interpretation system means to intend its reconditioning. It means that one deliberately and carefully attempts to enlarge its capabilities. By living in accordance with the sorcerers' way, dreamers save and store the necessary energy to suspend judgment and thus facilitate that intended revamping. If we choose to recondition our interpretation system, reality becomes fluid, and the scope of what can be real is enhanced without endangering the integrity of reality. Dreaming , then, indeed opens the door into other aspects of what is real.

If we choose to disregard our system, the scope of what can be perceived without interpretation grows inordinately. The expansion of our perception is so gigantic that we are left with very few tools for sensory interpretation and, thus, a sense of an infinite realness that is unreal or an infinite unrealness that could very well be real but is not.

The existence of inorganic beings is the foremost assailant of our rationality. Only after you have really suspended judgment will you get any relief.



An apprentice's energy level, which steadily grows, one day reaches a threshold that allows him to disregard assumptions and prejudgments about the nature of man, reality, and perception. That day he becomes enamored with knowledge, regardless of logic or functional value, and, above all, regardless of personal convenience.



The inorganic beings are after our awareness. They'll give us knowledge, but they'll extract a payment: our total being.

Inorganic beings can't force anyone to stay with them. To live in their world is a voluntary affair. Yet they are capable of imprisoning any one of us by catering to our desires, by pampering and indulging us. Beware of awareness that is immobile. Awareness like that has to seek movement, and it does this, as I've told you, by creating projections, phantasmagorical projections at times.

Inorganic beings hook onto dreamers ' innermost feelings and play them mercilessly. They create phantoms to please dreamers or frighten them. Inorganic beings are superb projectionists, who delight in projecting themselves like pictures on the wall.

The old sorcerers portrayed the inorganic beings' world as a blob of caverns and pores floating in some dark space. And they portrayed the inorganic beings as hollow canes bound together, like the cells of our bodies. Every dreamer sees that world in the same terms; as it is.

The inorganic beings create for dreamers the sense of being unique, exclusive; plus a more pernicious sense yet: the sense of having power. Power and uniqueness are unbeatable as corrupting forces. Watch out!

You can avoid that danger by going to that world a few times, and then never going back. In the opinion of sorcerers, the universe is predatorial, and sorcerers more than anyone else have to take this into account in their daily sorcery activities. Consciousness is intrinsically compelled to grow, and the only way it can grow is through strife, through life-or-death confrontations.

The awareness of sorcerers grows when they do dreaming . And the moment it grows, something out there acknowledges its growth, recognizes it and makes a bid for it. The inorganic beings are the bidders for that new, enhanced awareness. Dreamers have to be forever on their toes. They are prey the moment they venture out in that predatorial universe. To be safe, you must be on your toes every second! Don't let anything or anybody decide for you. That is to say, go to the inorganic beings' world only when you want to go.

Once you isolate a scout, a tremendous pull may be exerted on you to go to the inorganic beings' world. You can consciously stop that pull of the scouts. Always remember, you can change the course of your dreaming by intending that course.

With practice, your capacity to intend journeys into the inorganic beings' realm will become extraordinarily keen. An increased capacity to intend brings forth an increased control over your dreaming attention. This additional control makes one more daring. Such confidence is very scary because it is the confidence of a fool.

To be transported bodily is possible. We are energy that is kept in a specific shape and position by the fixation of the assemblage point on one location. If that location is changed, the shape and position of that energy will change accordingly. All the inorganic beings have to do is to place our assemblage point on the right location, and off we go, like a bullet, shoes, hat, and all.

It is absurd to trust the inorganic beings. They have their own rhythm, and it isn't human. Sorcerers' maneuvers are deadly. I beseech you to be extraordinarily aware. Don't get involved in having some idiotic confidence in yourself.

One must seriously consider that the inorganic beings have astounding means at their disposal. Their awareness is superb. In comparison, we are children, children with a lot of energy, which the inorganic beings covet.

You already understand that the gates of dreaming are specific obstacles, but you haven't understood yet that whatever is given as the exercise to reach and cross a gate is not really what that gate is all about.

I mean that it's not true to say, for example, that the second gate is reached and crossed when a dreamer learns to wake up in another dream, or when a dreamer learns to change dreams without waking up in the world of daily life. The second gate of dreaming is reached and crossed only when a dreamer learns to isolate and follow the foreign energy scouts.

Waking up in another dream or changing dreams is the drill devised by the old sorcerers to exercise a dreamer 's capacity to isolate and follow a scout.

Following a scout is a high accomplishment and when dreamers are able to perform it, the second gate is flung open and the universe that exists behind it becomes accessible to them. This universe is there all the time but we cannot go into it because we lack energetic prowess, and in essence, the second gate of dreaming is the door into the inorganic beings' world, and dreaming is the key that opens that door.

The rule of the second gate can be described in terms of a series of three steps: one, through practicing the drill of changing dreams, dreamers find out about the scouts; two, by following the scouts, they enter into another veritable universe; and three, in that universe, by means of their actions, dreamers find out, on their own, the governing laws and regulations of that universe.

The unavoidable reaction on the part of the inorganic beings is the attempt to keep the dreamer in their world. The inorganic beings don't let anyone go, not without a real fight.

You have to continue your dreaming until you have gone through the universe behind the second gate. I mean that you alone must either accept or reject the lure of the inorganic beings.

I was forced to teach you dreaming only because that is the pattern set out by the old sorcerers. The path of dreaming is filled with pitfalls, and to avoid those pitfalls or to fall into them is the personal and individual affair of each dreamer , and I may add that it is a final affair.

Those pitfalls are the result of succumbing to adulation or to promises of power. And not only succumbing to those, but succumbing to anything offered by the inorganic beings. There is no way for sorcerers to accept anything offered by them, beyond a certain point.

That point depends on us as individuals. The challenge is for each of us to take only what is needed from that world, nothing more. To know what's needed is the virtuosity of sorcerers, but to take only what's needed is their highest accomplishment. To fail to understand this simple rule is the surest way of plummeting into a pitfall.

If you fall, you pay the price, and the price depends on the circumstances and the depth of the fall. But there is really no way of talking about an eventuality of this sort, because we are not facing a problem of punishment. Energetic currents are at stake here, energetic currents which create circumstances that are more dreadful than death. Everything in the sorcerers' path is a matter of life or death, but in the path of dreaming this matter is enhanced a hundred fold.

You may come to think you are extremely disciplined and conscientious with your dreaming practices. That's the time for you to be even more disciplined and handle everything related to dreaming with kid gloves. Be, about all, vigilant, one can't foretell where the attack will come from.

The universe behind the second gate is the closest to our own, and our own universe is pretty crafty and heartless. So the two can't be that different.

The universe of the inorganic beings is always ready to strike. But so is our own universe. That's why you have to go into their realm exactly as if you were venturing into a war zone.

I don't mean that dreamers always have to be afraid of that world. Once a dreamer goes through the universe behind the second gate, or once a dreamer refuses to consider it as a viable option, there are no more headaches.

Only then are dreamers free to continue. The universe behind the second gate is so powerful and aggressive that it serves as a natural screen or a testing ground where dreamers are probed for their weaknesses. If they survive the tests, they can proceed to the next gate; it they do not, they remain forever trapped in that universe.

For dreamers , their feelings alone can stop their dreaming . Once they have formulated the thought of reentering dreaming , their practices will continue as if they had never been interrupted.

If dreaming is overemphasized, it becomes what it was for the old sorcerers: a source of inexhaustible indulging. You must exercise all the care you are able to muster up. The old sorcerers' flaw was that they took to the inorganic beings' realm like fish take to water. When dreamers realize that the inorganic beings have no appeal it is usually too late for them, because by then the inorganic beings have them in the bag. The inorganic beings are like fishermen; they attract and catch awareness.

You are suffering from anxiety, you say. That means nothing. Gain back your energy, and don't worry about nonsense.


Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf

The inorganic beings are forever in search of awareness and energy. The inorganic beings cannot lie.

The third gate of dreaming is reached when you find yourself in a dream, staring at someone else who is asleep. And that someone else turns out to be you.

There are two phases to each of the gates of dreaming . The first, is to arrive at the gate; the second is to cross it. By dreaming that you see yourself asleep, you arrive at the third gate. The second phase is to move around once you've seen yourself asleep.

At the third gate of dreaming you begin to deliberately merge your dreaming reality with the reality of the daily world. This is the drill, and sorcerers call it completing the energy body. The merge between the two realities has to be so thorough that you need to be more fluid than ever. Examine everything at the third gate with great care and curiosity.

Our tendency at the third gate is to get lost in detail. To view things with great care and curiosity means to resist the nearly irresistible temptation to plunge into detail.

The given drill, at the third gate, is to consolidate the energy body. Dreamers begin forging the energy body by fulfilling the drills of the first and second gates. When they reach the third gate, the energy body is ready to come out, or perhaps it would be better to say that it is ready to act. Unfortunately, this also means that it's ready to be mesmerized by detail.

The energy body is like a child who's been imprisoned all its life. The moment it is free, it soaks up everything it can find, and I mean everything. Every irrelevant, minute detail totally absorbs the energy body.

The most asinine detail becomes a world for the energy body. The effort that dreamers have to make to direct the energy body is staggering. I know that it sounds awkward to tell you to view things with care and curiosity, but that is the best way to describe what you should do. At the third gate, dreamers have to avoid a nearly irresistible impulse to plunge into everything, and they avoid it by being so curious, so desperate to get into everything that they don't let any particular thing imprison them.

My recommendations, which I know sound absurd to the mind, are directly aimed at your energy body. Your energy body has to unite all its resources in order to act.

Your entire energy body has to be engaged to perform the drill of the third gate. Therefore, to make things easier for your energy body, you must hold back your rationality.

At the third gate, rationality is responsible for the insistence of our energy bodies on being obsessed with superfluous detail. At the third gate, then, we need irrational fluidity, irrational abandon to counteract that insistence.



The position of the assemblage point is like a vault where sorcerers keep their records. Sorcerers are capable of leaving accurate records of their findings in the position of the assemblage point. When it comes to getting to the essence of a written account, we have to use our sense of sympathetic or imaginative participation to go beyond the mere page into the experience itself. However, in the sorcerers' world, since there are no written pages, total records, which can be relived instead of read, are left in the position of the assemblage point.



With the inorganic beings, once you get to play with them, you are hooked. They'll always be after you. Or, what's worse yet, you'll always be after them.



To be ready for a true merging of your dreaming reality and your daily reality you must recapitulate your life further.
The recapitulation of our lives never ends, no matter how well we've done it once. The reason average people lack volition in their dreams is that they have never recapitulated and their lives are filled to capacity with heavily loaded emotions like memories, hopes, fears, et cetera, et cetera.

Sorcerers, in contrast, are relatively free from heavy, binding emotions, because of their recapitulation. And if something stops them, the assumption is that there still is something in them that is not quite clear.

Recapitulating and dreaming go hand in hand. As we regurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne.
The recapitulation consists of reliving the totality of one's life experiences by remembering every possible minute detail of them. It's the essential factor in a dreamer 's redefinition and redeployment of energy. The recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and without this liberated energy dreaming is not possible.

Make a list of all the people you have met in your life, starting at the present. Arrange your list in an orderly fashion, breaking it down into areas of activity, such as jobs you have had, schools you have attended. Then go, without deviation, from the first person on your list to the last one, reliving every one of your interactions with them.

Recapitulating an event starts with one's mind arranging everything pertinent to what is being recapitulated. Arranging means reconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the physical details of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared the interaction, and then going to oneself, to the examination of one's feelings.

The recapitulation is coupled with a natural, rhythmical breathing. Long exhalations are performed as the head moves gently and slowly from right to left; and long inhalations are taken as the head moves back from left to right. This act of moving the head from side to side is called "fanning the event." The mind examines the event from beginning to end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind focuses on.

The sorcerers of antiquity, the inventors of the recapitulation, viewed breathing as a magical, life-giving act and used it, accordingly, as a magical vehicle; the exhalation, to eject the foreign energy left in them during the interaction being recapitulated and the inhalation to pull back the energy that they themselves left behind during the interaction.

It is more involved than an intellectual psychoanalysis. The recapitulation is a sorcerer's ploy to induce a minute but steady displacement of the assemblage point. The assemblage point, under the impact of reviewing past actions and feelings, goes back and forth between its present site and the site it occupied when the event being recapitulated took place.

The old sorcerers' rationale behind the recapitulation was their conviction that there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe, which makes organisms live by lending them awareness. That force also makes organisms die, in order to extract the same lent awareness, which organisms have enhanced through their life experiences. The old sorcerers believed that since it is our life experience this force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can be satisfied with a facsimile of our life experience: the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets sorcerers go, free to expand their capacity to perceive and reach with it the confines of time and space.

Dreaming requires every bit of our available energy. If there is a deep preoccupation in our life, there is no possibility of dreaming . If you think you are deeply preoccupied and your practices are not interrupted, it would be that you are only egomaniacally disturbed. To be preoccupied, for sorcerers, means that all your energy sources are taken on.

There is a second round of the recapitulation. It consists of a new recapitulation pattern. Construct a jigsaw puzzle by recapitulating, without any apparent order, different events of your life.

It'll be a mess if you let your pettiness choose the events you are going to recapitulate. Instead, let the spirit decide. Be silent, and then get to the event the spirit points out.

There are two basic rounds to the recapitulation, the first is called formality and rigidity, and the second fluidity.



When dreaming you are seeing your body you have to establish some valid guide to find out whether you are actually seeing your body asleep in your bed. Remember, you must be in your actual room, seeing your actual body. Otherwise, what you are having is merely a dream. If that's the case, control that dream, either by observing its detail or by changing it. Figure out a way to validate the fact that you are looking at yourself. Use your own judgment.

Dreamers have to be imaginative to move their energy bodies. Sorcerers say that at the third gate the entire energy body can move like energy moves: fast and directly. Their energy bodies know exactly how to move. They can move as they move in the inorganic beings' world. When your energy body learns to move by itself, you'll be thoroughly out of the inorganic beings' reach.



Be impeccable. I have told you this dozens of times. To be impeccable means to put your life on the line in order to back up your decisions, and then to do quite a lot more than your best to realize those decisions. When you are not deciding anything, you are merely playing roulette with your life in a helter-skelter way.



Instead of struggling to walk in dreaming , one wills oneself to move. It takes sorcerers forever to learn to move the energy body with their own volition. Once you've learned how to move your energy body by yourself, you should continue moving. Moving your energy body opens up a new area of extraordinary exploration.

Again, one must come up with an idea to validate the faithfulness of one's dreams.
To be transported by a scout is the real dreaming task of the second gate. It is a very serious matter, but not as serious as forging and moving the energy body. Therefore, when the time comes, you have to make sure, by some means of your own, whether you are actually seeing yourself asleep or whether you are merely dreaming that you're seeing yourself asleep. One's new extraordinary exploration hinges on really seeing oneself asleep.

Dreamers take a very long time to perfect their energy bodies. And this is exactly what's at stake here: perfecting your energy body. The reason the energy body is compelled to examine detail and get inextricably stuck in it is its inexperience, its incompleteness. Sorcerers spend a lifetime consolidating the energy body by letting it sponge up everything possible.

Until the energy body is complete and mature, it is self-absorbed. It can't get free from the compulsion to be absorbed by everything. But if one takes this into consideration, instead of fighting the energy body, one can lend it a hand by directing its behavior, that is to say, by stalking it.

Since everything related to the energy body depends on the appropriate position of the assemblage point, and since dreaming is nothing else but the means to displace it, stalking is, consequently, the way to make the assemblage point stay put on the perfect position, in this case, the position where the energy body can become consolidated and from which it can finally emerge.

The moment the energy body can move on its own, sorcerers assume that the optimum position of the assemblage point has been reached. The next step is to stalk it, that is, to fixate it on that position in order to complete the energy body. The procedure is simplicity itself. One intends to stalk it.
Let your energy body intend to reach the optimum dreaming position . Then, let your energy body intend to stay at that position and you will be stalking .

Intending is the secret. Sorcerers displace their assemblage points through intending and fixate them, equally, through intending . And there is no technique for intending . One intends through usage.

The ideal spot and the fixation of the assemblage point are metaphors. They have nothing to do with the words used to describe them.
What comes next is a sorcerer's gem, the real task; seeing energy in your dreaming with your energy body.

Dreamers have a rule of thumb. If their energy body is complete, they see energy every time they gaze at an item in the daily world. In dreams, if they see the energy of an item, they know they are dealing with a real world, no matter how distorted that world may appear to their dreaming attention. If they can't see the energy of an item, they are in an ordinary dream and not in a real world.

What is a real world? A world that generates energy; the opposite of a phantom world of projections, where nothing generates energy, like most of our dreams, where nothing has an energetic effect.

Another definition of dreaming is: a process by which dreamers isolate dream conditions in which they can find energy-generating elements. Dreaming is the process by which we intend to find adequate positions of the assemblage point, positions that permit us to perceive energy-generating items in dreamlike states.

The energy body is also capable of perceiving energy that is quite different from the energy of our own world, as in the case of items of the inorganic beings' realm, which the energy body perceives as sizzling energy. In our world nothing sizzles; everything here wavers.

From a certain point the issue of your dreaming will be to determine whether the items on which you focus your dreaming attention are energy generating, mere phantom projections, or generators of foreign energy.
Seeing energy is the gauge to determine whether or not you are observing your real body asleep.

Love Always
mudra

The Art of Dreaming

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_art_of_dreaming.pdf

In order to see in dreaming not only do you have to intend seeing but you have to put your intent into words. You have to speak up. There are other means to accomplish the same result, but voicing one's intent is one of the simplest and most direct way.
You need to have patience. You are learning to do something extraordinary, you are learning to intend to see in your dreams. Someday you will not have to voice your intent ; you'll simply will it, silently.

If nothing happens when you voice your intent to see it means that your dream is an ordinary dream; phantom projections; images that have life only in your dreaming attention.

Don't give up or get discouraged. Keep on trying. Sooner or later, you'll hit the right note.
The drill for the third gate of dreaming is to make the energy body move on its own.

In special dreams, our dreaming attention focuses on the daily world, and it moves instantly from one real object to another in the world. What makes this movement possible is that the assemblage point is on the proper dreaming position . From that position, the assemblage point gives the dreaming attention such fluidity that it can move in a split second over incredible distances, and in doing so it produces a perception so fast, so fleeting that it resembles an ordinary dream.

When your energy body is complete and functioning, the implication that you see energy in your dream is that you are perceiving a real world, through the veil of a dream.
Unless we see in dreaming , we can't tell a real, energy-generating thing from a phantom projection.



The world is like an onion, it has many skins. The world we know is but one of them. Sometimes, we cross boundaries and enter into another skin: another world, very much like this one, but not the same.

In the view of sorcerers, the universe is constructed in layers, which the energy body can cross. Do you know where the old sorcerers are still existing to this day? In another layer, in another skin of the onion.
The idea of a real, pragmatic journey, taken in dreams, is very difficult to understand or to accept. The journey of the energy body depends exclusively on the position of the assemblage point.

Our problem is our cynicism. Cynicism doesn't allow us to make drastic changes in our understanding of the world. It also forces us to feel that we are always right.

I propose that you do one nonsensical thing that might turn the tide. Repeat to yourself incessantly that the hinge of sorcery is the mystery of the assemblage point. If you repeat this to yourself long enough, some unseen force takes over and makes the appropriate changes in you.

Cut your cynical attitude! Repeat this in a bona fide manner. The mystery of the assemblage point is everything in sorcery. Or rather, everything in sorcery rests on the manipulation of the assemblage point. You may know all this, but you have to repeat it.



There is an enormous difference between the thoughts and deeds of the men of antiquity and those of modern men. The men of ancient times had a very realistic view of perception and awareness because their view stemmed from their observations of the universe around them. Modern men, in contrast, have an absurdly unrealistic view of perception and awareness because their view stems from their observations of the social order and from their dealings with it.

You are a modern man involved with the views and observations of men of antiquity. And none of those views and observations are familiar to you. Now more than ever you need sobriety and aplomb. I am trying to make a solid bridge, a bridge you can walk on, between the views of men of ancient times and those of modern men.

Of all the transcendental observations of the men of ancient times, the only one with which you are familiar, because it has filtered down to our day, is the idea of selling our souls to the devil in exchange for immortality, which sounds to me like something coming straight out of the relationship of the old sorcerers with the inorganic beings.

Succumbing to the lure of the inorganic beings is not just an idea; it's real. Dreaming , likewise, is real; it is an energy-generating condition. You hear my statements and you may understand what I mean, but your awareness hasn't caught up with the total implication of it yet.
When you are fully aware of what an energy-generating condition means you will measure dreaming with the greatest care and deliberation. When you believe you are just dreaming , you take blind chances. Faulty reasoning tells you that no matter what happens, at a given moment the dream will be over and you will wake up.

I am talking to you about the views of men of antiquity and the views of modern man because your awareness, which is the awareness of modern man, prefers to deal with an unfamiliar concept as if it were an empty ideality.
If I left it up to you, you'd regard dreaming as an idea. Of course, I'm sure you take dreaming seriously, but you don't quite believe in the reality of dreaming .

I am saying all this because the time will come when you are in the proper position to understand that dreaming is an energy-generating condition. Then, you will understand that ordinary dreams are the honing devices used to train the assemblage point to reach the position that creates this energy-generating condition we call dreaming .

Since dreamers touch and enter real worlds of all-inclusive effects, they ought to be in a permanent state of the most intense and sustained alertness; any deviation from total alertness imperils the dreamer in ways more than dreadful.
Regard dreaming as something extremely dangerous. And begin that now.

When you can displace your assemblage point quickly and easily that ease can have the tendency to make the displacement erratic. Then you must bring that ease to order. And don't allow yourself even a fraction of an inch leeway.

Faithfully and daily repeat what I asked you to repeat, that everything in sorcery rests on the manipulation of the assemblage point. The results of your litany-like invocation will be incredible. It has the same effect on one's awareness that exercise has on the muscles of the body. Your assemblage point becomes more agile, which means that seeing energy in dreaming becomes the sole goal of your practices. A moment then comes when you are able just to intend seeing , without saying a word, and actually experience the same result as when you voice out loud your intent to see .

The energy of our world wavers. It scintillates. Not only living beings but everything in our world glimmers with an inner light of its own. The energy of our world consists of layers of shimmering hues. The top layer is whitish; another, immediately adjacent to it, is chartreuse; and another one, more distant yet, is amber. You will see glimmers of them whenever items that you encounter in your dreamlike states change shapes. However, a whitish glow is always the initial impact of seeing anything that generates energy.

There is an endless number of different hues, but for the purposes of a beginning order, you should be concerned with those three. Later on, you can get as sophisticated as you want and isolate dozens of hues, if you are able to do it.

The whitish layer is the hue of the present position of mankind's assemblage point. Let's say that it is a modern hue. Sorcerers believe that everything man does nowadays is tinted with that whitish glow. At another time, more distant yet, it made it amber. The color of sorcerers' energy is amber, which means that they are energetically associated with the men who existed in a distant past.

The present whitish hue may change someday if man is capable of evolving. The grand task of sorcerers is to bring forth the idea that, in order to evolve, man must first free his awareness from its bindings to the social order. Once awareness is free, intent will redirect it into a new evolutionary path.

sorcerers have succeeded in that task. They themselves are the proof. To convince others of the value and import of evolving is another matter.

The other kind of energy present in our world but alien to it is the scouts energy, the energy that sizzles.
Bear in mind that not every scout you are going to find belongs to the realm of inorganic beings. Some of the scouts you will encounter are going to be not from the inorganic beings' realm but from other, even more distant levels of awareness.

Since scouts are aware of themselves, they make contact with us when we are awake. But our great misfortune is to have our consciousness so fully engaged that we don't have time to pay attention. In our sleep, however, the two-way-traffic trapdoor opens: we dream. And in our dreams, we make contact.

The way to tell whether the scouts are from a level besides the inorganic beings' world is: the greater their sizzling, the farther they come from. It sounds simplistic, but you have to let your energy body tell you what is what. I assure you, it'll make very fine distinctions and unerring judgments when faced with alien energy.

Unless you know exactly what you are doing and what you want out of alien energy, you have to be content with a brief glance. Anything beyond a glance is as dangerous and as stupid as petting a rattlesnake.

Scouts are always very aggressive and extremely daring. They have to be that way in order to prevail in their explorations. Sustaining our dreaming attention on them is tantamount to soliciting their awareness to focus on us. Once they focus their attention on us, we are compelled to go with them. And that, of course, is the danger. We may end up in worlds beyond our energetic possibilities.
There are many types of scouts, but at a beginning level of energy one can only focus on three. The first two types are the easiest to spot. Their disguises in our dreams are so outlandish, that they immediately attract our dreaming attention. The scouts of the third type are the most dangerous, in terms of aggressiveness and power, and because they hide behind subtle disguises.

One of the strangest things dreamers find, which you yourself will find, is this third type of scout. The most ferocious scout hides behind people in our dreams. It's annoying that they are always associated with the dream images of our parents or close friends. Perhaps that's why we often feel ill at ease when we dream of them. A rule of thumb for dreamers is to assume that the third type of scout is present whenever they feel perturbed by their parents or friends in a dream. Sound advice is to avoid those dream images. They are sheer poison.

Blue energy doesn't sizzle. It is like ours; it wavers, but it is blue instead of white. Blue energy doesn't exist in a natural state in our world.
The deadly scouts of the third type are bright orange.



The inorganic beings only show themselves at the beginning. After their scouts take us to their world, there is no necessity for the inorganic beings' projections. If we want to see the inorganic beings, a scout takes us there. For no one, and I mean no one, can journey by himself to their realm.

Their world is sealed. No one can enter or leave without the consent of the inorganic beings. The only thing you can do by yourself once you are inside is, of course, voice your intent to stay. To say it out loud means to set in motion currents of energy that are irreversible. In olden times, words were incredibly powerful. Now they are not. In the inorganic beings' realm, they haven't lost their power.
There is one last issue related to that world that we haven't discussed. In the final analysis my aversion to the old sorcerers' activities is very personal. As a nagual, I detest what they did. They cowardly sought refuge in the inorganic beings' world. They argued that in a predatorial universe, poised to rip us apart, the only possible haven for us is in that realm.

They believed that because it's true. Since the inorganic beings can't lie, the sales pitch of the dreaming emissary is all true. That world can give us shelter and prolong our awareness for nearly an eternity.

When the emissary's sales pitch, even if it's the truth, has no appeal to you, and you are ready to chance a road that might rip you apart, you will be ready for this one final statement about that world. The most dreadful statement I can make.
The energy necessary to move the assemblage points of sorcerers comes from the realm of inorganic beings.

This is the truth and the legacy of the old sorcerers to us. The inorganic beings have us pinned down to this day. This is the reason I don't like them. I resent having to dip into one source alone. Personally, I refuse to do it. And I am trying to steer you away from it.

We can't have dealings with them. And yet we can't stay away from them. My solution has been to take their energy but not give into their influence. This is known as the ultimate stalking . It is done by sustaining the unbending intent of freedom, even though no sorcerer knows what freedom really is.

The reason sorcerers have to take energy from the realm of inorganic beings is because there is no other viable energy for sorcerers. In order to maneuver the assemblage point in the manner they do, sorcerers need an inordinate amount of energy. As I've said, a redeployment of energy is necessary in order to do dreaming . To start dreaming sorcerers need to redefine their premises and save their energy, but that redefining is valid only to have the necessary energy to set up dreaming . To fly into other realms, to see energy, to forge the energy body, et cetera, et cetera, is another matter. For those maneuvers, sorcerers need loads of dark, alien energy.

They take it from the inorganic beings' world by the mere act of going to that world. All the sorcerers of our line have to do this.

Awareness is an endless area of exploration for sorcerers and man in general. In order to enhance awareness, there is no risk we should not run, no means we should refuse. Bear in mind, however, that only in soundness of mind can awareness be enhanced.

I'm going to propose a line of action for you. It's the last task of the third gate of dreaming , and it consists of stalking the stalkers , a most mysterious maneuver. To stalk the stalkers means to deliberately draw energy from the inorganic beings' realm in order to perform a sorcery feat. A journey--a journey that uses awareness as an element of the environment.

In the world of daily life, water is an element of the environment that we use for traveling. Imagine awareness being a similar element that can be used for traveling. Through the medium of awareness, scouts from all over the universe come to us, and vice versa; via awareness, sorcerers go to the ends of the universe.

Awareness is an energetic element. You have to make that distinction. For sorcerers who see , awareness is a glow. They can hitch their energy body to that glow and go with it.

The difference between a physical and an energetic element is that physical elements are part of our interpretation system, and energetic elements are not. Energetic elements, like awareness, exist in our universe. But we, as average people, perceive only the physical elements because we were taught to do so. Sorcerers perceive the energetic elements for the same reason: they were taught to do so.

The use of awareness as an energetic element of our environment is the essence of sorcery. In terms of practicalities, the trajectory of sorcery is, first, to free the existing energy in us by impeccably following the sorcerers' path; second, to use that energy to develop the energy body by means of dreaming ; and, third, to use awareness as an element of the environment in order to enter with the energy body and all our physicality into other worlds.

There are two kinds of energy journeys into other worlds. One is when awareness picks up the sorcerer's energy body and takes it wherever it may, and the other is when the sorcerer decides, in full consciousness, to use the avenue of awareness to make a journey. It takes an enormous discipline to do the second.

In the life of sorcerers there are issues that require masterful handling, and dealing with awareness, as an energetic element open to the energy body, is the most important, vital, and dangerous of those issues.

With enough energy you can perform the last task of the third gate of dreaming : to break the boundaries of the normal world and, using awareness as an energetic element, enter into another. This breaking and entering amounts to stalking the stalkers . Using awareness as an element of the environment bypasses the influence of the inorganic beings, but it still uses their energy.



In a pinch, your energy body is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.



After getting into a state of total inner silence, slip gently into dreaming , voicing your intent to go to the realm of the inorganic beings. Once you are in the world of the inorganic beings, you have to voice your intent to transfer your normal awareness to your energy body. What is important is that you intend the transfer of the total awareness of your daily world to your energy body.

Transferring awareness is purely a matter of voicing your intent and having the necessary amount of energy to tip the scales. That means to be able to add one's total physical mass to the energy body. Using awareness as a medium to make the journey into another world is not the result of applying any techniques but is the corollary of intending and having enough energy to be energetically capable of pulling our physicality and placing it on the energy body in order to make that journey.

In order to enter into that other world your total physical mass has to be added to your energy body. The great difficulty of this maneuver is to discipline the energy body. Lack of discipline is the only reason you may fail in performing this feat of ultimate stalking . Sometimes, as a fluke, an average person ends up performing it and entering into another world. But this is immediately explained away as insanity or hallucination.



Forget the self and you will fear nothing.



During an experience of stalking the stalkers one realizes that perceiving is an all-inclusive act when the assemblage point has been immobilized on one position. I have told you that the power our daily world has over us is a result of the fact that our assemblage point is immobile on its habitual position. This immobility is what makes our perception of the world so inclusive and overpowering that we cannot escape from it. If you want to break this totally inclusive force, all you have to do is dispel the fog, that is to say, displace the assemblage point by intending its displacement.

You yourself will understand what I mean the moment you have to bring your assemblage point to another position in order to dispel that world's fog which will begin to swallow you during a maneuver of stalking the stalkers . The reentry into our world is automatic if we don't let the fog set in.

Ordinarily dreamers experience the whole maneuver as a series of slow transitions, and they have to voice their intent to use awareness as an element. Ordinarily, dreamers are merely voyeurs.

The old sorcerers' damnation was that the inorganic beings took them to worlds from which they could not return.
Since they entered into that world with all their physicality, the fixation of their assemblage points on the position preselected by the inorganic beings was so overpowering that it created a sort of fog that obliterated any memory of the world they came from. The natural consequence of such an immobility, is that the dreamer 's assemblage point cannot return to its habitual position.

Think about this. Perhaps this is exactly what is happening to all of us in the world of daily life. We are here, and the fixation of our assemblage point is so overpowering that it has made us forget where we came from, and what our purpose was for coming here. The task is to sneak by the inorganic beings, not be run by them.

Perhaps you will stalk the stalkers when you have the strength. Or perhaps you'll never accomplish it. It doesn't really matter; if one thing doesn't work, another will. sorcery is an endless challenge.

In order to use awareness as an element of the environment, dreamers first have to make a journey to the inorganic beings' realm. Then they have to use that journey as a springboard, and, while they are in possession of the necessary dark energy, they have to intend to be hurled through the medium of awareness into another world.

In your dreaming practices, see energy in energy-generating dreamlike states. When you are able to see everything that presents itself to you, you may become incapable of rendering intelligently what you see . It may be then, as though you have reached states of perception for which you have no lexicon.

Such incomprehensible and indescribable visions would be your energy body using awareness as an element not for journeying, because you wouldn't yet have enough energy, but for entering into the energy fields of inanimate matter or of living beings.

At the fourth gate of dreaming , the energy body travels to specific, concrete places. There are three ways of using the fourth gate: one, to travel to concrete places in this world; two, to travel to concrete places out of this world; and, three, to travel to places that exist only in the intent of others. Whether or not you can cross the fourth gate by yourself is up to the spirit.
Modern-day sorcerers have realized that only if they remain totally detached can they have the energy to be free. Theirs is a peculiar type of detachment, which is born not out of fear or indolence but out of conviction.



Stretch your arms in front of you, to the sides, and then behind you. It relaxes the body.



For modern-day sorcerers to perceive energy directly is a matter of personal attainment. We maneuver the assemblage point through self-discipline.
Your energy body has endless resources. Modern-day sorcerers do not know the details of the thousands of possible positions of the assemblage point. By details I mean particular ways of treating the energy body in order to maintain the assemblage point fixed on specific positions.

Most of the shifts modern-day sorcerers experience are mild shifts within a thin bundle of energetic luminous filaments inside the luminous egg, a bundle called the band of man, or the purely human aspect of the universe's energy. Beyond that band, but still within the luminous egg, lies the realm of the grand shifts. When the assemblage point shifts to any spot on that area, perception is still comprehensible to us, but extremely detailed procedures are required for perception to be total.
Every grand shift has different inner workings which modern sorcerers could learn if they knew how to fixate the assemblage point long enough at any grand shift.

By inducing a systematic displacement of the assemblage point, dreaming liberates perception, enlarging the scope of what can be perceived.

For the sorcerers of my party, dreaming has not only opened the doors of other perceivable worlds but prepared us for entering into those realms in full awareness.

The second attention has endless treasures to be discovered. The initial position in which the dreamer places his body is of key importance. The old sorcerers used to call this the twin positions. The initial position in which a dreamer holds his physical body to begin dreaming is mirrored by the position in which he holds his energy body, in dreams, to fixate his assemblage point on any spot of his choosing. The two positions make a unit.

The position in which one places the body is of utmost importance. Start your dreaming by lying on your right side, with your knees a bit bent. The discipline is to maintain that position and fall asleep in it. In dreaming , then, the exercise is to dream that you lie down in exactly the same position and fall asleep again.

It makes the assemblage point stay put, and I mean really stay put, in whatever position it is at the instant of that second falling asleep. The result of this exercise is total perception.
The four variations of the exercise are to fall asleep lying on the right side, the left, the back, and the stomach. Then in dreaming the exercise is to dream of falling asleep a second time in the same position as the dreaming had been started.

I came from a line of sorcerers who knew how to move about in the second attention by projecting their intent . They practiced the art of projecting their thoughts in dreaming in order to accomplish the truthful reproduction of any object or structure or landmark or scenery of their choice.

The sorcerers of my line used to start by gazing at a simple object and memorizing every detail of it. They would then close their eyes and visualize the object and correct their visualization against the true object until they could see it, in its completeness, with their eyes shut.

The next thing in their developing scheme was to dream with the object and create in the dream, from the point of view of their own perception, a total materialization of the object. This act is called the first step to total perception.
From a simple object, those sorcerers went on to take more and more complex items. Their final aim was for all of them together to visualize a total world, then dream that world and thus re-create a totally veritable realm where they could exist.

When any of the sorcerers of my line were able to do that they could easily pull anyone into their intent , into their dream.
Whole populations disappeared dreaming like that. It's possible because they visualized and then re-created in dreaming the same scenery.

To cross the fourth gate and travel to places that exist only in someone else's intent is perilous, since every item in such a dream has to be an ultimately personal item.

The essence of my explanation is that if you were, for instance, dreaming of your hometown and your dream had started when you lay down on your right side, you could very easily stay in the town of your dream if you would lie on your right side, in the dream, and dream that you had fallen asleep. The second dream not only would necessarily be a dream of your hometown, but would be the most concrete dream one can imagine.

The only way to have absolute control of dreams is to use the technique of the twin positions. And don't ask me why. It just happens. Like everything else.



The thought of evil cannot withstand examination. In the universe only energy exists; evil is merely a concatenation of the human mind, overwhelmed by the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual position. Logically, there is really nothing to be afraid of.

There is no past or future in the universe. There is only the moment. Think for a moment, in the universe there is only energy, and energy has only a here and now, an endless and ever-present here and now.



The secret of the twin positions is that the second dream is intending in the second attention: the only way to cross the fourth gate of dreaming .

To make a dream an all-inclusive reality is the art of the old sorcerers. This is dreaming . You should know by now that its transactions are final.

You have been given an abstract gift: the possibility of flying on the wings of intent.


Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

I suggest that you gather a collection of the memorable events of your life.

The shamans of ancient Mexico conceived of the collection of memorable events as a bona-fide device to stir caches of energy that exist within the self. They explained these caches as being composed of energy that originates in the body itself and becomes displaced, pushed out of reach by the circumstances of our daily lives. In this sense, the collection of memorable events is the means for redeploying our unused energy.

The prerequisite for this collection is the genuine and all-consuming act of putting together the sum total of one's emotions and realizations, without sparing anything. The shamans of our lineage were convinced that the collection of memorable events was the vehicle for the emotional and energetic adjustment necessary for venturing, in terms of perception, into the unknown.

The total goal of the shamanistic knowledge that we are handling is the preparation for facing the definitive journey: the journey that every human being has to take at the end of his life. Through their discipline and resolve, shamans are capable of retaining their individual awareness and purpose after death. For them, the vague, idealistic state that modern man calls "life after death" is a concrete region filled to capacity with practical affairs of a different order than the practical affairs of daily life, yet bearing a similar functional practicality. To collect the memorable events in their lives is, for shamans, the preparation for their entrance into that concrete region which they call the active side of infinity.



Every warrior, as a matter of duty, collects an album that reveals the warrior's personality, an album that attests to the circumstances of his life. Above all, it is like an album of pictures made out of memories, the recollection of memorable events&endash;memorable because they have a special significance in one's life. Put in it the complete account of various events that have had profound significance for you.

Not every event has a profound significance for you. There are a few, however, that I would consider likely to have changed things for you, to have illuminated your path. Ordinarily, events that change our path are impersonal affairs, and yet are extremely personal.

Don't think about this album in terms of banalities, or in terms of a trivial rehashing of your life experiences.



Every one of us human beings has two minds. One is totally ours, and it is like a faint voice that always brings us order, directness, purpose, The other mind is a foreign installation. It brings us conflict, self-assertion, doubts, hopelessness: it's ourselves as the me-me center of the world.

Let's put the topic of our two minds aside and go back to the idea of preparing your album of memorable events. Such an album is an exercise in discipline and impartiality. Consider this album to be an act of war. As such, it has all the meaning in the world.



We are not naturally petty and contradictory. Our pettiness and contradictions are, rather, the result of a transcendental conflict that afflicts every one of us, but of which only sorcerers are painfully and hopelessly aware: the conflict of our two minds! One is our true mind, the product of all our life experiences, the one that rarely speaks because it has been defeated and relegated to obscurity. The other, the mind we use daily for everything we do, is a foreign installation.

To resolve the conflict of the two minds is a matter of intending it. Sorcerers beckon intent by voicing the word intent loud and clear. Intent is a force that exists in the universe. When sorcerers beckon intent, it comes to them and sets up the path for attainment, which means that sorcerers always accomplish what they set out to do.

Intent can be called, of course, for anything, but sorcerers have found out, the hard way, that intent comes to them only for something that is abstract. That's the safety valve for sorcerers; otherwise they would be unbearable. Beckoning intent to resolve the conflict of your two minds, or to hear the voice of your true mind, is not a petty or arbitrary matter. Quite the contrary; it is ethereal and abstract, and yet as vital to you as anything can be.

Your album, being an act of war, demands a super-careful selection. It is a precise collection of the unforgettable moments of your life, and everything that led you to them. Concentrate in it what has been and will be meaningful to you. A warrior's album is something most concrete, something so to the point that it is shattering.

Sit down, alone, and let your thoughts, memories, and ideas come to you freely. Make an effort to let the voice from the depths of you speak out and tell you what to select.

The selection is not an easy matter. This is the reason I say that making this album is an act of war. You have to remake yourself ten times over in order to know what to select.

Don't include stories that relate exclusively to you as a person who thinks, feels, cries, or doesn't feel anything at all. The memorable events of a shaman's album are affairs that will stand the test of time because they have nothing to do with him, and yet he is in the thick of them. He'll always be in the thick of them, for the duration of his life, and perhaps beyond, but not quite personally.

In my time, not only did I not know what to choose, I thought I had no experiences to choose from. It seemed that nothing had ever happened to me. Of course, everything had happened to me, but in my effort to defend the idea of myself, I had no time or inclination to notice anything.

The stories of a warrior's album are not personal, not assertions about you as the center of everything. You feel, you don't feel; you realize, you don't realize. All of that type of story is just you.

The memorable events we are after have the dark touch of the impersonal. That touch permeates them. I don't know how else to explain this.



Don't explain yourself to much. Sorcerers say that in every explanation there is a hidden apology. So, when you are explaining why you cannot do this or that, you're really apologizing for your shortcomings, hoping that whoever is listening to you will have the kindness to understand them.

Every one of us, young and old alike, is making figures in front of a mirror in one way or another. Tally what you know about people. Think of any human being on this earth, and you will know, without a shadow of a doubt, that no matter who they are, or what they think of themselves, or what they do, the result of their actions is always the same: senseless figures in front of a mirror.



Listen to your inner voice. Don't listen to the superficial voice that makes you angry. Listen to that deeper voice that is going to guide you from now on, the voice that is laughing. Listen to it! And laugh with it. Laugh! Laugh!



It is the nature of infinity, once we cross a certain threshold, to put a blueprint in front of us.



Don't waste your energy worrying about things. Everyone is locked in a vicious cycle. We all have our magic cure which we trust will cure everything, and resolve every one of our problems. At the moment, perhaps we can't afford it, but we have great hopes that we eventually will be able to.



sorcerers' aspirations are to reach infinity, and to be conscious of it. The task of sorcerers is to face infinity. They plunge into it daily, as a fisherman plunges into the sea. It is such an overwhelming task that sorcerers have to state their names before venturing into it. In this manner, they assert their individuality in front of the infinite.

What makes human beings into sorcerers is their capacity to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe. Human beings are not only capable of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe, but they actually do see it, although they are not deliberately conscious of seeing it.

"Awareness" is energy and "energy" is constant flux, a luminous vibration that is never stationary, but always moving of its own accord.



The nagual Elias and The nagual Julian were astoundingly alike in that there was nothing inside them. They were empty. The nagual Elias was a collection of astounding, haunting stories of regions unknown. The nagual Julian was a collection of stories that would have anybody in stitches, sprawled on the ground laughing. Whenever I tried to pin down the man in them, the real man, the way I could pinpoint the man in my father, the man in everybody I know, I found nothing. Instead of a real person inside them, there was a bunch of stories about persons unknown. Each of the two men had his own flair, but the end result was just the same: emptiness, an emptiness that reflected not the world, but infinity.

The moment one crossed a peculiar threshold in infinity, either deliberately or, unwittingly, everything that happens to one from then on is no longer exclusively in one's own domain, but enters into the realm of infinity.

Infinity is everything that surrounds us: the spirit, the dark sea of awareness. It is something that exists out there and rules our lives.

My steps and yours are guided by infinity. The circumstances that seem to be ruled by chance are in essence ruled by the active side of infinity: intent. What put you and me together was the intent of infinity. It is impossible to determine what this intent of infinity is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and I are. Sorcerers say that it is a tremor in the air. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the tremor in the air exists, and to acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there's no pondering, wondering, or speculating. They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the intent of infinity, and they just do it.



A nagual is empty. That emptiness doesn't reflect the world, it reflects infinity.
A nagual has no boisterousness on his part, or assertions about the self. There is not a speck of a need to have either grievances or remorse. His is the emptiness of a warrior-traveler, seasoned to the point where he doesn't take anything for granted. A warrior-traveler who doesn't underestimate or overestimate anything. A quite, disciplined fighter whose elegance is so extreme that no one, no matter how hard they try to look, will ever find the seam where all that complexity has come together.



What's happening to you is the workings of infinity. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal realization that your time is up. You are aware of it, but not deliberately conscious of it. You feel the absence of time, and that makes you impatient. I know this, for it happened to me and to all the sorcerers of my lineage. At a given time, a whole era in my life, or their lives, ended. Now it's your turn. You have simply run out of time.

Your malady is a very simple one: your world is coming to an end. It is the end of an era for you. Do you think that the world you have known all your life is going to leave you peacefully, without any fuss or muss? No! It will wriggle underneath you, and hit you with its tail.



But an era doesn't really come to an end until the king dies. You are the king.


Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

Every one of us has an energetic fissure, an energetic crack below the navel. That crack, which sorcerers call the gap, is closed when a man is in his prime.

Normally, all that is discernible to the sorcerer's eye is a tenuous discoloration in the otherwise whitish glow of the luminous sphere. But when a man is close to dying, that gap becomes quite apparent.

I once say a man's gap that was wide open. The significance was a deadly one. The spirit was signaling to me that something was coming to an end. I thought it was my life that was coming to an end, and I accepted it as gracefully as I could. It dawned on me much, much later that it wasn't my life that was coming to an end, but my entire lineage.

You bypass things like this. It's youth. So many things to do, so many people around you. You are not alert. You never learned to be alert, anyway.

To be alert doesn't mean to be watchful. For sorcerers, to be alert means to be aware of the fabric of the everyday world that seems extraneous to the interaction of the moment.

Don't hide yourself behind banalities. Stand up, assume responsibility for what you know. Don't get lost in the extraneous fabric of the world around you, extraneous to what's going on. Don't be so concerned with yourself and your problems. Watch the scenery around us: the mountains in the distance, or the riverbed, or the desert. Sorcerers do that and then nothing counts except what their eyes can absorb. In this way they unburden themselves of everything superfluous.

sorcerers never say things idly. I am most careful about what I say to you or to anybody else. The difference between you and me is that I don't have any time at all, and I act accordingly. You, on the other hand, believe that you have all the time in the world, and you act accordingly. The end result of our individual behaviors is that I measure everything I do and say, and you don't.

You're looking for a sorcerer's medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part. You want results&endash;one potion and you're cured.

sorcerers face things in a different way. Since they don't have any time to spare, they give themselves fully to what's in front of them. Your turmoil is the result of your lack of sobriety.

As for your friend, you didn't have the sobriety to thank him properly. That happens to every one of us. We never express what we feel, and when we want to, it's too late, because we have run out of time. It's not only your friend who ran out of time, you, too, ran out of it. You should have thanked him profusely. But the moment when you should have thanked him, you were angry with him&endash;you were judging him, he was nasty to you, whatever. And then you postponed seeing him. In reality, what you did was to postpone thanking him. Now you're stuck with a ghost on your tail. You'll never be able to pay what you owe him.

Your friend knew that he was dying. Now you say that the weight of my words is too much for your shoulders, that you want to leave, to be in the city and get lost in its noise. You are having a taste of infinity. I know it, because I have been in your shoes. You want to run away, to plunge into something human, warm, contradictory, stupid, who cares? You want to forget the death of your friend. But infinity won't let you. It has gripped you in its merciless clutches. The only thing you can do is to keep the memory of your friend fresh, to keep it alive for the rest of your life and perhaps even beyond. Sorcerers express, in this fashion, the thanks that they can no longer voice. You may think it is a silly way, but that's the best sorcerers can do.

Sadness, for sorcerers, is not personal. It is not quite sadness. It's a wave of energy that comes from the depths of the cosmos, and hits sorcerers when they are receptive, when they are like radios, capable of catching radio waves. The sorcerers of olden times, who gave us the entire format of sorcery, believed that there is sadness in the universe, as a force, a condition, like light, like intent, and that this perennial force acts especially on sorcerers because they no longer have any defensive shields. They cannot hide behind their friends or their studies. They cannot hide behind love, or hatred, or happiness, or misery. They can't hide behind anything.

The condition of sorcerers is that sadness, for them, is abstract. It doesn't come from coveting or lacking something, or from self-importance. It doesn't come from me. It comes from infinity. The sadness you feel for not thanking your friend is already leaning in that direction.



Inner silence is a peculiar state of being in which thoughts are canceled out and one can function from a level other than that of daily awareness. Inner silence means the suspension of the internal dialogue&endash;the perennial companion of thought&endash;and is therefore a state of profound quietude.

The old sorcerers called it inner silence because it is a state in which perception doesn't depend on the senses. What is at work during inner silence is another faculty that man has, the faculty that makes him a magical being, the very faculty that has been curtailed, not by man himself but by some extraneous influence.

Inner silence is the stand from which everything stems in sorcerer. In other words, everything we do leads to that stand, which, like everything else in the world of sorcerers, doesn't reveal itself unless something gigantic shakes us.

The sorcerers of ancient Mexico devised endless ways to shake themselves or other sorcery practitioners at their foundations in order to reach that coveted state of inner silence. They considered the most far-fetched acts, which may seem totally unrelated to the pursuit of inner silence, such as, for instance, jumping into waterfalls or spending nights hanging upside down from the top branch of a tree, to be the key points that brought it into being.

Inner silence is accrued, accumulated. I've guided you to construct a core of inner silence in yourself, and then add to it, second by second, on every occasion you practice it. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico discovered that each individual has a different threshold of inner silence in terms of time, meaning that inner silence must be kept by each one of us for the length of time of our specific threshold before it can work.

Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What the old sorcerers were after was the final, dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence. Some very talented practitioners need only a few minutes of silence to reach that coveted goal. Others, less talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of complete quietude, before they reach the desired result. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called stopping the world, the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it's always been.

This is the moment when sorcerers return to the true nature of man. The old sorcerers also called it total freedom. It is the moment when man the slave becomes man the free being, capable of feats of perception that defy our linear imagination.

Inner silence is the avenue that leads to a true suspension of judgment&endash;to a moment when sensory data emanation from the universe at large ceases to be interpreted by the senses; a moment when cognition ceases to be the force which, through usage and repetition, decides the nature of the world.

sorcerers need a breaking point for the workings of inner silence to set in. The breaking point is like the mortar that a mason puts between bricks. It's only when the mortar hardens that the loose bricks become a structure.

From the beginning of our association I have drilled into you the value, the necessity, of inner silence. You must do your best to follow my suggestions by accumulating inner silence second by second. You have no means to measure the effect of this accumulation, nor do you have any means to judge whether or not you have reached any threshold. Simply aim doggedly at accruing it. The act of accumulating it is a challenge in itself.

Every sorcerer I know, male or female, sooner or later arrives at a breaking point in their lives. Not a mental breakdown or anything like that. Mental breakdowns are for persons who indulge in themselves. What I mean is that at a given moment the continuity of their lives has to break in order for inner silence to set in and become an active part of their structures.

It's very, very important that you yourself deliberately arrive at that breaking point, or that you create it artificially, and intelligently.

Your breaking point is to discontinue your live as you know it. You have done everything I've told you, dutifully and accurately. If you are talented, you never show it. That seems to be your style. You're not slow, but you act as if you were. You're very sure of yourself, but you act as if you were insecure. You're not timid, and yet you act as if you were afraid of people. Everything you do points at one single spot: you need to break all that, ruthlessly.

I think everything boils down to one act: you must leave your friends. You must say good-bye to them, for good. It's not possible for you to continue on the warrior's path carrying your personal history with you, and unless you discontinue your way of life, I won't be able to go ahead with my instruction.

Your friends are your family, they are your points of reference. Therefore, they have to go. Sorcerers have only one point of reference: infinity.
You must simply leave, leave any way you can.

You have never been alone in your life. This is the time to do it. I don't want your body to die physically. I want your person to die. The two are very different affairs. In essence, your person has very little to do with your body. Your person is your mind, and believe you me, your mind is not yours.

I'll tell you about that subject someday, but not while you're cushioned by your friends.

The criteria that indicates that a sorcerer is dead is when it makes no difference to him whether he has company or whether he is alone. The day you don't covet the company of your friends, whom you use as shields, that's the day that your person has died.



I ran away from the sorcerers' world once, and I had to nearly die to realize my stupidity. The important issue is to arrive at a breaking point, in whatever way, so that inner silence will become real for you.

You have no time to lose. For infinity, the only worthwhile enterprise of a warrior is freedom. Any other enterprise is fraudulent.

Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

The end of an era is an accurate description of a process that shamans go through in dismantling the structure of the world they know in order to replace it with another way of understanding the world around them. I've endeavored, from the very instant we met, to introduce you to the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico.

The world of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico is different from ours, not in a shallow way, but different in the way in which the process of cognition is arranged. In our world our cognition requires the interpretation of sensory data. The universe is composed of an infinite number of energy fields that exist in the universe at large as luminous filaments. Those luminous filaments act on man as an organism. The response of the organism is to turn those energy fields into sensory data. Sensory data is then interpreted, and that interpretation becomes our cognitive system.

The end of an era means that the units of a foreign cognition are beginning to take hold. The units of your normal cognition, no matter how pleasant and rewarding they are for you, are beginning to fade. A grave moment in the life of a man!



Don't admire people from afar. That is the surest way to create mythological beings. Get close to them, talk to them, see what they are like as people. Test them. If their behavior is the result of their conviction that they are a being who is going to die, then everything they do, no matter how strange, must be premeditated and final. If what they say turns out to be just words, they're not worth a hoot.

Human beings are beings that are going to die. Sorcerers firmly maintain that the only way to have a grip on our world, and on what we do in it, is by fully accepting that we are beings on the way to dying. Without this basic acceptance, our lives, our doings, and the world in which we live are unmanageable affairs.

The acceptance of this is far-reaching. However, it's not the mere acceptance that does the trick. We have to embody that acceptance and live it all the way through. Sorcerers throughout the ages have said that the view of our death is the most sobering view that exists. What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, it that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality, We behave as if we were never going to die&endash;an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it: the sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our minds.

sorcerers don't admire people in a vacuum. They talk to them; they get to know them. They establish points of reference. They compare.

sorcerers view any kind of activity with people, no matter how minute or unimportant, as a battlefield. In that battlefield, sorcerers performed their best magic, their best effort. The trick to being at ease in such situations is to face our opponents openly. Abhorrent are the timid souls who shy away from interaction to the point where even though they interact, they merely infer or deduce, in terms of their own psychological states, what is going on without actually perceiving what is really going on. They interact without ever being part of the interaction.

Always look at the man who is involved in a tug of war with you. Don't just pull the rope; look up and see his eyes. You'll know then that he is a man, just like you. No matter what he's saying, no matter what he's doing, he's shaking in his boots, just like you. A look like that renders the opponent helpless, if only for an instant; deliver your blow then.
When the sorcerers talk about the cognitive world of ancient Mexico they are talking about things for which we have no equivalent in the world of everyday life.

For instance, perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe is a unit of cognition that shamans live by. They see how energy flows, and they follow its flow. If its flow is obstructed, they move away to do something entirely different. Shamans see lines in the universe. Their art, or their job, is to choose the line that will take them, perception-wise, to regions that have no name. You can say that shamans react immediately to the lines of the universe. They see human beings as luminous balls, and they search in them for their flow of energy. Naturally, they react instantly to this sight. It's part of their cognition.

The practicalities that scientists are interested in are conducive to building more and more complex machines. They are not the practicalities that changed an individual's life course from within. They are not geared to reaching the vastness of the universe as a personal, experiential affair. The stupendous machines in existence, or those in the making are cultural affairs, the attainment of which has to be enjoyed vicariously, even by the creators of those machines themselves. The only reward for them is monetary.

Perhaps you can recall what I said to you about one of our biggest flaws as average human beings. The big flaw I am talking about is something you ought to bear in mind every second of your existence. For me, it's the issue of issues, which I will repeat to you over and over until it comes out of your ears.

We are beings on our way to dying. We are not immortal, but we behave as if we were. This is the flaw that brings us down as individuals and will bring us down as a species someday.

The sorcerers' advantage over their average fellow men is that sorcerers know that they are beings on their way to dying and they don't let themselves deviate from that knowledge. An enormous effort must be employed in order to elicit and maintain this knowledge as a total certainty.

Why is it so hard for us to admit something that is so truthful? It's really not man's fault. Someday, I'll tell you more about the forces that drive a man to act like an XXX.

Many of us make sense when we talk because we are prepared to use words accurately. But most of us are not prepared to take ourselves seriously as men who are going to die. Being immortal, we wouldn't know how to do that. It makes no difference what complex machines scientists can build. The machines can in no way help anyone face the unavoidable appointment: the appointment with infinity.

The nagual Julian used to tell me about the conquering generals of ancient Rome. When they would return home victorious, gigantic parades were staged to honor them. Riding with them was always a slave whose job was to whisper in their ear that all fame and glory is but transitory.

If we are victorious in any way, we don't have anyone to whisper in our ear that our victories are fleeting. Sorcerers, however, do have the upper hand; as beings on their way to dying, they have someone whispering in their ear that everything is ephemeral. The whisperer is death, the infallible advisor, the only one who won't ever tell you a lie.
Warrior-travelers don't leave any debts unpaid. It is time that you square certain indebtedness you have incurred in the course of your life. Not that you will ever pay in full, mind you, but you must make a gesture. You must make a token payment in order to atone, in order to appease infinity.

What you intend to do is something very simple, and yet nearly impossible. You want to cross over the threshold of personal indebtedness and in one sweep be free, in order to proceed. If you cannot cross that threshold, there won't be any point in trying to continue with me.

I have told you over and over that warrior-travelers are pragmatists. They are not involved in sentimentalism, or nostalgia, or melancholy. For warrior-travelers, there is only struggle, and it is a struggle with no end. If you think that you have come here to find peace, or that this is a lull in your life, you're wrong. This task of paying your debts is not guided by any feelings that you know about. It is guided by the purest sentiment, the sentiment of a warrior-traveler who is about to dive into infinity, and just before he does, he turns around to say thank you to those who favored him.

You must face this task with all the gravity it deserves. It is your last stop before infinity swallows you. In fact, unless a warrior-traveler is in a sublime state of being, infinity will not touch him with a ten-foot pole. So, don't spare yourself; don't spare any effort. Push it mercilessly, but elegantly, all the way through.



If you don't have self-importance, you have only feelings.

Do the following simple and direct exercise that could mean the world to you: Remove from your memory of a past interaction with someone any statements that you make to yourself such as 'He said this or that to me, and he yelled at me!' and remain at the level of your feelings. If you hadn't been so self-important, what would you have had as the irreducible residue at that level of your feelings; and is that feeling any less today than it was? Now, embrace them from your silence. Don't be meager, embrace them totally for the last time. But intend that this is the last time on Earth. Intend it from your darkness. If you are worth your salt, when you make your gift to them, you'll sum up your entire life. Acts of this nature make warriors airborne, almost vaporous.

What we usually feel is merely the result of indulging and self-pity. In order to say good-bye and thank you, and really mean it and sustain it, sorcerers have to remake themselves.

Vanquish your self-pity right now. Vanquish the idea that you are hurt; and what you have as the irreducible residue is your feelings. Not in the spirit of renewing anything, or harming anyone, including yourself, but in the spirit of a warrior-traveler whose only virtue is to keep alive the memory of whatever has affected him, whose only way to say thank you and good-bye is by this act of magic: of storing in his silence whatever he has loved.



Don't indulge in being fatigued. Your fatigue is, more than fatigue, a desire not to be bothered. Something in you resents being bothered. But it's most important that you exacerbate that part of you until it breaks down.



There is an enormous premium on time. For sorcerers in general, time is of the essence. The challenge I am faced with is that in a very compact unit of time I must cram into you everything there is to know about sorcery as an abstract proposition, but in order to do that I have to build the necessary space in you.

The premise of sorcerers is that in order to bring something in, there must be a space to put it in. If you are filled to the brim with the items of everyday life, there's no space for anything new. That space must be built. Do you see what I mean? The sorcerers of olden times believed that the recapitulation of your life made the space. It does, and much more, of course.

The way sorcerers perform the recapitulation is very formal. It consists of writing a list of all the people they have met, from the present to the very beginning of their lives. Once they have that list, they take the first person on it and recollect everything they can about that person. And I mean everything, every detail. It's better to recapitulate from the present to the past, because the memories of the present are fresh, and in this manner, the recollection ability is honed. What practitioners do is to recollect and breathe. They inhale slowly and deliberately, fanning the head from right to left, in a barely noticeable swing, and exhale in the same fashion.

The inhalations and exhalations should be natural; if they are too rapid, one enters into something called tiring breaths: breaths that require slower breathing afterward in order to calm down the muscles.

Begin making your list today. Divide it by years, by occupations, arrange it in any order you want to, but make it sequential, with the most recent person first, and end with Mommy and Daddy. And then, remember everything about them. No more ado than that. As you practice, you will realize what you're doing.


Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

I am sure that you have bouts with intent. You intended something and anything that was opposed to it you had to let go. The touch of warrior-travelers is very light, although it is cultivated. The hand of a warrior-traveler begins as a heavy, gripping, iron hand but becomes like the hand of a ghost, a hand made of gossamer. Warrior-travelers leave no marks, no tracks. That's the challenge for warrior-travelers.

The power of the recapitulation is that it stirs up all the garbage of our lives and brings it to the surface.
I'm going to delineate the intricacies of awareness and perception, which are the basis of the recapitulation. I am going to present an arrangement of concepts that you should not take as sorcerers' theories under any conditions, because it is an arrangement formulated by the shamans of ancient Mexico as a result of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. I will present the units of this arrangement to you without any attempt at classifying them or ranking them by any predetermined standard.

I'm not interested in classifications. You have been classifying everything all your life. Now you are going to be forced to stay away from classifications. Classifications have a world of their own. After you begin to classify anything, the classification becomes alive, and it rules you. But since classifications never started as energy-giving affairs, they always remain like dead logs. They are not trees; they are merely logs.

The sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw that the universe at large is composed of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments. They saw zillions of them, wherever they turned to see. They also saw that those energy fields arranged themselves into currents of luminous fibers, streams that are constant, perennial forces in the universe. The current or stream of filaments that is related to the recapitulation was named by those sorcerers the dark sea of awareness, and also the Eagle.

Those sorcerers also found out that every creature in the universe is attached to the dark sea of awareness at a round point of luminosity that was apparent when those creatures were perceived as energy. On that point of luminosity, which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the assemblage point of human beings, zillions of energy fields from the universe at large, in the form of luminous filaments, converge and go through it. These energy fields are converted into sensory data, and the sensory data is then interpreted and perceived as the world we know. What turns the luminous fibers into sensory data is the dark sea of awareness. Sorcerers see this transformation and call it the glow of awareness, a sheen that extends like a halo around the assemblage point. I'm going to make a statement which, in the understanding of sorcerers, is central to comprehending the scope of the recapitulation.

What we call the senses in organisms is nothing but degrees of awareness. If we accept that the senses are the dark sea of awareness, we have to admit that the interpretation that the senses make of sensory data is also the dark sea of awareness. To face the world around us in the terms that we do is the result of the interpretation system of mankind with which every human being is equipped. Every organism in existence has to have an interpretation system that permits it to function in its surrounding.

The old sorcerers saw that at the moment of death, the dark sea of awareness sucked in, so to speak, through the assemblage point, the awareness of living creatures. They also saw that the dark sea of awareness had a moment's, let's say, hesitation when it was faced with sorcerers who had done a recounting of their lives. Unbeknownst to them, some had done it so thoroughly that the dark sea of awareness took their awareness in the form of their life experiences, but didn't touch their life force. Sorcerers had found out a gigantic truth about the forces of the universe: the dark sea of awareness wants only our life experiences, not our life force.

sorcerers believe that as we recapitulate our lives, all the debris, as I told you, comes to the surface. We realize our inconsistencies, our repetitions, but something is us puts up a tremendous resistance to recapitulating. Sorcerers say that the road is free only after a gigantic upheaval, after the appearance on our screen of the memory of an event that shakes our foundations with its terrifying clarity of detail. It's the event that drags us to the actual moment that we lived it. Sorcerers call that event the usher, because from then on every event we touch on is relived, not merely remembered.

Walking is always something that precipitates memories. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed that everything we live we store as a sensation on the backs of the legs. They considered the backs of the legs to be the warehouse of man's personal history.

Walking will have you ready to begin this sorcerers' maneuver of finding an usher: an event in your life that you will remember with such clarity that it will serve as a spotlight to illuminate everything else in your recapitulation with the same, or comparable, clarity. Do what sorcerers call recapitulating pieces of a puzzle. Something will lead you to remember the event that will serve as your usher. Give it your best shot; do your best.



To recount events is magical for sorcerers. It isn't just telling stories. It is seeing the underlying fabric of events. This is the reason recounting is so important and vast.

Warrior-travelers roll with the punches. They go wherever the impulse may take them. The power of warrior-travelers is to be alert, to get maximum effect from minimal impulse. And above all, their power lies in not interfering. Events have a force, a gravity of their own, and travelers are just travelers. Everything around them is for their eyes alone. In this fashion, travelers construct the meaning of every situation, without ever asking how it happened this way or that way.

Today, you may remember an event that sums up your total life. We are always faced with a situation that is the same as one that we never resolved. Infinity always puts us in this terrible position of having to choose. We want infinity, but at the same time, we want to run away from it. You want to tell me to go and jump in a lake, but at the same time you are compelled to stay. It would be infinitely easier for you to just be compelled to stay.



Something in you will begin to collapse for sure. It has been collapsing all along, but it repairs itself very quickly every time its supports fail. I've told you already, we have two minds, and only one of them is truly ours. There is a secret option to the recapitulation. Just like I told you that there is a secret option to dying, an option that only sorcerers take. In the case of dying, the secret option is that human beings could retain their life force and relinquish only their awareness, the product of their lives. In the case of the recapitulation, the secret option that only sorcerers take is to choose to enhance their true minds.

Any haunting memory of your recollections can come only from your true mind. The other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model: economy strength, one size fits all. But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake now is the advent of a disintegrating force. But not a force that is disintegrating you&endash;I don't mean it that way. It is disintegrating what the sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in every other human being. The effect of the force that is descending on you, which is disintegrating the foreign installation, is that it pulls sorcerers out of their syntax.

I know how difficult it is for you to deal with this facet of your life. Every sorcerer that I know has gone through it. The males going through it suffer infinitely more damage than the females. I suppose it's the condition of women to be more durable. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico acting as a group, tried their best to buttress the impact of this disintegrating force. In our day, we have no means of acting as a group so we must brace ourselves to face in solitude a force that will sweep us away from language, for there is no way to describe adequately what is going on.

Sorcerers face the unknown in the most common incidents one can imagine. When they are confronted with it, and cannot interpret what they are perceiving, they have to rely on an outside source for direction. I've called that source infinity, or the voice of the spirit. If sorcerers don't try to be rational about what can't be rationalized, the spirit unerringly tells them what's what.

Infinity is a force that has a voice and is conscious of itself. Consequently, I have prepared you to be ready to listen to that voice and act efficiently always, but without antecedents, using as little as possible the railings of the a priori.



Infinity is a conscious force that deliberately intervenes in the lives of sorcerers. You will seek explanations with linear cause and effect. Each of your recollections will become more and more vivid, more and more maddening to you, because as I told you already, you have entered an irreversible process. Your true mind is emerging, waking up from a state of lifelong lethargy.

Infinity is claiming you. Whatever means it uses to point that out to you cannot have any other reason, any other cause, any other value than that. What you should do, however, is to be prepared for the onslaughts of infinity. You must be in a state of continuously bracing yourself for a blow of tremendous magnitude. That is the sane, sober way in which sorcerers face infinity.

Everything you do has to be an act of sorcery. An act free from encroaching expectations, fears of failure, hopes of success. Free from the cult of me; everything you do has to be impromptu, a work of magic where you freely open yourself to the impulses of the infinite.

The sorcerers of my lineage considered that one of the most coveted results of inner silence is a specific interplay of energy, which is always heralded by a strong emotion. Such an interplay manifests itself in terms of hues that are projected on any horizon in the world of everyday life, be it a mountain, the sky, a wall, or simply the palms of the hands. This interplay of hues begins with the appearance of a tenuous brushstroke of lavender on the horizon. In time, this lavender brushstroke starts to expand until it covers the visible horizon, like advancing storm clouds.

A dot of a peculiar, rich, pomegranate red shows up, as if bursting from the lavender clouds. As sorcerers become more disciplined and experienced, the dot of pomegranate expands and finally explodes into thoughts or visions, or in the case of a literate man, into written words; sorcerers either see visions engendered by energy, hear thoughts being voiced as words, or read written words.

There's nothing gentle about sorcerers or sorcery. The first time that infinity descends on you it may be a total takeover of your faculties. Insofar as the speed of your visions is concerned, you yourself will have to learn to adjust it. For some sorcerers, that's the job of a lifetime. Energy may appear to you as if it were being projected onto a movie screen. Whether or not you understand what's projected is another matter. In order to make an accurate interpretation you need experience. My recommendation is that you shouldn't be bashful, and you should begin now. Your true mind is emerging, and it has nothing to do with the mind that is a foreign installation . Let your true mind adjust the speed. Be silent, and don't fret, no matter what happens.

Anyway, infinity chooses. The warrior-traveler simply acquiesces to that choice. But above all, don't be overwhelmed by the event because you cannot describe it. It is an event beyond the syntax of our language.


Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

We can speak a little more clearly now about inner silence. Dreaming is the act of changing the point of attachment with the dark sea of awareness. If you view it in this fashion, it's a very simple concept, and a very simple maneuver. It takes all you have to realize it, but it's not an impossibility, nor is it something surrounded with mystical clouds.

Dreaming is a term that weakens a very powerful act. It makes it sound arbitrary; it gives it a sense of being a fantasy, and this in the only thing it is not. I tried to change the term myself, but it's too ingrained. Maybe someday you could change it yourself, although, as with everything else in sorcery, I am afraid that by the time you could actually do it, you won't give a damn about it because it won't make any difference what it is called anymore.

Dreaming is an art, discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, by means of which ordinary dreams are transformed into bona-fide entrances to other worlds of perception. Dreaming attention, is the capacity to pay a special kind of attention, or to place a special kind of awareness on the elements of an ordinary dream.

Don't set out deliberately to have a desired dream, but fix your attention on the component elements of whatever dream presents itself.

The assemblage point is displaced very naturally during sleep. To see the displacement is a bit difficult because it requires an aggressive mood. Such an aggressive mood was the predilection of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico. Those sorcerers found all the premises of their sorcery by means of this mood

It is a very predatory mood. It's not difficult at all to enter into it, because man is a predator by nature. You could see, aggressively, anybody around you, or perhaps someone far away, while they are asleep; anyone would do for the purpose at hand. What's important is that you arrive at a complete sense of indifference. You are in search of something, and you are out to get it. You're going to go out looking for a person, searching like a feline, like an animal of prey, for someone to descend on.

The difficulty with this technique is the mood. You can't be passive in the act of seeing, for the sight is not something to watch but to act upon.
sorcerers are divided into two groups: one group is dreamers; the other is stalkers. The dreamers are those who have a great facility for displacing the assemblage point. The stalkers are those who have a great facility for maintaining the assemblage point fixed on that new position. Dreamers and stalkers complement each other, and work in pairs, affecting one another with their given proclivities.

The displacement and the fixation of the assemblage point can be realized at will by means of the sorcerers' iron-handed discipline. The sorcerers of our lineage believed that there were at least six hundred points within the luminous sphere that we are, that when reached at will by the assemblage point, can each give us a totally inclusive world; meaning that, if our assemblage point is displaced to any of those points and remains fixed on it, we will perceive a world as inclusive and total as the world of everyday life, but a different world nevertheless.

The art of sorcery is to manipulate the assemblage point and make it change positions at will on the luminous spheres that human beings are. The result of this manipulation is a shift in the point of contact with the dark sea of awareness, which brings as its concomitant a different bundle of zillions of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments that converge on the assemblage point. The consequence of new energy fields converging on the assemblage point is that awareness of a different sort than that which is necessary for perceiving the world of everyday life enters into action, turning the new energy fields into sensory data, sensory data that is interpreted and perceived as a different world because the energy fields that engender it are different from the habitual ones.

An accurate definition of sorcery as a practice would be to say that sorcery is the manipulation of the assemblage point for purposes of changing its focal point of contact with the dark sea of awareness, thus making it possible to perceive other worlds.

The art of the stalkers enters into play after the assemblage point has been displaced. Maintaining the assemblage point fixed in its new position assures sorcerers that they will perceive whatever new world they enter in its absolute completeness, exactly as we do in the world of ordinary affairs. For the sorcerers of our lineage, the world of everyday life is but one fold of a total world consisting of at least six hundred folds.

What we can do from inner silence is very similar to what is done in dreaming when one is asleep. However, when journeying through the dark sea of awareness, there is no interruption of any sort caused by going to sleep, nor is there any attempt whatsoever at controlling one's attention while having a dream. The journey through the dark sea of awareness entails an immediate response. There is an overpowering sensation of the here and now. Some idiotic sorcerers gave the name dreaming-awake to the act of reaching the dark sea of awareness directly, making the term dreaming even more ridiculous.

When one thinks that they have had the dream-fantasy of going to a town of their choice, they have actually placed their assemblage point directly on a specific position on the dark sea of awareness that allows the journey. Then the dark sea of awareness supplies them with whatever is necessary to carry on that journey. There's no way whatsoever to choose that place at will. Sorcerers say that inner silence selects it unerringly. Simple, isn't it?

Choice, for warrior-travelers, is not really the act of choosing, but rather the act of acquiescing elegantly to the solicitations of infinity.

Infinity chooses. The art of the warrior-traveler is to have the ability to move with the slightest insinuation, the art of acquiescing to every command of infinity. For this, a warrior-traveler needs prowess, strength, and above everything else, sobriety. All those three put together give, as a result, elegance!

The universe has no limits, and the possibilities at play in the universe at large are indeed incommensurable. So don't fall prey to the axiom, "I believe only what I see," because it is the bumbest stand one can possibly take.

You must deliberately journey through the dark sea of awareness but you'll never know how this is done. Let's say that inner silence does it, following inexplicable ways, ways that cannot be understood, but only practiced.



You are not unique in your pettiness, It is a condition in which human beings are trapped, a condition that is not even human, but imposed from the outside.

A break in the continuity of time. That is what inner silence does.

The interruption of that flow of continuity that makes the world understandable to us is sorcery. You journey through the dark sea of awareness, you see people as they are, engaged in people's business. And then you see the strand of energy that joins specific lines of human beings. You witness something specific and inexplicable. You understood what people are saying, without knowing their language, and you see the strand of energy that connects human beings to certain other beings, and you select those aspects through an act of intending it. This intending is not something conscious or volitional; this intending is done at a deep level, and is ruled by necessity. You need to become cognizant of some of the possibilities of journeying through the dark sea of awareness, and inner silence guides intent&endash;a perennial force in the universe&endash;to fulfill that need.



You already know that there exists in the universe a perennial force, which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the dark sea of awareness. While they were at the maximum of their perceiving power, they saw something that made them shake in their boots. They saw that the dark sea of awareness is responsible not only for the awareness of organisms, but also for the awareness of entities that don't have an organism.

The old shamans discovered that the entire universe is composed of twin forces, forces that are at the same time opposed and complementary to each other. It is inescapable that our world is a twin world. Its opposite and complementary world is one populated by beings that have awareness, but not an organism. For this reason, the old shamans called them inorganic beings.

I told you that it's our twin world, so it's intimately related to us. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico didn't think like most do in terms of space and time. They thought exclusively in terms of awareness. Two types of awareness coexist without ever impinging on each other, because each type is entirely different from the other. The old shamans faced this problem of coexistence without concerning themselves with time and space. They reasoned that the degree of awareness of organic beings and the degree of awareness of inorganic beings were so different that both could coexist with the most minimal interference.

We can perceive those inorganic beings, sorcerers do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize that they're doing it because they are not conscious of the existence of a twin world. It has never occurred to them that their fantasies have their origin in a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not alone.

The difficulty with your facing things in terms of time and space is that you only notice if something has landed in the space and time at your disposal, which is very limited. Sorcerers, on the other hand, have a vast field on which they can notice if something extraneous has landed. Lots of entities from the universe at large, entities that possess awareness but not an organism, land in the field of awareness of our world, or the field of awareness of its twin world, without an average human being ever noticing them. The entities that land on our field of awareness, or the field of awareness of our twin world, belong to other worlds that exist besides our world and its twin. The universe at large is crammed to the brim with worlds of awareness, organic and inorganic.

Those sorcerers knew when inorganic awareness from other worlds besides our twin world had landed in their field of awareness. As every human being on this earth would do, those shamans made endless classifications of different types of this energy that has awareness. They know them by the general term inorganic beings.

If you think that life is to be aware, then they do have life. I suppose it would be accurate to say that if life can be measured by the intensity, the sharpness, the duration of that awareness, I can sincerely say that they are more alive than you and I.

If you call death the termination of awareness, yes, they die. Their awareness ends. Their death is rather like the death of a human being, and at the same time, it isn't, because the death of human being has a hidden option. It is something like a clause in a legal document, a clause that is written in tiny letters that you can barely see. You have to use a magnifying glass to read it, and yet it's the most important clause of the document.

Death's hidden option is exclusively for sorcerers. They are the only ones who have, to my knowledge, read the fine print. For them, the option is pertinent and functional. For average human beings, death means the termination of their awareness, the end of their organisms. For the inorganic beings, death means the same: the end of their awareness. In both cases, the impact of death is the act of being sucked into the dark sea of awareness. Their individual awareness, loaded with their life experiences, breaks its boundaries, and awareness as energy spills out into the dark sea of awareness
For a sorcerer, death is a unifying factor. Instead of disintegrating the organism, as is ordinarily the case, death unifies it.

Death for a sorcerer terminates the reign of individual moods in the body. The old sorcerers believed it was the dominion of the different parts of the body that ruled the moods and the actions of the total body; parts that become dysfunctional dreg the rest of the body to chaos, such as, for instance, when you yourself get sick from eating junk. In that case, the mood of your stomach affects everything else. Death eradicates the dominion of those individual parts. It unifies their awareness into one single unit.

For sorcerers, death is an act of unification that employs every bit of their energy. You are thinking of death as a corpse in front of you, a body on which decay has settled. For sorcerers, when the act of unification takes place, there is no corpse. There is no decay. Their bodies in their entirety have been turned into energy, energy possessing awareness that is not fragmented. The boundaries that are set up by the organism, boundaries which are broken down by death, are still functioning in the case of sorcerers, although they are no longer visible to the naked eye.

I know that you are dying to ask me if whatever I'm describing is the soul that goes to hell or heaven. No, it is not the soul. What happens to sorcerers, when they pick up that hidden option of death, is that they turn into inorganic beings, very specialized, high-speed inorganic beings, beings capable of stupendous maneuvers of perception. Sorcerers enter then into what the shamans of ancient Mexico called their definitive journey. Infinity becomes their realm of action.

My sobriety as a sorcerer tells me that their awareness will terminate, the way inorganic beings' awareness terminates, but I haven't seen this happen. I have no firsthand knowledge of it. The old sorcerers believed that the awareness of this type of inorganic being would last as long as the earth is alive. The earth is their matrix. As long as it prevails, their awareness continues. To me, this is a most reasonable statement.

You ask if there is a possibility that ghosts and apparitions really exist. Whatever you may call a ghost or an apparition when it is scrutinized by a sorcerer, boils down to one issue&endash;it is possible that any of those ghostlike apparitions may be a conglomeration of energy fields that have awareness, and which we turn into things we know. If that's the case, then the apparitions have energy. Sorcerers call them energy-generating configurations. Or, no energy emanates from them in which case they are phantasmagorical creations, usually of a very strong person&endash;strong in terms of awareness.


Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

The inorganic beings who populate our twin world are considered, by the sorcerers of our lineage, to be our relatives. Those shamans believed that it was futile to make friends with our family members because the demands levied on us for such friendships are always exorbitant. That type of inorganic being, who are our first cousins, communicate with us incessantly, but their communication with us is not at the level of conscious awareness. In other words, we know all about them in a subliminal way, while they know all about us in a deliberate, conscious manner.

The energy from our first cousins is a drag! They are as messed up as we are. Let's say that the organic and inorganic beings of our twin worlds are the children of two sisters who live next door to each other. They are exactly alike although they look different. They cannot help us, and we cannot help them. Perhaps we could join together, and make a fabulous family business corporation, but that hasn't happened. Both branches of the family are extremely touchy and take offense over nothing, a typical relationship between touchy first cousins. The crux of the matter, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed, is that both human beings and inorganic beings from the twin worlds are profound egomaniacs.

Another classification that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico made of the inorganic beings was that of scouts, or explorers; that is, the inorganic beings that come from the depths of the universe, and which are possessors of awareness infinitely sharper and faster than that of human beings. The old sorcerers spent generations polishing their classification schemes, and their conclusions were that certain types of inorganic beings from the category of scouts or explorers, because of their vivaciousness, were akin to man. They could make liaisons and establish a symbiotic relation with men. The old sorcerers called these kinds of inorganic beings the allies.

The crucial mistake of those shamans with reference to this type of inorganic being was to attribute human characteristics to that impersonal energy and to believe that they could harness it. They thought of those blocks of energy as their helpers, and they relied on them without comprehending that, being pure energy, they didn't have the power to sustain any effort.
I've told you all there is to know about inorganic beings. The only way you can put this to the test is by means of direct experience.



Energy is the irreducible residue of everything. As far as we are concerned, to see energy directly is the bottom line for a human being. Perhaps there are other things beyond that, but they are not available to us.

The inorganic beings essence is impersonal energy aware of itself.

You must realize that it is our cognition, which is in essence an interpretation system, that curtails our resources. Our interpretation system is what tells us what the parameters of our possibilities are, and since we have been using that system of interpretation all our lives, we cannot possibly dare to go against its dictums.

The energy of those inorganic beings pushes us and we interpret that push as we may, depending on our mood. The most sober thing to do, for a sorcerer, is to relegate those entities to an abstract level. The fewer interpretations sorcerers make, the better off they are.

From now on, whenever you are confronted with the strange sight of an apparition, hold your ground and gaze at it with an inflexible attitude. If it is an inorganic being, your interpretation of it will fall off like dead leaves. If nothing happens, it is a worthless aberration of your mind, which is not your mind anyway.



In the course of this training you may find yourself in a total quandary as to how to behave in the world. The world around you will not have changed. It definitely would stem from a flaw in you. My influence and all the activities stemming from my practices, into which I have engaged you so deeply, may take their toll on you and may even cause in you a serious incapacity to deal with your fellow men. The flaw would be your compulsion to measure everyone using me as a yardstick.

I am a being who lives my life professionally, in every aspect of the term, meaning that every one of my acts, no matter how insignificant, counts. You are surrounded by people who believe that they are immortal beings, who contradict themselves every step of the way; they are beings whose acts could never be accounted for. You are accustomed to the Nagual's unalterable behavior, to his total lack of self-importance, and to the unfathomable scope of his intellect; very few of the people you know are even aware that there exists another pattern of behavior that fosters those qualities. Most of them know only the behavioral pattern of self-reflection, which renders men weak and contorted. Consequently you may find yourself having a very difficult time.

I've recommended to you that warrior-travelers should have a romance with knowledge, in whatever form knowledge is presented.

Warrior-travelers are sorcerer who, by being warriors, travel in the dark sea of awareness. Human beings are travelers of the dark sea of awareness, and this Earth is but a station on their journey; for extraneous reasons, the travelers have interrupted their voyage. Human beings are caught in a sort of eddy, a current that goes in circles, giving them the impression of moving while they are, in essence, stationary. Sorcerers are the only opponents of whatever force keeps human beings prisoners, and by means of their discipline sorcerers brake loose from its grip and continue their journey of awareness.



What is important is the exercise of discipline. It doesn't make any difference, for example, how good a reader a student is, and how many wonderful books he can read. What's important is that he has the discipline to read what he doesn't want to read. The crux of the sorcerers' exercise of going to school is in what you refuse, not in what you accept.


Warrior-travelers don't complain, they take everything that infinity hands them as a challenge. A challenge is a challenge. It isn't personal. It cannot be taken as a curse or a blessing. A warrior-traveler either wins the challenge or the challenge demolishes him. It's more exciting to win, so win!

You say that that's easy for me to say but that to carry it out is another matter, and that your tribulations are insoluble because they originate in the incapacity of your fellow men to be consistent.

It's not the people around you who are at fault, they cannot help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone.

You may not understand what I'm talking about. If you're not conscious of your desire to judge them you are in even worse shape. This is the flaw of warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand.

You admit to me that your complaints are petty in the extreme. You say that you are confronted with daily events, events that have the nefarious quality of wearing down all your resolve, and that you are embarrassed to relate to me the incidents that weigh heavily on your mind.
Come on, Out with it! Don't have any secrets from me. I'm an empty tube. Whatever you say to me will be projected out into infinity.

You say that you have only complaints and that you are exactly like all the people you know. That there's no way to talk to a single one of them without hearing an overt or a covert complaint.

In the ups and downs of daily living, you win, and you lose, and you don't know when you win or when you lose. This is the price one pays for living under the rule of self-reflection. There is nothing that I can say to you, and there's nothing that you can say to yourself. I could only recommend that you not feel guilty because you fail, but that you strive to end the dominion of self-reflection.



Every human being has the potential to see energy directly. Every human being already sees energy directly but doesn't know it.



Anything is possible if one departs from inner silence. The clear view, or losing the human form is the time when human pettiness vanishes, as if it had been a patch of fog looming over us, a fog that slowly clears up and dissipates.
The sorcerers' world is not an immutable world like the world of everyday life, where they tell you that once you reach a goal, you remain a winner forever. In the sorcerers' world, to arrive at a certain goal means that you have simply acquired the most efficient tools to continue your fight, which, by the way, will never end.



The energy body is a conglomerate of energy fields, the mirror image of the conglomerate of energy fields that makes up the physical body when it is seen as energy that flows in the universe. It is smaller, more compact, and of heavier appearance than the luminous sphere of the physical body. The body and the energy body are two conglomerates of energy fields compressed together by some strange agglutinizing force. The force that binds that group of energy fields together is according to the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, the most mysterious force in the universe. My personal estimation is that it is the pure essence of the entire cosmos, the sum total of everything there is.

The physical body and the energy body are the only counterbalanced energy configurations in our realm as human beings.

By means of discipline it is possible for anyone to bring the energy body closer to the physical body. Normally, the distance between the two is enormous. Once the energy body is within a certain range, which varies for each of us individually, anyone, through discipline, can forge it into the exact replica of their physical body&endash;that is to say, a three-dimensional, solid being. Hence the sorcerers' idea of the other or the double. By the same token, through the same processes of discipline, anyone can forge their three-dimensional, solid physical body to be a perfect replica of their energy body&endash;that is to say, an ethereal change of energy invisible to the human eye, as all energy is.

I've not described a mythical proposition. There is nothing mythical about sorcerers. Sorcerers are practical beings, and what they describe is always something quite sober and down-to-earth. The difficulty in understanding what sorcerers do is that they proceed from a different cognitive system.

The energy body is of key importance in whatever has been taking place in your life. It is an energetic fact that your energy body, instead of moving away form you, as it normally happens, is approaching you with great speed. It means that something is going to knock the daylights out of you. A tremendous degree of control is going to come into your life, but not your control, the energy body's control.

There are scores of outside forces controlling you at this moment. The control that I am referring to is something outside the domain of language. It is your control and at the same time it is not. It cannot be classified, but it can certainly be experienced. And above all, it can certainly be manipulated. Remember this: It can be manipulated, to your total advantage, of course, which again, is not your advantage, but the energy body's advantage. However, the energy body is you, so we could go on forever like dogs biting their own tails, trying to describe this. Language is inadequate. All these experiences are beyond syntax.

If you pay close attention to the darkness of the foliage without focusing your eyes, but sort of look at it from the corner of your eye, you will see a fleeting shadow crossing your field of vision.

Early night is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do. It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don't stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow, fleeting black shadows all over the place. That's the universe at large, incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you will see them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for life. We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so.

It's pitch black around us, but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.

You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.

There is an explanation which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them.

Well, you haven't heart it all yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I'm going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I'm going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you're caught. Not because I'm holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!

I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.

In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver&endash;stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.

I know that even though you have never suffered hunger you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.

sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. That glowing coat of awareness is what the predators consume, and when a human being reaches adulthood, all that is left of that glowing coat of awareness is a narrow fringe that goes from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permits mankind to continue living, but only barely.

To my knowledge, man is the only species that has the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the predator.

This narrow fringe of awareness is the epicenter of self-reflection, where man is irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order to them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.

There's nothing that you and I can do about it. All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the crap out of you. And not so much because they don't believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there's an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence.

Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point, do something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see.

You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees, that's pretty good. I'd like you to see them inside this room. You're not seeing anything. You're just merely catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that.

The sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.

What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.

This predator, which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are, I think as children we do see it and decide it's so horrific that we don't want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.

The only alternative left for mankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don't mean harsh routines. I don't mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you're blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.

sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer. The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don't have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.

If the predators don't eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while, it'll keep on glowing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.

The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times was to burden the flyers' mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed the flyers' mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind's foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the flyers' mind becomes routine, until one day it flees permanently. A sad day indeed! That's the day when you have to rely on your own devices, which are nearly zero. There's no one to tell you what to do. There's no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you're accustomed to.

My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer's life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.

Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end, so, through their discipline, sorcerers vanquish the foreign installation.

I am going to give the flyers' mind, which you carry inside you, one more jolt. I am going to reveal to you one of the most extraordinary secrets of sorcery. I am going to describe to you a finding that took sorcerers thousands of years to verify and consolidate.

The flyers' mind flees forever when a sorcerer succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together as a conglomerate of energy fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers' mind flees in defeat. And that's exactly what you are going to do: hold on to the energy that binds you together.

You are fearing the wrath of God, aren't you? Rest assured, that's not your fear. It's the flyers' fear, because it knows that you will do exactly as I'm telling you.

Don't worry, I know for a fact that those attacks wear off very quickly. The flyers' mind has no concentration whatsoever. You're being torn by an internal struggle. Down in the depths of you, you know that you are incapable of refusing the agreement that an indispensable part of you, your glowing coat of awareness, is going to serve as an incomprehensible source of nourishment to, naturally, incomprehensible entities. And another part of you will stand against this situation with all its might.

The sorcerers' revolution is that they refuse to honor agreements in which they did not participate. Nobody ever asked me if I would consent to be eaten by beings of a different kind of awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like themselves, and that's the end of the story.

The more you think about it, and the more you talk to and observe yourself and your fellow men, the more intense will be the conviction that something has rendered us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that doesn't have the self as its focal point. Your concern, as well as the concern of everyone you know or talk to, is the self.

Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see. The flyers' mind has not left you, it has been seriously injured. It's trying its best to rearrange its relationship with you. But something in you is severed forever. The flyer knows that. The real danger is that the flyers' mind may win by getting you tired and forcing you to quit by playing the contradiction between what it says and what I say.

You see, the flyers' mind has no competitors, when it proposed something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you've done something of worth. The flyers' mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is pure nonsense, and then the same mind will agree with its own proposition, "Yes, of course, it is nonsense," you will say. That's the way they overcome us.

The flyers are an essential part of the universe and they must be taken as what they really are&endash;awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us.

We are energetic probes created by the universe, and it's because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers. They cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe allows us to continue.

It's time for another kind of maneuver. I want to propose a weird idea to you. I have to stress that it's a weird idea that will find endless resistance in you. I will tell you beforehand that you won't accept it easily. But the fact that it's weird should not be a deterrent. Your mind is always open to inquiry, isn't that so?

The weird idea is that every human being on this earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the same feelings. They seem to respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those reactions seem to be sort of fogged up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are exactly the same reactions that besiege every human being on Earth. I would like you to become curious about this and see if you could formally account for such homogeneity.

A task for you one day will be to see the predator. It is one of the most mysterious things of sorcerer, something that goes beyond language, beyond explanations. The mystery of sorcerer must be cushioned in the mundane. It must stem from nothing, and go back again to nothing. That's the art of warrior-travelers: to go through the eye of a needle unnoticed. Someday, when you are ready, sit and brace yourself by propping your back against something. Cross your legs and enter into inner silence. Enter into inner silence, but don't fall asleep. This won't be a journey through the dark sea of awareness, it will be seeing from inner silence.

When you can see from inner silence, the predator may appear as a gigantic shadow, leaping in the air and then landing with a silent thud. They are really heavy. Don't be frightened. Keep your inner silence and it will move away.

The predator is not something benevolent. It is enormously heavy, gross, indifferent. You can feel its disregard for us. Doubtless, it has crushed us ages ago, making us weak, vulnerable, and docile. You have your unbending intent, not to let them eat you.


Love Always
mudra

The Active side of Reality

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_active_side_of_infinity.pdf

Soon you will be entering into infinity by the force or your personal power. Once you have entered into infinity, you can't depend on anyone to bring you back. Your decision is needed then. Only you can decide whether or not to return. I must also warn you that few warrior-travelers survive this type of encounter with infinity. Infinity is enticing beyond belief. A warrior-traveler finds that to return to the world of disorder, compulsion, noise, and pain is a most unappealing affair. You must know that your decision to stay or to return is not a matter of a reasonable choice, but a matter of intending it.

If you choose not to return, you will disappear as if the earth has swallowed you. But if you choose to come back, you must tighten your belt and wait like a true warrior-traveler until you task, whatever it might be, is finished, either in success or in defeat.

Today you are going to fulfill a concrete task, the last link of a long chain; and you must do it in your utmost mood of reason.

The backbone of a warrior-traveler is humbleness and efficiency, acting without expecting anything and withstanding anything that lies ahead of him.

We are alone. That's our condition, but to die alone is not to die in loneliness.

The great issue with us males is our frailty. When our awareness begins to grow, it grows like a column, right on the midpoint of our luminous being, from the ground up. That column has to reach a considerable height before we can rely on it. At this time in your life, as a sorcerer, you easily lose your grip on your new awareness. When you do that, you forget everything you have done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path because your consciousness shifts back to the awareness of your everyday life. I have explained to you that the task of every male sorcerer is to reclaim everything he has done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path while he was on new levels of awareness. The problem of every male sorcerer is that he easily forgets because his awareness loses its new level and falls to the ground at the drop of a hat.

Don't worry about verbalizations. You'll verbalize all you want in due time. Today, you must act on your inner silence, on what you know without knowing. You know to perfection what you have to do, but this knowledge is not quite formulated in your thoughts yet.

It is obligatory that a warrior-traveler say good-bye to all the people he leaves behind. He must say his good-bye in a loud and clear voice so that his shout and his feelings will remain forever recorded.

Warrior-travelers can't owe anything to anyone. Warrior-travelers pay elegantly, generously, and with unequaled ease every favor, every service rendered to them. In this manner, they get rid of the burden of being indebted.



You have recapitulated your life thoroughly, but you are far from being free of indebtedness. You cannot confuse solitude with solitariness. Solitude for me is psychological, of the mind. Solitariness is physical. One is debilitating, the other comforting.



We must have something we could die for before we can think that we have something to live for. If you have nothing to die for, how can you claim that you have something to live for? The two go hand in hand, with death at the helm.



Loneliness is inadmissible in a warrior. Warrior-travelers can count on one being on which they can focus all their love, all their care: this marvelous Earth, the mother, the matrix, the epicenter of everything we are and everything we do; the very being to which all of us return; the very being that allows warrior-travelers to leave on their definitive journey.

Let's put it this way. In order for me to leave this world and face the unknown, I need all my strength, all my forbearance, all my luck; but above all, I need every bit of a warrior-traveler's guts of steel. To remain behind and fare like a warrior-traveler, you need everything of what I myself need. To venture out there, the way we are going to, is no joking matter, but neither is it to stay behind.

We will never be together again. You don't need my help anymore; and I don't want to offer it to you, because if you are worth your salt as a warrior-traveler, you'll spit in my eye for offering it to you. Beyond a certain point, the only joy of a warrior-traveler is his aloneness. I wouldn't like you to try to help me, either. Once I leave, I am gone. Don't think about me, for I won't think about you. If you are a worthy warrior-traveler, be impeccable! Take care of your world. Honer it; guard it with your life!

Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level of awareness you find yourself to be.



A male sorcerer who is the nagual perforce has to be fragmented because of the bulk of his energetic mass. Each fragment lives a specific range of a total scope of activity, and the events that he experiences in each fragment have to be joined someday to give a complete, conscious picture of everything that has taken place in his total life.

That unification takes years to accomplish. I have been told of cases of naguals who never reached the total scope of their activities in a conscious manner and lived fragmented.

The world of sorcerers is not an immutable world, where the world is final, unchanging, it's a world of eternal fluctuation where nothing should be taken for granted.

How could all this be possible? Who are we really? Certainly not the people all of us have been led to believe we are.

A sorcerer weeps when he is fragmented. When he's complete, he's taken by a shiver that has the potential, because it is so intense, of ending his life.

There is nothing to mourn, nothing to feel sad about. Nothing matters. All of us are warrior-travelers, and all of us have been swallowed by infinity.

We are warrior-travelers. Only energetic facts are meaningful for us. All the rest are trimmings that have no importance at all.

Our normal cognition requires a linear explanation in order to be satisfied, and linear explanations are not possible. That is the crux of the interruption of continuity. That interruption is sorcerer. In order for you to stay behind, you need all your strength, all your forbearance, and above all, a warrior-traveler's guts of steal.


Love Always
mudra

The Wheel of Time

Link to the full PDF of the book

http://thetoltecpath.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the_wheel_of_time.pdf

Introduction
By Carlos Castaneda

This series of specially selected quotations was gathered from the first eight books that I wrote about the world of the shamans of ancient Mexico. The quotations were taken directly from the explanations given to me as an anthropologist by my teacher and mentor don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman from Mexico. He belonged to a lineage of shamans that traced its origins all the way back to the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times.

In the most effective manner he could afford, don Juan Matus ushered me into his World, which was, naturally, the world of those shamans of antiquity. Don Juan was, therefore, in a key position. He knew about the existence of another realm of reality, a realm which was neither illusory, nor the product of outbursts of fantasy. For don Juan and the rest of his shaman-companions - there were fifteen of them - the world of the shamans of antiquity was as real and as pragmatic as anything could be.

This work started as a very simple attempt to collect a series of vignettes, sayings, and ideas from the lore of those shamans that would be interesting to read and think about. But once the work was in progress, an unforeseeable twist of direction took place: I realized that the quotations by themselves were imbued with an extraordinary impetus. They revealed a covert train of thought that had never been evident to me before. They were pointing out the direction that don Juan's explanations had taken over the thirteen years in which he guided me as an apprentice.

Better than any type of conceptualization, the quotations revealed an unsuspected and unwavering line of action that don Juan had followed in order to promote and facilitate my entrance into his world. It became something beyond a speculation to me that if don Juan had followed that line, this must have also been the way in which his own teacher had propelled him into the world of shamans.

Don Juan Matus's line of action was his intentional attempt to pull me into what he said was another cognitive system. By cognitive system, he meant the standard definition of cognition: "the processes responsible for the awareness of everyday life, processes which include memory, experience, perception, and the expert use of any given syntax." Don Juan's claim was that the shamans of ancient Mexico had indeed a different cognitive system than the average man's.
Following all the logic and reasoning available to me as a student of the social sciences. I had to reject his statement. I pointed out to don Juan time and time again that whatever he was claiming was preposterous. It was, to me, an intellectual aberration at best.

It took thirteen years of hard labor on his part and on mine to discombobulate my trust in the normal system of cognition that makes the world around us comprehensible to us. This maneuver pushed me into a very strange state: a state of quasi-distrust in the otherwise implicit acceptance of the cognitive processes of our daily world.

After thirteen years of heavy onslaughts, I realized, against my very will, that don Juan Matus was indeed proceeding from another point of view. Therefore, the shamans of ancient Mexico must have had another system of cognition. To admit this burned my very being. I felt like a traitor. I felt as if I were voicing the most
horrendous heresy.

When he felt that he had overcome my worst resistance, don Juan drove his point as far and as deep as he could into me, and I had to admit, without reservations, that in the world of shamans, shaman practitioners judged the world from points of view which were indescribable to our conceptualization devices. For instance, they perceived energy as it flowed freely in the universe, energy free from the bindings of socialization and syntax, pure vibratory energy. They called this act seeing.

Don Juan's prime objective was to help me to perceive energy as it flows in the universe. In the world of shamans, to perceive energy in such a manner is the first mandatory step toward a more engulfing, freer view of a different cognitive system. In order to elicit a seeing response in me. don Juan utilized other foreign units of cognition. One of the most important units, he called the recapitulation, which consisted of a systematic scrutiny of one's life, segment by segment, an examination made not in the light of criticism or finding flaw, but in the light of an effort to understand one's life, and to change its course. Don Juan's claim was that once any practitioner has viewed his life in the detached manner that the recapitulation requires, there's no way to go back to the same life.

To see energy as it flows in the universe meant, to don Juan, the capacity to see a human being as a luminous egg or luminous ball of energy, and to be able to distinguish, in that luminous ball of energy, certain features shared by men in common, such as a point of brilliance in the already brilliant luminous ball of energy. The claim of shamans was that it was on that point of brilliance, which those shamans called the assemblage point, that perception was assembled. They could extend this thought logically to mean that it was on that point of brilliance that our cognition of the world was manufactured. Odd as it may seem, don Juan Matus was right, in the sense that this is exactly what happens.

The perception of shamans, therefore, was subject to a different process than the perception of average men. Shamans claimed that perceiving energy directly led them to what they called energetic facts. By energetic fact, they meant a view obtained by seeing energy directly that led to conclusions that were final and irreducible; they couldn't be tampered with by speculation, or by trying to fit them into our standard system of interpretation.

Don Juan said that for the shamans of his lineage, it was an energetic fact that the world around us is defined by the processes of cognition, and those processes are not unalterable: they are not givens. They are a matter of training, a matter of practicality and usage. This thought was extended further, to another energetic fact: the processes of standard cognition are the product of our upbringing, no more than that.

Don Juan Matus knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that whatever he was telling me about the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico was a reality. Don Juan was among other things, a nagual, which meant, for shaman practitioners, a natural leader, a person who was capable of viewing energetic facts without detriment to his well-being. He was, therefore, capacitated to lead his fellow men successfully into avenues of thought and perception impossible to describe.

Considering all the facts that don Juan had taught me about his cognitive world, I arrived at the conclusion, which was the conclusion that he himself shared, that the most important unit of such a world was the idea of intent. For the shamans of ancient Mexico, Intent was a force they could visualize when they saw energy as it flows in the universe. They considered it an all-pervasive force that intervenedin every aspect of time and space. It was the impetus behind everything; but what was of inconceivable value to those shamans was that intent - a pure abstraction - was intimately attached to man. Man could always manipulate it. The shamans of ancient Mexico realized that the only way to affect this force was through impeccable behavior. Only the most disciplined practitioner could attempt this feat.

Another stupendous unit of that strange cognitive system was the shamans' understanding and usage of the concepts of time and space. For them, time and space were not the same phenomena that form part of our lives by virtue of being an integral part of our normal cognitive system. For the average man, the standard definition of time is "a nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future." And space is defined as "the infinite extension of the three-dimensional field in which stars and galaxies exist; the universe."

For the shamans of ancient Mexico, time was something like a thought; a thought thought by something unrealizable in its magnitude. The logical argument for them was that man, being part of that thought which was thought by forces inconceivable to his mentality, still retained a small percentage of that thought; a percentage which under certain circumstances of extraordinary discipline could be redeemed.

Space was, for those shamans, an abstract realm of activity. They called it infinity, and referred to it as the sum total of all the endeavors of living creatures. Space was, for them, more accessible, something almost down-to-earth. It was as if they had a bigger percentage in the abstract formulation of space. According to the versions given by don Juan, the shamans of ancient Mexico never regarded time and space as obscure abstracts the way we do. For them, both time and space, although incomprehensible in their formulations, were an integral part of man.
Those shamans had another cognitive unit called the wheel of time. The way they explained the wheel of time was to say that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow was infinite, and there were infinite numbers of them. Living creatures were compulsorily made, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into one furrow alone meant to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.

A warrior's final aim is to focus, through an act of profound discipline, his unwavering attention on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be free from the spellbinding force of gazing into only one of those furrows means that warriors can look in either direction: as time retreats or as it advances on them.

Viewed in this manner, the wheel of time is an overpowering influence which reaches through the life of the warrior and beyond, as is the case with the quotations of this book. They seem to be strung together by a coil that has a life of its own. That coil, explained by the cognition of shamans, is the wheel of time.

Under the impact of the wheel of time, the aim of this book became, then, something that had not been part of the original plan. The quotations became the ruling factor, by themselves and in themselves, and the drive imposed on me by them was one of staying as close as I possibly could to the spirit in which the quotations were given. They were given in the spirit of frugality and ultimate directness.

Another thing that I tried unsuccessfully to do with the quotations was to organize them into a series of categories that would make reading them easier. However, the categorization of the quotations became untenable. There was no way of setting arbitrary categories of meaning that suited me personally to something so amorphous, so vast as a total cognitive world.
The only thing that could be done was to follow the quotations, and let them create a sketch of the skeletal form of the thoughts and feelings that the shamans of ancient Mexico had about life, death, the universe, energy. They are reflections of how those shamans understood not only the universe, but the processes of living and coexisting in our world. And more important yet. they point out the possibility of handling two systems of cognition at once without any detriment to the self.

Love Always
mudra