A MINDFIRE ARCHIVE INTERVIEW:
THESE TWO INTERVIEWS WITH CARLOS CASTANEDA'S SORCERESSES TAISHA ABELAR AND FLORINDA DONNER ARE FLOATING AROUND ON THE INTERNET IN AN INCOMPLETE AND MISLEADING FORM I REPRODUCE THEM HERE SO THAT YOU CAN READ THEM AS THEY WERE ORIGINALLY INTENDED..
There is another more compelling reason for posting these two interviews. There is extraordinary and highly valuable spiritual knowledge in these two conversations. The kind of knowledge that remains deeply relevant.
Mindfire: The sorcerer’s crossing
TAISHA ABELAR
in conversation with
ALEXANDER BLAIR- EWART
In the long years since Carlos Castaneda first informed the world of the wonders of American aboriginal spirit knowledge, many recognized that a tradition of great significance had began to reveal itself to the world.
Over the years Castaneda has progressively shown the all-engulfing worldview of the Toltec's in its reformed state as a work of spiritual art, shaped by the new seers who have survived the devastating encounter with European colonial civilization. Taisha Abelar, author of The Sorcerer’s Crossing: A Woman’s Journey (1992), is one of the new seers whose designation “stalker” balances the world of the “dreamer.
A L E X A N D E R B LA I R - E WA R T: Can I get you to talk about the complex subject of “stalking"?
TA I S H A. A B E LA R: There are two ways of approaching this. First, a general definition is that a stalker is someone who has made an art out of being unobtrusive. That is, he puts himself in the background, and there’s a certain training that is involved in order to become unobtrusive. Also, stalking is designed to give the sorcerer or the practitioner a jolt, and by a jolt we mean a push or a slight burst of energy so that the “assemblage point” shifts ever so slightly.
The stalkers are aiming to move or shift the assemblage point, and through that to change their perception of the world. Perception, of course, can be changed through dreaming, but stalkers do it while they’re awake. The way sorcerers perceive the world is that they say that everything we see while we are awake in this reality is a question of the position of the assemblage point.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Castaneda’s books, and you know what the assemblage point is, but let me just describe it again. It is the focused awareness point of luminosity on the luminous cocoon (also understood as the aura).
We believe that the human being’s energetic body is a mass of fibers of light of infinite number, and each one of those is a specific awareness. They’re not the light of, say, electricity, but they’re actually the light of awareness.
On the luminous egg shape that makes up the energetic body there is a point of extra luminosity where the concentration of the person, his awareness, is assembled and that point of luminosity is about the size of a golf ball, from the point of view of the “seer” who sees the person’s luminous being. But it can change size; it can also change position on the luminous body.
And where it is located determines what is perceived, because there’s a matching of the fibers that are lit up within the luminous body with the fibers that are out in the universe at large. Sorcerers maintain that the universe as a whole is composed of an infinite number of energetic fibers, some of which are perceivable, and others which are absolutely beyond our capacities as human beings to perceive.
So when the position of this assemblage point, this lighted-up area on the luminous being, matches what is outside, then perception takes place.
A B E: Would this apply to everyone?
TA I S H A A: We all have our assemblage point at pretty much the same place, because as an infant is born, by virtue of the fact that he is going to be a human being, a social person, he has to match the location of his assemblage point to that of other human beings in the world so that he can interact with them, perceive the same world.
Because our assemblage points are in the same place, we can have language, we can talk about trees and cars and solid walls and floors, and we can have a spatial and temporal continuity; we know that there was a yesterday, there’ll be a tomorrow. All of that has to do with the position of the assemblage point. Time, our conception of everything we know, is determined by where that heightened point of concentrated awareness is located.
And if by some anomaly it is not in the place where the human assemblage point ought to be, then these people are either sorcerers, (and we’ll talk about that in a moment), or they’re a candidate for mental illness. You find these latter kinds of people in asylums because their assemblage points are not fixed at the position where other human beings have theirs.
Therefore they don’t have this intersubjectivity in terms of perception and they don’t have agreement as to what constitutes reality. There’s a biological mandate that says that all human beings should have their assemblage point at this particular position so they can be what we call human.
Animals have it at different places, and that’s what fixes their species of animal. Trees have their assemblage point at a certain place in their luminous shell, and that makes them trees.
A B E: So could we also call the assemblage point the position of collective persona reality agreement?
TA I S H A A: Exactly. It’s our persona, it’s our person. Now this person, sorcerers say, is not all that we are humanly capable of being. We can be more than just a social person. In order to be more than what society, or what our birthright, has given us, we have to move or shift the place of the assemblage point. We have to move it out of the position where it is stuck.
So, not only is the assemblage point capable of moving elsewhere, but when it does, other luminous intelligent fibers of awareness are lit up and matched with the universe, and therefore other realities are constituted. These other realities are as real and solid as the one we are in now. And it’s all based on the fixation of the assemblage point. If it moves—and it does.
IF it moves in dreams, by itself—we call that dream reality, to be separated c from the waking state. We acknowledge that there are other realms of experience, but we always refer to them from the position of everyday reality.
Sorcerers don’t do that. They say that you can move the everyday reality while you’re awake. You don’t have to do dreaming. Dreaming, of course, is the control of the movement of the assemblage point in sleep, in dreams, and the fixation of it elsewhere.
A B E: And you can do it without being insane.
TA I S H A A: Absolutely.
A B E: That in itself is an enormously revolutionary statement.
TA I S HA A: Yes, because our agreement says that crazy people out there have hallucinations, see monsters and what not, and that they’re somehow deficient from the point of view of the social order. Yes, they’re deficient in the sense that they have not stabilized their assemblage point where everyone else has.
Somehow their assemblage point is in flux, it’s constantly shifting. They’re crazy because they’re hallucinating, and they don’t have the energy to maintain their assemblage point at any one given position. If they did have that energy and the control, they would be sorcerers, because they would be stalking that new position.
ABE: Yes, I see that.
TA I S H A A: So what this all really boils down to is a question of having the energy to perceive more than what we are allowed to perceive given the fact that we are born as human beings. Our social order doesn’t allow us to venture into other realms except through insanity or dreams, which it doesn’t really count as real anyway.
So those are two avenues that are open, but they’re not really viable avenues. Now, sorcerers say you can move the assemblage point, provided you have enough energy to fix it at another position, because you don’t want to end up crazy and absolutely lost in these worlds upon worlds that they maintain exist out there like the layers of an onion.
So what is needed is control, energy, and fluidity, and what they call “unbending intent.” Fluidity enables one to shift the assemblage point, to move away from the given spot that makes us persons, gives us a sense of self. And that’s where self-importance has to go out the window because as long as we maintain our allegiance to the self, what we’re really doing is maintaining our allegiance to that particular position of the assemblage point.
We’ll never be able to perceive anything beyond what is the taken-for-granted reality. We’re allowed only to perceive what is permissible by our given position within the social order. So we need fluidity to move the assemblage point elsewhere, and then we need the stability, the concentration, the energy to fix it on another position. And this is what sorcery really is.
A B E: Does your essential being hood, your essential humanity, survive this transition into worlds of alternative reality?
TA I S H A A: Your luminosity and your awareness, which is the assemblage point, stays intact elsewhere. But it’s not human. It doesn’t have to be human, and there’s the error that we don’t want to make. No, you leave everything that’s human behind.
A B E,: Most people would not really want to do that.
TA I S H A A: Exactly, no, they don’t. There’s a lot of interest in our work, in Carlos Castaneda and don Juan, but they don’t really want it. What they have is an intellectual curiosity about the possibility that there is something else out there, because we all have that as human beings.
A B E : If we acknowledge that this sorcerer’s path is really for the very few people who will actually walk it, why then did you publish your book?
TA IS HA A: One reason is that Carlos Castaneda and Florinda Donner, myself and Carol Tiggs, are the last of don Juan’s line. They didn’t know at the time we were being trained that Carlos was going to be the next Nagual. And they trained us in dreaming and stalking and many of the techniques we’re talking about.
But then it turned out that Carlos is not at all a four- sided Nagual. A Nagual is one who has four energetic compartments. But he’s a three-sided Nagual, meaning his mission is different. One of the major differences is that the Nagual woman who traditionally goes with the previous Naguals group—in this case Carol Tiggs—first went with don Juan, but then one day she came back.
The Nagual Carlos’s intent or Florinda Donner’s and mine, literally held her back in this reality. In other words, her assemblage point shifted back so that she is now with us. Now that’s absolutely unheard of in all the generations of Naguals and seers in don Juan’s lineage. And because Carol came back she gave us that energy to actually write about our experiences.
A B E: What does this unprecedented change mean?
TA I S H A A: The designs of the Spirit are absolutely different from what they were for don Juan. His group followed the rules, they had a certain training procedure. Although they were abstract, they were in this sense very concrete.
They were practitioners of the things that were handed to them by the previous group, and they handed down these things to us. But what we actually keep are only the most abstract methods such as the recapitulation, the idea of impeccability, the idea of doing or not doing, which amounts to the total negation of practices or procedures.
The Nagual woman Carol Tiggs gave us this extra energy to bring these things out into the ordinary reality. Otherwise, they would forever have remained ideas only. And because we practice them, we are the ideas.
There’s no difference between what we say and what we do, and that’s why we are able to move our assemblage points, because they’re not only abstractions. Our bodies actually embody these things;
Yes, there are millions of people reading these books and any one of them could practice and succeed in finding the way. And the reason I say this is because you don’t need a teacher. Being abstract, the way all of us are in this last generation, we can see that all you need is a minimal chance, an idea.
So if a person does the recapitulation, the not doing exercises, etc. , the Spirit or the Intent itself will guide them and teach them because that’s already built into the exercises and into the books.
A B E: What are some of the methods by which one can foster and cultivate stalking energy?
TA I S H A A: There are techniques or devices that sorcerers use, and they include “not doing” techniques and “recapitulation,” which is the fundamental technique of enabling the assemblage point to move off its normal position. There are also methods such as “losing personal history,” which also enables one to move away from what our fixed idea of the self is.
But losing self-importance is the key because, as I said, as long as we have this idea of a self, a strong self, an ego, a personality with which we interact with others in terms of intersubjective agreements, then we are held. You see, the strength of the world of the social order is so gigantic because of the agreement of billions of people holding that assemblage point at that particular spot.
A B E So, at a really crass level, you could call it “peer pressure,” and at a universal level you could call it “the spirit of the times.”
TA I S H A. A: Yes. At a very individual level you could call it “self-indulging,” or one’s idea of the self, or bowing to peer pressure. And then at a larger cultural level there’s language, the family, fundamental barriers you have to break through—individual, peers, family, culture—and then some gigantic collective unconscious that holds everything in place.
A sorcerer has to jump out of all of that onto a different level. And then even behind this collective unconscious you have the biological mandate that we’re really trapped in this “ape mold.” We have our biological drive, we need to be social, gregarious beings because we’re social animals.
Solitude is something that frightens people to death. I mean, that’s one of the killers of neophytes, the idea that they have to have a solitary journey, a solitary quest, because the recapitulation is done in absolute solitude. People think, well, they can meditate together, do things together, as long as they still have a group consensus.
But you see, it’s that very group consensus that prevents the subtle movement of the assemblage point. So you do have to get beyond that force, and you have to have the energy, and the energy comes from all the things that I mentioned before, including impeccability, and also using your death. You give a death, because you’ll end up giving a death anyway.
If you follow the sorcerer’s path, if you wish to move away from the self, from that given position of the assemblage point and venture into the unknown, then it is like dying. The self has to capitulate, and it’s a horrendous feeling, emotionally, physically. It is like, you know, man against the universe.
A B E: And that death is protracted, isn’t it? I mean, it doesn’t happen in one miraculous moment. It is something that progressively occurs. It could take years. When do you know you’ve really done it? When do you know that you’ve finally died to that old self, or become what is called in the literature a “formless warrior”?
TA I S H A. A: You have to be formless. You have to not have a self. First of all, like you say, it’s not a sudden process, although it can be. The movement of the assemblage point can be in some anomalous cases sudden. A great shock all of a sudden moves it elsewhere and a different reality is constituted in front of the person.
But that usually doesn’t last because it comes from an external force, and it usually shifts back. If it does last, the person won’t know what’s happened, and those are the cases for the asylums, the institutions. So, a gradual change is best because you have control.
A B E: I take it that drugs, power plants, can also induce this?
TA I S H A. A: Yes, exactly. Under the influence of psychotropic drugs you see different worlds, and the assemblage point is absolutely blasted out of its position. But you are not doing that, you don’t have the control. Again it’s an external agent. The sheer presence of a Nagual moves the assemblage point, too.
His impeccability can move the assemblage point in his students. He doesn’t have to give them the slap on the back or anything like that. Sheer energy can cause apprentices to assemble different worlds. But you see, there again, whenever we were in the presence of don Juan and his people, their force made us do fantastic things.
Those things I write about in my book. But when I came back to Los Angeles and they weren’t around, there I was with the force of the social order on top of me, and my assemblage point moved back into the “first attention.”
The tragedy is that unless you move your assemblage point back to the places where it was under the influence of don Juan and his people, you barely remember what you did or what those worlds consisted of. They’re like dreams. You have to store the energy to allow it to move into heightened awareness, so that you can maintain it there on your own and venture. And then you-move it further. So it’s a gradual shift.
A B E: How do you store or keep the energy to move your assemblage point?
TA I S H A A: The “recapitulation” is the major method. I just want to mention that another way of moving it is sheer impeccability, by intending the movement. Intent is really a line, a force that connects one directly with the energy out there at large. And because it has intelligence, a guiding order of sorts, they call it the Spirit, the Eagle.
But when man links his personal energy to the energy out there through impeccable acts, the Spirit itself moves the assemblage point for him, because in a sense he has relinquished control. He has relinquished himself, his ego. He has let go and is allowing the guiding force of Intent to move him.
And all of these sorcery activities that I mentioned, the recapitulation, all the not doings, have the sorcerer’s intent already linked to them. So a person just has to do these things and let the Intent take him, and his assemblage point will move, because these are ancient techniques that have been handed down for generations within don Juan’s lineage, and they already have that link to the Spirit inherent in them.
We already know of the necessity of storing energy, because that’s the only way to get out of the mold that we are born into as humans. We always like to talk in terms of the human ape, because it really puts man in a proper perspective.
A B E: I accept the ape metaphor very well. But the theory of evolution has never managed to explain to me how come we have these other capacities in us.
TA I S H A A: What sorcerers say is that we are continually evolving. Therefore we should not limit ourselves to that ape-like position of the assemblage point. Within the luminosity of human beings is the potential for an infinite number of other possibilities. Yes, from the point of view of evolution we have sort of stopped, encrusted ourselves at the current position.
But the force of evolution continues. Sorcerers are beings who at one time were human beings. But they have evolved to something else. They are no longer human beings in the strict sense of the word, because they can move their assemblage point elsewhere and maintain those positions, and actually change their form. They don’t have to maintain their human form.
They can move downwards, shift down to the animal level, so they can change shape into animals, into crows, into birds, or any other animal or entity. Or they can shift into inconceivable realms that have no physical counterparts, but are abstractions.
A B E: The literature speaks of two kinds of seers, old seers and new seers. Can you talk about the difference between the two?
TA I S H A A: There is a distinction between the old sorcerers and the new sorcerers in don Juan’s lineage, between his teacher the Nagual Julian and don Juan’s apprentice, the new Nagual Carlos Castaneda.
These latter are modern-day sorcerers, and what they’re interested in is this evolution towards the abstract, away from any of these downward shifts that are so easy to do in dreaming when the assemblage point by itself finds these positions.
And for that reason all of the people associated with Carlos Castaneda are university graduates, educated, clear thinkers (hopefully). I mean, that is one of our tasks. An actual sorcery task is to be able to think coherently, to think clearly, to see where we are as human beings, and to see what our potential is.
We try to get to this level of actual truth by using reason in its strictest sense, not in the shoddy sense of reasoning something and then acting in some other totally contradictory fashion, which is what human beings do.
A B E: One meets people who have abandoned reason and logic, and the natural functions of the mind, and who end up in a kind of twilight zone of not really being able to derive any clarity about anything.
TAI S HA A: Yes, and that was one of the major pitfalls of the old sorcerers, who emphasized dreaming techniques to shift the assemblage point, and who did not have the stalker’s technique to balance that out. It’s a question of balance, because unless you have the sobriety and the control, what’s the point of moving the assemblage point?
You move it and you get lost in those realms and you’re never able to return to this level. Stalkers have that control. In stalking you create the reality wherever you are by creating structure, by imputing order, by reasoning.
You can reason even if you’re in a totally different realm. You can still maintain your awareness. You try to bring order to the inconceivable perceptions, the chaos that is the universe, and the prerequisite for shifting into different realities is the ability to summon the energy needed to keep your awareness intact while in them.
A B E: Can you talk in a more specific way about the “recapitulation”?
TA I S H A A: Recapitulation is a very ancient technique handed down by the old sorcerers in don Juan’s lineage, but it was sort of forgotten by them because they were more interested in power, in dominating people. The furthest thing from their mind was the idea of losing self-importance.
But the new sorcerers revived this technique and we now consider it really the most fundamental technique in sorcery of all the techniques we learned for moving the assemblage point. And you don’t have to be a “sorcerer’s apprentice” or anything like that.
Anyone can do it. It is a technique for erasing the idea of self in terms of all the memories and associations with people that one had during one’s lifetime.
When one interacts with people energy is exchanged, and through deep emotions it’s left in the world and in people. So the strategy is to regain that energy so that you can have, it all with you now, in the present. Why leave it floating around in some mysterious past that holds you fixed in the place where you now are?
What you do is you find a place of quiet and solitude, an enclosed space preferably—the sorcerers used to have their recapitulation boxes where they would bury themselves, or go into caves—a place that encloses the energetic body so there is some pressure put on the luminous self.
But before you sit you make out a list of everyone you’ve ever encountered throughout your life—your family, associates, etc. This takes some doing, some remembering, which in itself loosens the assemblage point. And you work backwards in time.
Actually, ‘you make two lists. You start with your sexual experiences because sorcerers say that’s the fundamental energy that’s lost out there, and if you retrieve that, then that will give you the boost to do your other people.
So you have your two lists and you sit in your recapitulation box and start the breathing. This third element, the breath, is very important because the breathing is what disentangles the energy. Our interaction with others is done with our energy body and the breath moves the luminous fibers.
You start by putting your hand on your right shoulder, and when you have visualized perfectly the scenes of people and places in your mind, then you place your chin on your right shoulder and inhale, turning your head to your left shoulder. You then exhale moving your head back to your right shoulder, and then bring your head to center. It’s like a sweeping of the scene.
You sweep the whole scene, person, place, whatever, and you pull back whatever was left out there on the inhale, and exhale whatever of that other person’s energy was left in you. So you detach yourself from that particular encounter, and you do this with everything.
After you’ve done this for your whole life, you’ve detached pretty much from your remembered past. This is not meant to be a kind of self-analysis, but you can’t help seeing in the way you act and behave and what is expected of you a pattern forming. And with the breath you break that pattern. So what you essentially want to do is move into formless, pattern-less behavior, which is the way a sorcerer acts. He’s absolutely fluid.
Which brings us back to stalking. A stalker is someone who makes himself unobtrusive. He has no pattern, nothing to assert, no point to make, no demands, no desires. And all of this is eliminated through the recapitulation.
A B E: There is also something called “stopping the internal dialogue” in this tradition. Can you talk about that?
TA I S H A A: The way these patterns are ingrained in us is through the internal dialogue, in which we keep repeating certain things to ourselves like, “Oh, I’m no good,” or “They don’t like me,” or “I have to be like this to prove myself,” this constant flow of thoughts or reaffirmations of the self.
The sorcerers say that you need to put a stop to that continual reinforcement of the self, which fixes that position of the assemblage point.
When you begin to elongate these moments of silence by shutting off the internal dialogue, then you have the power that comes from sheer silence. That in itself will allow the assemblage point to move from your everyday state into heightened awareness.
So, by doing these techniques the seer within us gets to break out. There are lots of techniques like these in Carlos Castaneda’s books, for example, certain gazing techniques. You can do a match technique where you just hold up the flame for, a moment, gaze at it, then douse it, but not completely.
Then turn it upside down and hold it in your left hand and look at the flame as it burns the bottom of the match. This quiets the mind. You can do any sort of minor meditation techniques to accomplish this, but I wouldn’t recommend that you go heavily into Oriental meditation techniques because you’re already doing the recapitulation and you don’t want to get fixed into any form
All we’re doing now as abstract sorcerers is a minimum of technique so that we can get away from the self. We don’t want to get into the area of ego enhancement, i.e., “now we’re meditators,” etc.
A B E: So you don’t want to build up an image of yourself, even as a spiritual person?
TA I S H A A: No, you don’t want to add to that, and when you look at how much you have to get rid of, you’ll be kind of careful not to add more. [ And that’s where impeccability comes in. You want to maintain your daily behavior on an impeccable level, and that means you just do your humble best. We’re no longer interested in reasserting the ego or the self, or defending the self.
The brunt of our daily energy really goes into defense of the self because it’s attacked left and right, and the mind rallies like lightning to try to patch up the ego’s wounds. But the sorcerer lets it go. Don Juan had a good adage.
He said, “Eliminate the self and fear nothing.” If you don’t have a self, there’s absolutely nothing to fear, because all of our fears and disappointments come from our idea of the self, whether positive or negative.
So the only thing that the modern sorcerer or stalker is really dependent on is something so abstract that he calls it the Spirit, the Unknown. By getting rid of the self, they give the self to the Eagle as a token. They give themselves in a symbolic death, and in that sense the Eagle, they say, allows the impeccable warrior to escape.
A B E: And the old seers were not able to do this?
TAI S HA A: That’s right. When the old sorcerers did dreaming, they had very heavy ego and so they got lost and trapped in different levels of dreaming. They had their ideas of power and they became obsessive, so they weren’t able to move out again, because they were too heavy.
The modern-day stalker is not obsessed with anything. He treats the whole world as “controlled folly,” which means that there’s order, there’s structure, but it’s not to be taken seriously because there are other orders, other structures, an infinite number of layers to this onion of reality, and he can go elsewhere.
But wherever he is, he creates his order and his structure, and when the Spirit moves him, something moves the assemblage point and he moves elsewhere. He’s impeccable in his dreams and in this everyday reality if and when he’s here.
A B E: Would you say it’s a major accomplishment on the part of the would be seer when they reach a point where they are no longer concerned with whether or not they are liked?
TA I S H A A: Yes, that’s a major accomplishment. The sorcerers have a theory about the energy you were given at your own conception. If the parents liked each other, sexually I mean, if they had a very grand time, a great sexual experience, when that child is conceived it will have this great burst of energy.
And he may not care whether or not people like him because he has this intrinsic sense of energetic well-being. But, if one of the parents is bored—don Juan always called them “bored conceptions”—or if they just went through the motions of having sex because they were married and it was the thing to do on Friday night, then that child will come into the world with a real disadvantage.
He will always feel that something is missing. He wants his peers to like him, he wants mama to like him, and she may not even like him at all.
Sorcerers can see how energetic a luminous being is. They can see how the energy moves. In some people it’s very sluggish, stagnant, and of course that expresses itself in a very meek or low-level zest for life. In others it’s strong. Everything to them is a challenge. They dominate people naturally, have this charismatic, almost mesmeric effect on others, and they are not as needy as other people.
A B E: Of course, then that person who has all that energy will attract all kinds of needy people who want to suck onBB it.
TA I S H A A: The sorcerers say that the self is really a metaphorical dagger that we stab ourselves with. But it’s all right as long as we bleed in company. As long as there are others bleeding with us we’re okay. [ And I have to include myself in that category because absolutely I was not a product of a zestful union. And you see these demons in the recapitulation, which is never really done, because it has to be tried and tested in the everyday world. You can't just escape into the desert and do it, and then feel good and that’s the end of it. Get back with your mother, your father. What do they do to you for you to react like the little girl, the little boy that wants mommy to do his laundry, to take care of his tummy? We still have those feelings. So, recapitulation just by itself is not enough. Stalkers stalk the Self, and so when they’re with people in the world, they’re constantly stalking themselves and seeing what’s happening.
Copyright © A. Blair-Ewart 1995-2003.
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