FLORINDA DONNER in conversation with ALEXANDER BLAIR- EWART

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.

FLORINDA DONNER
in conversation with
ALEXANDER BLAIR- EWART

Florinda Donner is a longtime colleague and fellow dream traveler of Carlos Castaneda. She is the acclaimed author of Shabono (1982), The Witch’s Dream (1985), and Being-in-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer’s World (1991). Anthropologist and sorceress, Florinda Donner lives in Los Angeles, Cal and Sonora, Mexico.

A L E X A N D E R B LA I R - E WART: Can you talk about this living myth of the sorcerer’s world that you were drawn into?

FLORINDA DONNER: The myth of the Nagual is a myth, but a myth that is being relived over and over again. You see, the myth that exists is the myth that there is the Nagual and that he has his troop of apprentices and sorcerers.

I was an apprentice of Castaneda who was an apprentice of don Juan. I am one of the “sisters” who were actually of the women of Florinda, and she gave me her name. So, in that sense,’ it is a living myth.

A B E: The myth of the Nagual is that there is an unbroken lineage from the ancient Toltec’s right down to modern times. Can I get you to talk about what the pattern of the myth actually is?

Florinda. D: Well, there is no pattern to the myth. That’s why the whole thing is so baffling and so difficult. When I first got involved with these people my main quest, my main aberration, which I came to call it later, was that I wanted to have some rules and regulations about what the hell it is I had to do.

There were none. There is no blueprint, because each new group has to find their own way to deal with this idea of trying to break the barriers of perception. The only way we can break the barriers of perception, according to don Juan, is to cultivate energy. Our energy is already deployed in the world to present the idea of self—what we are and who we want to be perceived as.

Don Juan says 90% of our energy is deployed in doing that and therefore nothing new can come to us. There’s nothing open to us, because no matter how “egoless” we are, or we pretend to be, or we want to believe we are, we are not.

Even with, let’s say, “Enlightened” people, or gurus that I have met—at one time Carlos Castaneda was- going around trying to meet gurus—the ego of those people was gigantic in terms of how they wanted to be perceived in the world. And that’s, according to don Juan, exactly what kills us. Nothing is open to us anymore.

A B E: A real Nagual, a real seer, wouldn’t care how the world perceives them, particularly, would they?

Florinda. D: No, they don’t. But they still have to fight it. Castaneda has been at this for thirty years. I’ve been at this for over twenty years, and it’s ongoing; it doesn’t stop.

A B E: You use the language of the warrior. What’s the nature of the battle? Who are you fighting?

Florinda. D: The self. It’s not even the self; it’s an idea of the self, because if we really get below the surface, we don’t know what it is. But it is possible to curtail this idea, this bombastic idea we have of the self. Because whether it’s a negative idea or a positive idea doesn’t really matter. The energy employed to see that idea is the same.

A B E: There’s tremendous emphasis in this tradition on overcoming what is called self-importance.

Florinda. D: That’s the main battle, to shut off our internal dialogue. Because even if we are alone, we are still constantly talking to ourselves. That internal dialogue never stops.

And what does the internal dialogue do? It always justifies itself, no matter what. We replay things, events, what we could have said or could have done what we feel or don’t feel. The emphasis is always on “me.” We’re constantly spouting this mantra—”me... me .me”—silently or verbally.

A B E: So, an opening emerges when.

Florinda. D: When that dialogue shuts off. Automatically. We don’t have to do anything. And the reason people reject Castaneda as not true is because it’s too simple. But its sheer simplicity makes it the hardest thing there is to do. There are about six people in our world engaged in the same / pursuit. And the difficulty we all have is in totally shutting off that internal dialogue.

It’s fine if we’re not threatened. But when certain buttons are pushed, our reactions are so ingrained in its that it’s so easy to fall back on automatic pilot. You see, there’s one great exercise that don Juan prescribes—the idea of rec

apitulation. The idea is that you recapitulate your life, basically. But it’s not a psychological recapitulation. You want to bring back to yourself the energy you left in all the interactions you’ve had with people throughout your life. You start from the present moment and you go backwards in time. But if you really do a good recapitulation, you discover, by the time you are three or four years old, that you have learned all your reactions already.

Then we become more sophisticated, we can hide them better. But basically the pattern has already been established of how we’re going to interact with the world and with our fellow human beings.

A B E: So the human being travels the path of the “Tonal,” or the world of the social person. But this other world, this other opening, is something that has apparently always been there.

Florinda. D: Yes, it’s always there. Nobody really wants to tap into it, or people think they want to tap into it, but as don Juan pointed out, the seeker is usually involved in something false, because a person who seeks already knows what he’s seeking.

The disappointment that so many people who are “seekers” have with Castaneda is they have already made up their mind how things should be. So they’re not open.

A B E: My version of that is that I’m interested in self-realization, not self improvement. I’m not concerned with whether or not what I turn out to be in the process of realization is something nice and spiritual and acceptable, because it’s going to contain elements of madness as well as everything else.

Florinda. D: Exactly.

A B E: But this is a very deeply disturbing idea for most people.

Florinda. D: It is, definitely. You see, we believe in this idea that we are basically energetic beings. Don Juan said everything hinges on how much energy we have. Even to fight the idea f the self requires an enormous amount of energy. And we move always to the easiest path. We go back to what we know, even we who have been involved in this for so long.

It would be a lot easier just to say, “Oh, to hell with it, I’m just going to indulge a little bit.” But the thing is, that little bit of indulging would plunge you right back to point zero again.

A B E: Except for one thing that we both know, Florinda, which is this: that once you pass a certain point within yourself, if you have reached that silence, I believe, even for one moment, if it’s real...

Florinda. D: . . . you can’t stop it. Exactly. But to reach this moment of silence you need the energy. You can reach what don Juan calls this momentary pause, this cubic centimeter of chance, and you can “stop the world” immediately. If a critical mass of people could arrive at that feeling or at that knowledge, we could really change things in the world.

The reason nothing can change is because we’re not willing to change ourselves, whether because of our attachment to political dogma, economic or social issues, whatever. What the hell is the whole thing with the rain forest and the environment at the moment? flow can we expect someone to change if we’re not willing to change ourselves?

The change is phony; it is a restructuring or replaying of the pieces. Basically we are predatory beings, you see. That hasn’t changed in us. We could use that predatory energy to alter our course, but we’re not willing to change ourselves.

A B E: Now, in the myth, the individual seer and/or Nagual is selected by providence, the unknown, the ineffable.

Florinda. D : Yes. Carlos has been “tapped” energetically. In terms of energetic configuration some people are energetically different. They call Carlos a three-pronged Nagual; don Juan was a four-pronged Nagual. So what does that really entail? Basically, they have more energy than the rest of the group, and that’s something very curious.

Why the hell him, or why, for instance, are always the men Naguals? We have women Naguals in the lineage, but the men have more energy, the ones that have been selected so far at least. They’re not better.

There were people in don Juan’s world who were infinitely more spiritual, better prepared, men of greater knowledge, it didn’t make any difference. It is not that Carlos is more or less than somebody else. It’s just that he has that energy to lead.

A B E: And he can give of that energy, too, give somebody a boost.

Florinda. D: We draw from that energy, yes. But it is more that he has the energy, if nothing else, not to become what the world presents. For instance,—the worldly goodies that have been presented to Castaneda are unbelievable.

But he has never wavered from his path. If I had been put in that position for that many years, I could not honestly say that I would have been so impeccable. And you see, for that you need energy. That’s when you need whoever is then the leader of the group to point out that way. If somebody else who didn’t have the energy had been the Nagual, he would have succumbed.

A B E: Can a Nagual succumb and then recover?

Florinda. D: No. There is no chance.

ABE: Why is that?

Florinda. D: Go back to the myth. The Eagle flies in a straight line. It doesn’t turn around.

A B E: So, the Nagual works in different ways to fulfill the unfolding of the myth.

Florinda. D: Don Juan had more people behind him. Energetically he had a larger mass, so he could practically pluck you out and put you someplace. Carlos will not do that. For him, whoever he is working with— there are six of us—it’s a matter of decision. That’s all. Our decision is all that counts, nothing else; He will not cajole us; he will not beg; he will not tell us what to do.

We have to know. Having been exposed to this for so long, having been with don Juan, any way that we can try to walk on this path has to be enough for him.

A B E: Different Naguals work in different ways. I’ve heard Castaneda described as the Nagual of stalkers.

Florinda. D: Yes, but I would say... I don’t know.., he’s a dreamer.

A B E: Yes, that emerges, too. Could you talk about dreaming?

Florinda. D: What is this idea of dreaming, dreaming and being awake? It’s a different state. It’s not that you’re zonked out. No, you are totally normal and coherent, but something in you plays energetically on a different level.

A B E: There is something in your eyes, too, something in your eyes that is able to learn to look at two worlds simultaneously.

Florinda. D: Exactly. And again the idea is that you have collapsed the barrier of perception. Whatever we perceive has been defined for us by the social order. Intellectually we are willing to accept that perception is culturally defined, but we will not accept it on any other level.

But it’s absurd, because it exists on another level. And I can only say, because I’ve been involved with these people—and certainly I’m also in the world—that it is possible to see on those two levels, and to be totally coherent and impeccable

A B E: In the book Being-in-Dreaming you talk about how women are actually enslaved by their attachment to the sexuality of men.

Florinda. D: Definitely. First of all, to me, one of the most shocking things which I denied and refused to believe for quite some time was this idea of the fog created by sexual intercourse.

They went even further to explain that basically what goes on is that when we have sexual intercourse, when the male ejaculates, not only do we get the semen, but in that moment of energetic outburst, what really happens is that what don Juan calls ‘ worms” or filaments are passed into the woman. And those filaments stay in the body for a long time.

From a biological point of view, those filaments ensure that the male returns to the same female and takes care of the offspring. The male will, at a totally energetic level, recognize that it is his offspring by their filaments.

A B E: What is the exchange of energy in sexual intercourse?

Florinda. D: She feeds the man energetically. Don Juan believes that women are the cornerstone for perpetuating the human species. The bulk of that energy comes from the woman, not only to gestate, to give birth, and nourish her offspring, but also to ensure the male’s place in the whole process.

A B E: So, the woman is enslaved, then, by this fog. How does she release herself?

Florinda. D: If we talk about it from a biological point of view, is she enslaved? The sorcerers say yes, in the sense that she always views herself through the male. She has no option. I used to be excruciatingly mad about this whole discussion. I used to go over and over it with them, especially because this was in the early seventies when the women’s movement was at its peak.

And I said, “No, women have come a long way. Look at what they have accomplished,” and they said, “No, they haven’t accomplished anything.” They said that for women to be liberated sexually, in a way, enslaved them even more, because suddenly they were feeding energetically not just one male, but many males They were not prudes, and they were not interested in morality. They were only interested in energy.

A B E : That’s interesting..

Florinda. D: So, for them, it was absurd, and don Juan foresaw in the seventies what is happening now. He said that women were going to dive down on their noses, were going to be weakened. And they are. The few women I’ve talked to at my lectures and during the writing of my books agree.

I thought I would have a great deal of difficulty with this subject, but especially women who have gone through the process of having multiple lovers said they were exhausted arid they didn’t know why.

A B E: So we are talking about something beyond the sexual.

Florinda. D: Beyond the sexual aspect, the female womb ensures that the woman is the one who is closest to the spirit in this process of approaching knowledge “being-in-dreaming.” The man cones upward, and by the sheer definition of the cone, it comes to a finite end.

He strives because he is not close to the spirit, or whatever we want to call that great energetic force out there. According to the sorcerers, the woman is exactly the opposite. The cone is upside down. They have a direct link with it because the womb for the sorcerer is not just an organ of reproduction; it is an organ for dreams, a second brain.

ABE: Or heart.

Florinda. D: Or heart. And it does apprehend knowledge directly. Yet We have never been allowed to define what knowledge is in our society or in any society. And when women do create or help to formulate a body of knowledge, it has to be done in male terms. Let’s say a woman does research.

If she does not abide by the rules already established by the male consensus, she won’t be published. She can deviate slightly, but always within that same matrix. It is not allowed for women to do anything else.

A B E: So the sorceress is removed from the hypnotism of all of that.

Florinda. D: On the social level, yes. It’s very interesting that you mention the idea of hypnotism, because don Juan always said that when psychology produced Mesmer and Freud we were too passive. We are mesmeric beings. We never really developed that other path.

A B E: Yes. The path of energy.

Florinda. D: And this would never have happened to us if Freud hadn’t attained the upper hand.

A B E: Well, he’s lost it now.

Florinda. D: No, not really, because who knows how many generations it takes to change something so deeply ingrained? He may be discredited intellectually, but people who don’t even know who Freud is still talk in those terms. It’s part of our language, our culture.

A B E: Yes, I know. It’s very frustrating dealing with people who approach the whole of reality from this hackneyed psychological viewpoint.

Florinda. D: Yes. And they don’t even know where it comes from. It’s part of our cultural baggage.

A B E: So the sorceress is freed from this condition.

Florinda. D: Well, free in the sense that once you see that the social order really is an agreement, then at least you are more cautious in accepting it. People say, “Oh, but look how different life is from your grandmother’s or mother’s time.” I say that it’s not. It’s only different in degree.

But nothing is fundamentally different. If I would have lived my life the way it had been established for me—yes, I was more educated, I had a better chance—I still would have ended up the same way many do: married, frustrated, with children that by now I would probably hate, or who would hate me.

A B E: What occurs now that you’ve realized that there is that thralldom and you begin to free yourself from it? What is it that opens up to perception?

Florinda. D: Everything. First of all, in your dreams you can “see.” For instance, my work is done in dreaming.

A B E : Now you’re using the word dreaming in a very specific sense as understood in this tradition. Can you talk about what dreaming actually is?

Florinda. D: In the traditional sense, when we fall asleep, as soon as we start entering a dream, in that moment when we’re half awake and half asleep, we know from Castaneda’s work that the assemblage point flutters, it starts shifting, and what the sorcerer wants to do is that he wants to use that natural shift to move into other realms.

And for that we need an exquisite energy. We need an extraordinary amount of energy because we want to be conscious of that moment and use it without waking up.

A B E: Yes, a very high accomplishment.

Florinda. D: For me, it’s very easy to enter, to use it. The thing is, I had no control at that time—although I have now—over when it was going to happen. But I could enter into this state of what they would call the “second attention” or “dreaming awake.” And you can reach different levels.

What happens is that in that dreaming state eventually you have the same control you have in your daily life. And that’s exactly what the sorcerers do.

A B E: So you are now able to exist in another reality?

Florinda. D: Well, I don’t really know. You see, we don’t have the language to talk about it, except in known terms. So in a weird way, when I ask myself, Do I exist in another reality?

I have to say yes and no, because it is all one reality, there is no difference. Let’s say there are different layers, like an onion. But it’s all the same. So how am I going to talk about it? In metaphors? Our metaphors are already so defined by what we already know.

A B E: Yes, the problem of language.

Florinda. D: But it is as real as any other reality. What is reality? It is, again, a consensus, and it all hinges on energy.

A B E: That’s right. But it also hinges on something called “Intent.”

Florinda. D: Exactly. “Intent” is out there, it’s this force. Don Juan was not interested in religion, but in a weird way maybe “Intent” is exactly what we call God, the supreme being, the one force, the Spirit. You see, each culture knows what it is. Don Juan said you don’t beg for it, you ask. And in order to ask for it, you need energy. Not only do you need energy to hook yourself onto it, but you want to stay hooked.

A B E: This idea of “Intent” is easy to talk about, but it’s actually quite a complex operation, isn’t it?

Florinda. D: Yes, exactly, very complex. For don Juan and his people, sorcery is an abstraction, and it is based on this idea of expanding the limits of perception. For them, our choices in life are limited by the social order. We have boundless options, but by accepting these choices, of course, we set
a limit to our limitless possibilities.

A B E : And yet the human being seems...

Florinda. D: * . . . constantly to be searching for that which has been lost or caged in by the social order. They put blinds on us the’ moment we are born. Look at the way we coerce the child to perceive the way we perceive.

A B E: Yes, the transmission of culture.

Florinda. D: It’s the most perfect example. Children truly perceive more, obviously, a great deal more. But they have to make some order out of that chaos, and we, of course, are the perennial teachers of what is proper to perceive within our group. And if they don’t abide by that, my god, we shoot them with drugs, or lock them up in therapy with psychiatrists.

A B E: There have been these traditions, which have existed for a long, long time, and now in the last twenty or thirty years in particular we start to hear about them. Why did Castaneda write his books?

Florinda. D: Writing those books was a sorceric task that don Juan impressed upon him. For our mentality as the Western ape, as don Juan always called us, we have to be hooked first intellectually, because that’s how our whole being works.

A B E: So, the knowledge is made available to millions of people, and people become hooked by it. And does that mean that the tradition has now begun to proliferate itself in that way, also?

Florinda. D: I don’t know. If I go by Castaneda’s mail, which he doesn’t read, I would say yes. But I open letters from time to time, and they’re mad, they’re crackpots most of them. Some of them are very, very serious inquiries,, but most of them are just truly cracked people. [ Like, “I am the new Nagual,” or “I have been visited by you in dreams.”

A B E: Well, there are many levels to that, as you know. But I think that the whole Castaneda reality has actually affected the mass collective consciousness of, particularly, North America.

Florinda. D: It is as you say. The work is out there. There’s a great many people reading it. And some people are truly very serious about it.

A B E: Some of them are people who are non-Natives who have become involved in Native spirituality. And in a way, the work that has come from your group has had a tremendous quickening effect on Native spiritualities all over this continent, who have found a track back into their traditions.

Florinda. D: You see, the whole point of don Juan was that you don’t go back, because we get caught again in the myth and the rituals. Don Juan said that originally a ritual is only to hook your attention. Once your attention is hooked, you drop it.

As the apes that we are, we of course are very comforted by the ritual. People that truly transcend a certain knowledge do it by exactly getting out of it. Yet the rest of the mass is mesmerized by the ritual.

A B E: Castaneda describes you as the new seers. What does this mean for you?

Florinda. D: The new seers? For the women, it is very important, this idea that the womb is not just an organ of reproduction. In order to activate this, our intent has to be different. In order to change our intent, we go back again to energy. You see, we don’t really know what it means to use the womb as an organ for being, an organ -of light, of intuition.

For us, intuition really is something that has already been defined. There is no real intuition anymore because we intuit with our brains. Don Juan was interested in women, and people always ask, “How come there’s always so many women? Do you have orgies?” He said, “No, it’s because the male doesn’t have the womb.
He needs that magical “womb power” - It’s very important, you see.

A B E: Let me ask some technical questions there, if I may, on behalf of our female readers. Does the womb have to be fully functioning? I mean, if a woman had her tubes tied, would her womb still work?

Florinda. D: Yes, as long as she doesn’t have a hysterectomy.

A B E: So long as the womb isn’t removed.

Florinda. D: Yes. The only thing is you need to summon that intent. I was talking to some women a month ago, and they were all in goddess groups. Every month they go into the forest; they go up to Sequoia or someplace and they groove in the forest, among the trees, and oh, they have a great time hanging out, debating making rituals in the river.

And I said to them, “But what the fuck are you doing? You go back home, and then you are the same assholes you were before. You open your legs whenever the master says, ‘I need you.’” And they were shocked. I mean, they quite disliked me because they don’t like to hear that. They said, “But we felt so good for three days.”

And I said, “What’s the point of feeling good for three days if your life continues the same way?” What are we resting from? Why don’t we change? The idea of these rituals and even going back to the Native beliefs—well, it didn’t even work back then, on one level. We were conquered.

A B E: So it’s something that has to live now in a completely authentic way.

Florinda. D: It has to be fluid, and the practitioner has to be fluid to accept these changes. Even within us, things are changing constantly, and we’re so comfortable in a certain groove until something blasts us out of it. And we resent it. But we have to be fluid, and only energy will give us that fluidity.

A B E: How do you accumulate energy?

Florinda. D: To start off with, at least at the beginning, it was don Juan’s idea that the best energy that we have is our sexual energy. It’s the only energy that we really have, and most of our sexual energy is squandered.

A B E: Is it the same for men and women both?

Florinda. D: Of course it’s the same for men and women. The only difference is that with women you see that energetically the woman takes on the burden of feeding the man through her energetic filaments. So, in that sense, it’s worse for women, and for the man, too, because the man is hooked.

Energetically he is hooked, no matter what. And we have all kinds of psychological explanations for this to do with the people we’ve had affairs with, or our obsession with certain relationships, or whatever. You see, we have this gray barrage of psychological description, but what really is going on is on a totally different level, a level that we don’t want to talk about because it’s not part of our cultural kit.

A B E: So the primary way of accumulating energy is to be celibate?

Florinda. D: Well, it’s very difficult, but it would be a good start.

A B E: If a person was called to this path, that is if they got “hooked,” how would they know that they had been hooked by a tradition and not just by some damn obsession?

Florinda. D: You will know that something has changed because you will feel it energetically. And you know that you are not part of the social agreement. You see, if you let something go, something in you will know.

A B E: These books that you and others have written are affecting a change in the way people perceive themselves.

Florinda. D: Yes. Basically the goal is realizing how we perceive the world and ourselves, and breaking those parameters of perception. But we don’t want to focus on the “I.” We want to be a witness. Because everything in our society is filtered through the “I,” through the ‘me,” we are incapable ( of telling a story or recounting an event without making ourselves the main protagonist.

You see, don Juan was interested in letting the event unfold itself, and then it becomes infinitely richer, because then it opens up. And I even in the world, as an exercise, just become a witness. Stop being the protagonist and it’s amazing what opens up.

A B E: Now, on this long path, one of the things that’s described in the Castaneda literature is that the person, the seer and the Nagual, everybody, will reach a period of despondency, where they’re sure it’s going to fail. And the reason I raise this is because I have a sense that this feeling is actually being shared
by many people now.

Florinda. D: I’m going to add to your depression. [laughter] It is true. Something in us knows, and that’s why there’s the urgency with don Juan. The imperative from the point of view of Nature, is the perpetuation of the species, and we are no longer interested. We are interested in evolution, because evolution is an equal, if not a greater, imperative than procreation.

If we don’t evolve, if we don’t mutate into something different, we are truly going to blast ourselves out of this planet, I think irredeemably. We have destroyed our resources. Whether we have fifty or a hundred more years in a terms of time, as a planet, is immaterial. It doesn’t really matter. We as a species are doomed. And in that sense, evolution is our only way out. And as
don Juan stresses, evolution is in the hands of women, not of men.

A B E: So, as a male, what do I do? I just sit here and wait for women to save the world?

Florinda. D: Yes and no. You see, the man has to relinquish his power, and he’s not going to do it, not peacefully. I not saying that, you know, you’re beating your chest, saying, “I will not relinquish my power!” No, it’s much more insidious than that.

For instance, here are these sensitive men who have been in men’s groups, trying to come to terms with their spirituality, and who have moved into a place of total agreement with their wives, or the female they are with... but not quite. There are certain things they will not relinquish because it’s too threatening. This whole idea of the men’s movement originally started out as a truly spiritual movement.

But something in the male is threatened. There is this fear of relinquishing something that will have to be relinquished for us as a species to go on. We certainly know that the female has to be given time for something to evolve. For instance, for us to become erect, when the vagina had to change position, well, who had to adapt?

The males. The penis had to grow larger. Well, the female again needs time. And the male has to give her that time. From one point of view the male has to give the female time for the womb to try to switch into its secondary function.

There have to be enough females who have that time so that something will change in the womb. They have to dream a new possibility. Don Juan said our evolution is Intent. You see, that leap from the large crawling reptiles to flying creatures, this idea of wings, was intended. It was an act of Intent.

A B E: That’s very interesting. So you feel that women all over the world currently, sisterhoods of different kinds, are intending a new human future?

Florinda. D: They’re not aware of it although some women, I think, are.

A B E: And the man is now going to take a backseat in the evolution of the species?

Florinda. D: Not a backseat, really. Again, those are words that suggest a positive/negative kind of connotation. No. It’s more that you have to provide the time.

A B E: How can the man do that? Talk about that functionally.

Florinda. D: You see, we women are relegated to the status of second class citizens. No matter what power we attain, we still don’t have any real power. We don’t decide anything.

And even for us to talk in little groups is almost like banging against a huge iron door, because whoever decides, whoever’s in power, is not going to relinquish this for the hell of it. Do you think for a moment those men in Washington or Ottawa are going to even listen to what we’re saying? Not in the least. But some kinds of pockets have to be found for something new to develop.

Otherwise we’re doomed. And in terms of this idea of saving the planet, the environment, well, all we are really thinking is that we as a species will not survive. The Earth will certainly survive; it might go into some kind of horrendous winter, but eventually it will come out of it. But we as a species will not survive.

Copyright © A. Blair-Ewart 1995-2003.

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TAISHA ABELAR ABOUT STALKING

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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