Interview with Abelar.

[Nagual LoneWolf]

Version 2011.07.09
KPFK Radio Interview - 1993Taisha Abelar 
KPFK Radio Interview (1993)
John Martinez: Taisha Abelar is author of The Sorcerers' Crossing, A Woman's Journey. She tells of her experience, how she became acquainted with sorcerers and the actual practice of sorcery. A colleague of Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, and Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar in the following interview speaks on the validity of experiences in the non-ordinarily reality and explains in detail the sorceric process, as well as sorcerers' perspectives with implications regarding the social order, feminism and freedom.
Once again the author of The Sorcerers' Crossing, Taisha Abelar. And we are here with Taisha Abelar, author of The Sorcerers' Crossing, A Woman's Journey. First of all, Ms. Abelar, welcome to KPFK.
Taisha:   Yes, it's a great pleasure to be here and be given the opportunity to talk about my work and some of the concepts of sorcery.
John:   Taisha, if you could please start off with a short biography of yourself, your life prior to the actual material that's listed in the book to give our readers a background of who, exactly, Taisha Abelar is.
Taisha:   I mean the closest Taisha Abelar that -- the question you just asked don't really refer to Taisha Abelar because Taisha Abelar is a sorceric name that was given to me upon completing a certain amount of training. And the training that was involved was really moving the assemblage point -- and I'll talk about that -- to another position. So that's the position that I'm speaking to you from at this point, is the sorcerer's position, the position of a sorceress. And that is who Taisha Abelar is.
Prior to that I was an ordinary person. I entered Don Juan's world when I was in my early 20's an I had no special qualifications. I was just an ignorant young woman who had absolutely no interest in anything except finding a romance or being liked, worried about what people say about you. I had no academic training whatsoever.
So my background before coming into Don Juan's world is really comparable to anyone, any person. So I'm often asked the question, well, do you have any special qualifications in your past that made you open to this, or were you selected somehow? No, just think of myself as just a normal, regular person who somehow stumbled into Don Juan's world.
Or from my point of view it was stumbling because I was simply in the desert. I used to do drawing and I was doing some sketches and a woman approached me. And we started talking and I thought she was a very interesting person because she said she been in China and she had done martial arts. And prior to entering Don Juan's world, I did do some martial arts.
So that was some background. I was interested in movement and also drawing, but other than that there was nothing else of interest. She invited me to go with her to Mexico to stay with her for a few days and I accepted because I thought we were going to talk about Buddhism and oriental philosophy and things like that.
And so I went with her. I stayed with her a few days in Mexico and the days turned into weeks and eventually months and then she put me to doing this series of exercises which -- she said she took one look at me and she saw I was energetically depleted, and therefore I should do this training that she was showing me. And I had no idea that this was sorcery.
There was a cave near her house and I would go every day and sit in the cave. And she said I should do this process of recounting my life. And I didn't know that this was really an ancient sorceric technique called the recapitulation. And it merely involved breathing in the memories of the past, pulling back the energy of one's past history.
An I bring this up now because what happened during that procedure was that slowly I began to lose myself as I was as an ordinary person in the world. So that's the recapitulation sort of wiped out one's human self or one's regular self in terms of past, in terms of where one was born. All those things get dissolved and you lose your personal history so that you could build up your sorcerer's persona, personality.
So then I met Don Juan. When I had stored enough energy I was introduced to Don Juan Matus and some of his other cohorts, his colleagues, and they taught me some of the other techniques that were involved in sorcery.
And one of the things, the stipulations, was going back to my state at that time, was since I had no interest in education or knowledge or -- I couldn't think; I couldn't talk, prior to coming into this world. I was one of these people that I grew up learning you shouldn't speak unless you're spoken to, children should be seen but not heard. So there was no way of really expressing oneself -- couldn't have any idea of conceptualizing. Abstract thought was so foreign to me because I was only interested in the pragmatic things of everyday life, of meeting people, finding love, whatever interests women at that age.
So I was not unusual in that sense. So given as part of my training, they gave me the mandate of going to the university and receiving an education as part of the sorcerer's training. And the reason for that was not only to be able to alter the expectations that society has of women in terms of well, it's men should be educated and should get jobs and careers and things, but women well, it's sort of left up to them. If they want to, yes; if they don't, that's okay, too, because their fate is really already preset in terms of finding a husband, getting married, and having families and things like that, which was also my destiny.
So by receiving an education it had two aspects. One was that it sort of undermined my own expectations of my possibilities, my capabilities, or the expectations others had of me. And second, it gave me the opportunity to be able to think analytically, to conceptualize, to understand what sorcery is. Because even though they were teaching us techniques, certain practices, procedures, they also were giving us very abstract concepts as to what is sorcery. Why even be interested in something like this, how do sorcerers perceive the world, how do they see reality. And that requires a very keen intellect to be able to grasp the essence of what it is they're saying.
Otherwise you're at a certain level and you look at sorcery the way, let's say, anthropologists look at it, just from the outside and just see the surface of it. And you think sorcery involves chanting, curing, dances, wearing masks, doing weird ritualistic things. Those are our conceptions from the point of view of our society of what sorcery is and what sorcerers do.
I didn't know anything about sorcery at that time and I didn't even know that that's what they were teaching me, but it came out little by little. And as it came out, I had to understand not the superficial gloss of what sorcery is but what it really entails, and for that you have to have a very keen intellect and a deep education to be able to grasp those concepts.
John:   Taisha, could you -- I know Carlos Castaneda, who has written about the Yaqui way of knowledge and his quest to be a man of knowledge, and with the ingestion of peyote his work was popular in the late 60s and early 70s and is still read widely today. I know Castaneda writes your forward in your book. Could you address some of the issues that are constantly raised with Castaneda, first of all that it is fictional, his work, and that it promotes or gives the okay for what is now called illicit drug use and abuse. Could you mention anything in terms of Castaneda's influence now 20 years later?
Taisha:   Absolutely, because the training that I received in Don Juan's world was very similar to the training Carlos Castaneda received, because we're really a group of very few that were trained by Don Juan himself and his associates. And that's myself, Florinda Donner, who writes about her training in Being-in-Dreaming and Carol Tiggs and just a very handful of people, and we all received basically the same training.
But the works of Carlos Castaneda, of course, came out very early in the 60s and people read his works. And the first two books, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality deal with the use of drugs -- well, not drugs but hallucinogenic plants. These are hallucinogenic substances that we call like mind-altering drugs, things like that.
Now there is several reasons. I can address this issue first and then go on to the validity of things later. The reason for Don Juan exposing Carlos Castaneda to these drugs in his training is twofold. One is because Carlos Castaneda was the new nagual. He was the one that was seen at that time to be a leader of a new group, although that altered dramatically. There is really no group at this point.
Something along the course of the training made Don Juan and his people realize that this generation is not the same as his generation. So there was marked, marked changes in his training as opposed to the traditional sense of training a sorcerer, but he did want to pass on -- at that point Don Juan thought that he would pass on the tradition of the use and how to prepare these plants because that was part of the sorcery tradition for Don Juan. And it was his duty to pass it on to his apprentice. So he taught him all the lore, all the preparation, the detail of the use of these plants.
Then the second reason was that the purpose of using the plants is to what sorcerers say, to move the assemblage point. I think I have to mention what the assemblage point is at this point because it will be coming up and otherwise it won't be clear to the listener.
When a sorcerer sees the energetic body of a person, they see a spot of luminosity, very intense, made of very brilliant light. And that is situated in a certain point on the energetic body and it lights up certain energetic filaments that are matched with the energetic fibers in the universe at large. So because there's an infinite number of possibilities making up the universe and also making up our energetic bodies. Only a very select few -- one band -- gets matched to what's outside in making, let's say, the perceptions that are out in the universe.
When that matching takes place, sorcerers say perception takes place; we constitute our reality. And that is dependent on the position of the assemblage point. So we are all born into a certain place. We have our assemblage points at a certain place that we can agree upon as to what we see, we can agree upon as to what we are perceiving.
The use of drugs, or the psychotropic plants, moves the assemblage point to a different position and lights up different filaments so that we perceive different things. Drugs through chemical reactions -- they affect the energetic body and you have different perceptions, you perceive things.
Now the reason Don Juan had Carlos exposed to the psychotropic plants was because of not just tradition, but as a rational being, it was very difficult for him to move his assemblage point using natural methods or the other sorceric practices. He had to be jolted out of that position fast, and that's what these the plants do, the use of the smoke or peyote. They move the assemblage point violently and very drastically to another position.
The dangers involved are tremendous, however. One is that there's no control. There is no telling where is it going to move, what universes are you going to perceive under the influence of the little smoke or in our day just drugs, whether it's marijuana, even tobacco -- doesn't have to be cocaine, things like that. The dangers are the same. We have no control as to what is going to happen to our perception of reality. And the physical dangers of the harm it does to the body, how harmful it is to the energetic body because it drains energy.
Any time you have an experience of moving the assemblage point, unless you do it with control, it's energetically depleting and you -- of course, the ultimate danger is that you can either die or go crazy or lose your mind, whatever. These things happen. We see that every day.
But Don Juan, of course, when he gave the tradition of the plants to Carlos Castaneda, he was always there and Don Genaro flanking him, to make sure that they knew where his assemblage point was moving. They knew exactly what realities he was lighting up through their seeing and they supplied the control to him that he was unable to supply himself because he was under the influence of something else, an external force. So they supplied the control and made sure that nothing happened to him, nothing bad happened to him, and to make sure that he could come back, that his assemblage point could move back, which it usually naturally does when the effects wear off.
But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes sorcerers get lost in other realms and they just don't wake up; they don't come back; and they die. So there's extreme danger involved there. And to do this without a guide or leader is suicidal, really.
So the purpose is to get out of the rational fixation that we have, that this reality is the way it is; which from our point of view is a given, but from the point of view of sorcerers, it's an act of creation.
And phenomenologists also -- okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about phenomenology and then talk about the validity of his work. So we will hit both questions.
Just to conclude the part about the psychotropic plants, our training did not include any of these, the use of drugs or the peyote. That includes Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs. Women do not have to be drastically jolted out of their hold on reality. Their assemblage points are very fluid and they move automatically. All of ours move during sleep when we dream, but, of course, they just jump back and forth and we have no control. But it's a natural movement of the assemblage point in sleep.
The women when they menstruate, their assemblage points get displaced very slightly. But they may see things; they may catch glimpses; they may hear things; they get emotionally very, very sensitive, because their assemblage point is being displaced monthly. They can use that natural displacement to do dreaming and to do sorcery, which is what the women, the female sorcerers do.
So only in rare cases and because Carlos Castaneda was the nagual, was he given the plants to actually understand and to use. His first two books deal with that work, but after that you don't hear much about them anymore. And you don't because he no longer -- his assemblage point was loosened enough so that it could move through other means, softer means, more natural means. And the rest of his training, all the other books, deal with the movement of the assemblage point using other sorceric means.
So I was going to talk a little bit about our conception of reality and the sorcerer's conception of reality because it ties in with the movement of the assemblage point. The sorcerers maintain that whatever we perceive in front of us is determined by the placement of that assemblage point. And we are born into that reality as children. Of course the assemblage point is erratic. Infants, they can't speak; they don't have language. They perceive the world differently. But as they grow, their perception of the world matches that of everyone around them so there's a matching that takes place.
Phenomenologists say that the facticity of the world is constructed; it's not a given although we assume that it is. Phenomenologists take that tacit agreement that we have of everyday life, that there was a yesterday in terms of temporality and spaciality and intersubjectivity that we can agree upon what others in the room are doing. Phenomenologists take those assumptions or taken-for-grantedness of those things and turn them into their phenomena for investigation.
The fact that we know that there was a natural history to things -- let's see, I'll give you some examples just to make this clearer. So that we know that, let's say, that door over there didn't just appear, we know that it was there before we came into the room. We know that it's going to remain there after we leave. That's a temporal continuity that's built into their perception of reality. Spatial continuity is built in.
We know that there is a street outside and beyond the street there is buildings, even though we don't directly perceive them. We know that there is an ocean a certain number of miles. We have mapped out our space, our spatial realm. Reality is based on our conception of space and time and the certainty that we have that other people also know that we're in a room. We built up the same glosses based on our language, of door, of street, of house.
Now sorcerers, they look at perception immediately. Instead of working on glosses the way we do in our everyday lives -- we don't perceive directly. We have already filtered perception through language, through our culture, through our past experience. We're not perceiving immediately. The sorcerers training is to get oneself back to that immediate perception of reality.
They ask the same questions as phenomenologists do: What is perception, what is reality, what is agreement. But they say that perception is really a question of having the assemblage point on the same position. Or let's say agreement is everyone having the assemblage point on the same place. When that moves, other realities just as real as the one we're in now are constituted.
The validity of anything can only be determined by actual experience. Everything that we do in our daily lives is real because we have experienced it or others have experienced it, and we share -- we have an intersubjective agreement and a common language that enables us to understand what it is we are talking about.
For example, an astronaut or a man walking on the moon, we saw that on television; we read papers; we even heard them speaking the "giant step for mankind" words that now have become so famous. So even though we didn't see them on the moon, we look up at the moon at night and say well, men were up there. Now is that a leap of faith? No, not exactly, not like the virgin birth or the immaculate conception. It's based upon the work of the men in NASA, the aerospace industry.
Each subgroup has what phenomenologists or even sociologists call membership in their group. They're able to validate their small segment. It's like layers and layers, like the layers of the astronaut suit. They have 24 or 25 layers in their suits. To me that defies imagination. We're used to thinking of a single layer duofold, two-ply wool and cotton. But no, they have 18, 20 layers, each one doing something very specific. The people that made those suits knew what they were doing, what they are talking about. We have to assume that they do because we don't have that direct knowledge.
Everyone working together with the tremendous concentration, years and years of training, have been able to make this feat reasonable, valid experience that there were men on the moon that now no one questions. But sorcery also takes years and years of training. You can't just say, lie down and all of a sudden you're a crow or something like that. Of course, that sounds absurd, and it is absurd. From the point of view of our everyday lives, from the reality of our being-in-the-world, the feats of sorcery are tales of energy, tales of power. They are only tales and therein arises the question of doubt and stories that people say that Carlos Castaneda's work, our work, is really basically fiction, they're tales. Well, from the point of view of everyday life, yes, because there's no way the average person has validated these things unless he gains membership.
But we can't go walking on the moon. That's not open to us. But to be a sorcerer or sorceress, yes, it's open to us. Anyone can validate for himself or herself what Carlos Castaneda or I am writing about in our books, because we don't just describe these other realities and say, oh, yes, they are out there and take it on faith. No, by describing them we're really being phenomenologists. We're describing what happened to us physically from the point of view of our physicality, our energetic body. We experienced those.
For us they're not tales of power, tales of energy, they're actually descriptions to the best of our ability. Depending on how much energy we have, we're able to describe these other positions of the assemblage point that we have moved to. And later on I want to be sure to talk about exactly how you can move your assemblage point.
The things that are in the book, the work, are guidelines. They tell everyone that if you do these things, if you practice the recapitulation, if you practice not-doing, if you practice losing your personal history, if you practice gazing, your assemblage point will move and your body will know. You will know with your very being what it is that sorcerers are talking about.
The validity is there, there for anyone to discover, but it's a process of creation just as putting a man on the moon is really a process of creation. It just doesn't happen at a snap of a finger. It takes tremendous energy, conceptual, mental power, mathematics, physics, astrophysics, physical training of astronauts. All of that gets put together to perform one single feat.
The same thing with sorcery. It takes years, our lives. I was in my early 20s when I came into Don Juan's world. From that moment on every single thing that I have done has been a training, sorcery training, and that includes going to the university. That was a mandate that they gave me. They said, "you have to cultivate a romance with knowledge". And I had to do the university training, receive a Ph.D., not from the point of view of the everyday person in the world the way people usually just go to school.
No, it was an exercise in stalking. I had to use petty tyrants that came around, professors. I had to curtail expectations that I grew up with through recapitulating. Recapitulating really enables you to see what your patterns are, your patterns of behavior and what your expectations are. So you apply what you learned through recapitulating. You apply it to your everyday life, your being in the world. And as you apply it, you're validating the sorcerer's position, rather than validating the position of everyday life, the position of your parents, the position of your peers, of what society tells you.
We're always validating that through our behavior and our thoughts and our language, our internal dialog. We keep repeating over and over the things that we should be repeating -- it's like a little circle -- to make sure that nothing else comes in. We're already loaded to maximum capacity in terms of our perception. It's a bubble. It's sealed so there is no escape. An opening has to come from outside, from another position of the assemblage point.
Don Juan gave us the entrance, the opening. He calls it the cubic centimeter of chance that pops up. And you either -- well, either you're so enthralled with yourself that you don't even see it, or you don't grasp it because of reasons of your own: You're too rational or too knowledgeable in the sense that you already know everything and you're closed minded, let's say. Or you do grasp it. And the people associated with us, Don Juan, we did grasp that quarter centimeter of chance. And we are continuing to validate everything that he had said sorcery is and the potentiality of being more than what was allotted in terms of being born into the world, into a certain position.
John:   If you would, just to finalize this point, there are critics in society that criticize Castaneda for his work and simplify it and say that it promotes drug use and abuse. Are they simply just showing their ignorance in terms of the context of Castaneda's path to knowledge?
Taisha:   What they're doing is looking at reading the books or looking at maybe they haven't even read some of the books -- maybe they haven't even read the books, maybe just the first two books and stopped there, because the first two books, as I said, deal just with the tradition of the psychotropic plants. But before they say anything, absolutely they should read all the books to see what the context is.
They're also speaking in terms from the point of view of everyday life, from the position that yes, drugs are bad. I don't think there is really a disagreement here in terms of drug use.
By we, I mean Carlos Castaneda and anyone practicing sorcery, we lead absolutely pure lives. And we're very careful of what we eat because anything that affects the energy body curtails the chances of sobriety, of control. If it affects the energetic body deleteriously, then you lack the control of what sorcerers call stalking, the stalker's ability.
And stalking is really the ability to take a new position of the assemblage point -- or it doesn't have to be a different one, it can be the one where we are -- and look at its ramifications, but for that you need energy. You need energy to observe what is reality, to rather than blindly going in and letting things happen to you, being at the mercy of the modality of the day, which is what Don Juan calls this particular point of where our assemblage point is.
We were born into that as characterized by the modality of our time. We are at the mercy of that whatever tumbles down on us, whatever our parents or peers, education system, whatever we hear and read in books and radios, newspapers. It all tells us certain things of what we can do and what we can be. So we are absolutely affected by that.
But to look at it, you have to have energy rather than be at the mercy of it. So let's say people who grew up, or the peers say yes, use marijuana, do this, do that. They don't have the energy to resist to -- I don't mean resist, but to question. They're sucked in by whatever their environment says and does. And they go with it no matter if it's suicidal or what.
Sorcery says the exact opposite. It says no, you question. You don't accept anything. You don't accept religious dogma; you don't accept what your friends say when they slip you a little packet of cocaine or whatever. But who can actually question these things? Only someone who has a strength that comes from elsewhere. And where is this elsewhere? Sorcerers say it's the energy body.
Every one of us has really two positions of the assemblage point: One, the one that is given to us, the one by our parents, the one we are born into, the one that makes this particular reality manifest itself and keep on going and be the force that makes us accept it as the one and only reality.
But we all have an energetic body in like a phantom position -- sorcerers call it the double -- another position we sort of activate in dreams, with intuition. We all have the feeling there is something else there but we don't have the energy to grasp it. Or we feel we might want to be different or more coherent, more clear, more alive. But we don't. We can't because of the burden of society, our work, the concerns of everyday life, our worries about ourselves, what is going to happen to me, me, myself, and I, are of primary concern. We don't have energy for anything else.
But Don Juan says yes -- or sorcerers, not just Don Juan. There is another position that we can all have and we should activate it. We should use that as a balance and that’s what's going to give us the energy to not be swayed by everyday life. It's going to give us -- it enables us to have a little perch, a little platform outside of the quagmire, let's say, where we are and enables us to see from a different perspective.
Where is this other perspective? It's another position of the assemblage point outside. And how do you get to it? How do you reinforce it? Because this is what sorcerers want to do. They want to be able to perceive more. It's a question of perceiving. They want to perceive more than is permissible or allowable from the point of view of our everyday reality.
Our reality says no, trees are trees, the house is there, you know there is an ocean. We have a system of glosses set up and those are like rigid. They're not flexible. Sorcery training enables the mind, the body, to acquire a flexibility of -- drugs or psychotropic plants move the assemblage point. Then it moves right back and you're again stuck worse off than before because you're energetically depleted; you have harmed your body; you've lost a sense of control, command. And you keep reinforcing that and you're not really going to be able to activate this energetic body. You're destroying it, in fact.
So the other methods of training, the recapitulation, is one of the key methods. And we all do it, all of us that train in sorcery. We practice; we do the recapitulation. Carlos Castaneda recapitulates constantly, constantly. All of us do.
What it is, is you're -- pragmatically it has two layers. By pragmatically, what it is, is you make a list of everyone you've ever known in your life, and you sit and you visualize from today, moving backwards, all the experiences that constitute your life, the memory of what you are, what makes up your persona, what you are.
And that, of course, includes your interaction with your family, your friends. All of that is intrinsically related to what makes you you because you have that intersubjectivity. You don't live in a vacuum and neither do sorcerers. But your assemblage point and your energy is constantly being bombarded by what others tell you and you respond, so there is this interaction.
What the recapitulation does is it allows you to look at that and to extricate your energy from your remembered self, from your past actions. So you close your eyes and you visualize your activities, very systematically. You have your list and you work backwards and you use the breathing, because breathing is a very subtle method of inhaling. You bring back the energy; you visualize; you begin on your --
Very specifically here I'm going to describe it, although it is described in The Sorcerers' Crossing. Begin on your right shoulder. You have your visualized scene and you inhale, moving your head to your left shoulder. And then you exhale everything that is extraneous to you, everything that they have poured on you verbally, physically, that you no longer want, because this is all in the past anyway. You push it; you exhale it. You give it back as you're moving your head back to your right shoulder and then you bring your head to the center. And you just continue sweeping the scenes in your memory and you're cleansing.
What you're doing is bringing back the energy that is trapped there so you can use it in the present. And where does it go? Of course you have to be very careful that you don't put it back into, like again reinforcing the self, but use it to build up your energetic body, to be able to have that extra energy so you can see what life is, what it is that you're doing. You have some control over your existence.
The recapitulation in an abstract sense, because sorcerers are very abstract, in fact, is so abstract that at this point, our bodies are really an idea. We're no longer at the position of the assemblage point of the facticity of the world that we have our physical body. The bench is here; the tree is there, no. We've questioned all that and we've seen that through the recapitulation, these things are only a matter of agreement. We were told this and our bodies themselves have responded to the agreement that we had no choice in because we were born into it.
So on an abstract level, what the recapitulation does is it builds another, a little platform for you to work off of, because while you're remembering the past, your energetic past, and you're working back, you are also working at two places at the same time. You're moving from here, from your energetic body, to these, the memories of the facticity of yourself, of what constituted your world. And you can see your patterns repeating themselves. You can hear what your parents told you and you see.
All of a sudden you see, but what is it that sees? Not you in the world, but this other being, the seer. Don Juan calls it the seer in you that's waking up. You're activating this phantom position of the assemblage point that we all have, but you're making it stronger. You're using it for once. Within your culture we're not allowed to use it. We don't even acknowledge that it's there.
Everything has all our concern, because of the modality of our day, really has gone into our immediate needs and wants and we don't even have a choice in the matter. This other position gets activated, becomes stronger, and then we're able to actually question and break through the barriers of perception that have been set up through the concerns of our everyday life.
John:   Taisha, you've talked now about terms and concepts within your book. Could you give us a general overview of your book in terms of the themes in your book, the issues raised, concepts. We can start like that.
Taisha:   Basically the first half of it deals with the recapitulation and it tells, explains in detail, how it's done and my own experiences with it and the difficulties in doing it and the procedures. And so that in itself gives the reader an opportunity to try it themselves. It's an invitation, really, for anyone, because sorcerers are not an elite group -- that you have to be selected or run into Don Juan or have a sorcerer as a leader.
No, anyone can pick up these books and do the things, the practices that are described in them. And that again is a means of validating what it is that we're talking about through your own experiences.
So the first part of the book is dealing with the recapitulation. And I was also, as I said, when I had enough energy, I was introduced to Don Juan and some of the other members of his group. And that's also described in the book, my encounters with them and the things that they taught me.
I was given certain practices that included gazing techniques, not-doing techniques. There are sorcery passes which work directly on the energy body, certain movements and breathing that activate again or cleanse the energy body and activate certain energy centers so that the assemblage point can move with fluidity.
And then the second part of the book, I suppose sort of near the middle, was because they though I was ready to make what they call the sorcerer's crossing, the great crossing, which all it is is a movement of the assemblage point, a displacement, because through the recapitulation it prepares you for that.
I was living or staying in this house and there was a left portion of the house that was always alluded to but I was never allowed to enter. And so at one point they decided yes, I'm ready to meet the other members of the party who were waiting for me on the left side of the house, which is really a movement of the assemblage point into a different reality because the left side of the house didn't exist in this realm as we know it.
And so I went through a series of techniques and energetic movements invoking intent. My energy body was able to activate itself, of course, also with the help of Nelida, who was there beside me. I activated my energy body, meaning I shifted my assemblage point. But rather than moving it harmoniously to a certain position they had expected me to, where they were waiting for me, I sort of shot out and had no recollection of where actually my assemblage point ended up. And I could not remember the details of my perceptual realm. That's the drawback. That happens also under some cases where there's no control. It's an erratic shift. In order words, my assemblage point shifted too erratically.
And so the second part of the book deals with different type of training. I found myself in a grove of trees in a tree house in the front part of the house. At that point I didn't know how I had gotten there. I just assumed that somebody had hoisted me up in a harness and I was up in a tree house. But what I didn't know then was that I did not wake up. My assemblage point didn't move back to it's normal position. It was a position where -- in another reality but not very far removed. I had come back from my wanderings and in that position -- so the second part of the training really dealt with stalking, which was to stabilize the position of the assemblage point wherever it is.
In my case this was in this grove of trees in the tree house in the front part of the house. But the training itself -- and it was conducted under the guidance of Emilito who also didn't exist in the reality of everyday life. He was in a position of the assemblage point, a dream position. So I had woken up in a dream position in a different place, but I had to cultivate stalkers technique in order to maintain that position and achieve a certain control over my energetic body.
And that training was very, very important for subsequent things that would be happening, because again, it doesn't make any difference at all if you move your assemblage point. Unless you can stabilize it at another position and stalk that reality, you have again, random glimpses, like what happens under, I suppose, under the influence of drugs. You have glimpses of random occurrences of monsters appearing or your assemblage point hops around and that's what's deleterious to the energetic body.
So you have to be able to stabilize it at another position. So the stalkers training - which was very, very important in my case because my assemblage point was erratic - was to explore the ramifications of a different reality. And in my case it was the realm of the trees in the tree house. But that tree house existed because other members of the sorcery group also -- whoever had that same problem, namely Zuleica, one of Don Juan's cohorts who was really Emilito, because Emilito was Zuleica's dream body in this other position. So whoever had the problem of erratic assemblage point movements was hoisted up in the harness, put in a tree house to learn to stabilize.
And why did they put them in trees? Because being surrounded by trees, being elevated from the ground, forces the body to develop a new relationship between what really was our energy body, but it really was as real and solid as our physical body and the ground and gravity. So by being in the trees, by climbing branches, by again recapitulating in the trees, by gazing in trees and all the other activities that you practiced in the trees off the ground, enabled me to explore a new position of the assemblage point, and was very limited because I never left the trees, the tree house. I stayed -- well, I would come down and enter the main house, you know, if I had to go to the restroom, the bathroom, but I would go right back up and my food would be hoisted up. Emilito would hoist up my food.
So well, all of my time was spent off the ground. I would sleep in the trees. And the concentration and sobriety it takes to climb trees is so intense, because any wrong movement you would fall, forced me keep all my attention focused on my immediate activity rather than letting my brain shift around in terms of past, present and future the way we do now at this position of the assemblage point.
We're hardly ever focus on the here and now where half of us is -- half of our energy is locked up in the past, past actions. The other is sort of projecting into some unknown future and not much of us is really engaged in whatever we're doing at this moment. But my being in the trees, everything, was -- and, of course, also having recapitulated already, there was no past, there was no temporal horizon.
So the sorcerers were really disrupting the spatial and temporal agreement that we have learned in our bodies by being in an enclosed space surrounded by something where you couldn't see the horizon. There was no spatial distance. You couldn't see very far, the trees were so dense. So there was no space in terms of distance and also there -- I could not assume the way we assume from this position of the assemblage point that yes, there's houses outside; there's streets; there's the ocean. I had no idea what was beyond the grove of trees. In fact, it was like a void.
All I had, my entire, quote, universe at that point were the trees. So the sorcery training had effectively disrupted the spatial and temporal continuity. There was not this here and there perspective that we have in our daily lives because we're -- like when we're sitting here from the point of view of everyday life there is always a there because we're here obviously. And we can get up and walk over there or we can imagine the there even if we can't get to it.
We can get to it by plane or train. I mean there is not -- I can't see it, but intentionality from the point of view of phenomenology makes us fill in the gaps, fill in the spatial blocks or deficiencies, but not in the sorcerers world. In the sorcerers world in the trees, whatever was in front of me was all there was to the world at that particular point. And that was a way of training to focus on what it is that you're doing.
Later, I used that stupendous training in my academic work to concentrate on what it is that I'm doing, not to assume that there's a university there somewhere. No, from the point of view of the trees and the tree house, the world of everyday life no longer existed. It was completely demolished or disappeared because there was no guarantee that I would ever come back either.
So the instructions, the things that I had to do, the recapitulation from the tree house was again a different layer of getting back anything that was left dangling in the past or other spaces, other areas, to bring everything in, to consolidate the energy body. And only by consolidating the energy body can you lean on it and use it. And so that was really the second part of my training.
I was given, also, dreaming tasks that I did from the tree house because after a while the immediacy of everything makes you want to expand. It's all right to be totally immediate but you also can from that position move the assemblage point elsewhere. So the second stage was to dream from the tree house which was already a dreaming position. So you use dream positions, use your energy body, to move.
The training of stalkers is to be absolutely fluid, to maintain a position of the assemblage point, but then also be able to move from that. But then wherever you are moving to, you move with sobriety and control and the same amount of discipline, and you explore your new reality in order to make that real. We create our reality as we move. As the assemblage point gets displaced, new realities get created in front of our eyes.
But we have to interact with them. So reality -- let's go back to our, to the reality of everyday life. It is not just there. It's there because we're interacting with it. We know that there is a here and there because we're moving through the room bypassing the furniture to get someplace. We're in it. We're creating this reality as we do things, as we think, as we're -- but we're creating it within the limits set up with our linear mind and our rational predilection.
This assemblage point limits to a great extent what it is that we can do from this point. We can't go through the wall, in other words, because it's solid. We know that it's there. But through gazing, which I did in the trees -- let's say, part of the training is gazing techniques because gazing is a very easy way -- basically anyone can do this -- a very fundamental way of realizing the validity of what I'm talking about.
See, all you do is look at a tree, a little plant. You start gazing at the leaves and pretty soon it becomes two dimensional. We're fleshing out the back of it. We don't see it. Intentionality says that a leaf has a front side and a back to it and has little veins through it. Botanists have many, many layers of intricate knowledge about trees and plants that we may not have, but there is definite layers of knowledge of something that we can agree upon. But when you start gazing at trees or leaves or gravel or whatever, you see just what is given to your energetic body, the immediacy. You really see; that's what you see. That is why sorcerers call it seeing, because that is when you're really seeing. You're placing your energy body at the disposition of the energy that emanates from what is out there and you're matching in a different way so that you're seeing energy. So you're looking at a tree or gazing at it and all of a sudden you realize no, it's not a fact; it's not solid; it's moving. It doesn't have a back to it the way we think or roots. We don't see that; we see swirls of light.
All of a sudden these leaves start to glow and you're seeing swirls of energy and you're saying oh, that is what a tree is. I had no idea until I started experimenting, playing around with this, some of these things. And if you try it you will also say oh, there is more to a tree than the gloss, tree. Really a tree is energetically alive just as the human body, just as we are energetically alive. And we can do infinitely more things than we were taught or we learned we're capable of doing with our physical bodies.
Gazing enables us to engage our energetic selves, a different position of the assemblage point, and that phantom position gets stronger and stronger. And then we see trees moving. All of a sudden we can shift them by focusing our energy on them and they're not rooted in one spot. Sorcerers say that entire groves of trees can all of a sudden be elsewhere.
Now, it's a tale of energy again, but they've actually seen, because when the world is fluid, nothing is rooted, is given, is a fact. It's in constant motion and that's the way the world is. That's the way reality is. It's we who make it limited, solid, factual. We impose on it its' limitations. But there's no reason -- to expand your capabilities as sentient beings and use other aspects that we haven't even conceived of, that it's possible to use or to see the world in different terms.
John:   Taisha, you're touching on these terms and concepts in your book, dreaming, stalking, assemblage point, recapitulating. Are there - or would it be too limited to try to attempt to do this? Are there any correlations in terms of analystic terms and concepts in science that are similar to these terms and concepts in your book?
Taisha:   Yes, there are correlates, and I talked extensively about one coming from philosophy, namely phenomenology. I don't need to go back into that, but phenomenologists, they know theoretically or they intuit that this is the way perception is, this is the way we ought to approach when we talk about reality and perception -- we should suspend judgment meaning not impose the facticity of our world onto what we are talking about. But when it's applied and in even phenomenology many, many people are familiar with that.
In fact, anthropologists, sociologists are very familiar with those concepts. But when they, let's say, go out and do field work or even live their daily lives, they never venture beyond the theoretical stage of using these things. They're scary because what sorcery does, for example, it disrupts the comforts or the certainty of everyday life that the world is such and such. It disrupts it and some of us don't want that disruption.
It creates great dissonance and very unsettling and it has to be done systematically. Otherwise can you absolutely freak out if all of a sudden just, you know, the wall disappears and you find yourself elsewhere without having actually walked over there. You wake up, you know, down the block, and say where am I. I mean it's very disrupting.
So the concepts are there. Phenomenology, anthropology use some of it in terms of actually going into other cultures, studying other realities. But they study it. The word study for them takes on sort of an academic sense of armchair theorizing. Although I'm sure anthropologists don't want to consider themselves armchair theorists anymore. That was in the 19th century. But in a way they're still doing it from hotel rooms or if they go into the field they may -- they still have a preset theory that they want to explore. They're not going in having suspended judgment as phenomenologists recommend one should do. And definitely they don't want to apply it to their daily lives and actually become something else, something other than they are.
And you can't study sorcery or understand what sorcerers do without giving up some of your holdings in the everyday world, without actually altering your ideas on the nature of what it is that you are, what it is that you do in your everyday life. If you're always using those assumptions to interpret what -- let's say Don Juan does -- and this is what happened with Carlos Castaneda's books, those assumptions were used to say oh, he is doing this and like he is doing, because whoever is saying these things hasn't validated for themselves what this other realm takes. But there is other areas of -- like eastern philosophy, they have some of the same concepts again of altering other realities, of being aware of the here and now. They have the term "the great crossing."
In fact, I was going to call my book "the great crossing" but that term is a very specific term used in Buddhist philosophy which is not what sorcery is. Although getting back to your question, on a theoretical level, it may appear the same. They're interested in exploring perception, expanding perception, of awakening the energetic body. Some of the techniques are very similar, quieting the internal dialog, using meditation. But the difference is that -- what a practitioner has to do is relinquish his mode of linear thinking and unless that is done and relinquished, the attachment to the self stays the fundamental obstacle -- and the eastern disciplines talk about that too. But all I can say is that we actually do that.
We spend a lifetime with it and we are still engaged in this procedure of actually doing that very thing, relinquishing the attachment to the world of everyday life, our humanness, that assemblage point into which we were born, and moving away and exploring these other dimensions. So we're doing -- so the difference then, I think that the concepts, yes, that they're there. They're not unique in that sense, but the practices -- you can't just have a concept without actually engaging in doing, because a concept by itself doesn't mean anything. It has to be a bodily experience.
And sorcery is really designed that you do these practices, you get the bodily experience, rather than just talking philosophically about something the way philosophers do or sometimes Oriental philosophers or even the physicists, the new age physics. I don't want to talk about it because I'm not really familiar with physics. I'm not a physicist. But they touch upon certain areas of indeterminacy, of limits of perception, of light, of what it means to see things. For example, an object to a physicist from their studies and experiments realizes it is not solid at all. That has to do with your perspective and size.
So solidity of something is only because we are human beings and we can see something. A bee or a bat would have a totally different perspective of, let's say, a tree or a log or a piece of wood. He would see it totally different. So physicists explore the limits of reality, of what constitutes it. And there's books that combine eastern wisdom with physics. And so there is that connection.
But I don't know of any physicists who actually would practice all the things that he knows intellectually in his daily life. When he comes home he still sits down on that old chair and he has his wife there and he has his same behaviors, sociologists, too. They understand certain concepts that are similar to sorcery but sorcery is not just a concept.
Sorcery is an abstract way of life so that the totality of your being becomes as abstract as those concepts. So when we say that the energetic body is luminous, is composed of fluid filaments, that is what a sorcerer is. He's not just saying it. He is it because he uses it and his reality is based on that, the utilization of those filaments of light.
For example, a good example is from one of the books of Carlos Castaneda, when Don Genaro jumped over the waterfall. From the point of view of somebody just watching, in this case Carlos Castaneda in his early days, he just saw -- well, he saw half and half, just he saw somebody sort of jumping, very agile, doing weird things, antics, gyrations, acrobatics. Now, of course, if he would see the same thing he would know exactly what's taking place because he himself could do it. His body can understand because he can cast out his lines, fibers of light, and tie them to places. The recapitulation enables you to do that, too, to cast your fibers, energetic beams, back into the past and tie them on things or untie them. Basically you would dislodge the energy that's tied there. So yes, there's parallels but not really from the point of view of actual practice.
John:   Going now to your book again, you've mentioned what sorcery is briefly and what sorcerers do. Could you give a perspective -- this depends again on the milieu of the actual sorcerers themselves. Is there a sexual dichotomy between the male and female sorcerers? Is there anything in terms of the feminist concept? Could you give an explanation, a description of what a sorcerer's -- their role is. Are they still part of a social cultural milieu? Is there sort of an ethos, a world view that sorcerers hold in terms of how they see reality? Can you give more in terms of an in-depth description of sorcery and sorcerers?
Taisha:   Uh-huh, yes. There's several questions there. Let's just start with a definition of sorcery because that's very basic. Sorcery, basically, is the ability to perceive more than is allotted from the world into which we were born. They try to expand perception and they do it in -- they have certain techniques, dreaming, stalking, gazing techniques. Many of these, in fact, all of them are described in the books, the techniques.
But they all lead to displacements of the assemblage point and giving up your holding on the world of everyday life so that you are able to perceive more. How can you perceive another reality if you are only given to perceiving this one. I mean it's a contradiction. It can't be done. You have to let go.
It's like the monkey who is putting his fist in a bottle and he's grabbing a fist full of nuts. He can't pull his hand out to go elsewhere. He is stuck there, but if he lets go of what he is grasping he can slip his hand out and be free. So sorcerers, all they're doing is they're letting go of their holdings, the handful of nuts that we all grasp on and which consists of the expectations we have of ourselves and what we were taught that the world is like. So you let go of that and by the very fact that you are letting go, something else comes in; something else slips in. And that's what sorcerers do.
Now the training is basically the same for everyone, except I did mention that Carlos Castaneda, being the nagual, was trained in the uses of the psychotropic plants at the very initial stages. After that he was also trained -- did many recapitulations as we all do. That's fundamental.
The first thing that anyone does -- forget the marijuana, forget taking anything. You sit down and do a thorough recapitulation. That in itself will set you up and give you the possibility of moving elsewhere. Recapitulating your life is letting go of that handful of nuts that you're grasping on or whatever. As you let it go it's very painful because all our lives we're taught to hold on. The stronger your hold, the better person you are, the more ego strength you have.
So sorcerers teach the opposite. That's why we call sorcery training not-doing, because they don't really do anything in particular. They just not-do the things that we were trained to do. So it's very simple, but in its simplicity it becomes almost impossible and there's very few takers, of course.
People think that everyone wants to join Carlos Castaneda and his, quote, group. And the few people whose -- let's say their paths cross and somehow -- not that they're invited to be a member of any group but some of this -- maybe they're told to recapitulate or something.
Do they do it? No, because to recapitulate you have to take energy away from your daily life. And what, you have to take it away from the nights our on dates or whatever, going to the disco or watching TV or worrying about work or someplace or worrying about yourself. The energy to recapitulate has to come from somewhere because you have to first of all just make time. Physically you have to have time to do it.
So the opportunity is there really for anyone but the willingness has to be also balanced, has to come with the opportunity to actually do it. So otherwise it becomes only a tale of energy that you think about.
And we all have this idea that oh, I wish I would be different; I wish I could do this, but you don't have the energy. With the recapitulation as a method of training you get the energy; you make the energy; you no longer are wishing, you're intending. But intent is very different from wishing.
Intent is hooking up your energy, your purpose, to something that's already set up by the sorcerers. And if you hook to that, via, let's say the recapitulation, it pulls you. But you do have to do it.
This thing about another technique is gazing. I used to watch television a great deal when I first entered Don Juan's realm. And they told me well, okay, you spend what -- and this is true for anyone. We spend maybe what, two hours. They have done studies -- maybe two hours a day watching television. He said okay, watch television, but don't turn it on.
So there I was sitting in front of the television set gazing at the television. So that's an act of not-doing. That's an example of not-doing. And you do your own not-doings, make up your not-doings, whether it's looking at a little match and inhaling the light -- that's a not-doing -- or gazing at something.
So I found that when I was gazing at the television set -- of course, in private, you don't right there. If you start doing this in public and with someone around, they will start wondering what is the matter with you. So you do these things but you don't spread them around because everyone is going to judge you from the point of view of their perspective.
And the reality of everyday life is like Alcatraz. I mean there is no escaping. There is wardens and guards making sure that you don't get off that rock. So anybody who wants to venture into that shark-infested-waters -- and there is no guarantees that you will ever make it anywhere.
You do have to practice stalking and be very unobtrusive. A stalker, to give a definition of a stalker, is someone -- well, one of the definitions is someone who really makes it an art of being invisible. So you can get off the rock as long as nobody sees you. It's as simple as that. Nothing's holding you there really. You just let go of that handful of nuts. But make sure nobody sees you. You do it gradually. Otherwise they're going to make sure -- they're going to put impediments in your path, guaranteed.
So as I was gazing at the television and there right there you see that the facticity of what a TV set is is taken for granted because the thing starts dissolving, starts becoming two dimensional. The idea of three dimensional space is an assumption, is something that we learn as children, as infants, really to see three dimensionality. So that children when they cross the street or speak is something that children learn. They know that those cars are moving fast.
For a little infants or toddlers they don't know that. That's why the mother always has to say don't cross the street, cars are coming. They don't know what a car is capable of doing because they don't have the gloss, car, yet. They'll get it soon, hopefully not the hard way. But if they burn their finger on a flame, they'll realize what is heat and what the properties of fire is.
Even that is not a given fact because there's people that can walk on coals and not get burned. We learn the parameters of our reality. So gazing disrupts the facticity of our reality of everyday life.
Let me talk a little bit about women. I was trained by yes, basically the female members of Don Juan's group. Emilito, who to me, I mean he was absolutely male but he was Zuleica's dream body. Your dreaming would be anything male, female and of course, I was also trained by Don Juan himself because there were certain things that we needed to know and be able to understand because our -- Florinda Donner, Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs -- our situation was not the same as his situation where he had the four dreamers, the four stalkers, and really the rule kind of governed how they would proceed.
Our training didn't follow the rule except in a very minimal sense. Whenever he trained Carlos Castaneda, he would ask the omens and that's pointed out in the books. He would look at the omens to see well, should we proceed like this or this. And the omens would say no, don't follow the rule, just let the thing happen and the same way with us.
We were trained in specific things but never by any rule. I mean I don't -- we all had to recapitulate but we could do it any way that suited us. I happen to -- I like being in enclosed spaces. I did it in a cave but Florinda Donner, you couldn't put her in a cave. She recapitulated walking down the street or just when something triggers something, maybe a memory of the past, and we still have a little agitation of some sort, we recapitulate it. We're on the spot wherever we are.
Or the sorcery passes. They're techniques, bodily movements to activate the energy body. But there's hundreds of them. So you do the ones that suit you. There's really no rigid rule of training. And the reason being is because in order to move the assemblage point you have to be fluid. I personally was given very heavy training in stalkers' techniques and stalking because my assemblage point was very erratic and so I needed that training.
Other people don't need the training. They have a natural bent for something, Florinda Donner for her dreaming and she discusses her training in Being-in-Dreaming. She has a very natural bend. Her assemblage point moves when she is sitting in front of me. All of a sudden her assemblage point is moving and she is amalgamating other bits of reality that come in very, very easily.
Women get to the -- females have a very natural facility for moving the assemblage point by two things, one biologically. They do have the cycles; they menstruate. Chemically things in their bodies change so that it gives them a chance to let other stimuli in. It just trickles in. They have wombs and there is something about the womb that as an organ is able to -- it has like a secondary function. It can sense and understand directly.
And we all say, well, women are more intuitive than men. We have that coming into our daily jargon and we have slogans: Women are more intuitive, they are so sensitive when they menstruate, and this and that. It's true but women can use it instead of being put down or it's a negative thing. They can use it to do sorcery, to recapitulate, to heighten their concentration when they're recapitulating. They will have a hard time reading phenomenology when they menstruate, but they will have an easy time doing dreaming. So they can do their dreaming during that time of the month.
The second reason it's easier for women is because our society doesn't make that may demands on them as it does on men. Men, boys, you know, mothers raise their children to educate them. They pour a great deal of attention on them, the males, because they're the ones that have to perpetuate the social order. They are the ones that get the education so they can teach and perpetuate whatever aspect that they're trained in, whether it's science or medicine, law.
Although now that's changing, of course. Women also are anything into those fields but basically for the wrong reasons. Women are going into these fields so they can be like men, equal with men. It's functional from the point of view of the social order. They're stabilizing their position because now they're lawyers and doctors. But it's not functional from the point of true sorcery because now they're making new ties, stronger links to the social order. So it has, of course, advantages and disadvantages.
Not to say that a sorcerer or somebody training in sorcery can't become a lawyer or a doctor. Every one of us, Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs, we received a university education in order to be able to think abstractly and communicate, but not to be the bastions of the social order, you know, anthropology professors, lawyers or doctors.
Carol Tiggs has a tremendous knowledge in acupuncture, medicine of the body, the physical body and the energetic body, comparable to any doctor. She got that from the point of view of her sorcery training, so she can use that to move away. So women have a better, really, a better chance of moving out of the social order, off that Alcatr

[Guest]