Florinda Donner - Being in dreaming - Author's Note

My first contact with the sorcerers' world was not something I planned or sought out: It was rather a fortuitous event.

I met a group of people in northern Mexico, in July of 1970, and they turned out to be the strict followers of a sorcerers' tradition belonging to the Indians of pre-Columbian Mexico.

That first meeting had a long-range, overpowering effect on me.

It introduced me to another world that coexists with ours.

I have spent twenty years of my life committed to that world.

This is the account of how my involvement began, and how it was spurred and directed by the sorcerers who were responsible for my being there.

The most prominent of them was a woman named Florinda Matus. She was my mentor and guide. She was also the one who gave me her name, Florinda, as a gift of love and power.




To call them sorcerers is not my choice.

Brujo or bruja, which mean sorcerer or witch, are the Spanish terms they themselves use to denote a male or a female practitioner.

I have always resented the negative connotation of those words, but the sorcerers themselves put me at ease, once and for all by explaining that what is meant by sorcery is something quite abstract; the ability, which some people develop, to expand the limits of normal perception.

The abstract quality of sorcery voids automatically, then, any positive or negative connotation of terms used to describe its practitioners.

Expanding the limits of normal perception is a concept that stems from the sorcerers' belief that our choices in life are limited, due to the fact that they are defined by the social order.

Sorcerers believe that the social order sets up our lists of options, but we do the rest: By accepting only these choices, we set a limit to our nearly limitless possibilities.

This limitation, they say, fortunately applies only to our social side and not to the other side of us; a practically inaccessible side, which is not in the realm of ordinary awareness.

Their main endeavor, therefore, is to uncover that side.

They do this by breaking the frail, yet resilient, shield of human assumptions about what we are and what we are capable of being.

Sorcerers acknowledge that in our world of daily affairs there are people who probe into the unknown in pursuit of alternative views of reality.

The sorcerers contend that the ideal consequences of such probings should be the capacity to draw from our findings the necessary energy to change, and to detach ourselves from our definition of reality.

But the sorcerers argue that unfortunately such probings are essentially mental endeavors: New thoughts and new ideas hardly ever change us.

One of the things I learned in the sorcerers' world was that without retreating from the world, and without injuring themselves in the process, sorcerers do accomplish the magnificent task of breaking the agreement that has defined reality.

[ _B2SPIRIT_ @ Carodejove, carodejky... ]

Taisha Abelar - The Sorcerers' Crossing: A Woman's Journey
Preface

I have devoted my life to the practice of a rigorous discipline which for lack of a more suitable name we have called sorcery.

I am also an anthropologist, having received my Ph.D. in that field of study.

I mention my two areas of expertise in this particular order because my involvement with sorcery came first.

Usually, one becomes an anthropologist and then one does fieldwork on an aspect of culture- for example, the study of sorcery practices.

With me, it happened the other way around: as a student of sorcery I went to study anthropology.




In the late sixties, while I was living in Tucson, Arizona, I met a Mexican woman by the name of Clara Grau, who invited me to stay in her house in the state of Sonora, Mexico.

There, she did her utmost to usher me into her world.

Clara Grau was a sorceress; part of a cohesive group of sixteen sorcerers.

Some of them were Yaqui Indians; others were Mexicans of various origins and backgrounds, ages and sexes. Most were women.

All of them pursued, single-heartedly, the same goal: breaking the perceptual dispositions and biases that imprison us within the boundaries of the normal everyday world and prevent us from entering other perceivable worlds.

For sorcerers, to break such perceptual dispositions enables one to cross a barrier and leap into the unimaginable.

They call such a leap "the sorcerers' crossing."

Sometimes they refer to it as 'the abstract flight,' because it entails soaring from the side of the concrete; the physical, to the side of expanded perception and impersonal abstract forms.

These sorcerers were interested in helping me accomplish this abstract flight so that I could join them in their basic endeavors.

For me, academic training became an integral part of my preparation for the sorcerers' crossing.

The leader, or 'nagual' as he is called, of the sorcerers' group with whom I am associated, is a person with a keen interest in formal academic erudition.

Hence, all those under his care were encouraged to develop their capacity for the abstract, clear thinking that he acquired in a modern university.

As a woman, I had an even greater obligation to fulfill this requirement.

Women in general are conditioned from early childhood to depend on the male members of our society to conceptualize and initiate changes.

The sorcerers that trained me had very strong opinions in this regard.

They felt that it is indispensable that women develop their intellects and enhance their capacity for analysis and abstraction in order to have a better grasp of the world around them.

Also, training the intellect is a bona-fide sorcerers' subterfuge.

By deliberately keeping the mind occupied in analysis and reasoning, sorcerers are free to explore, unimpeded, other areas of perception.

In other words, while the rational side is busy with the formality of academic pursuits, the energetic or nonrational side, which sorcerers call 'the double', is occupied with the fulfillment of sorcery tasks.

In this way, the suspicious and analytic mind is less likely to interfere or even notice what is going on at a nonrational level.

The counterpart of my academic development was the enhancement of my capacity for awareness and perception: together the two develop our total being.

Working together as a unit, they took me away from the taken-for-granted life that I had been born into and socialized for as a woman; to a new area of greater perceptual possibilities than what the normal world had in store for me.

That is not to say that solely my commitment to the world of sorcery was enough to assure my success.

The pull of the daily world is so strong and sustained that in spite of their most assiduous training, all practitioners find themselves again and again in the midst of the most abject terror, stupidity and indulging, as if they had learned nothing.

My teachers warned me that I was no exception, and that only a minute to minute relentless struggle can balance one's natural but stupefying insistence to remain unchanged.

After a careful examination of my final aims, I, in conjunction with my cohorts, arrived at the conclusion that I have to describe my training in order to emphasize to seekers of the unknown the importance of developing the ability to perceive more than we do with normal perception.

Such enhanced perception has to be a sober, pragmatic, new way of perceiving.

It cannot be, under any condition, merely the continuation of perceiving the world of everyday life.

The events I narrate here depict the initial stages of sorcery training for a stalker.

This phase involves the cleansing of one's habitual ways of thinking, behaving and feeling by means of a traditional sorcery undertaking, one which all neophytes need to perform, called 'the recapitulation'.

To complement the recapitulation, I was taught a series of practices called 'sorcery passes', involving movement and breathing.

To give these practices an adequate coherence, I was instructed with the accompanying philosophical rationales and explanations.

The goal of everything I was taught was the redistribution of my normal energy, and the enhancement of it, so that it could be used for the out-of-the-ordinary feats of perception demanded by sorcery training.

The idea behind the training is that as soon as the compulsive pattern of old habits, thoughts, expectations and feelings is broken by means of the recapitulation, one is indisputably in the position to accumulate enough energy to live by the new rationales provided by the sorcery tradition- and to substantiate those rationales by directly perceiving a different reality.

[ _B2SPIRIT_ @ Carodejove, carodejky... ]

Building is not done by abstaining from demolition! (Kamar)

REFLECTION

When hill, tree, cloud, those shadowy forms
Ascending heaven are seen,
Their mindless beauty I from far
Admire, a gulf between;

Yet in the untroubled river when
Their true ideas I find
That river, joined in trance with me,
Becomes my second mind.

(George Rostrevor Hamilton)

"To co Vás uráží si volíte sám."

[ YBUKO @ CITATY ... aneb veci, ktere vam pomohly otevrit oci ... ]

There are three men on a train - economist, logician and a mathematician.
They have just crossed the border into Scotland and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train. The economist says: "Look, the cows in Scotland are brown." The logician says: "No. There are cows in Scotland of which at least one is brown." The mathematician replies: "No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown."

hezkej relativismus pohledu v tomhle starym "matememetickym" vtipku ...:)

„Ale když se pak člověk naučí VIDĚT,
uvědomí si, že už dál nemůže přemýšlet o věcech,
na které se dívá, a jestliže nemůže přemýšlet o tom,
na co se dívá, všechno se stává nedůležité.“
Carlos Castaneda

"abys moh privist na svet luka skywalkera musis se stat darth waderem"

Mysl dokonalého člověka je jako zrcadlo. Nic nezachycuje. Nic neočekává. Odráží, ale nezadržuje. Tudíž dokonalý člověk může jednat bez úsilí.

-Čuang-c´-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ty3SV26Y4M&mode=related&search=
Tony Benn vs. Dawkins o bohu a nevire..

An Answer to the Question:
What is Enlightenment?
IMMANUEL KANT

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html

People are not born evil, but rather with survival talents, and remarkable mental templates to be anything imaginable — just as infants readily learn to speak and understand any of a thousand languages in an instant in their development. We get a push from nature in various directions, such as being more inhibited or bold, but who we become is ultimately a complex process of cultural, historical, religious, economic and political experiences in familial and other institutional settings.

Most of us fail to appreciate the extent to which our behavior is under situational control, because we prefer to believe that is all is internally generated. We wander around cloaked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and rationality.

Instead, few of us really know ourselves or most others in our lives. We can hardly have confidence in assertions of what we would do in a new or alien situation because we chose to live in familiar, safe, predictable situations. And we play the same roles over and over in each of our various behavioral settings, as do those we think we know.

Those roles come with scripted actions and dialogues that soon are familiar to our audiences, since we are rarely taxed to improvise but say the lines as stated.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/04/ten_questions_w.html

Vzdát se je někdy jediný způsob jak zvítězit

Již jsem dán síle, která vede můj osud
Již po ničem netoužím, a tak nemám co bránit
Nemám myšlenek, a tak mohu zřít
Již ničeho se neobávám, tak proto se rozvzpomenu na své Já
Klidného a odpoutaného nechá mě Orel projít ke svobodě

..z knihy Uniknout Orlovi Gato

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

KERRAY: díky, tento citát mi dnes velmi sednul...
vůbec bři Čapkové byli "chytráci", co mužu slyšet X-krát je třeba Továrna na Absolutno od Karla...

"Mysli si tedy," opakoval Marek, "že, dejme tomu, v každé hmotě je obsaženo Absolutno v jakémsi vázaném stavu, řekněme jako vázaná, inertní energie; nebo jednoduše, že Bůh je všudypřítomný, že tedy je přítomen v každé hmotě a v každé částečce hmoty. A teď si představ, že kus hmoty úplně zničíš, zdánlivě beze zbytku; ale protože každá hmota je vlastně Hmota plus Absolutno, zničil jsi jenom hmotu a zůstal ti nezničitelný zbytek: čisté, uvolněné, činné Absolutno. Zbylo chemicky nerozložitelné, nehmotné reziduum, jež nevykazuje spektrálních čar, ani atomové váhy, ani chemické slučivosti, ani Mariottova zákona, ničeho, ničeho, praničeho z vlastností hmoty. Zůstal čistý Bůh. Chemické nic, které působí s ohromnou energií. Protože je to nehmotné, není to vázáno na zákony hmoty. Už z toho plyne, že se to projevuje protipřírodně a přímo zázračně. To všechno vyplývá z předpokladu, že jest Bůh přítomen ve hmotě. Dovedeš si myslet, že, dejme tomu, v ní je?"

"Dovedu," pravil Bondy. "A dál?"

"Dobrá," řekl Marek a povstal, "tedy je to tak opravdu."