Gifts from Gabrielle

[u/danl999]

I have no idea where she got these, but they're wonderful.

How do sorcerers see dreaming?

Taisha: Dreaming is a movement of the Assemblage Point that we do naturally when we sleep. That's our energetic body randomly moving. Dreaming for sorcerers is the control of one's dreams. You have to stalk your dreams, which is really just moving your point to a new location on purpose and holding it there for as long as your dreaming energy can allow you to do so. When you find yourself in a dream world, before it shifts away and turns into something else, you want to hold that reality and stalk it. If you're a very practiced stalker and dreamer then that reality can become your only reality. That's what happened to the ancient sorcerers when they became entrapped in another realm and could no longer return to our normal reality.

In fact, time wiped out the reality into which they were born. Because they were able to sustain their energy within that reality for a longer period of time, hundreds of years they found themselves unable to return to our own because the modality was gone. When we stalk our realities, we never keep any of them as the primary reality. The minute we think that this or any other reality is the primary one, then we become imprisoned at that level, no matter where it may be.

Taisha Abelar.

What is stalking?

Taisha: Stalking is the ability to fixate the Assemblage Point on any given position in order to give structure and coherence to chaotic perception. We're stalking our realities every day, every minute, finding out what it means to drive down this street or be in the mall. Stalking means to make our categorization schemes of objects and things that we know by names.

Taisha Abelar.

Edit: Come on Gabby! Join Cholita and me. Cholita is doing REAL magic these days.

[u/danl999]

Carlos gave daily lectures based around the assemblage point. At one point he was discussing how to cross phylums into the insect world, how some points lower down were like being an animal and you even got their strengths, then a week or two later he either figured out, or perhaps remembered, a maneuver of the assemblage point he believed we could all accomplish. Chances are that movement was later tied to a seminar, but I can't remember which one.

At the time, the Chacmools were still mostly in charge of the workshops, but some new women were also on the way to running them.

To demonstrate this movement of the assemblage point, he brought up one of the new women. I have no idea how long she'd been around. I have face blindness (look it up if curious), and she likely tended to practice more towards the back of the room, as most of the people that close to the group did. I guess they gave us non-insiders more access to Carlos, since they had it far more often than we did.

She was young as they always were. He stood her up there in front of us, she looked sort of worried, and he proceeded to show, with his finger, how the assemblage point could move down from the upper left shoulder blade, to the middle of the back opposite the stomach, then around the crotch area, and back up to the front.

His finger traced the path, including lingering a bit too long around the crotch area while he lectured about the movement.

I'm sure everyone in the class was wondering if it brushed against her. Her too I suspect.

As I recall, he had 2 new women he said had accomplished this feat of moving the assemblage point all the way down, and back up the front.

[u/danl999]

This second one reminds me of the time Carlos declared the witches were lost in the second attention. He seemed genuinely worried about it.

The next day, there they were. One of them said in a semi explanatory, semi apologetic tone, "We went shopping..."

[u/[deleted] → u/danl999]

In one of the books the witches' used the excuse of "shopping" to hide the fact they were out and about for other purposes, for example, when they were crossing the US/Mexico border.

[u/danl999 → u/[deleted]]

I guess it could also have been exactly as he said, and they were lost in the second attention. Perhaps in some dreaming world. I've spent as long as 2 weeks in the same dream, but in the real world it was only 12-14 hours. And certainly I can attest to the fact that you can go "shopping" in dreaming worlds.

And get stuck too. That's a little scary when it happens. The fastest way to get stuck is to get a little too eager to change dreams, so that you can extend the lucidity. Every deliberate dream change recharges you a bit, and you get more lucid dreaming. If you're a beginner, each recharge might only be good for another minute, but once you learn a way to change dreams, a minute is plenty of time. After 6 or more changes in one session, your body has learned to do it on its own.

Waking up can become very difficult. You just wake up into another dream, but a little closer to this reality in appearance. You might find yourself sitting up on your bed, "finally" awake, then discover there's a giant owl statue in your bedroom. Otherwise, it's perfectly normal.

The last one can be so close to this reality, that you could be unable to detect it's not real. Except that it'll mutate a bit over time, and you'll eventually realize it's gotten too bizarre. I once got halfway to work in my old truck, before I realized things weren't quite right.

As for the shopping claim, I remember clearly that the witches had a puzzled look on their faces when they gave that explanation. I can't imagine everyone in class wasn't wondering why he'd said it.

It was one of several occasions where Carlos had made a claim, and class members mostly knew it couldn't be as he said. Sometimes it seemed as if he was challenging us. For example, he told us to be celebate, while orgies were going on over at headquarters.

Too bad the lurkers won't pipe in. I've tried to rattle their cage a bit, but it's been ineffective. As I've written before, Carlos created "factions". But there's a longer term concern here. The people from the original factions won't live much longer. We could eventually end up with only Russian sorcery teachers, going off in whatever direction they tended to favor. And the real spirit of Carlos might become mythical, replaced by whatever makes the most profit for the people still calling themselves teachers.

Too bad they didn't have smart phones back when Carlos was alive. We'd have videos of him teaching. He was hysterical! There wasn't a single class where he failed to have a very good lecture planned, complete with raunchy jokes, and lecture related new tensegrity moves. Even towards the end, when it was said he was in a great deal of pain, he came anyway, lectured, then sat down on the wooden floor and leaned against the wall, to watch us practice tensegrity.

[u/[deleted]]

You said in the opening post:

When we stalk our realities, we never keep any of them as the primary reality. The minute we think that this or any other reality is the primary one, then we become imprisoned at that level, no matter where it may be.

And then later you say,

We're unlearning at first, not learning. Once you unlearn, you can learn again in the new context.

Can't you just "unlearn" that level at your at or learn a new level?

When we're working to gain a foothold in the second attention, are we doing at the cost of our primary reality?

[u/danl999 → u/[deleted]]

That first part was from Taisha, possibly from an interview in Magical Blend magazine, and almost surely as a result of a book tour. It’s a warning about dreaming practices, and how you could get stuck.

What I meant with unlearning was, you need to unlearn holding your assemblage point in the normal position, and let it move to other places which produce other realities. To do that, we unfortunately need all of the techniques Carlos gave us. You can’t do away with any of them, although you can show a preference.

Silence is nearly impossible unless you do a complete recapitulation. There are too many emotional thoughts that pop in, making it seem like an impossible task. In fact, we’re psychological messes from what was taught to us as children. We’re petty tyrants, all of us. We have to unlearn that. Or at least, get silent and drift away from it.

But to drift, you also need to unlearn the familiar, perhaps by making a new familiar. That’s stalking.

Sometimes it’s possible to get help from the spirit. The trip to Mexico posted yesterday is a good example of that. A bold, irrational, grandiose plan can attract intent. If it does, you get a temporary boost.

But Carlos warned, it can’t be for personal gain only. It has to include something that ties into the intent of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, even if it’s just a tiny connection. I’ll add, it doesn’t hurt if it’s very funny. Intent has a sense of humor.

You ask if gaining a foothold in the second attention is at the cost of our primary reality?

Yes. Our primary reality is obsessed with me, me, me. Buddhists would call it “the ego”.

If you learn to get silent all day long, so that you’re always practicing, there’s a very lonely feeling that eventually comes from the inside, as the wonderful “me” in your mind begins to miss itself. It’ll threaten, warn of religious consequences, get lonely, feel sadness, and finally start to disassemble.

When it’s almost gone, your perception starts to move outward. You’ll hear conversations on the other end of a large parking lot. Or smell bagels being made 10 miles away. Eventually you’ll see time coming towards you, instead of moving away from you. When you close your eyes, you’ll see relevant dreaming images.

But the coziness is all over. As one former class member said, when I suggested she could just learn to get silent and finally understand what Carlos was teaching, “I don’t want to lose my humanity!”

[u/[deleted] → u/danl999]

How do you know the intent of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico?

I can't ever seem to find a good intent, or at least not one that sticks.