Since we are drafted into that system by being born into it, from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to adjust our perceiving to conform to the demands of this system, a system that rules us for life. Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly right in believing that the act of countermanding it and perceiving energy directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.
I am in wonder at the greatest accomplishment of our human upbringing: to lock our assemblage point on its habitual position. For, once it is immobilized there, our perception can be coached and guided to interpret what we perceive. In other words, we can then be guided to perceive more in terms of our system than in terms of our senses. Human perception is universally homogeneous, because the assemblage points of the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.
Sorcerers prove all this to themselves when they see that at the moment the assemblage point is displaced beyond a certain threshold, and new universal filaments of energy begin to be perceived, there is no sense to what we perceive. The immediate cause is that new sensory data has rendered our system inoperative; it can no longer be used to interpret what we are perceiving.
Perceiving without our system is, of course, chaotic. But strangely enough, when we think we have truly lost our bearings, our old system rallies; it comes to our rescue and transforms our new incomprehensible perception into a thoroughly comprehensible new world. Just like what happens to an apprentice when he gazes at the leaves of a tree and his dreaming attention comes forth. His perception is chaotic for a while; everything comes to him at once, and his system for interpreting the world doesn’t function. Then, the chaos clears up and there he is, in front of a new world.
That world exists in the precise position of his assemblage point at that moment. In order to perceive it, he needs cohesion, that is, he needs to maintain his assemblage point fixed on that position. The result is that he totally perceives a new world for a while.
Others would perceive that same world if they had uniformity and cohesion. Uniformity and cohesion is to hold, in unison, the same position of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers called the entire act of acquiring uniformity and cohesion outside the normal world “stalking perception.”
The art of stalking , as I have already said, deals with the fixation of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers discovered, through practice, that important as it is to displace the assemblage point, it is even more important to make it stay fixed on its new position, wherever that new position might be.
If the assemblage point does not become stationary, there is no way that we can perceive coherently. We would experience then a kaleidoscope of disassociated images. This is the reason the old sorcerers put as much emphasis on dreaming as they did on stalking . One art cannot exist without the other, especially for the kinds of activities in which the old sorcerers were involved.
The old sorcerers called them the intricacies of the second attention or the grand adventure of the unknown. These activities stem from the displacements of the assemblage point. Not only had the old sorcerers learned to displace their assemblage points to thousands of positions on the surface or on the inside of their energy masses but they had also learned to fixate their assemblage points on those positions, and thus retain their cohesiveness, indefinitely. We can’t talk about the benefits of that, we can talk only about end results.
The cohesiveness of the old sorcerers was such that it allowed them to become perceptually and physically everything the specific position of their assemblage points dictated. They could transform themselves into anything for which they had a specific inventory. An inventory is all the details of perception involved in becoming, for example, a jaguar, a bird, an insect, et cetera, et cetera. It is possible, not so much for you and me, but you them. For them, it was nothing.
The old sorcerers had superb fluidity. All they needed was the slightest shift of their assemblage points, the slightest perceptual cue from their dreaming , and they would instantaneously stalk their perception, rearrange their cohesiveness to fit their new state of awareness, and be an animal, another person, a bird, or anything.
Sorcerers bring order to the chaos. Their preconceived, transcendental purpose is to free their perception. Sorcerers don’t make up the world they are perceiving; they perceive energy directly, and then they discover that what they are perceiving is an unknown new world, which can swallow them whole, because it is as real as anything we know to be real.
What happens as an apprentice gazes at the leaves of a tree is that he began by perceiving the energy of the tree. On the subjective level, however, he believes he is dreaming because he employs dreaming techniques to perceive energy. To use dreaming techniques in the world of everyday life was one of the old sorcerers most effective devices. It made perceiving energy directly dreamlike, instead of totally chaotic, until a moment when something rearranged perception and the sorcerer found himself facing a new world. The scenery one views in that case is not a dream, nor is it our daily world.
I’ve been saying this to you over and over, and you think that I am merely repeating myself. I know how difficult it is for the mind to allow mindless possibilities to become real. But new worlds exist! They are wrapped one around the other, like the skins of an onion. The world we exist in is but one of those skins.
So then, is the goal of my teaching to prepare you to go into those worlds? No. I don’t mean that. We go into those worlds only as an exercise. Those journeys are the antecedents of the sorcerers of today. We do the same dreaming that the old sorcerers used to do, but at one moment we deviate into new ground. The old sorcerers preferred the shifts of the assemblage point, so they were always on more or less known, predictable ground. We prefer the movements of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers were after the human unknown. We are after the nonhuman unknown. You haven’t gotten to that yet. You are only beginning. And at the beginning everyone has to go through the old sorcerers’ steps. After all, they were the ones who invented dreaming .
When dreaming is too easy for you it can be a damnation if you don’t watch it. It leads to the human unknown. As I said to you, modern-day sorcerers strive to get to the nonhuman unknown; that is, freedom from being human. Inconceivable worlds that are outside the band of man but that we still can perceive. This is where modern sorcerers take the side road. Their predilection is what’s outside the human domain. And what are outside that domain are all-inclusive worlds, not merely the realm of birds or the realm of animals or the realm of man, even if it be the unknown man. What I am talking about are worlds, like the one where we live; total worlds with endless realms.
Those worlds are in different positions of the assemblage point. But positions sorcerers arrive at with a movement of the assemblage point, not a shift. Entering into those worlds is the type of dreaming only sorcerers of today do. The old sorcerers stayed away from it, because it requires a great deal of detachment and no self-importance whatsoever. A price they couldn’t afford to pay.
For the sorcerers who practice dreaming today, dreaming is freedom to perceive worlds beyond the imagination. Freedom is an adventure with no end, in which we risk our lives and much more for a few moments of something beyond words, beyond thoughts or feelings.
What can be the driving force to do all this? To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.
To suspend judgment and let the inorganic beings come, was in fact, the very procedure used by the sorcerers of antiquity to attract them. It is very difficult to make the self give up its strongholds except through practice. One of the self’s strongest lines of defense is indeed our rationality, and this is not only the most durable line of defense when it comes to sorcery actions and explanations but also the most threatened. The existence of inorganic beings is a foremost assailant of our rationality.
From time to time a projection from the realm of the inorganic beings, a current of foreign energy, a scout, will be injected into your dreams. So after you have crossed the first gate of dreaming , adjust your dreaming attention and be on the alert.