The Art Of Stalking True Freedom

Taisha Abelar in conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart, Part 2.

In the long years when Carlos Castaneda first informed the world of the wonders of American aboriginal spirit knowledge, many recognized that a tradition of great significance had begun to reveal itself to the world. Over the years Castaneda has progressively shown the all-engulfing worldview of the Toltecs in its reformed state as a work of spiritual art, shaped by the new seers, who have survived the devastating encounter with European colonial civilization.

Taisha Abelar is one of the new seers whose designation "stalker" balances the world of the "dreamer" [see Dimensions Feb.'92 interview with the "dreamer" Florinda Donner]. It is with true delight that we witness the emergence into the world of a new and genuine way of the spirit.

Alexander Blair-Ewart: Recognizing that this is a complex subject that can be understood only by people who are genuinely interested, can I get you to talk about stalking?

Taisha Abelar: That's a question that comes up often when I give lectures. People want to know exactly what is stalking. And there's two ways of approaching this. First, just a general definition is that a stalker is really someone who has made an art out of being unobtrusive. And that is he puts himself in the background, and there's a certain training that is involved in order to become unobtrusive, and I can tell you why it is necessary to be unobtrusive.

Let me give you a couple other ways of talking about stalking. It's designed to give the sorcerer or the practitioner a jolt, and by a jolt we mean a push or a slight burst of energy, so that the assemblage point shifts ever so slightly. Now, I think I have to talk about the assemblage point because that is exactly what the stalkers are aiming at. They're aiming to move or shift the assemblage point, and through that to change the perception of the world.

Perception, of course, can be changed through dreaming, but stalkers do it while they're awake. So the way sorcerers perceive the world is that they say that everything we see, while we are awake in this reality is a question of the position of the assemblage point. I'm sure you're familiar with Castaneda's books, and you know what the assemblage point is, but let me just describe it again. It is the focused awareness point of luminosity on the luminous cocoon (aura--ed). We believe that the human being's energetic body is a mass of fibers of light that have infinite number, and each one of those is a specific awareness. So that they're not just light like electricity, but they're actually light like awareness. And on the luminous egg shape that makes up the energetic body there is a point of extra luminosity where the concentration of the person, his awareness, is assembled, and that point of luminosity is about the size of a golf ball, from the point of view of the 'seer' who sees the person's luminous being. But it can change size; it also can change position on the luminous body.

Now, where that is located determines what is perceived, because there's a matching of the fibers that are lit up within the luminous body and the fibers that are out in the universe at large, because sorcerers also maintain, of course, that the universe us a whole is an infinite number of both energetic fibers, some of which are perceivable, and others which are absolutely beyond our capacities as human beings to perceive. But where the position of this assemblage point is, this lighted up area on the luminous being, when that matches what is outside, then perception takes place.

Abe: Would this apply to everyone?

Taisha: We all have our assemblage point at pretty much the same place, because as an infant is born, by virtue of the fact that he is going to be a human infant and a human being, a social person, he has to match the location of his assemblage point to that of other human beings in the world so that he can interact with them, and perceive the same world, the same segment of the possibility of perception that is open to him, so that we can all agree as to what we are perceiving.

Because our assemblage points are in the same place, we can have language, we can talk about trees and cars and solid walls and floors, and we can have a spatial and temporal continuity; we know that there was a yesterday, there'll be a tomorrow. All of that has to do with the position of the assemblage point. Time, our conception of everything we know to be so, is determined by where that heightened point of concentration awareness is located. And if by some anomaly it is not in the place where the human assemblage point ought to be, then these people are either sorcerers, (and we'll talk about that in a moment), or they're a candidate for the mentally ill.

So you find these people in asylums, because their assemblage points are not fixed at the position where other human beings have theirs fixed. Therefore they don't have this intersubjectivity in terms of perception. And they can't have the agreements to what constitutes reality.

There's a mandate, let's say, even a biological mandate that says that all human beings should have their assemblage point at this particular position so they can be what we call human. Animals have it at different places, and that's what fixes their species of animal. Trees have their assemblage point at a certain place in their luminous shell, and that makes them trees.

Abe: So could we also call the assemblage point the position of collective persona reality agreement?

Taisha: Exactly. It's our persona, it's our person. Now this person, sorcerers say, is not all that we are humanly capable of being. So we can we be more than just a social person. Now, in order to be more than what society, or what our birthright, has put forth for us, we have to move or shift the place of the assemblage point.

We have to move it out of its position where it is stuck. So, not only is the assemblage point capable of moving elsewhere, but when it does, other luminous intelligent fibers of awareness are lit up and matched with the universe, and therefore other realities are constituted, and these other realities are as real and solid as the one we are in now, because the reason this reality where we are now is what we call undeniably real is because of the agreement that we have that this is what the world is like.

And that is based on the fixation of the assemblage point. If it moves- and it does; it moves in dreams, by itself- we call that dream reality, to be separated of course from the waking state. So we acknowledge that there are other realms of experience, but we always refer to them from the position of everyday reality.

But sorcerers don't do that. They say that you can move the everyday reality while you're awake. You don't have to do dreaming... Dreaming, of course, is the control of the movement of the assemblage point in sleep, in dreams, and the fixation of it elsewhere.

Abe: And you can do it without being insane.

Taisha: Absolutely.

Abe: That in itself is an enormously revolutionary statement.

Taisha: Because our agreement says that yes, there's crazy people out there that have hallucinations. They see monsters and what not. But they're somehow deficient and in this sense, from the point of view of the social order, yes, they're deficient in the sense that they have not stabilized their assemblage point where everyone else has placed it. Somehow their assemblage point is in flux, it's constantly shifting, and therefore of course they're crazy because they're hallucinating, and they don't have the energy to maintain it at any one given position. If they did have that energy and the control, then they would be sorcerers, because they would be stalking that new position.

Abe: Yes, I see that.

Taisha: So what this all really boils down to is a question of having the energy to perceive more than we are allowed to perceive given the fact that we are born as human beings. Our social order doesn't allow us to venture into other realms except through insanity or through dreams, which they don't really count as real anyway.

So those are two avenues that are open, but they're not really viable avenues. Now sorcerers say you can move the assemblage point, provided you have enough energy to fix it at another position, because you don't want to end up crazy and absolutely lost in these worlds upon worlds that they maintain exist out there, like the layers of an onion. So what is needed is control, energy and fluidity. And what they call 'unbending intent'.

Now the fluidity enables one to shift the assemblage point to move away from the given spot that makes us persons, and we'll get back to this, because what this given spot that makes us persons really is what we call the self.

And that's where self-importance has to go out the window because as long as we maintain our allegiance to the self, what we're really doing is maintaining our allegiance to that particular position of the assemblage point. We'll never be able to perceive anything beyond what the taken-for-granted reality out there is. We're allowed only to perceive what is permissible by our given position within the social order.

So we need fluidity to move the assemblage point elsewhere, and then we need the stability, the concentration, the energy to fix it on another position. And this is what sorcery really is, the movement and the fixation, fixing again the assemblage point at the different positions, thereby lighting up different realities that are just as concrete and real as what we take as reality of the everyday world.

Abe: So sorcerers foster and cultivate energy in unique ways, and there's a way of fostering and cultivating dreaming energy, and your book is primarily about the way in which you foster and cultivate stalking energy. Would that be right?

Taisha: Precisely. There are techniques, there are devices that sorcerers do, and they include 'not doing' techniques, 'recapitulation', which is the fundamental technique of enabling the assemblage point to move off its spot of the self, things like 'losing personal history', which also enables one to move away from what our expectation or our idea is of the self.

Losing self- importance is the key, of course, because as I said, as long as we have this idea of a self, a strong self, an ego, a personality with which we interact with others in terms of an intersubjective agreement, they hold us. You see, the strength of the world, of the social order, is so gigantic through the agreement of billions of people holding that assemblage point at that particular spot.

Abe: So, at a really crass level, you could call it 'peer pressure', and at a universal level you could call it 'the spirit of the times'. Taisha: Yes. At a very individual level you could call it 'self-indulging' or one's idea of the self, and then peer pressure. Exactly, all that, and then at a larger level the language itself, on a cultural level, and we have to get to the family, because that's fundamental, and you have to break through each of those barriers- individual, peer, family, cultural- and then some gigantic collective unconsciousness that holds everything in place.

A sorcerer has to jump out of all of that onto a different level.

And then even behind this collective unconscious, you have the biological mandate that we're really trapped in this 'ape mold'. We have our biological drive, we need to be social, gregarious beings because we're social animals. Solitude is something that frightens people to death. I mean, that's one of the killers of neophytes, the idea that they have to have a solitary journey, a solitary quest, because the recapitulation is done in absolute solitude.

But people think, well, they can meditate together, do things together, as long as they still have a group consensus. But you see, it's that very group consensus that prevents the subtle movement of the assemblage point. So you do have to get beyond that force, and you have to have the energy, and the energy comes from all the things that I mentioned before, including impeccability, and also using your death. You give a death, because you'll end up giving a death anyway.

If you follow the sorcerer s path, if one wishes to move away from the self, from that given position of the assemblage point, and venture into the unknown, then it is like dying. The self has to capitulate, and it's a horrendous feeling. Emotionally, physically, it is like, you know, man against the universe.

Abe: And that death is protracted, isn't it? I mean, it doesn't happen in one miraculous moment. It's something that progressively occurs. It will take years. When do you know you've really done it? When do you know that you've finally died to that old self, or become what is called in the literature a 'formless warrior'?

Taisha: You have to be formless. You have to not have a self. First of all, like you say, it's not a sudden process, although it can be. The movement of the assemblage point can be, in some people, in some anomalous cases, sudden, or under a great shock all of a sudden it moves elsewhere, and a different reality is constituted in front of the person. All of a sudden he's somewhere else. But that usually doesn't last because it comes from an external force, and it usually shifts back. If it does last, he won't know what happened to him, and those are the cases for the asylums, the institutions. So, a gradual change is best
Abe: I take it that drugs, power plants, can also induce this?

Taisha: Yes, exactly. That too. Under the influence of psychotropic drugs you see different worlds, and the assemblage point is absolutely blasted out of its position. But you are not doing that, you don't have the control, again it's an external agent. The sheer presence of a Nagual moves the assemblage point, too. His impeccability can move the assemblage point in his students. He doesn't have to give them the slap on the back or anything like that.

Sheer energy can cause apprentices to assemble different worlds. But you see, there again, whenever we were in the presence of Don Juan and his people, their force made us do fantastic things. Those things 1 write about in my book. But, when I came back to Los Angeles and they weren't around, there I was. I had the force of the social order on top of me, and my assemblage point moved back into the 'first attention'.

And the tragedy, of course, is that unless you move your assemblage point back to the places that it was under the influence of don Juan and his people, you barely remember what you did or what those worlds consisted of. They're like dreams. So you have to store the energy to allow it to move into heightened awareness, so that you can maintain it there on your own, and venture. And then you move it further, and it's a gradual shift.

Abe: How do you store or keep the energy to move your assemblage point?

Taisha: The 'recapitulation' is the major one. I just want to mention that another way of moving it is sheer impeccability, by intending the movement. Intent is really a line, a force that connects one directly with the energy out there at large. And, because it has an intelligence, a guiding order of sorts. They call it the Spirit, the Eagle. But when man links his personal energy to the energy out there through impeccable acts, then the Spirit itself moves the assemblage point for him, because in a sense he has relinquished control.

He has relinquished himself, his ego. He has let go, and is allowing the guiding force of intent to move him. And all of these sorcery activities that I mentioned, the recapitulation, all the not-doings, all those have the sorcerer's intent already linked to them. So a person just has to do these things and let the intent take him, and his assemblage point will move, because these are ancient techniques that have been handed down from generations within Don Juan's lineage, and they have already that link to the Spirit out there inherent in them.

So the necessity of storing energy we already know, because that's the only way to get out of the mold that we are born into as humans. We always like to talk in terms of the human ape, because it really puts man in a proper perspective.

Abe: Are you using that, though, as a metaphor, in the sense that what I understand is that these luminous beings that we are actually, in the process of "time", took on the form that we now have, that at some point we intended ourselves human or flesh and blood, but that what we intrinsically are is something that comes from that vast 'out there', but that we haven't, in the normal sense of evolution, evolved from monkeys? I mean, is that something that you deal with at all? I accept the ape metaphor very well. But the theory of evolution has never managed to explain to me how come we have these other capacities in us.

Taisha: Ah hah. And what sorcerers say is that we are continually evolving. Therefore we should not stay or limit ourselves to that ape-like position of the assemblage point. As you say, within the luminosity of human beings is the potential for an infinite number of other possibilities. Yes, I would agree with you, that from the point of view of evolution we have sort of stopped there, and encrusted ourselves at that position. But the force of evolution continues.

Sorcerers are beings who at one time were human beings. But they have evolved to something else. They are no longer human beings in the strict sense of the word, because they can move their assemblage point elsewhere and maintain those positions, and actually change their form. They don't have to maintain their human form. They can move downwards, shift down to the animal level, and they can change shape into animals, into crows, into birds, or any other animal or entity. Or they can shift into inconceivable realms that have no physical counterparts, but are abstractions.

Abe: So there are old and new seers?

Taisha: What the new sorcerers are doing...there is a distinction between the old sorcerers and the new sorcerers in Don Juan's lineage, or the modern day sorcerers, Don Juan and his teacher the Nagual Julian, and Don Juan's apprentice, the new Nagual Carlos Castaneda. These are all modern day sorcerers, and what they're interested in is this evolution towards the abstract, away from any of these downward shifts that are so easy to do in dreaming when the assemblage point by itself finds these positions.

And for that reason all of the people associated with Carlos Castaneda, we're university graduates, educated, clear thinkers (hopefully). I mean, that is one of our tasks. An actual sorcery task is to be able to think coherently, to think clearly, to see where we are as human beings, and what our potential is, and be able to see and get to this level of actual truth, not only through reason, but using reason in its strictest sense, and not in the shoddy sense of reasoning something and then acting some other way totally in contradiction, which is what human beings do.

End of Part 2.

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