Version 2007.03.13

## “Being in Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerers' World” - ©1991 by Florinda Donner

### Chapter 14

HTML EDITOR:

They were on a perpetual warpath. And the enemy was the idea of the self.

...

Only superficially, Isidore Baltazar claimed, are we willing to accept that what we call reality is a culturally determined construct.

We need to accept at the deepest level possible that culture is the product of a long, cooperative, highly selective, highly developed, and last but not least, highly coercive process that culminates in a mutually shared agreement that shields us from other possibilities.

END HTML EDITOR

After my return from the witches' house I never needed any more coaxing or encouragement.

The women sorcerers had succeeded in giving me a strange coherence; a sort of emotional stability I never had before.

It wasn't that I was suddenly a changed person, but rather there was a clear purpose to my existence. My fate was delineated for me.

I had to struggle to free my energy.

And that was that. Simplicity itself.

But I didn't remember, clearly or even vaguely, all that had transpired in the three months I spent at their house.

The task of remembering it took me years; a task into which I plunged with all my might and determination.

The nagual Isidore Baltazar, nevertheless, warned me about the fallaciousness of clear-cut goals and emotionally charged realizations.

He said that they were worthless because the real arena of a sorcerer is the day-to-day life and in this arena superficial rationales do not withstand pressure.

The women sorcerers had said more or less the same but in a more harmonious way.

They explained that since women are used to being manipulated, they agreed easily. But a woman's agreements are simply empty adaptations to pressure.

But if it is possible to convince that women of the need to change her ways, then half the battle is won.

Even if they don't intellectually agree, their emotional realization is infinitely more durable than that of men.

I had the two opinions to weigh. I thought that both were right. From time to time, all my sorcery rationales crumbled under the pressures of the everyday world, but my original commitment to the sorcerers' world was never in need of revision.

Little by little I began to acquire enough energy to dream.

This meant that I finally understood what the women had told me: Isidore Baltazar was the new nagual; and he was no longer a man.

This realization also gave me enough energy to return periodically to the witches' house.

That place, known as the witches' house, belonged to all the sorcerers of the nagual Mariano Aureliano's group. A big and massive house from the outside, it was indistinguishable from other houses in the area; hardly noticeable in spite of the exuberantly blooming bougainvillea hanging over the wall that encircled the grounds.

What made people pass the house without noticing it, the sorcerers said, was the tenuous fog that covered it, thin as a veil, visible to the eye, but unnoticeable to the mind.

Once inside the house, however, one was acutely and inescapably aware of having stepped into another world. The three patios, shaded by fruit trees, gave a dreamlike light to the dark corridors and the many rooms that opened on these corridors. What was most arresting about the house were the brick and tile floors which were laid out in the most intricate designs.

The witches' house was not a warm place, yet it was friendly. It was not a home by any stretch of the imagination, for there was something crushing about its impersonality; its relentless austerity. It was the place where the old nagual Mariano Aureliano and his sorcerers conceived their dreams and realized their purpose.

Since the concern of those sorcerers had nothing to do with the daily world, their house reflected their otherworldly preoccupations: Their house was the true gauge of their individuality; not as persons, but as sorcerers.

At the witches' house, I interacted with all the sorcerers of the nagual Mariano Aureliano's party.

They didn't teach me sorcery or even dreaming. According to them, there was nothing to teach.

They said that my task was to remember everything that had transpired between all of them and me during those initial times that we were together. In particular, I was to remember everything that Zuleica and Florinda did or said to me- but Zuleica had never talked to me.

Whenever I tried to ask any of them for help, they outright refused to have anything to do with me. They all argued that, without the necessary energy on my part, all they would do would be to repeat themselves; and that they didn't have time for that.

At first, I found their refusal ungenerous and unfair. After a while, however, I gave up every attempt to probe them, and I simply enjoyed their presence and their company.

I realized that they were, of course, totally right in refusing to play our favorite intellectual game; that of pretending to be interested by asking so-called soul-searching questions which usually have no meaning to us whatsoever.

And the reason they have no meaning to us is that we don't have the energy to do anything about the answer we might hear, except to agree or disagree with it.

Via our daily interaction, however, I realized scores of things about their world.

The women dreamers and stalkers embodied two modes of behavior among women, as different as they could be.

Initially, I wondered whether the group that was described to me as the dreamers- Nelida, Hermelinda, and Clara- were the actual stalkers. For as far as I could ascertain, my interaction with them was on a strictly everyday, worldly level.

Only later did I fully realize that their mere presence elicited- without even any hint of it- a new modality of behavior on my part. That is, I felt no need to reassert myself with them. There were no doubts, there were no questions on my part whenever I was with them.

They had the singular ability to make me see- without ever having to state it verbally- the absurdity of my existence. And yet I felt no need to defend myself.

Perhaps it was this lack of forcefulness, of directness, that made me acquiesce, accept them without any resistance.

It wasn't long before I realized that the women dreamers, by interacting with me on a worldly level, were giving me the necessary model to rechannel my energies.

They wanted me to change the manner in which I focused on mundane matters such as cooking, cleaning, laundering, staying in school, or earning a living.

These were to be done, they told me, under different auspices: They were not to be mundane chores but artful endeavors; one as important as the other.

Above all, it was their interaction with each other and with the women stalkers that made me aware of how special they were.

In their humanness; their ordinariness, they were devoid of ordinary human failings.

Their total awareness coexisted easily with their individual characteristics; be it short-temperedness, moodiness, rude forcefulness, madness, or cloying sweetness.

In the presence and company of any of those sorceresses, I experienced the most peculiar feeling that I was on a perpetual holiday. But that was but a mirage.

They were on a perpetual warpath, and the enemy was the idea of the self.

At the witches' house, I also met Vicente and Silvio Manuel, the other two sorcerers in the nagual Mariano Aureliano's group.

Vicente was obviously of Spanish descent. I learned that his parents had come from Catalonia. He was a lean, aristocratic-looking man with deceptively frail-looking hands and feet. He shuffled around in slippers and preferred pajama tops, which hung open over his khaki pants, to shires. His cheeks were rosy, but otherwise he was pale. His beautifully cared for goatee added a touch of distinction to his otherwise absentminded demeanor.

Not only did he look like a scholar, but he was one. The books in the room I slept in were his; or rather, it was he who collected them, who read them, who cared for them. What made his erudition [* erudition- profound scholarly knowledge] so appealing- there was nothing he didn't know about- was that he conducted himself as though he was always the learner. I felt sure that this could seldom be the case, for it was obvious that he knew more than the others.

It was his generous spirit that made him give his knowledge away with a magnificent naturalness and without ever shaming anyone for knowing less.

Then there was Silvio Manuel. He was of medium height, corpulent, beardless, and brown skinned. A mysterious, sinister-looking Indian, he was the perfect image of what I expected an evil-looking brujo to look like. His apparent moodiness frightened me, and his sparse answers revealed what I believed to be a violent nature.

Only upon knowing him did I realize how much he enjoyed cultivating this image. He was the most open, and for me, delightful, of all the sorcerers.

Secrets and gossip were his passion. Whether they were truths or falsehoods didn't matter to him. It was his recounting of them that was priceless to me, and to everyone else, for that matter.

He also had an inexhaustible supply of jokes, most of them downright dirty. He was the only one who enjoyed watching TV and thus was always up to date on world news. He would report it to the others with gross exaggerations, salting it with a great deal of malice.

Silvio Manuel was a magnificent dancer. His expertise in the various indigenous, sacred dances was legendary. He moved with rapturous abandon and would often ask me to dance with him. Whether it was a Venezuelan joropo, a cumbia, a samba, a tango, the twist, rock and roll, or a cheek-to-cheek bolero, he knew them all.

I also interacted with John, the Indian I had been introduced to by the nagual Mariano Aureliano in Tucson, Arizona. His round, easygoing, jovial appearance was but a facade. He was the most unapproachable of all the sorcerers. He drove around in his pickup truck on errands for everyone else. He also fixed whatever needed to be mended in and around the house.

If I didn't bother him with questions or comments and kept silent, he would take me with him on his errands and show me how things were fixed. From him I learned how to change washers and adjust a leaking faucet or toilet tank; how to fix an iron, a light switch; how to change the oil and spark plugs in my car. Under his guidance, the proper use of a hammer, a screwdriver, a saw, and an electric drill became quite natural to me.

The only thing none of them did for me was answer my questions and probes about their world. Whenever I tried to engage them, they referred me to the nagual Isidore Baltazar. Their standard rebuff was to say, "He's the new nagual. It's his duty to deal with you. We are merely your aunties and uncles."

At the beginning, the nagual Isidore Baltazar was more than a mystery to me. Where he actually lived was not clear to me. Oblivious to schedules and routines, he appeared at and disappeared from the studio at all hours. Day and night were all the same to him. He slept when he was tired- hardly ever- and ate when he was hungry- almost always.

Between his frantic comings and goings, he worked with a concentration that was astounding. His capacity to stretch or compress time was incomprehensible to me. I was certain that I spent hours, even entire days, with him, when in reality it could have been only moments, snatched here and there either during the day or the night from something else he did- whatever it might have been.

I had always considered myself an energetic person. However, I could not keep up with him. He was always in motion- or so it appeared; agile and active; ever ready to undertake some project. His vigor was simply incredible.

It was much later that I fully understood that the source of Isidore Baltazar's boundless energy was his lack of concern with himself.

It was his unwavering support; his imperceptible yet masterful machinations that helped me stay on the right track. There was a lightheartedness in him, a pure delight in his subtle yet forceful influence, that made me change without my noticing that I was being led along a new path; a path on which I no longer had to play games or needed to pretend or use my womanly wiles to get my way.

What made his guidance so tremendously compelling was that he had no ulterior motive. He wasn't in the least possessive, and his guidance wasn't adulterated with promises or sentimentality.

He didn't push me in any particular direction. That is, he didn't advise me on what courses I should take or what books I should read. That was left entirely up to me.

There was only one condition he insisted upon: I was to work on no particular goal other than the edifying and pleasurable process of thinking. A startling proposition! I had never considered thinking in those terms or in any others. Although I didn't dislike going to school, I had certainly never thought of schoolwork as particularly pleasurable. It was simply something I had to do, usually in a hurry and with the least possible effort.

I couldn't help but agree with what Florinda and her cohorts had so bluntly pointed out to me the first time I met them: I went to school not to pursue knowledge but to have a good time. That I had good grades was more a matter of luck and loquaciousness than studiousness. I had a fairly good memory, I knew how to talk, and I knew how to convince others.

Once I got past my initial embarrassment over having to admit and to accept the fact that my intellectual pretensions were a sham and that I didn't know how to think except in the most shallow manner, I felt relieved. I was ready to put myself under the sorcerers' tutelage, and to follow Isidore Baltazar's study plan.

To my great disappointment, he didn't have one. All he did was insist that I stop studying and reading outdoors. He believed that the thinking process was a private, almost secret rite and could not possibly occur outdoors in public view. He compared the process of thinking with leavened dough. It can only rise inside a room.

"The best way to understand anything, of course, is in bed," he said to me once. He stretched out on his bed, propped his head against several pillows, and crossed the right leg over the left, resting the ankle on the raised knee of the left leg.

I didn't think much of this absurd reading position, yet I practiced it whenever I was by myself. With a book propped on my chest, I would fall into the most profound sleep. Keenly sensitive to my insomniac tendencies, I was more pleased with sleep than with knowledge.

Sometimes, however, just prior to that moment of losing consciousness, I would feel as if hands were coiling around my head, pressing ever so lightly against my temples.

My eyes would automatically scan the open page before I was even conscious of it and lift entire paragraphs off the paper. The words would dance before my eyes until clusters of meaning exploded in my brain like revelations.

Eager to uncover this new possibility opening up before me, I pushed on, as if driven by some relentless taskmaster.

There were times, however, when this cultivation of reason and method exhausted me, physically as well as mentally. At those times, I asked Isidore Baltazar about intuitive knowledge; about that sudden flash of insight, of understanding, that sorcerers are supposed to cultivate above all else.

He always said to me at those times that to know something only intuitively is meaningless. Flashes of insight need to be translated into some coherent thought, otherwise they are purposeless. He compared flashes of insight to sightings of inexplicable phenomena. Both wane as swiftly as they come. If they are not constantly reinforced, doubt and forgetfulness will ensue, for the mind has been conditioned to be practical and accept only that which is verifiable and quantifiable.

He explained that sorcerers are men of knowledge rather than men of reason. As such, they are a step ahead of Western intellectual men who assume that reality- which is often equated with truth- is knowable through reason. A sorcerer claims that all that is knowable through reason is our thought processes; but that it is only by understanding our total being, at its most sophisticated and intricate level, that can we eventually erase the boundaries with which reason defines reality.

Isidore Baltazar explained to me that sorcerers cultivate the totality of their being. That is, sorcerers don't necessarily make a distinction between our rational and our intuitive sides. They use both to reach the realm of awareness they call silent knowledge, which lies beyond language, beyond thought.

Again and again, Isidore Baltazar stressed that for one to silence one's rational side one first has to understand his or her thought process at its most sophisticated and intricate level. He believed that philosophy, beginning with classical Greek thought, provided the best way of illuminating this thought process. He never tired of repeating that, whether we are scholars or laymen, we are nonetheless members and inheritors of our Western intellectual tradition. And that means that regardless of our level of education and sophistication, we are captives of that intellectual tradition and the way it interprets what reality is.

Only superficially, Isidore Baltazar claimed, are we willing to accept that what we call reality is a culturally determined construct.

And what we need is to accept at the deepest level possible that culture is the product of a long, cooperative, highly selective, highly developed, and last but not least, highly coercive process that culminates in an agreement that shields us from other possibilities.

Sorcerers actively strive to unmask the fact that reality is dictated and upheld by our reason; that ideas and thoughts stemming from reason become regimes of knowledge that ordain how we see and act in the world; and that incredible pressure is put on all of us to make certain ideologies acceptable to ourselves.

He stressed that sorcerers are interested in perceiving the world in ways outside of what is culturally determined.

What is culturally determined is that our personal experiences, plus a shared social agreement on what our senses are capable of perceiving, dictate what we perceive.

Anything out of this sensorially agreed-upon perceptual realm is automatically encapsulated and disregarded by the rational mind.

In this manner, the frail blanket of human assumptions is never damaged.

Sorcerers teach that perception takes place in a place outside the sensorial realm. Sorcerers know that something more vast exists than what we have agreed our senses can perceive. Perception takes place at a point outside the body, outside the senses, they say.

But it isn't enough for one merely to believe this premise: It is not simply a matter of reading or hearing about it from someone else.

In order for one to embody it, one has to experience it.

Isidore Baltazar said that sorcerers continually and actively strive to break that frail blanket of human assumptions.

However, sorcerers don't plunge into the darkness blindly. They are prepared. They know that whenever they leap into the unknown, they need to have a well-developed rational side. Only then will they be able to explain and make sense of whatever they might bring forth from their journeys into the unknown.

He added that I wasn't to understand sorcery through reading the works of philosophers. Rather, I was to see that both philosophy and sorcery are highly sophisticated forms of abstract knowledge. Both for sorcerer and philosopher, the truth of our Being-in-the-world does not remain unthought. A sorcerer, however, goes a step further. He acts upon his findings which are already by definition outside our culturally accepted possibilities.

Isidore Baltazar believed that philosophers are intellectual sorcerers. However, their probings and their pursuits always remain mental endeavors. Philosophers cannot act upon the world they understand and explain so well except in the culturally agreed-upon manner. Philosophers add to an already existing body of knowledge. They interpret and reinterpret existing philosophical texts. New thoughts and ideas resulting from this intense studying don't change them, except perhaps in a psychological sense. They might become kinder, more understanding people- or, perhaps, the opposite.

However, nothing of what philosophers do philosophically will change their sensorial perception of the world, for they work from within the social order.

Philosophers uphold the social order even if intellectually they don't agree with it. Philosophers are sorcerers manque. [* manque- unfulfilled or frustrated in realizing an ambition]

Sorcerers also build upon an existing body of knowledge.

However, they don't build upon this knowledge by accepting what has already been established and proven by other sorcerers.

Sorcerers have to prove to themselves anew that that which already stands as accepted does indeed exist, does indeed yield to perceiving.

To accomplish this monumental task, sorcerers need an extraordinary amount of energy which they obtain by detaching themselves from the social order without retreating from the world.

Sorcerers break the agreement that has defined reality, without breaking up in the process themselves.