Topic: Being in Dreaming

[Firestarter]

Something about the book reading it years later. I think I'm better to understand things now, than before:

When she is speaking to Delia and Esperanza, the healer:

"She further explained that in order to accomplish a dream of that nature [dreaming awake, or dreaming to be a hawk, for example], women have to have an iron discipline. She leaned toward me and in a confidential whisper, as though she didn't want the others to overhear her, said, 'By an iron discipline I don't mean any kind of strenuous routine but rather that women have to break the routine of what is expected of them.

And they have to do it in their youth,' she stressed. 'And most important, with their strength intact. Often, when women are old enough to be done with the business of being women, they decide it's time to concern themselves with nonworldly or other-worldly thoughts and activities. Little do they know or want to believe that hardly ever do such women succeed.' She gently slapped my stomach, as if she were playing a drum. 'The secret of a woman's strength is in the womb.'

Esperanza nodded empathically, as if she had heard the silly question that had popped in my mind: 'The womb?'

'Women,' she continued, "must begin by burning their matrix. They cannot be the fertile ground that has to be seeded by men, following the command of God himself.'"

A bit further in:

"'In order to be a dreamer, I had to vanquish the self.' Esperanza explained. 'Nothing, but nothing, is as hard as that. We women are the most wretched prisoners of the self. The self is our cage. Our cage is made out of commands and expectations poured on us from the moment we are born...

'The sorcerers, on the contrary, understood freedom as the capacity to do the impossible, the unexpected-to dream a dream that has no basis, no reality in everyday life....The knowledge of sorcerers is what is exciting and new. Imagination is what a woman needs to change the self and become a dreamer.'"

[Firestarter]

Ok let me return to this. I had put it aside for a bit to reread the Art of Dreaming.

I am remembering why I like Taisha better. When I read The Sorcerers Crossing, she was very into discipline and technique. But I am on page 108. And so far, Florinda is making me want to puke her stupid school girl crush over Carlos. Now I know, this was an unusual connection they had. But like her getting upset and fighting folks or biting them or falling down. She just makes a total ass of herself. I don’t remember her being so sorry like this. Now I’m not done. I know it should get better. My memory is fuzzy. I’m trying to recall and relearn here. But she is flowering annoying me. If I go another hundred pages of this. I’m liable to quit this flowering book.

[Firestarter]

That shifted quickly.

So we finally move into where she is dreaming with the women sorcerers when she does. The energy is different.

But something I notice. I don’t know if coincidence. Once I get to that part, the heat in my body rises, a lot. It is cool in the duplex. It’s not hot at all. But I’m unreasonably hot. No fever tho. My head is fine.
Weird.

[Firestarter]

This is interesting. And part why I’m reading this:

“I could feel every muscle, every bone in my body tense as I remembered the nights events disconnected fragments of some god awful dream. There was no continuity, no linear sequence to all I had experienced during those interminable hours. I had awoken twice during the night, in different beds, in different rooms, even in a different house.”

That is pretty clear she is jumping timelines, to different selves. Now I don’t know further in if she will feel different. But this seems to be a thread with Carlos in Art if Dreaming, too.

“As if they had a life of their own, these disconnected images piled up and expanded, all at once, into a labyrinth that somehow I was able to comprehend all at once.”

Most folks can only handle seeing one timeline. She was experiencing more than one.

[Firestarter]

Ok. Some of my grievances. And when I read certain parts. It’s like a man wrote it. Can this be real?

When she is interacting with Esperanza, and the witch feels the need to show herself naked to Florinda. Even a V shot. Imagine if you will. Old books, perhaps in Tales of Power, what if Don Juan dropped his pants and yelled at Carlos “Look at my dick!” Or “grab it!” Carlos would be a laughingstock. No one would continue the series. Not based even on homophobia. We know folks are weird. But we just don’t need to see Don Juan swinging it. I don’t need the visual. So in this book, I don’t understand the witches doing this. There has got to be better ways to teach the power of working with the womb.

All I’m gonna say.

[Firestarter]

This is when Carlos is speaking:

“‘Sorcerers,’ he went on, ‘mark one see the whole nature of reality is different from what we believe it to be; that is, from what we have been taught it to be. Intellectually, we are willing to tease ourselves with the idea that culture predetermines who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.  But we are not willing to embody this idea, to accept it as a concrete, practical proposition. And the reason for that is that we are not willing to accept that culture also predetermines what we are able to perceive.

Sorcery makes us aware of different realities, different possibilities, not only about the world but also about ourselves, to the extent we are no longer able to believe in even the most solid assumptions about ourselves and our surroundings.’”

[Firestarter]

Also Carlos says:

“‘ A sorcerer is not only aware of different realities,’ he went on, ‘but he uses that knowledge in practicalities. Sorcerers know-not only intellectually but also practically-that reality, or the world as we know it, consists of only an agreement extracted out of every one of us. That agreement could be made to collapse, since it’s only a social phenomenon. And when it collapses, the whole world collapses with it.’”

[Firestarter]

This is a good quote from Florinda. Not the writer. The one she took her name from:

“‘The world of sorcerers is a dream, a myth, yet it is as real as the everyday world,’ Florinda proceeded. ‘In order to perceive and to function in the sorcerer’s world, we have to take off the everyday mask that has been strapped to our faves since the day we were born and put on the second mask, the mask that enables us to see ourselves and our surroundings for what we really are: breathtaking events that bloom into transitory existence once and are never to be repeated again…

‘What does freedom cost?’

‘Freedom will cost you the mask you have on,’ she said. ‘The mask that feels so comfortable and is so hard to shed off, not because it fits so well but because you have been wearing it for so long.’l

[Firestarter]

This is a good part:

“Again and again, Isidoro Baltazar (Carlos) stressed that for one to silence one’s rational side one first had 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 at illuminating the thought process. He never tired of repeating that; whether we are scholars or layman, 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, Isidoro Baltazar claimed, are we willing to accept that what we call reality is a culturally determined construct. And what 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 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 ideaologies 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 are 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 assumption is never damaged.


Sorcerers teach that perception takes place in a place outside the sorcerers 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.”

[Firestarter]

So this is interesting. Just last night, I had the dream I’m drugged and taken to a place with people at tables. But two people sat at the table with large cone like hats. What is interesting, I’m at a part, Esperanza is trying to explain the difference between men and women of knowledge. Men she drew on paper, a cone on the head. Women, an inverted cone on the head. Now I have seen these symbols for sun and moon before. Or putting them together, resembling a Star of z David of sorts.

Then Esperanza proposes religion, much of its design is for the oppression of women. I had to think on that. Other than say Paganism, most religions do oppress women in some capacity. Then course she goes on about connecting with the womb: a woman’s advantage.

“Women haven’t lost their connection…Women still have a direct link with spirit. They have only forgotten how to use it, or rather, they have copied men’s condition of not having it at all. For thousands of years, men have struggled to make sure that women forget it. Take The Holy Imquisition, for example. That was a systematic purge to eradicate the belief that women have a direct link to the spirit. All organized religion is nothing but a very successful maneuver to put women in a lower place. Religions invoke a divine law that says that women are inferior.”


But Esperanza says this on male sorcerers. “Sorcerers are able to align themselves to intent, to the spirit, because they have given up what specifically defines their masculinity. And they are no longer males.”

[Firestarter]

This part reminds me of The Bird Michael always speaks of:

"I am standing in the Sonoran desert. It is noon. The sun, a silvery disk so brilliant as to be almost invisible, has come to a halt in the middle of the sky. There is not a single sound, not a movement around. The tall saguaros, with their prickly arms reaching toward that immobile sun, stand like sentries guarding the silence and the stillness.

The wind, as if it has followed me through the dream, begins to blow with tremendous force. It whistles between the branches of the mesquite trees and shakes them with systematic fury. Red dust devils well up in powdery swirls all around me. A flock of crows scatter like dots through the air then fall to the ground a bit farther away, softly, like bits of black veil.

As abruptly as it has begun, the wind dies down. I head toward the hills in the distance. It seems I walk for hours before I see a huge, dark shadow on the ground.

I look up. A gigantic bird hangs in the air with outstretched wings, motionless, as though it were nailed to the sky. It is only when I gaze again at its dark shadow on the ground that I know that the bird is moving. Slowly, imperceptibly, its shadow glides ahead of me. Driven by some inexplicable urge, I try to catch up with the shadow; but regardless of how fast I run, the shadow moves farther and farther away from me. Dizzy with exhaustion, I stumble over my own feet and fall flat on the ground. As I rise to dust off my clothes, I discover the bird perched on a nearby boulder. Its head is slightly turned toward me, as though beckoning me. Cautiously, I approach it. It is enormous and tawny, with feathers that glisten like burnished copper. Its amber-colored eyes are hard and implacable and as final as death itself. I step back as the bird opens its wide wings and takes off. It flies high up until it is only a dot in the sky. Yet its shadow on the ground is a straight dark line that stretches into infinity and holds together the desert and the sky. Confident that if I summon the wind I will catch up with the bird, I invoke an incantation. But there is no force; no power in my chant. My voice breaks into a thousand whispers that are quickly absorbed by the silence. The desert regains its eerie calm. It begins to crumble at the edges, then slowly fades all around me..."

[Firestarter]

“The Nagual Mariano Aureliano (Don Juan) had once told me that sorcerers, when they talk amongst themselves, speak of sorcery as a bird; they call it the bird of freedom. They say that the bird of freedom only flies in a straight line and never comes around twice. They also say that it is a nagual who lures the bird of freedom. It is he who entices the bird to shed its shadow on the warriors path. Without the shadow, there is no direction.”

[Firestarter]

“Only if the nagual is supported and upheld by his fellow dreamers can he lead them into other viable worlds  from which he can entice the bird of freedom.”

[Firestarter]

“The price of freedom is very high. Freedom can only be attained by dreaming without hope, by being willing to lose all. Even the dream.

For some of us, to dream without hope, to struggle with no goal in mind, is the only way to keep up with the bird of freedom.”