The Sorcerers' Crossing: Preface - By Taisha Abelar.

The Sorcerers' Crossing - A Woman's Journey ©1992 by Taisha Abelar.

Preface.

I devote my life to the practice of a rigorous discipline.

For lack of a more suitable name, I call my personal quest sorcery.

In the late sixties, while I was living in Tucson, Arizona, I met a Mexican woman named Clara Grau.

Clara invited me to stay at her house in the state of Sonora, Mexico.

There, she did her utmost to usher me into her world.

Clara was a sorcerer, and she was part of a cohesive group of sixteen sorcerers.

Some of the sorcerers were Yaqui Indians; others were Mexicans of various origins, backgrounds, ages, and sexes; and most of the sorcerers were women.

All of them pursued, single-heartedly, the same goal of, breaking the normal perceptual biases, that imprison us.

We, as average human beings, are imprisoned within the boundaries of the normal everyday world.

This prevents us from entering the other perceivable worlds.

Sorcerers break free from our common perceptual disposition.

As we break our perceptual barrier, we leap, into, the unimaginable.

Sorcerers call this leap, "the sorcerers' crossing."

Or, sometimes they refer to crossing this barrier as 'the abstract flight' because it entails soaring from the side of the concrete- our physical side- to the side of expanded perceptions- the side of impersonal forms.

These sorcerers were interested in helping me accomplish this abstract flight, so that I could join them in their basic endeavors.

Carlos Castaneda was the leader of my sorcerers' group, or 'nagual', as he is called, was a person with a keen interest in formal academic erudition.

Therefore, all of us in his group were encouraged to develop our capacity for clear thinking and abstraction by our attending a modern university.

So, academic training became an integral part of my preparation for the sorcerers' crossing.

Now, in addition to being a sorcerer, I have a Doctor of Philosophy degree in anthropology.

I mention my two areas of expertise in this order because my involvement with sorcery came first.

Usually a person becomes an anthropologist, and then does fieldwork on some aspect of culture; for example, the study of sorcery practices.

With me, it happened the other way around.

While I had been a student of sorcery, I went to study anthropology.

As a woman, I felt an even greater obligation to fulfill this requirement.

Normally women, in general, are conditioned from early childhood, to depend on the male members of society to conceptualize and initiate changes.

The sorcerers that trained me, expressed very strong opinions, in this regard.

The sorcerers said that it is indispensable, that women develop and enhance their intellects; and their capacity for analysis, and abstraction.

Women would then have a better grasp of the male world around them.

However, training the intellect turns out to be a bona-fide sorcerers' subterfuge.

In opposition to our rational sides, we have an energetic non-rational side that sorcerers, for lack of a better word, call their 'double'.

By deliberately keeping our minds occupied in analysis and reasoning, our double is freed to explore other areas of perception beyond those the intellect can classify.

While our rational side is busy with the formality of academic pursuits, the double is free to fulfill sorcery tasks.

In this way, the suspicious and analytic mind is less likely to interfere or even notice what is going on at a nonrational level.

So, in fact, the counterpart of my academic development was the enhancement of my capacity for awareness and perception.

Together the two developed my total being.

Working together as a unit, my intect and my double took me away from the taken-for-granted life that I had been both born into and raised within.

I now have greater perceptual possibilities than what the normal world had in store for me.

That is not to say that solely my commitment to the world of sorcery was enough to assure my success.

The pull of the daily world is so strong and sustained that in spite of my most assiduous training, I find myself again and again in the midst of the most abject terror; and find myself at times as stupid and indulging as if I had learned nothing.

My teachers assured me that I was no exception, and that only a minute to minute relentless struggle can balance an individual's natural but stupefying insistence to remain unchanged.

After a careful consideration of my final aims, I, in conjunction with my cohorts, arrived at the conclusion that I have to describe my training to you in order to emphasize, if you seek the unknown, the importance of developing your ability to perceive more than we do with normal perception.

Such enhanced perception has to be a sober and pragmatic new way of perceiving.

It cannot be, under any condition, merely the continuation of perceiving the world of everyday life.

The events I narrate here depict the initial stages of sorcery training for a stalker.

This phase involved the cleansing of my habitual ways of thinking, behaving and feeling.

This cleansing is accomplished by means of a traditional sorcery undertaking, which all neophytes need to perform, called 'the recapitulation'.

And to complement the recapitulation, I was taught a series of practices involving movement and breathing called, the 'sorcery passes'.

I was instructed with accompanying philosophical rationales and explanations to give all my practices an adequate coherence.

Quite simply, the goal of everything I was taught was the redistribution of my normal energy, and the enhancement of it, so that my awareness could be used for the extraordinary feats of perception that were a normal course in sorcery training.

The idea behind the training is that, as soon as our compulsive pattern of old habits, thoughts, expectations and feelings is broken by means of the recapitulation and the magical passes, you are indisputably in the position to accumulate enough energy to live by the new rationales provided by the sorcery tradition.

I substantiate those rationales by directly perceiving a non-ordinary reality.