(Section 12)
To talk about bodyplay in more depth, we will have to keep jumping from subject to subject, without a linear logic. The whole picture will be hidden until we have reached the end. This is because writing is a mono-channel, linear communication. There are ways to get around this, but they require a giving up of the linear way of thinking, of living, of dealing with reality.
This is also true within the apprenticeship. Although the apprenticeship is a multi-channel exchange, talking is the closest channel to the surface. Talking is a limited form of communication, limited in time and limited in informational amount.
At certain points in the apprenticeship, the student grabs onto a thread of the learning. She understands this thread, has real insights about this thread. To the student, this thread becomes the most important aspect of the process. She sees how this thread affects her everyday life and how it could affect her future ... could even be her future. So she thinks this thread is the core of the apprenticeship, if not the whole of the apprenticeship. She wants to follow this thread to its end, to talk about this thread to the teacher as a drama, and to make plans based on this thread.
By doing this, what the student really is doing is taking control of the apprenticeship by leaving her function as a student by thinking that she understands, that she knows how things should be, should turn out, should feel or look like. As a result, the apprenticeship becomes a personal therapy or a soap opera of relationships.
The teacher in the apprenticeship is weaving onto and into the student a complex spell of reality. This spell has many channels of intercourse. Within each channel, he is working with many different threads. If the student does not let the teacher weave all the threads together into the spell, the way will be longer and harder. The focus should not be on the threads, but on the weaving. If the student can grasp this, she will learn how to weave, and also will have a spell within which she can create. By creating spells onto the student, the teacher learns and develops.
But if one or more channels are clogged by a thread, then the weaving will come to a halt. The student should realize that she is creating through the teacher the spell. This is not just a path to the student’s personal way or medium of healing and creating. This is the student’s way. The student should make this way by making the way the teacher is teaching her own. She does this, not by changing it or adding onto it, but just by accepting it, as given, as her own. There is nothing to search out, to understand, to find, to get to, to be more. Just accept. Then everything will grow out of just accepting.
(Section 13)
In social communications, we are made to think that the only way to be effective is through the mass channels. In truth, the magical, private, interpersonal channels are more effective and accessible. The same is true with the channels of the body. Society focuses us onto the face and the “sex” organs for our normal communication channels. The more open and free the person is, the more he expands from these channels.
In bodyplay, the top of the head to the forehead is the “spiritual” or “inner” center. The forehead is “wisdom”. The throat is “higher emotions”. The chest and the breasts are “nourishing love”. The belly is “lower emotions” such as doubts and fears, but it is also the cord, on the DNA level that connects you, not only to every human, but also to every life form on Earth in the past, present and future. The “sexual” organs are connected to sex, but they are also connected to deep communications and magical attraction. From between the legs to the base of the spine is the center of survival, but also of imagination, creativity, and taboos.
These are the major centers. There are many more minor centers. Each center has its trigger points. We begin to see that there are many more possibilities, many more channels than the plot of fragmentation wants us to know about. This is because it controls just a few of the channels ... the ones that it has made us believe are the only channels.
If the student rubs with his hands (or feet) on the person on the centers which the student feels are involved, there will be some healing effect. But the healing effect is increased when the student’s centers are rubbed directly upon the person’s centers. Other factors are rubbing centers in relation to one another; how deep and for how long the touch is; what kind of touch it is; what kinds of sounds and body gestures wrapped the touch; how free the student is from fears and doubts. It is like learning to play a complex musical instrument. Among other factors are how much chero is stored up in the magical place and how deep the rapport is between the people. The student should do bodyplay only under the guidance of the teacher throughout the apprenticeship. The reality of the cherotic relationship of student-teacher in the Cave of Lila allows a higher intensity and a greater freedom than normally exists in the other reality. The student should not assume that he can safely create this intensity outside the Cave of Lila. With the guidance of the teacher, the student will be able to raise the intensity level.
Every time the student and the teacher meet, they push a pressure point of the normal reality of the outer world, building the normal world ever so slightly into balance. Slowly, the student’s whole life will become this kind of healing push. The healing, the performances, the Cave of Lila, and even the apprenticeship are only contexts in which “the work” can be done.
This is true of the magic. It is only a necessary context of “the work”.
“The work” is living with integrity and discipline in human love within a community network of deep personal relationships. This is the life that the teacher guides, teaches, builds within the students. “The work” is life. Everything has a right time to be done. Everything has a new meaning.
This is why it is vital that the student trusts and follows the teacher even when everything looks and feels to the student totally opposite to what the teacher says it is. It is vital that the student do what the teacher says in the time-cycle involved, trusting without understanding.
The teacher is a shaman, a trickster. He can change himself into a pitiful crying fool, a madman, a sexual pervert, a cruel bastard, a weak idiot, or anything else that the student fears. He transforms so realistically, so suddenly, that he “becomes” these characters. If the student does not hold onto the trust and respect for the real feeling that is the real teacher, the feeling which the student knows, then the student starts reacting to the characters as real, plunging himself deep within a world of illusions. If the student holds onto his trust and respect for the teacher, relating to him from that trusting place, then the student’s grasp on reality will become stronger.
Not only will the student be closer to the teacher, but he will trust himself much more.
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