(Section 20)
In the last section, I was guilty of being imprecise, being casual about combining realities, combining linear matter (of the sub-atomic electrons, neutrons, and protons) with the non-linear quantum particles, the packets of possibilities which are contained, but not confined, within the linear matter reality of time-space.
This being imprecise, this being casual, is one of the major veils blocking us from seeing the true dynamics of existence. To a certain extent, this casualness and impreciseness are built into our frontbrain, our cultural frame, and our thinking and speaking language to protect the existing normal reality. This imprecise casualness causes us to take for granted that we know reality, that we know what is being talked about. This casualness turns on automatic mental tapes of meanings. For example, many people equate pornography with anything “sexual” in a work, they then equate pornography with “evil”, and react according to the reactionary judgement of moral reflex. This creates a flat, easy world. In this flat world, it is very easy to control and to be controlled by power. The apprenticeship explodes these taped automatic moral judgments and the casual self-sureness of knowing/understanding that clog our frontbrain.
All of this may lead some to think that what is needed is being precise, and objective, and uninvolved together with a good dose of skepticism. They use as their model the scientist and the journalist. But science has shown that the normal western concept of objectivity is a myth that has no base in reality ultimately. The observer always affects the observed because they are one experience. What people usually call objectivity is clinging onto their old ways of seeing. When western journalists studied shamanic faith healers, the westerners discovered “frauds” and “tricks” and sleights-of-hand such as what was represented by the shamans as diseased innards turned out to be wads of cloth dipped in chicken blood. The westerners were quick to dismiss the magic as fake. They thought they were being objective, precise, and seeing things as they are ... not like the desperate, ignorant people who got well. What the western objectivity does is put blinders on our feelings, on our emotional response.
What is needed for the student is the preciseness of the poet. This is the Yin preciseness. This preciseness assumes that there are many levels, layers, meanings, channels of possibilities to every word, every concept, every situation. The student should assume that he is only aware of just a few of these levels, but that he is affected by all the levels. He should open himself up to being guided by the teacher into more and more of these meaning levels. This receiving, accepting mode prevents a rigid preciseness that has at its core a macho casualness. This Yin way of acceptance creates a deep wonder awe in a reality that is always new, always alive with unthought-of possibilities.
But this requires the student to have a special kind of personality, both strong and accepting. This is the Yin personality. We are using the word Yin as we have defined it in this book, stripped from the usual western mind-connotation of the feminine, inactively passive, weak, and negative. Erour is a Yin strength. The Yin personality is the same in both men and women, but because of the distorting quality of our society, it appears to be different in men and women. The Yin women are strong, they are not afraid of the physical, of giving themselves on all levels. They are lusty but not casual. The men are soft and gentle, with round edges. Because of these qualities, the Yin people do not fit into the western sexual dichotomy. They are not bimbos, bitches, wimps, men trying to be women or women trying to be men. They are people full of chero and erour. Usually in the first parts of the apprenticeship, the social distortions are stripped away, uncovering the basic Yin personality.
So far, we have talked about the apprenticeship in terms of the relationship between the teacher and the student. But there is another dimension to the apprenticeship, that of the tribal community. This tribal community is made up of the teacher and his students. The teacher-student relationship is the base and the core of this tribal community. But the dynamics of the inter-relations among the students and the teacher create a powerful projector of an altered reality, an inter-connecting dynamic of agreement of new living possibilities. This makes the reality shaping much more deep than it would be if it were just a teacher and just a student because the tribal community is a web of re-enforcing possibilities. The student is slowly melted into this web through the teacher. His life and personality are intimately melted to, connected to, the teacher and the other students in a myth life which is outside of the normal world.
To understand these things, it should be remembered that this apprenticeship came from primal times when the frame of reality was that of a small tribe. In this tribal reality, every person was important to everyone else. Every act in some way affected everyone in the tribe. This inter-connectedness, this inter-dependency created a tribal collective over-soul by which the identity of a person was defined. This tribal over-soul is a model of the web of the ultimate reality in which something only exists in its relationship to everything else. In this primal tribe, the going out on your own was a ritual trial to make the person worthy to take on the responsibility of inter-dependence.
This tribal being requires a Yin personality who knows how to correctly operate with and within Yang energy. I should warn the reader-student that at this point he is only beginning to receive the needed magical glasses and hidden coded knowledge required to understand this and other statements in this book. The more he thinks he understands what is really going on, how things really work, the greater are the amount of things, opportunities, information, dimension, level, and magic that are hidden from him ... hidden from him by his ego, his old narrow self, his old reality and how things were supposed to work in that old reality. The more the student can master the Yin discipline of taking what the teacher gives him, the Yin discipline of receiving without judging, testing, analyzing, questioning, debating, without asking for proofs, without being concerned with how he himself and other things appear ... and master the Yin discipline of giving in this very same way ... the more the student can master this Yin discipline of erour, the easier, the quicker, and the deeper the coming of awareness will be.
The teacher knows that he does not know. He is aware of that. He is aware that he is following, being guided by the magic. One of the aspects he is following, being guided by, is the student, his students. The only way the teacher can be complete, growing in awareness and magic, is by serving and following his students. You think I am writing this book. But in the absolute truth, you are writing this as I am.
For months ideas have been running in my head, ideas that I have wanted to write about. But every time I sit down here to write, something other than what I thought about writing comes out. Who my students are and what they are going through totally shapes the writing. You, who you are and what you are going through now, are totally shaping what I am writing now, no matter how long you are reading this after I have written it. You and the students are equally writing this as I am.
Moreover, details and new possibilities keep popping up from the magical channel. These need to be written down before the subject I want to write about, because they will nonlinearly add depth to the subject. So I have to wait months, or years, to write what I want to write about. So I feel like just the scribe of this. But what is created by this dynamic process is much, much more magical, accurate, poetic, rich, deep than if just I, just you, or just my students, or all of us combining-sharing our individualities, had written this. We are in a tribal communal dynamic reality, linked by nonlinear two-way pathways beyond time. This reality cannot be successfully divided into parts, labeled YOU and ME, because the whole reality is much more than the sum of the parts.
The nonlinear pathways which link us together, and indeed link all possibilities to one another in the web of ultimate reality, can be thought of as tubes of matter, down to and including the subatomic level. These tubes extend through time and space. Within these matter/time/space tubes run the nonlinear quantum packets of possibilities. This is the secret of inter-penetration of reality shaping. We will get into this in greater detail in later sections, chapters, volumes.
For now, the student should know that the various kinds of these tubes are connected to each center of the body.
The student comes into the apprenticeship with many casual concepts of reality. The most damaging is that there is a state of perfection and that this state is the end goal of the training. To put it in physical terms, this misconception holds that health is a static state, something you get to, maintain, or lose. It is being unsick, untired, balanced, grounded, normal, undying. In truth, health is a dynamic state of interaction of the seven centers, each operating as close within its Tao as possible. Sickness, contractions, mistakes, death are as equally parts of the state of health as wellness, expansions, doing the right things, and life are. There will be no state of perfection, only the process of living, the art of living. The student feels something is out of Tao, that he made a mistake, someone else is not doing something right, something is wrong somewhere in his reality. He starts focusing on this one part, assuming it means other parts of his life are also “bad”. This, if not quickly stopped, will tilt the other centers out of the range of Tao. This will lead to a real state of unhealth.
We have talked about contractions and expansions, and their healthy functions in life. When we talked about them, we talked as if there could be only a single expansion or contraction at a time. In truth, there is always a system of expansions and contractions on the different levels. In reality, this system tends to maintain health automatically. To do this, it uses everything, including sickness. Unhealth is created when the student focuses upon just one level, misreading into what seems to be happening on that one level. This throws the whole system further out of Tao. This is why it is important to follow your teacher, no matter how it appears, or even feels to you. The teacher is operating on all the levels at once, whereas you may be temporarily fixated on one level.
To understand this truly, we need to understand the road blocks of “morals” placed in the student’s path by the forces of fragmentation.
Do to others as you would want to be done to you. Treat people as yourself. Love your neighbor, your enemy, others as yourself. You will reap what you sow. The law of karma. These are all nice abstractions with the loopholes of individualistic choice and time built into them. That is, they secretly imply that there is a choice about seeing the other as separate from yourself, from your personal body ... imply that there is a karmic credit card on which you can in effect charge “wrong” action to be paid, with a certain rate of interest, in either good works or suffering at a later date. This creates a judging, an evaluating, a choosing, a questioning whether a “wrong” action is worth the charge on the credit card, how it affects your credit rating. Worst yet, it like the bank’s Mastercard, tends to hide the real costs of the “wrong” actions, hiding it within the easy payment plan, hiding the wide-ranging resulting effects of the “wrong” actions.
“Wrong” actions are different both from mistakes and from “bad” action in a morality system. Mistakes are learning tools within life’s evolution. Mistakes are vital, unavoidable, and vulnerable because true mistakes are the result of creative risk-taking. A “mistake” that is repeated over and over is not a mistake at all, but a “wrong” action. A wrong action is an action which harms, does not promote life-affirmations ... it is in fact a life-denial, broadcasting life-denials. Morality is an itemized list from the moral visa card ... a list of all the possible sins and the form of payment required for each sin. But nowhere on this list is there any mention of the real results, both personal and dynamic, of the so-called sin.
This moral/karmic easy payment plan is one of the main means by which the life-denying power-combine abstracts us out of the direct involving experience of life. It puts the results outside of the personal present into an impersonal future. It puts the “payment” result of a sin outside of the personal present into both an impersonal past and impersonal future ... that is, in a moral system of payment. You are paying for past sins in the future. This is fragmenting the reality of experience. A credit card makes it much harder to experience the reality of buying something because it fragments the exchange, the relationship, between two people. There is no exchange of what/who you are in the present. So it is very much harder to feel, experience, the real worth or result of the buying experience. It is much harder to feel, experience who you really are. So you spend more than you would if it had been a physical exchange, a physical relationship, between you and another person. Moreover, the medium of the exchange, money, has been abstracted into unreality, put outside the personal reality. This makes spending casually a matter of course. Creating this casualness is a main reason for credit cards, poker chips, and sins.
But the abstraction does not end at the purchase experience. Without the context of the relationship of exchange, the actual experience of the result of the exchange ... for example, the concert which the ticket is for ... takes on an unreality to it. Moreover, when it comes time to pay, the experience of the concert has long ago happened, faded into the past. The payment is no longer a personal physical involvement in the actual experience of the concert. The payment is now an involvement with the abstraction, the power system, of the credit card. This involvement with the abstraction is the concept of duty, “should” duty. Because the experience of the concert has been long ago made over into an abstraction before payment time, it is difficult to feel the real effect of the concert. So you dutifully, casually pay the credit card bill.
This basic credit card dynamic is at the root of all moral systems. All moral systems are systems of power, of abstraction, of fragmentation. A moral system contains a framework of shoulds, should nots, taboos. This moral framework is substituted for the direct experience of life. The reasons for the shoulds, should nots, and taboos are not revealed or explained. Love thy neighbor. Thou shall not kill. But there is not a real sense of why. This is true of the modern anti-moral systems of “going with the flow” and “do your own thing” ... these anti-moral systems are just moral systems dressed up in mirrors. The should/taboo framework is a con for power.
A saint takes on a moral system so completely that he becomes the social system. Living within a moral framework as a saint does limits the personal ability to shape reality, hence transferring this ability in the form of power to the abstract social structure.
But a life of a saint is not the real goal of any moral system. If everybody lived as saints, the power that was thus generated would not be anywhere near enough to keep an abstract structure in existence. This is why real saints are always in a very tiny minority or a false myth. Saints are decoy models projected in front of people by the abstract power structure.
The real goal of any moral system is personal failure. This type of failure is different from the failure within evolution or creativity. It is the failure of a victim or a loser. A moral system is set up to be almost impossible, if not in fact impossible, for humans to live within. At the heart of the con of morality is to convince the people that they should do what they are not empowered to do. Convince them by creating a system of rewards and punishments which is based on the fragmentation of time into past and future. Once a person is plugged into this reward/punishment system, he stops shaping his actions by the concrete experience of the results, both linear and nonlinear, of his actions. Instead, he starts focusing on the rewards and punishments within the moral system ... starts focusing on the past and/or future ... starts doing/not doing based on the promised reward/punishment. This abstracts the person out of the direct present experience of his life action and its resulting effects. This abstraction is the root cause of personal casualness. Once he is thus abstracted out of the direct experience, he can be sold whatever prepackaged pictures of reality that the abstract power structures issue, will pay whatever price for forgiveness, protection, for a piece of power (no matter how small). In this way, the person is convinced by the power structure that he needs it, needs to belong to it, to conform to its prepackaged deck of pictures of reality.
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