(SECTION 22)
Matter is a symbol containing within it packets of possibilities. Chero is the possibilities. The human body-personality is a symbolic system containing possibilities. It is a symbol containing chero flowing nonlinearly through it, breathing through it. The human body-personality is a point of creative multi-universal responsibility because it contains self-awareness. The “self” in this self-awareness is not the individual ego, but the self of the web of ultimate reality of all possibilities. This self-awareness is only beginning to evolve out from the web. This means the on-going act of multi-universal creation has just started. This creation depends on the self-awareness which is flowing through each one of us.
Modern physics tells us that our universe is sitting on the razor’s edge between existence and non-existence, leaning slightly on the side of existence. The self-awareness is the slight edge of existence. It is creating existence. This creating is radiating both linearly and nonlinearly from the point of responsibility which is contained within each of us.
Our point of entry into this on-going dance of magical creation is our body-personality in everyday living, everyday relating.
We think our body is contained, enclosed, limited within our skin. In reality, the skin is not the borderline marking the difference between inside and outside, marking off what the individual (or any other object) is. As we have seen, there is an energy field of thoughts, emotions, and other psychic material. This field usually comes out a quarter of an inch from the skin. This field is as much a part of the body as anything within the skin. The skin is the eighth center of the body, the center of relating, of touch, of melting. It is the center which connects the first and the seventh centers together, creating a circle out of the horizontal linear order.
The skin is not a fence of individualistic ego. Instead, it is the connecting organ of the body, our body. This body does not end at the skin. This body, our body, extends both outward and inward throughout the multi-dimensional, multi-universal existence which is being created by self-awareness. What we normally think of as our body is in reality only a small part of our body. It is only a symbol of personal responsibility which lives within us creating. We are now entering the secret of inter-penetration.
When we look at our body within the physical world, we can easily become aware of physical trails. At least they at first appear to be trails we leave just as the snail leaves a shining trail as it travels along the sidewalk. After we begin to recognize the existence of such trails, we begin to quickly see more and more of these trails. Body smells, dead skin falling or rubbing off the body, fingerprints, sweat, shit and piss are just some of the most obvious of these trails. There are many hundreds of these trails, mostly unknown to modern man. Each of these trails has volumes of information and possibilities about us and about our connection to the web of existence. In fact, each of our trails contains us. The scientist can clone a body copy from a single cell. A cat can read the emotional state of another animal by the smell of the piss left hours before. Everything leaves these traces of its existence in the reality. Our homes are filled with these traces of ours, which is why our homes have feelings of us, smells of us.
These trails are really meltings between our body and the rest of the web of ultimate reality. These meltings are the breathing of chero, the blood veins of chero running both linearly and nonlinearly throughout the entire reality web. This implies that the whole web of ultimate reality is one living organism which extends beyond time and space. What is usually thought of as the individual’s ego/personality/being is a connection in relationships of responsibility, of creation, and of change.
When reality is seen in this way, what looked like trails of individuals left behind within space and time become channels of cherotic breath and cherotic blood of possibilities. These channels are physical, although not necessarily material. We have just listed some of the more obvious material trails. But thoughts are physical trails too. These thought trails, these melting webbings, are made of many, many different kinds of conducting materials, such as chemical, electrical, vibrational, and many materials that we have not yet either discovered or connected to thought. Thought is focused in the sixth body center, that of wisdom.
Most people think that the thoughts in their heads are their own, coming from their own being ... exceptions being strange occurrences of visions, possessions, and other “psychic” events. But thoughts are not our own. They are nonlinear veins of cherotic possibilities running through us. Here I am just using thought as an example of how the webbings work. What is contained is a nonlinear wave of cherotic possibility which has been affected by every mind body it has passed through. When the thought first enters your mind body, it is not your thought. It is in the air. The teacher can trace the thought back through several generations of mind bodies that the thought has passed through. This is useful to make the student recognize that she is not the source of the doubts, fears, inferiority feelings and other life-denials.
The student should keep and act upon her trust of the teacher so that they can create a zone around the student that is free of life-denials. This zone can be created when the student stops taking the life-denials on as herself, stops thinking and acting from the life-denials as if the life-denials are her. This is done by a consistent self-discipline based on the trust of the teacher. This self-discipline has no room for self-guilt or self-pity. Such guilt and pity are just time-wasting acids that eat away at the freeing zone. The longer the student swims in these acid pools of self-indulgence, the longer the acids are eating away at the zone.
We will always and forever make so-called mistakes. Will always and forever have contractions. These are a part of the magical process that is life. These could be seen as sufferings, hurts, pains. But as parts of the magical life process, the heavy negativity slips away from them, and they become a rugged mountain path to be lustfully, extensically traveled. Any guilt or pity detours us from the compassionate and passionate life.
We have said the student’s consistent self-discipline has to be based, firmly rooted, in his trust in the teacher. She should recognize that the teacher came out of her body, that he dwells within her body. The student usually creates at a certain point in the apprenticeship the false conflict between trusting herself and trusting the teacher. This conflict is false because it does not take into account the principle of inter-penetration. Full trust never has a subject. Full trust does not focus itself on one particular person or thing. Instead, it spreads into the general living. Focused trust is a fragile hiding from life.
The true trusting person trusts life and extensically acts from that trust. He does not ask for proofs of worthiness of trust, no trials or tests for earning of trust. He trusts because that opens the door to all possibilities. When you trust into life, you are fully trusting yourself. When you freely trust others, you open the total freedom for both yourself and others. When the student in apprenticeship lets his trust for the teacher slip, what he is really doing is not trusting himself, not trusting his ability, his courage, his humor. Understand, the teacher is a projection of the student’s soul into the field of objectivity. The student and the teacher are melting halves of a whole which we will call “deep love” or “erour love”. When the student thinks of himself as just a student, just a disciple - as if there could be any greater calling - he has lost sight of his trust in not only the teacher and himself, but also in life. This is a common detour into fragile fragmentation, fatal only if the student stays too long in this quicksand pool, or returns to it too often.
The love relationship of the teacher and the student exists within the tribal flowering plant of apprenticeship. It is not a relationship between the teacher and the student, but of the web flower itself which contains this relationship. It is important in this web to not look for sources. It is important to not claim the source for life-denials within yourself. It is also important that, when the teacher traces a certain life-denial backward through several people, that you do not confuse them as the ultimate source at which blame and guilt can be aimed. The teacher is doing the tracing simply to get you to realize that you are not the source.
The function of the shamans is to take in life-denials from the universe, transform them into life-affirmations, then project these life-affirmations into the web of ultimate reality by actively living these life-affirmations. This is what being responsible really means. This is real magic, real alchemy, real creativity. It is the cherotic breath. It is the dance without dancers. We as shamans admit that we are not individualistic egos or sources. Instead, we admit we are points of responsibility. This admitting creates a zone around us. Within this zone, life-affirmations are created out of the life-denials which have entered the zone. These now life-affirmations then either combine with older life-affirmations, creating more richly complex life-affirming realities, or are projected outward from the zone to be a part of the decaying, rubbing dance with life-denials. This is very similar to the process of the green plants transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen.
This process is without end. This endless process is magical life. The person who is waiting, wishing, for the end of life-denials does not understand what life and magic are. At best, she can only put up with life, making do with an unsatisfactory situation. She usually gets overwhelmed and becomes wrapped up in layers of life-denials which create more life-denials.
The basic secret of magic is to like life, to love life, to throw yourself into life so completely, so extensically that you lose yourself as a source in the individualistic sense. You become a point in a wave. In this deep love of life, life-denials are seen as what they really are. They are the building-blocks of life-affirmations. The process of transformation of life-denials into life-affirmations cannot be done in the Maya of the isolation of individual self. This transformation can only occur within relationships outside of self, within the real whole body of the web. This is why the lusty giving up of self into deep love is so important in order for magic to happen. Awareness is tribal, not individual. To understand this, the student should see the web of reality as one body, one tribe, one organism that is creating itself always.
We will explore what deep love is very extensively in the following book because in deep love we have the very heart of magic. But it is useful to summarize the physical process of the dynamic interplay of reality in our body-personality.
All chero, which is packets of possibilities, affects you and is affected by you as it passes through your body. These effects shape the waves of change. When light (photons) enters your eye, when sound vibrations hit your eardrum, when air enters your body, they are changed by your body. They are then reflected back both outward and inward into the web of reality. This is also true of thoughts and emotions which are different forms of packets of possibilities.
If you look for sources of these waves, either within yourself or in others, you will be missing the true reality ... you will be spinning your wheels. But if you realize that you are a part of a nonlinear system of living change, of universal creation, you will begin to grasp how to be a shaman. By doing what is right in any and all situations, it releases a creative change, not within you, but rather in the relationship between you and a magical other.
This is the root of the student-teacher relationship. When we talk about doing the right thing, about being responsible, we are not talking about what is considered moral or comfortable in the normal social frame of reality. Such morals are a system of checks that keep most people inside this social frame. The function of the shaman takes us far outside the social frame. So the right thing in the normal social frame may look and/or feel immoral, may look/feel impossible or overwhelming. This can be overcome by admitting you are connected on every level to the web of ultimate reality, connected by personal relationships to the people around (in the apprenticeship, to the teacher and other students). In this way, you are not limited to ego-power, but are linked to the unlimited force of the web. By projecting the creative change outside yourself within the context of the magical other, you will not be sidetracked by thinking you are the source, that you are doing something. This melts you into erour, into the dance of no dancers, into the magical realm of poetry.
Poetry is a metaphor that explodes normal reality by using things within that normal reality, using normal things, such as words, in non-normal or super-normal ways. The apprenticeship is living poetry. The key is the erour love/trust. Erour love/trust is extensic love/trust which has no subject. It is a love/trust of life, of yourself, of the teacher, of others, all in one. This is an act of will and faith. This is the deep love/trust that admits to joy and unity.
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