Your every action, thought, and word is important: it has a radiating effect which shapes reality throughout the entire web of relationships, throughout time.
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.
Making a commitment and keeping it allows you to use the whole course of events creatively, instead of becoming a victim if things turn bad.
The apprenticeship is the process of living the holistic myth. This creates a sub-frame or an inner frame by which the holistic myth can enter the cultural frame and shift reality.
Two of the major keys of having and using power or creativity are doing what you say you will do and sticking to what you set out to do.
Vulnerability is not fragile. Vulnerability is a rubber ball. It gives very easily, but it bounces back to its original shape after it undergoes pressures of hard knocks, and it keeps rolling on the path.
The root of all magic is shifting reality from one possibility to another by a committed, disciplined focus of will from our back brain over time; this is not just wishing to make what you want so: this is hard work.
What we usually think of as reality is a frame that is fit over the ultimate reality.
The cultural frame of reality which we all absorb into our being just by growing up in our social culture is not just the rules, taboos, and ethics we are taught: it includes what is and is not possible within our reality.
Every situation in life has the potential of both fear and strength, of both doubt and power, of both desire and freedom; the choice is always there.
Every time people doubt or fear, they are shaping reality.
The student should concentrate on doing and experiencing the apprenticeship rather than trying to understand the apprenticeship.
Seeing time as a dynamic pattern of relationships, instead of as a linear progression of events, fundamentally reshapes reality and how you react to reality. It makes guilt, remorse, and anger outmoded. When it is realized that what is done in the present automatically changes what has been done by you and what was done to you, such feeling actions as guilt, remorse, and blame are just continuing the past event into the future by way of the present.
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.
Chero is the life force. It is what attracts. It is what the shamans used to heal and melt other realities into the normal reality.
To create deeply requires the removal of time.
The human mind and civilization were evolved by playing.
The fun we are talking about in this work is a deep, intense fun that corrects imbalances and induces newness. This kind of fun comes from risk-taking and work. This deep fun feels very different from the surface, light, fast fun of the world of politeness, glamour, romance, and social rules. This difference confuses students.
Primitive tribal culture saw the magical work as the most important factor in their survival; modern western culture sees it as a strange form of subversion.
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 human mind, when deprived of all sensory input, will create another reality very quickly. This is because, to keep on existing, the mind needs other possibilities to relate to, even if it has to create those other possibilities itself.
In the web of ultimate reality, there is not a single center, because each relationship is the center. Each relationship is linked to all other relationships. They are linked in a dynamic interplay, in which relationships, all relationships affect, change, create one another always.
Each center of the body is connected to many of the rivers of possibility. The nonlinear flow of the packets of possibilities within these rivers is Chero. By transforming, transmuting, the packets of possibilities, it is actually possible to change matter, to change the material world. This alchemical fact is just the opening for the more important fact that reality is created, recreated every second by and within us.
We have said reality creation is a dance and that we are the dancers. But in truth, it is a dance without dancers. If we really take on personal responsibility for the dance, we surrender to the dance, give up individual “control”, give up individual linking with the results. By taking on the personal responsibility for the dance, we are the dance. We melt with the dance. We are only the dance. We admit these facts. It is not a question of becoming, but of remembering and admitting. It is a question of being, living, dancing lustfully, without controls or limits in responsibility. In the apprenticeship, this quality is called EXTENSIC. The Extensic life dance is beyond morals or limits. It joyfully digs into the dance to the juicy black core.
Some scientists now believe that the function of self-awareness, which they have up until now contributed only to our particular species (which is questionable), is to “create” reality by “discovering” reality. This moves the “Big Bang” of the creation of the universe from the distant past on the physical plane to the present of self-awareness.
Matter is a symbol containing within it packets of possibilities. Chero is the possibilities.
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.
Evolutionary change on every level always comes from this journey of a single person or a small group, into the web of all possibilities, bringing back into the frame a new possibility, trying it out in the frame.
In magic, words have power: to create a word for something is to create the possibility for it to exist in our reality, for it to happen.
In this flat world (of “normal” reality), 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 front brain.
Controlled folly tricks the student into trusting the magical knowledge.
The student should realize that he is creating through the teacher the spell; he does this, not by changing it or adding on to it, but just by accepting it, as given, as his own.
The student should take everything in the cave of Lila seriously, no matter how silly, trivial, or unimportant it appears.
To achieve a goal, put it away in your back brain; do not focus on it, but still have it.
Bodyplay has to be intensely personal, but should not be individualistic; it should not push people inward into themselves, but outward into others.
In bodyplay, if you focus on the body centers, there will be no magic, but if you focus on the relationships between the people and the body centers, there will be magical healing fun which will radiate its effects.
Most working relationships in magic are two-way channels that empower both people involved: student/teacher, healer/healed, performer/audience.
The cave of Lila is a reality-travel machine that links the physical and dream realities.
The hands are healing wands of Chero, and the laying on of hands is powerful magic, but rubbing body centers together is much more powerful, therefore more taboo.
The relationship of the student and the teacher within the cave of Lila is a relationship of lovers. It is an unromantic love. It does not conform to the rules and the goals of a love relationship in the outer reality. But it is an intensely personal, intensely vulnerable relationship. It is what all human relationships are ruled by if the shit would be cut away.
The shaman guided his students into the state of controlled folly where the magical knowledge could be manifested through their bodies so that it could evolve the human mind/spirit.
The turn-on of breaking the taboos of common morality is not a natural part of eroplay: it has been added on by social repression.
To understand the difference between being an individual and being a person, you have to be able to “see” things with both your front brain and back brain simultaneously and combine the two pictures together.
Cherotic healing creates a complete Chero circuit between the healer and the person being healed, allowing the Chero to flow freely, finding the needed balance in both. When this balance is reached in the two people, the special fun of controlled folly is released into the world, inching the outer world into balance. This world balance is the ultimate purpose of these healing rituals of magical play. This ultimate purpose is usually hidden from awareness by focusing on healing the person.
Magical masks are not meant to be a hiding, covering up, or a protection. Rather, they are meant to reveal, to liberate, to call forth the deep personality which is usually hidden in normal society.
The western mind has evolved to its physical material limits, neglecting its dream side, because people focus their magical knowledge on physical survival.
Art, religion, and psychology were once part of a single magical knowledge.
The eyes are often thought of as one-way channels which let in visually the outer world to our inner reality, but they also visually let out what is happening inside us.
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