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Kovalenko » 23 мар 2017, 11:28:47
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FLORINDA D: If we talk about it from a biological point of view,
is she enslaved? The sorcerers say yes, in the sense that she
always views herself through the male. She has no option. I used
to be excruciatingly mad about this whole discussion; I used to
go over and over it with them, and go back to this whole idea,
especially because this was in the early seventies when the
women's movement was at its peak. And I said "No, women have come
a long way. Look at what they have accomplished.", and they said,
"No, they haven't accomplished anything." To them, the sexual
revolution- and they were not prudes- they were not interested
in morality, they were only interested in energy- so they said,
that for women to be liberated sexually, in a way enslaved them
even more, because suddenly they were feeding energetically not
just one male, but many males.
ABE: That's interesting.
FLORINDA D: So for them it was absurd, and whatever's happening
at the moment, he foresaw that in the seventies. He said they're
going to dive down on their noses. They're going to be weakened.
And they are. The few women I've talked to- I've given
certain lectures, and the books- and when I've talked about this,
it's very interesting that the women do agree. And I first
thought I would have a great deal of difficulty with this
subject, but especially women who have gone through the process
of having multiple lovers said they were exhausted, and they
don't know why.
ABE: So we are talking about something beyond the sexual.
FLORINDA D: Originally, beyond the the sexual aspect, the female,
the womb ensures that the woman is the one that's closest to
the spirit in this process of approaching knowledge as being-in-
dreaming. The man cones upward, and by the sheer definition of
the cone, it comes to a finite end. It's an energetic force. He
strives because he is not close to the spirit, or whatever we
want to call that great energetic force out there. According to
the sorcerers, the woman is exactly the opposite. The cone is
upside down. They have a direct link with it, because the womb
for the sorcerer is not just an organ of reproduction; it is an
organ for dreams, a second brain.
ABE: Or heart.
FLORINDA D: Or heart, and they do apprehend knowledge directly.
Yet we have never been allowed to define what knowledge is in our
society or in any society. And the women who do create or help to
formulate the body of knowledge, it has to be done in male terms.
Let's say a woman does research. If they do not abide by the
rules already established by the male consensus, they won't be
published. They can deviate slightly, but always within that
same matrix. It is not allowed for women to do anything else.
ABE: So the sorceress is removed from the hypnotism of all that.
FLORINDA D: Of the social, yes. It's very interesting that you
mention the idea of hypnotism, because Don Juan always said at
the time when psychology produced Freud, we were too passive. We
would have followed either Mesmer or Freud. We are mesmeric
beings. We never really developed that other path...
ABE: Yes. The path of energy.
FLORINDA D: ...and this would never have happened to us if Freud
wouldn't have had the upper hand.
ABE: Well, he's lost it now.
FLORINDA D: No, not really, because with all we do, who knows how
many generations it takes? Let say he has been discredited
intellectually, but our whole cultural baggage...We still talk in
those terms, even people who don't even know who Freud is. It's
part of our language, our culture.
ABE: Yes, I know. It's very frustrating, dealing with people who
approach the whole of reality from this hackneyed psychological
viewpoint.
FLORINDA D: Yes. And they don't even know where it comes from.
It's part of our cultural baggage.
ABE.: So the sorceress is freed from this condition.
FLORINDA D: Well, free in the sense that once you see what the
social order really is- it's an agreement- at least you are more
cautious in accepting that. People say, "Oh but look how
different life is from your grandmother's or mother's time." I
say, it's not. It's only different in degree. But nothing is dif-
ferent. If I would have lived my life the way it had been
established for me...yes, I was more educated, I had a better
chance. But that's all. I still would have ended up the same way
they had ended up. Married, frustrated, with children that by
now I probably would hate, or they would hate me.
ABE: I keep trying to get you now to cross that line, and talk
about what occurs now that you've realized that there is that
thralldom and you begin to free yourself from it. What is it that
opens up to perception?
FLORINDA D: Everything.
ABE: Everything. Good.
FLORINDA D: First of all, in your dreams you can see. For
instance, my work is done in dreaming. Not that I don't have to
do the work, but it comes in dreaming.
ABE: Now you're using the word dreaming in this very specific
sense, which is in this tradition. Can you talk about what
dreaming actually is?
FLORINDA D: In the traditional sense, when we fall asleep, as
soon as we start entering a dream, in that moment when we're half
awake and half asleep, and still conscious, you know from Casta-
neda's work that the assemblage point flutters, it starts
shifting, and what the sorcerer wants to do is that he wants to
use that natural (that happens to every one of us) shift to move
into other realms. And for that you need an exquisite energy.
Again it comes down to energy. We need an extraordinary amount of
energy because you want to be conscious of that moment and use it
without waking up.
ABE: Yes, a very high accomplishment.
FLORINDA D: For me, it's very easy to enter, to use it. The thing
is, I had no control at that time- although I have now- over when
it was going to happen. But I could center into this state of
what they call...I mean, the women were not interested in calling
it the 'second attention'; they were interested in calling it
'dreaming awake', because it is the same thing. And you'd reach
different levels, and what you do is that in that dreaming state
eventually you have the same control you have in your daily life.
And that's exactly what the sorcerers do. It's the same thing;
there's no difference anymore.
ABE: So you are now able to exist in another reality?
FLORINDA D: Well, I don't really know. You see, we don't have the
language to talk about it, except to talk about it in known
terms. So in a weird way, when I ask myself, "Do I exist in
another reality?", yes and no. It's not quite right to really
say that, because it is one reality.
There is no difference. Let's say there are different layers,
like an onion. But it's all the same. And it becomes very
bizarre. How am I going to talk about it? In metaphors? Our
metaphors are already so defined by what we already know.
ABE: Yes, the problem of language.
FLORINDA D: You see we don't have the language to really talk
about what then really happens when you are in the 'second
attention', or when we 'dream awake' . Bul it is as real as any
other reality. What is reality? It is, again, a consensus. And
you see, the thing is, we only want to agree about this
intellectually on one level. But it's more than just an
intellectual agreement. Let's say, it can be more. And for
that, again, we go back to that same thing- it all hinges on
energy.
ABE: That's right. But it also hinges on something called 'intent'.
FLORINDA D: Exactly. But in order to hook yourself to
'intent'...See, 'intent' is out there, it's this force- Don
Juan was not interested in religion- but, in a weird way maybe it
is exactly what we call God, the supreme being, the one force,
the spirit. You see, each culture knows what it is. And the thing
is, Don Juan, again, said you don't beg for it. You ask, and in
order to ask for it, you need energy. Because not only do you
need energy to hook yourself onto it, but you want to stay
hooked.
ABE: Ycs. So, this thing of intent, I mean it's an easy word to
say, but it's actually a quite complex operation.
FLORINDA D: Yes, exactly, very complex. For Don Juan and his
people, to talk about sorcery and witchcraft, with all those
negative connotations, they couldn't care less what we called the
practices. For them it was very very abstract. To them sorcery is
an abstraction, and it was this idea of expanding the limits of
perception. Because, for them, our choices in life are limited by
the social order. We have boundless options, but by accepting
these choices, of course, we set a limit to our limitless
possibilities.
ABE: And yet the human being seems...
FLORINDA D: ...constantly searching for that which has been...
ARE: ... lost...
FLORINDA D: ....lost or caged in by the social order. They put
blinds on us the moment we are born. Look at the way we coerce
the child to perceive the way we perceive.
ABE: Yes, the transmission of culture.
FLORINDA D: It's the most perfect example. Children truly
perceive more, obviously, a great deal more. But they have to
make some order out of that chaos, and we, of course, are the
perennial teachers of what is proper to perceive within our
group. And if they don't abide by that, my god, we shoot them
with drugs, or lock them up in therapy with psychiatrists.
ABE: There have been these traditions, which have existed for a
long, long time, and now in the last, say, twenty or thirty years
in particular, we start to hear about them. Why did Castaneda
write his books?
FLORINDA D.: Bccause it was a task; it was a sorceric task. That
Don Juan impressed upon him. Castaneda is the last of his
line. There is no one else. There's a group of Indians that we
work with. You see, Don Juan, in a weird way made almost a
mistake with Castaneda, when he first was put in touch, whatever
the design or power of the spirit was which put Don Juan face to
face with Castaneda. And he rallied right away. His circle of
apprentices- and I think it's in Tales of Power and The Second
Ring of Power, when he talks about the people in Oaxaca and the
Little Sisters and all those people. And then, years later, Don
Juan realizes that that's not the way Castaneda is going.
Castaneda was even more abstract than Don Juan was. His path
was a totally different path. And then when he gathered these
other people, because the people that are with Castaneda, we all
met Don Juan before we met Castaneda. Actually there was only
five of us before- four of us and Castaneda.
ABE: So, there was the sorcerer's task of writing the books. What
I'm trying to get at is, that this knowledge, just as knowl-
edge, becomes available now and is available to millions of
people in this form. What is the purpose of that?
FLORINDA D: Well, somebody has to get hooked by it. And people
do. For us, for our mentality as the westem ape, as Don Juan
always called us, you see, we have to be hooked first
intellectually, because obviously that's how our whole being
works. When I was in school, I was just a step away from going
into graduate school, and l had been in this world for two or
three years, and I said, "What am I doing by continuing school?
Why should I get a PhD.? It's absolutely redundant." And Don Juan
and all the women said it's absolutely not redundant, because in
order to reject something you have to understand it at its most
sophisticated. Because for you to say you're not interested in
philosophy, or you're not interested in anthropology, it's
meaningless. You can only say it after you have at least have
made some attempt to understand it. There's no reason to reject
it, and when plunging into this world of the 'second attention'
and 'dreaming awake', your mind has to be so well trained for you
to emerge again, to come out with the knowledge. Because if you
have not the brain or the mind to do it, you might as well just
go throw stones in the desert; because it's meaningless. And for
them it was extremely important that all of us are very well
trained. Everyone working within this little group has a degree.
There are historians, anthropologists, librarians.
ABE: So, the knowledge is made available to millions of people,
and people become hooked by it.
FLORINDA D: On one level, they will, yes.
ABE: And does that mean that the tradition has now begun to
proliferate itself in that way, also?
FLORINDA D: I don't know. If I go by Castaneda's mail, which he
doesn't read, I would say yes. But then, most of the stuff... I
mean I open letters from time to time, and they're mad, they're
crackpots most of them. Some of them are very, very serious
enquiries, and most of them are just truly cracked people.
(laughter) I mean they're cracked. Like, "I am the new Nagual."
or "I have been visited by you in dreams." I mean truly bizarre
things.
ABE: Well, there are many levels to that, as you know. But I
think that you women, you sorcerers there, and the whole Casta-
nedan reality has actually affected the mass collective
consciousness of, particularly, North America.
FLORINDA D: It is as you say; the work is out there. There's a
great many people reading it. And some people are truly very
serious about it.
ABE: And some of them are people who are non-Natives who have
become involved in Native spirituality. In a way, the work that
has come from your group has had a tremendous quickening effect
on Native spiritualities all over this continent, who have
found a track back into their traditions.
FLORINDA D.: You see, the whole point of Don Juan was that you
don't go back, because we are caught again in the myth and the
rituals. And for Don Juan, myth and rituals...myth in the sense
that yes, that you're part of this matrix, but not in the sense
that you're going to live it by invoking certain rituals, certain
powers that were, let's say, successful in the l9th century.
Because, he said, that's exactly the fallacy, because originally
a ritual is only to hook your attention. Once your attention is
hooked, you drop it. As the apes that we are, we of course are
very comforted by the ritual. People that truly transcend a
certain knowledge do it by exactly getting out of it. Yet the
rest of the mass is mesmerized by the ritual.
ABE: Seeing the truth of that and the fact that Castaneda
describes you as the new seers, how does that emerge?
FLORINDA D: The new seers? For the women it is very important,
this idea that the womb is not just an organ of reproduction.
In order to activate this, our intent has to be different. In
order to change our intent we go back again to energy. You see,
we don' t really know what it means to use the womb as an organ
for being, an organ of light, of intuition. For us, intuition
really is something that has already been defined. There is no
real intuition anymore, because we intuit with our brains. Don
Juan was interested in women, and people always ask, "Well, how
come there's always so many women? Do you have orgies? Is there
all kinds of stuff going on?" He said, "No, it's because the male
doesn't have the womb. He needs that magical 'womb power'
(laughter). " It's very important, you see.
ABE: Let me ask some technical questions there, if I may, on
behalf of my female readers. Does the womb have to be fully
functioning? I mean, if a woman had her tubes tied, would her
womb still work?
FLORINDA D: Yes, as long as she doesn't have a hysterectomy.
ABE: So long as the womb isn't removed...
FLORINDA D: ...if the womb is there, yes.
ABE: Then it can work.
FLORINDA D: Oh, absolutely. But the only thing is you need to
summon that intent. Like certain of the Goddess cults- "When God
Was A Woman"- and I was talking to some women a month ago, and
they were all in goddess groups. And every month they go into the
forest; they go someplace up to Sequoia and they groove in the
forest, in the trees, and oh, they have a great time hanging out,
debating, making rituals in the river. And I said, "But what the
fuck are you doing? You go back home, and then you are the same
assholes you were always. You open your legs whenever the master
says "I need you"" And they were shocked. I mean, they quite dis-
liked me, because they don't like to hear that. They said, "But
we felt so good for three days." And I said, "But what's the
point of feeling good for three days if your life continues the
same way?" What are we resting from? Because our life is going to
continue. Why don't we change? This idea of the rituals and even
going back to the Native beliefs, it didn't even work back then,
on one level. We were conquered.
ABE: So it's something that has to live now in a completely
authentic way.
FLORINDA D.: It has to be fluid, and the practitioner has to be
fluid to accept these changes. Even within us, things are
changing constantly, and we're so comfortable in a certain
groove, until something blasts us out of it. And we resent it,
but we have to be fluid. Only energy will give us that fluidity.
ABE: How do you accummulate energy?
FLORINDA D: To start off with, at least at the beginning, it was
Don Juan's idea that the best energy that we have is our sexual
energy. It's the only energy that we really have, and most of our
sexual energy is squandered.
ABE: Now, is it the same for men and women?
FLORINDA D: Of course it's the same for men and women. The only
thing is with women you see that energetically the woman takes on
the burden of feeding the man through their energetic fila-
ments. So, in that sense, it's worse for women. And for the man
too, because the man is hooked. Energetically he is hooked, no
matter what. And we have all kinds of psychological explanations.
People who we've had affairs with, and we can't get her out of
our minds, whatever. You see, we have this gray barrage of
description, but what really is going on is on a totally
different level that we don't want to talk about because it's not
part of our cultural kit.
ABE: So the primary way of accumulating energy, then, is to be celibate?
FLORINDA D: Well, it's very difficult, but it would be a good
try, at least to start out with.
ABE: If a woman was called to this way, if she got hooked, or
a man got hooked by this tradition, how would they know? How
would they know that they had been hooked by a tradition and
not just by some damn obsession?
FLORINDA D: For instance, Castaneda's books spell out very
clearly...if you read Castaneda's books carefully, they're al-
most manuals.
ABE: Yes, I know. And you read them again and again, and you
finally understand what they're talking about
FLORINDA D: You will know that something has changed, because you
will feel it energetically. And then there's this whole idea that
you can abandon this idea of the self. It's not that you're going
to laugh at others. But you find them despicable, and yet you
don't want to judge them, either, because who the hell are we to
judge anybody anyway? But you know that you are not part of it,
in the sense of the social agreement, and it's almost like a
phony part of you that is clinging to you, because you do have to
function in the world. You have to present a coherent idea Of the
self. You know, Don Juan always said if some truthful change has
taken place there is no way to be rejected, whatever it means to
be rejected. I don' t know. By intent coming in contact with us?
I don't really know. There have been two people that have come in
contact with us, and they are there. I mean, we're never together
anyway; each person lives on their own, and just from time to
time we do get together. Originally we had this little class
when Castaneda was here. He teaches certain very interesting
movements, basically to store up energy. So, these people have
been there for two years, and they're changing little by
little. And it's amazing. You see, if you let something go, some-
thing in you will know.
ABE: You have published this book, for instance, and I read it.
Now I don't have a physical image of you, but my feelings form a
sense of who you might be, or what you might be like. Now, does
that energy field affect you, now that there's this book out
there?
FLORINDA D: One of the things that Don Juan made very clear to
Castaneda...see, once the book is out, the book is out. It has
nothing to do with you anymore. For you to be wondering, living
in hope- is the book doing well or not doing well?- see, that's a
very, very difficult thing to divorce yourself from. Because
somehow you are involved. To truly let go is very very
difficult. I had two other books- The Shabono and The Witches
Dream- and it was very easy. With this one, because it's the first
time I talk about my involvement with Don Juan, it's very
difficult. And maybe because for the first time I'm talking more
openly-- with the other ones I did absolutely nothing. With this
one I am more involved. I have given lectures in bookstores to
groups of people, which is very interesting, because, as you
said before, there are a great many people who are truly very
seriously interested, but intellectually, again.
ABE: Oh, I think I know a know people who've gone a little beyond
intellect with it.