Dreaming is a sorcerer's jet plane. They can create and project what sorcerers know as the dreaming body, or the Other, and be in two distant places at the same time.

The spirit makes adjustments in our capacity for awareness. That's a statement of fact. You can say that it's an incomprehensible fact for the moment, but the moment will change.

While we dream the assemblage point moves very gently and naturally. Mental balance is nothing but the fixing of the assemblage point on one spot we're accustomed to. Dreams make that point move, and dreaming is used to control that natural movement.

There are two different issues. One, the need to understand indirectly what the spirit is, and the other, to understand the spirit directly.

Once you understand what the spirit is, the second issue will be resolved automatically, and vice versa. If the spirit speaks to you, using its silent words, you will certainly know immediately what the spirit is.

The difficulty is our reluctance to accept the idea that knowledge can exist without words to explain it. Accepting this proposition is not as easy as saying you accept it. The whole of humanity has moved away from the abstract. It takes years for an apprentice to be able to go back to the abstract, that is, to know that knowledge and language can exist independent of each other.

The crux of our difficulty in going back to the abstract is our refusal to accept that we can know without words or even without thoughts. Knowledge and language are separate.

I told you there is no way to talk about the spirit because the spirit can only be experienced. Sorcerers try to explain this condition when they say that the spirit is nothing you can see or feel. But it's there looming over us always. Sometimes it comes to some of us. Most of the time it seems indifferent.

The spirit in many ways is a sort of wild animal. It keeps its distance from us until a moment when something entices it forward. It is then that the spirit manifests itself.

For a sorcerer an abstract is something with no parallel in the human condition. For a sorcerer, the spirit is an abstract simply because he knows it without words or even thoughts. It's an abstract because he can't conceive what the spirit is. Yet without the slightest chance or desire to understand it, a sorcerer handles the spirit. He recognizes it, beckons it, entices it, becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts.

Think about the proposition that knowledge might be independent of language, without bothering to understand it.

Consider this. It was not the act of meeting me that mattered to you. The day I met you, you met the abstract. But since you couldn't talk about it, you didn't notice it. Sorcerers meet the abstract without thinking about it or seeing it or touching it or feeling its presence.

The second abstract core of the sorcery stories is called the Knock of the Spirit. The first core, the Manifestations of the Spirit, is the edifice that intent builds and places before a sorcerer, then invites him to enter. It is the edifice of intent seen by a sorcerer. The Knock of the Spirit is the same edifice seen by the beginner who is invited--or rather forced--to enter.

A nagual can be a conduit for the spirit only after the spirit has manifested its willingness to be used--either almost imperceptibly or with outright commands.

After a lifetime of practice, sorcerers, naguals in particular, know if the spirit is inviting them to enter the edifice being flaunted before them. They have learned to discipline their connecting links to intent. So they are always forewarned, always know what the spirit has in store for them.

Progress along the sorcerers' path is, in general, a drastic process the purpose of which is to bring one's connecting link to order. In order to revive that link sorcerers need a rigorous, fierce purpose--a special state of mind called unbending intent.

An apprentice is someone who is striving to clear and revive his connecting link with the spirit. Once the link is revived, he is no longer an apprentice, but until that time, in order to keep going he needs a fierce purpose which, of course, he doesn't have. So he allows the nagual to provide the purpose and to do that he has to relinquish his individuality. That's the difficult part.

Volunteers are not welcome in the sorcerers' world, because they already have a purpose of their own, which makes it particularly hard for them to relinquish their individuality. If the sorcerers' world demands ideas and actions contrary to the volunteers' purpose, volunteers simply refuse to change.

Reviving an apprentice's link is a nagual's most challenging and intriguing work. And one of his biggest headaches too. Depending, of course, on the apprentice's personality, the designs of the spirit are either sublimely simple or the most complex labyrinths.