I have given you different versions of what the sorcery task consists. It would not be presumptuous of me to disclose that, from the spirit's point of view, the task consists of clearing our connecting link with it. The edifice that intent flaunts before us is, then, a clearinghouse, within which we find not so much the procedures to clear our connecting link as the silent knowledge that allows the clearing process to take place. Without that silent knowledge no process could work, and all we would have would be an indefinite sense of needing something.

The events unleashed by sorcerers as a result of silent knowledge are so simple and yet so abstract that sorcerers decided long ago to speak of those events only in symbolic terms. The manifestations and the knock of the spirit are examples.

For instance, a description of what takes place during the initial meeting between a nagual and a prospective apprentice from the sorcerers' point of view, would be absolutely incomprehensible. It would be nonsense to explain that the nagual, by virtue of his lifelong experience, is focusing something we couldn't imagine, his second attention--the increased awareness gained through sorcery training-- on his invisible connection with some indefinable abstract. He is doing this to emphasize and clarify someone else's invisible connection with that indefinable abstract.

Each of us is barred from silent knowledge by natural barriers, specific to each individual. The most impregnable of my barriers was the drive to disguise my complacency as independence.

We as average men do not know, nor will we ever know, that it is something utterly real and functional--our connecting link with intent --which gives us our hereditary preoccupation with fate. During our active lives we never have the chance to go beyond the level of mere preoccupation, because since time immemorial the lull of daily affairs has made us drowsy. It is only when our lives are nearly over that our hereditary preoccupation with fate begins to take on a different character. It begins to make us see through the fog of daily affairs. Unfortunately, this awakening always comes hand in hand with loss of energy caused by aging, when we have no more strength left to turn our preoccupation into a pragmatic and positive discovery. At this point, all there is left is an amorphous, piercing anguish, a longing for something indescribable, and simple anger at having missed out.

The third abstract core is called the trickery of the spirit, or the trickery of the abstract, or stalking oneself, or dusting the link.