“Here is sudden reticular observation that struck me:
Galileo famously reintroduces that doctrine of primary and secondary qualities.
I looked upon this description of the reticulum and its additive and subtractive nature,
Of course a primary and secondary qualities account of a thing imagines a space not unlike that but in a different way.
Here in a sense we have not only stripped the secondary qualities away but also the primary qualities, Both seem to become relational threads.
Since the threads themselves are the only way we can describe them and not really threads at all.
This in turn made the whole reticulum look to me like a vast diagram.”

Seranoga (1964)

This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan.

Ok so something weird happened. You said to try to use the ally-thing to make something happen. So after thinking of the wind and feeling one with it, I seem to have summoned my cat to a place of power. During a trip, there was an imbalance, a discomfort brought up by the fact of the left eye now seeing and moving differently. The suggestive state of the psychedelics allied with this asymmetry (with the metallic thing appearing from one corner only) made so that my body kept being sucked into that corner. But after some weird poking around, I started thinking about the cat and seconds after she appeared here and asked to enter (the door was closed), then entered and went straight to the place counter the corner, ending the discomfort immediately. This has become a motif. The cat itself has become part of the circuitry of this performance spell. It’s like an accretion tapping, like you said. It’s like the routine of the cat, myself, and the plants/fungi are now entangled in this motif

Started to understand the ally better because I’m now jnteracting with nodes. Nodes appear as semi-physical balls defying both light and darkness, the size of watermelons, and they can be felt anywhere, be it in the middle of the air or inside a closet. The only distinction is that nodes cannot move from their place, and there cannot be two nodes too close together, as if they repel each other. So I started using the trick of the light with the left eye (using the comer of the room to shift the level of brightness) to see them better. It’s a faint aura most of the time and, using this trick, I can rotate the the nodes (although for them to move seems impossible).

Rotating the nodes changed the perception of color (beyond that of brightness) and mood of each thing in flux through the air, probably IOBs, creating the sensation of a big circular slide that vibrates and can change to places existing only at the edge of the corner of the eyes. So it feels like moving really fast in a car-spaceship while sitting down, and seeing multiple paths inside a normal 3D space (like a series of broken mirrors).

This field of a type of magnetism that the nodes emit feel like they could be harnessed for energy (it feels like a plant, with the flying IOBs feeling like it’s their habit to “eat” this energy the nodes give off. So they’re like moths to a flame, clustering around the nodes.

Does the metallic thing go away if you want it to?

That’s a good one. Up until now I hadn’t thought about it. Just never wanted it to leave. Seemed weird and disrespectful.

Well ally relationships of use (if that’s what it is) are supposed to have you in control as I understand it. I’m not overly concerned about it but obviously it’s not your ‘friend’ as such, it’s some kind of reciprocal relation thing. It is reasonably said I think that IOBs will try to be whatever you obsess over. Now weirdly yours already looks like a weird multidimensional thing but then this level of complexity and weirdness is in your makeup. I mean I don’t know, it might not be one but whatever it is you should probably be able to have it here or not.

I would say the relation is definitely more like a refined respect that you would find among big animals like a jaguar and a anaconda, they won’t fight because both of them would get very destroyed with no gain.

That’s why it’s so weird to want to control its summoning. It feels like imposing my will into it like an imprint, a name. Which I might be able to do, but I could either tarnish this thing that feels so free and kill myself (acknowledging here the flair of the dramatic like DJ)

It seems related to light (as in reflexions and reflections) and time (as in captured moments). These two main categories seem to govern as the main principles of its effects. It bends light and plays with time. I can feel its presence even when not appearing visibly. And it has since become more fluid in the way that it doesn’t need to appear to work anymore. To make it appear feels each time more important, as if each appearance is supposed to teach me something and each time I learn something it gets harder to properly make it appear (energetic snowball effect). Maybe it is an IOB being something other than an image necessarily. I think the silence was achieved to a different point where the obsessions might have dissipated. It was unbelievably hard to keep this for so long. It honestly feels like Plato seems to have felt about ideas.

It’s a very strange situation, I don’t want to sit here spouting things like the CC books know the truth, besides which this is way beyond any of my occult interactions. I partially think ‘has some weird neurological phenomenon afflicted them?’ But then I think this so. The Warao tribe has a tradition of dark ‘killer’ shamans (that’s how they mostly function) that are trained largely through tobacco, so their bodies are steeped in, by the time they’re (the apprentices) cooked and ready to go, the tobacco has physically altered their bodies, they smell awful on the breath, they look scary from what we would think of as various toxicity effects and their eyes are suited to the twilight apparently another effect we can understand physiologically. But of course from the tribes perspective these alterations are the transformations into the shaman thing, they aren’t ‘really’ the western descriptions. So as I say, if anything you’re experiencing could be explained through neuroscience, it doesn’t really help since the sorcery ontology is in the first place. But it seems to sit well with me that sorcery is very much a physiological thing. I suppose I have in my mind the general sense in magick etc. that other worldly beings generally need restraining and that you can’t trust them and so I exercise a degree of concern for you.

I think it goes straight from trying to work through logoi and nomoi to work on forms that are deliberately created somehow through rituals so that they can alter their new form. Your concern seems to be the case all around the world. DJ is always afraid for CC. Magick shares this with sorcery. And it’s not really clear how they differ.

And that fits with CCs understanding that the giving you what you want could be a kind of trick, maybe?

Yes, the reciprocal trade seems to be a thing that needs care. The giving too much is always a weird sign that something might be wanted from the one sustaining the presence. That’s why I’m not keeping anything. I let it use me as a foil, but it asks before. This feels like payment.

Hmmm, be so careful and consider that you are in quite serious sorcery land here, I don’t know about the death bit but a lot of the hyperbole is clearly appropriate. I’m thinking more that this is a lonely world in a sense, and yes the books do say that but you can see how it’s true, you end up something truly other. It’s not just something that will be there and then ‘now to get on with my proper life’

That thing about IOBs being things one obsesses over. This very thing seemed to manifest differently, as small obsessions then a big one (the pink river dolphin) before it cracked and this time-warper light thing emerged. Yes, definitely. I will be timing this and closing shop by the end of the month. It’s a limited vacation.