My first contact with the sorcerers' world was not something I planned or sought out: It was rather a fortuitous event.
I met a group of people in northern Mexico, in July of 1970, and they turned out to be the strict followers of a sorcerers' tradition belonging to the Indians of pre-Columbian Mexico.
That first meeting had a long-range, overpowering effect on me.
It introduced me to another world that coexists with ours.
I have spent twenty years of my life committed to that world.
This is the account of how my involvement began, and how it was spurred and directed by the sorcerers who were responsible for my being there.
The most prominent of them was a woman named Florinda Matus. She was my mentor and guide. She was also the one who gave me her name, Florinda, as a gift of love and power.
To call them sorcerers is not my choice.
Brujo or bruja, which mean sorcerer or witch, are the Spanish terms they themselves use to denote a male or a female practitioner.
I have always resented the negative connotation of those words, but the sorcerers themselves put me at ease, once and for all by explaining that what is meant by sorcery is something quite abstract; the ability, which some people develop, to expand the limits of normal perception.
The abstract quality of sorcery voids automatically, then, any positive or negative connotation of terms used to describe its practitioners.
Expanding the limits of normal perception is a concept that stems from the sorcerers' belief that our choices in life are limited, due to the fact that they are defined by the social order.
Sorcerers believe that the social order sets up our lists of options, but we do the rest: By accepting only these choices, we set a limit to our nearly limitless possibilities.
This limitation, they say, fortunately applies only to our social side and not to the other side of us; a practically inaccessible side, which is not in the realm of ordinary awareness.
Their main endeavor, therefore, is to uncover that side.
They do this by breaking the frail, yet resilient, shield of human assumptions about what we are and what we are capable of being.
Sorcerers acknowledge that in our world of daily affairs there are people who probe into the unknown in pursuit of alternative views of reality.
The sorcerers contend that the ideal consequences of such probings should be the capacity to draw from our findings the necessary energy to change, and to detach ourselves from our definition of reality.
But the sorcerers argue that unfortunately such probings are essentially mental endeavors: New thoughts and new ideas hardly ever change us.
One of the things I learned in the sorcerers' world was that without retreating from the world, and without injuring themselves in the process, sorcerers do accomplish the magnificent task of breaking the agreement that has defined reality.