Cycles of Recapitulation

There are two basic rounds to recapitulation; the first is called formality and rigidity, and the second fluidity.

Recapitulating an event starts with one’s mind arranging everything pertinent to what is being recapitulated. Arranging means reconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the physical details of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared the interaction, and then going to oneself, to the examination of one’s feelings.

The way sorcerers perform the recapitulation is very formal. It consists of writing a list of all the people they have met, from the present to the very beginning of their lives. Once they have that list, they take the first person on it and recollect everything they can about that person. And I mean everything, every detail. It’s better to recapitulate from the present to the past, because the memories of the present are fresh, and in this manner, the recollection ability is honed. What practitioners do is to recollect and breathe. They inhale slowly and deliberately, fanning the head from right to left, in a barely noticeable swing, and exhale in the same fashion. The inhalations and exhalations should be natural; if they are too rapid, one enters into something called tiring breaths: breaths that require slower breathing afterward in order to calm down the muscles.

Sorcerers talk about this act as breathing in all the feelings the person had at the event being recollected and expel all the unwanted moods and irrelevant feelings therein. Sorcerers believe that the mystery of the recapitulation lies in the act of inhaling and exhaling. Since breathing is a function that sustains life, sorcerers are certain that through it one can also deliver to the dark sea of ​​awareness or the Eagle the facsimile of their life experiences.

Begin making your list today. Divide it by years, by occupations, arrange it in any order you want to, but make it sequential, with the most recent person first, and end with Mommy and Daddy. And then, remember everything about them. No more ado than that. As you practice, you will realize what you’re doing. The recapitulation is a sorcerer’s ploy to induce a minute but steady displacement of the assemblage point. The assemblage point, under the impact of reviewing past actions and feelings, goes back and forth between its present site and the site it occupied when the event being recapitulated took place.

The old sorcerers’ rationale behind the recapitulation was their conviction that there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe, which makes organisms live by lending them awareness. That force also makes organisms die, in order to extract the same lent awareness, which organisms have enhanced through their life experiences.

The old sorcerers believed that since it is our life experience this force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can be satisfied with a facsimile of our life experience: the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets sorcerers go, free to expand their capacity to perceive and reach with it the confines of time and space.