tricky!
Previous Post on Glossing From 5 Years Ago
Glossing is a sorcery topic that hasn't come up very much in the subreddit. When I did some searching in our source materials, I found that it's only discussed/explained at length in the interviews and workshop notes.
This is from the transcript of Castaneda's Q&A With Students at UCLA in 1969:
>Castaneda: But what it the ‘fleeting world’? What is don Juan talking about? I say that he is talking about a process of re-glossing. He’s teaching me to gloss the same way that my progenitors, and my fellow men taught me as a child the ordinary glosses, the, the, I suppose there is an infinite number of glosses, for like the gloss "room," it’s either an infinite number 35,59 of concrete glosses that we use, or it is a pattern of glossing that we have learned, and then we apply it to everything we perceive. Either way. 34,10 But Don Juan, what he’s doing now, as I say, as a social scientist that is, I say that he’s teaching me to re-gloss. But he, alluding that one could see, he is alluding that it is possible to see an ultimate reality. And that of course we know, it can not be true. At least we as social scientists know that that is bunk. (laughter) That there is not an ultimate reality. And, I, I, I don’t know at this moment, uh, what will be the end result of all of it; all I can say is that I’m going to try to apprehend what he calls the ‘fleeting world’ and see that perhaps, or find out whether it is really is a process of re-glossing that, and I hope that I am sober enough to realize that it’s a process of re-glossing, or if there is a possibility of ‘seeing’, in quotes, or apprehending, an irreducible reality.
>Uh, Ludwig Wiggenstein in his life (35,27) you know attempted to, to, to resolve the problem. And he found … I think, he talk about language, the trappings of natural language, and I think Wittgenstein’s dilemma 35,36 was that he arrived to an edge that it was an impasse. You have the phenomena there that you want to describe. Is the phenomena and the description, two things, or is the description part of the phenomena? 35,56 When as a social scientist, as an anthropologist, I’m going to study primitive cultures, what can you say about my descriptions, and my conclusions, about the primitive culture I’m trying to study. Is it part of the primitive culture? Or is it a phenomenon in itself? Wittgenstein never resolved the problem. He felt it was the trappings of language, he called it natural language as opposed to philosophical syntax. There was a time in which the idea was that perhaps we could develop a language which was exact, a language of philosophers. 36,36 And we would be able to agree without doubt about what we are talking about in terms of philosophizing. And that seems to be an impossibility. The question is that we use language, and the meaning of the language is arbitrary (and disconnected)....
>...But what you're attempting to do is to sink into it the world view. Now what happened. Now what would happen if you could see & could utterly see into this other alien world 01,04,48 to your model. So that you’d be able to see the xxx – Well, you see, – xxx translate a bare facsimile of what he’s trying to say.
>01,05,04 Perhaps, perhaps if you want to be truly scientific, you could think of this possibility. 01,05,10 Or actually you could map the system of glossing which is proper for us the Europeans. 1,5,19 And then the system of glosses would map the other culture we’re studying. And we could see where they overlap. Maybe that is the only thing that could be accessed is that overlap. Cause I go already with my preconceptions. The prejudgment about the world is set for me. My glosses are there. And I’m going to go and judge the glosses of people alien to me through my own glosses? That’s absurdity.
>You end up with two sets of glosses.
>Perhaps if you could map them, you could overlap them perhaps, somehow. 1,5,54 Maybe there is a way of overlapping them. The code of the overlap is the only thing that could be acceptable. That’s it, that’s the proposition, you see, the xxx of .. of deciding, at least for me, of deciding alternatives from anthropology. Yes.
(what Carlos is talking about, in 1969 terms, is attempting to reconcile two different positions of the assemblage point on the basis of their respectively alien glosses)
Archived Backup of the Recording
And the longest discussion of glossing is in the December 1972, Psychology Today, interview conducted by Sam Keen:
Castaneda:
>Perhaps, something like that. But we have to begin by realizing, as don Juan says, that there is much more to the world than we usually acknowledge. Our normal expectations about reality are created by a social consensus. We are taught how to see and understand the world. The trick of socialization is to convince us that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a way that is supported by a social consensus.
Keen:
>Then a sorcerer, like a hypnotist, creates an alternative world by building up different expectations and manipulating cues to produce a social consensus.
Castaneda:
>Exactly. I have come to understand sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons' idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions--floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking. We have to learn to walk, but once we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains.
Keen:
>So sorcery, like art, teaches a new system of glossing. When, for instance, van Gogh broke with the artistic tradition and painted "The Starry Night" he was in effect saying: here is a new way of looking at things. Stars are alive and they whirl around in their energy field.
Castaneda:
>Partly. But there is a difference. An artist usually just rearranges the old glosses that are proper to his membership. Membership consists of being an expert in the innuendoes of meaning that are contained within a culture. For instance, my primary membership like most educated Western men was in the European intellectual world. You can't break out of one membership without being introduced into another. You can only rearrange the glosses.
Keen:
>Was don Juan re-socializing you or de-socializing you? Was he teaching you a new system of meanings or only a method of stripping off the old system so that you might see the world as a wondering child?
Castaneda:
>Don Juan and I disagree about this. I say he was re-glossing me and he says he was de-glossing me. By teaching me sorcery he gave me a new set of glosses, a new language and a new way of seeing the world. Once I read a bit of the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to don Juan and he laughed and said: "Your friend Wittgenstein tied the noose too tight around his neck so he can't go anywhere."
Keen:
>Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers who would have understood don Juan. His notion that there are many different language games--science, politics, poetry, religion, metaphysics, each with its own syntax and rules--would have allowed him to understand sorcery as an alternative system of perception and meaning.
Castaneda:
>But don Juan thinks that what he calls seeing is apprehending the world without any interpretation; it is pure wondering perception. Sorcery is a means to this end. To break the certainty that the world is the way you have always been taught you must learn a new description of the world--sorcery--and then hold the old and the new together. Then you will see that neither description is final. At that moment you slip between the descriptions; you stop the world and see. You are left with wonder; the true wonder of seeing the world without interpretation.
Keen:
>Do you think it is possible to get beyond interpretation by using psychedelic drugs?
Castaneda:
>I don't think so. That is my quarrel with people like Timothy Leary. I think he was improvising from within the European membership and merely rearranging old glosses. I have never taken LSD, but what I gather from don Juan's teachings is that psychotropics are used to stop the flow of ordinary interpretations, to enhance the contradictions within the glosses, and to shatter certainty. But the drugs alone do not allow you to stop the world. To do that you need an alternative description of the world. That is why don Juan had to teach me sorcery.
Keen:
>There is an ordinary reality that we Western people are certain is 'the' only world, and then there is is the separate reality of the sorcerer. What are the essential differences between them?
Castaneda:
>In European membership the world is built largely from what the eyes report to the mind. In sorcery the total body is used as a perceptor. As Europeans we see a world out there and talk to ourselves about it. We are here and the world is there. Our eyes feed our reason and we have no direct knowledge of things. According to sorcery this burden on the eyes in unnecessary. We know with the total body.
Keen:
>Western man begins with the assumption that subject and object are separated. We're isolated from the world and have to cross some gap to get to it. For don Juan and the tradition of sorcery, the body is already in the world. We are united with the world, not alienated from it.
Castaneda:
>That's right. Sorcery has a different theory of embodiment. The problem in sorcery is to tune and trim your body to make it a good receptor. Europeans deal with their bodies as if they were objects. We fill them with alcohol, bad food, and anxiety. When something goes wrong we think germs have invaded the body from outside and so we import some medicine to cure it. The disease is not a part of us. Don Juan doesn't believe that. For him disease is a disharmony between a man and his world. The body is an awareness and it must be treated impeccably.
alien element
(If others have never described it with language (akin to the Australian Aboriginal dreamtime creation songs), you can't even see it at this a.p. position (the blue zone)? Or, rather, the "songs" themselves, are repeated until the intent get's strong enough to block it out.)
13 Comments
I think it’s a different interview from what you posted.
It’s one that’s as audio on YouTube.
But Carlos explains “glossing” as “units of glossing” such as a tree being “a unit of tree”. It’s when he was still supposedly being tricked by Don Juan, around the time of the ones you posted, maybe earlier.
This tree concept is interesting because in “Stalking with the double”, it explains how a tree goes from being glossed to perceived for what it is, by the narrator.
The text from the Q&A is pulled from that referenced page, and the intro does line up with what you hear at the start of the audio recording on SoundCloud.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251205150712/http://toltecschool.com/journals/interviews/interview-b
http://archive.today/2026.02.09-002250/https://toltecschool.com/journals/interviews/interview-b
It should be noted that Carlos's own understand of sorcery in the late 1960's to early 1970's was not on par with what it was in the late 1990's, simply because he had no access to HUGE swaths of his stored memories.
UPDATE: But you may have simply been referencing another interview, in which he was discussing glossing....which didn't turn up in my search!
It’s this one, with Theodore Roszak:
The timestamp is around the middle. It’s been some time since I listened to it.
He's using different language in this interview. No mention of gloss or glossing, which is why it didn't turn up.
KPFA Radio Interview - 1968 :
CC: Well...I think the experiences are, they are designed to produce the knowledge that reality of consensus is only a very small segment of the total range of what we could feel as real. If we could learn to code reality or stimuli the way a (sorcerer) does, perhaps we could elongate our range of what we call real.
Q: What do you mean by that, how does a (sorcerer) like don Juan code stimuli?
CC: For instance, in the idea that a man could actually turn into a cricket or a mountain lion or a bird, is to me, this is my personal conclusion, it's a way of intaking a stimuli and readapting it. I suppose the stimuli is there, anybody who would take a hallucinogenic plant or a chemical produced in a laboratory, I think will experience more or less the same distortion. We call it distortion of reality. But the (sorcerers), I think, have learned through usage in thousands of years, perhaps, of practice, they have learned to reclassify the stimuli encoded in a different way. The only way we have to code it is as hallucination, madness. That's our system of codification. We cannot conceive that one could turn into a crow, for instance.
Q: But it was a tremendously vivid experience when you had it.
...
CC: Uh-huh. Yea, he, don Juan's a very sophisticated thinker, really, it's not easy to come to grips with him. You see, I had tried various times to wrestle with him intellectually and he always comes the victor, you know. He's very artful. He posed once the idea to me that the whole, the totality of the universe is just perception. It's how we perceive things. And there are no facts, only interpretations.
Audio Recording of the Interview
If you listened to most interviews on that specific small, and brief, time period Carlos is probably going to be raving about sorcery with the inventory he had at the time which is of an Anthropologist-Academic. So a lot of it will be him trying to formulate the insanity he was being subjected to by Don Juan secretly while being in heightened awareness, using philosophical concepts.
Which makes me wonder, in the process of making this a raw technology, is it supposed to be directed or are we being pushed by it because of the previous intent of something like Star Wars? Because a lot of what is happening seems to relate to science and technology specially.
I ask this because someone brought my attention to saccadic suppression. Which is an interesting phenomenon, that to me seems like glossing time itself. Like, you can gloss even the past and future. How we hear of glossing seems to be mostly spatial, objects, things. However I’m pretty sure time travel is related to time-glossing, which would then be related to non-linearity or something.
This is a concept that is sort of in my mind lately, time-glossing.
edit: forgot I wanted to mention he brought things closer to a technology thing with the whole hermeneutics thing.
edit: changed present to future
It’s weird, sorcery is weird, and weird how stuff lands here in detail when one is trying to grasp/understand the core concepts of sorcery.
crystal clear - nothing left to grasp, just work to do.
**not sure we can understand? Just a word I used.
I'm trying to get some work done on my animation today, so I only read the first part.
But it's an "in the weeds" point of view. Carlos alludes to the view outside the weeds in the part I read , but he's still down in the weeds seemingly arguing about individual blades of grass.
Reality is layers and layers and layers of emanations, at the focal point of your assemblage point.
No one can possibly bring them all into focus, to create a single reality using that assemblage point position. You have to gloss over most of it.
"Real" worlds there, are the ones that have been used before.
"Phantom" worlds are ones that only you managed to tune in.
"Tuning in" means, you managed to select some of the layers of emanations (reality) there, to combine them into a new, perceivable one.
Naturally if you can perceive it solidly, it feels "real". Even when you know full well, you just ignored 9999/10000 of it.
(an actual number Carlos gave us).
But more interesting is when the "tuning in" hasn't happened, and nothing at all comes into focus.
Except perhaps "dark junk".
That "trash heap" of reality that the Nagual Elias used to visit.
I've been seeing dark junk for 2 days now, due to some turmoil in the subreddit. Or maybe due to Cholita being off in Mexico.
Or maybe both are related.
Looks a tiny bit like this:
It's an "invitation to gloss up a new world".
Anything you need to construct it, is right there.
But you yourself, have to get it to form. By not interfering with what floats to the top.
There seems to be a viewing time limit on this kind of thing, of around 20 minutes.
Before you want to sleep.
So gazing at this is not very energizing.
Here’s the thing, how do interpret anything in sorcery as being of relevance? I once saw a “furry crocodile” in darkroom and I went insane with self-importance thinking it was Quetzalcoatl for some time. Then I read an excerpt somewhere that to either “nagual Elias” or “Silvio Manuel” (I don’t remember which) seeing a furry crocodile was the “epitome of humor” of their humor, so maybe the joke was on me, and it was the self-importance???
One might say that sorcery is the process of learning NOT to interpret things as being "relevant".
Especially out in the far reaches where reality begins to fall into tiny pieces, and clinging to the ones you liked keeps you from seeing what happens when it's all gone.
Speaking of don Genaro, you can fly around the Eucalyptus tree tops yourself, doing cosplay.
For real.
It wasn't such a big deal.
What makes that hard to do, is the way we place a value on everything and are motivated by "gain" rather than perception.
Though, without an Ally around to help, doing stuff that fun won't happen until you can sustain the purple zone long enough to find a stable horizontal shift.
The Ally stabilizes even bizarre horizontal shifts as far back as in the early red zone.
Unfortunately, we don't have any explanations for how to do that out there in the purple zone, where you don't need an ally anymore.
Carlos started to give us some when he gave the J curve lecture, but he saw that our attention was failing. So he ended the lecture after showing that sorcerers like a slight left shift, out there.
He said it makes the experience "sublime".
It's that left shift insect hive mind awareness again?
Except that unlike back in the green zone, sorcerers don't get trapped by it the way Asian meditation systems do.
They know it's just a slightly greedy choice among many.
I wonder if women couldn't exploit the "moods of assemblage point horizontal shifts"?
Those could in fact be described fairly well.
By a group of people who can shift their assemblage points on demand.
Cholita is dominated by her search for a better mood.
What’s the “alien element” gif supposed to signify? Is it just an example of the sorts of things we can eventually perceive?
Yes. And that our "syntax," as Castaneda has sometimes academically described it, has no gloss/code for.
There is an account of a group of Native American's in the 15th-16th century who saw something slightly odd on the sea along their shoreline.
This was before their first contact with Europeans.
It was just a disturbance against the sky and waves, nothing that could be clearly perceived.
The local shaman stood watch day after day, intently observing the area of disturbance to see if he could determine what it could actually be...since it remained in the same location, and seemed to be persistent.
After some time he either suddenly, or possible a bit at a time, saw that it was a clipper type ship anchored off their shoreline.
He called over some of those from his tribe, and described to them what he was seeing. And once he did, more of them were then able to perceive the SHIP.
Before then, they literally could not see it! It was so alien to their understanding of the world that they had no gloss for which to compare it to.
It was an element alien to their worldview, which did not allow for huge sailing ships full of white europeans.
Here is another University interview (ca. 1972):https://soundcloud.com/uwlibraries/wauem_1991011
There doesn't seem to be a transcript. The concept of glossing is first mentioned (but not by name) at 20:30 minutes. This might be the interview that the other user was reminded of, though it's only seems to be on Soundcloud.
Starting around 27:00, Carlos discusses "a unit of meaning" in terms of a series of memories. This eventually leads into the concept of "my brain is going to assemble all those units and turn it into ... a gloss." (at 28:28).
I roughly transcribed the stretch from 27:00 to 31:25 here:
"...This time I willingly I have let him guide me. He is interested in teaching me the difference between looking at the world and seeing. He makes a semantic difference between looking and seeing. His interest, as I see it, in giving me a series of memories of ... call it, blank... now what he says, don Juan or that sorcerer would turn into a frog. He's giving me a unit of meaning, turning into a frog, for which I have no equivalent. And these teachings force me to acquire a series of memories of turning into a frog, that is. Presuppose, that at a given moment, my brain is going to assemble all those units and turn it into what- in anthropological(?) jargon, we would call it a gloss.
Example. I say to you, Tree - and apparently I make sense. However, if you ask me what I mean by a tree. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what I mean by a tree. And all I could give you is a series of historical facts about a tree. Historical facts that I have learned as I grew up... I'd give you the anatomy of a tree, the works, name it... but the assumption is I have never apprehended(?) the phenomenon Tree. It may be there, but it looks that is in here... because I am interpreting it and I am interpreting the phenomenon Tree from a set of concise, preordained mechanics... preordained units... I've been taught to perceive Tree. At this point, my assumption I have never seen it. Perhaps I have seen Tree once, twice. But I can tell you in all sincerity that I have never seen Elephant. Because when did I see a Elephant? Two years old? Six months old? Never. The gloss Elephant has come to me, fully formed - through what processes I could say Elephant and it make sense?
We really don’t know that. We are not being concerned with that yet, we’re beginning to now. The gloss Elephant to me is an addition. Not the gloss Tree because it’s obvious that I saw trees when I was- what? Two days old? Three days old? Or whatever. Before I learned the gloss Tree, I had seen the gloss Room before it became a gloss. My assumption is at a certain time of my life, I may have walked into a room and even may have known the [???] Room, but I didn’t know the total gloss Room. It required a series of memories of walls, chairs, floors, ceiling to complete the gloss. And what don Juan is doing as I see it, is giving me a [???] of processes of glossing. He’s teaching me the mechanics of glossing. And that’s a thesis I wanted to throw out for feedback.
My crucial point is this, in his effort to teach me to see, don Juan says that seeing consists of training your eyes…”
I replaced the main link to this recording in our wiki with this one, as it's slightly higher audio quality.
Left the old link as an alternate source/backup.