Is Akka going to be his era's Seswatha?  It seems so with his relationship to Esmenet (similar to Seswatha's relationship to the high queen).  Also Akka beat down both Wuteat and Nil'giccas.  Holy crap.  A four-thousand year old nonman king and the father of dragons!

First of all I do think Kellhus would be limited by the Psûkhe, after all his passions are almost entirely subject to his persona.  Second, I'm not sure Titirga is cishaurim or even that he had Cishaurim-like powers so much as he worship the spaces between gods like the nonmen.  We have to remember in the atrocity tale Titirga was the strongest sorcerer 'to ever walk the ground', Ever.  He may have been able to propel his sorcery further by using something like the Psûkhe but ultimately his sorcery DID bear the stain, just not as deeply, so he would have definitely been using the Gnosis.  Also, Kellhus is also likely a stronger user due to the multiple inutterals.  Who knows how many he can use simultaneously now!

Greetings.  This is my first post here and I wanted to invite people to speculate on how the Cishaurim may train themselves.  Some of the clearest information is found in an interview Bakker did for Pat's fantasy hotlist here:

http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2011/07/r-scott-bakker-interview-part-2.html

where Bakker explains:

Everything comes down to meaning in Eärwa. Where sorcery is representational, utilizing either the logical form (as with the Gnosis) or the material content (as with the Anagogis) of meaning to leverage transformations of reality, the Psukhe utilizes the impetus. Practitioners of the Psukhe blind themselves to see through the what and grasp the how, the pure performative kernel of meaning–the music, the passion, or as the Cishaurim call it, the ‘Water.’ As a contemporary philosopher might say, the Psukhe is noncognitive, it has no truck with warring versions of reality, which is why it possesses no Mark and remains invisible to the Few.

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This statement also seems to suggest the Cishaurim hold to a process ontology as opposed to the substance ontology of say the Gnosis - a sorcery that turns upon the purity of meanings begotten from abstract logical forms (the end result is the meaning of the form as opposed to the Cishaurim holding the very experience of meaning itself to be desired primarily).

But one has to wonder how one would train for this sort of power.  What exercises would contribute to feeling meaning more intensely?  The first thing to come to my mind is the primacy of the Solitary God for the Cishaurim, who remember are priests as much as or even more than they are sorcerers.  Their art has no mark specifically because it (assumedly) does not overwrite the real with abstraction or analogy, but instead brings the potential meanings already present to a screeching, out of body present.  In other words its almost as if their souls are made into a sort of topos and they don't carry or release the water so much as becoming willing vessels for it.  Their souls then could be understood as fissures to the outside.

So certainly being cast into the desert after being newly blinded might work, but I'm having trouble coming up with decent ideas.  Anyone?

Also if this has been discussed elsewhere please let me know where.