us it is, a pattern, a form, a cast that groups together a particular bunch
of fiberlike elements, which we call man.
What he had said put me in a state of great distress. But he seemed
unconcerned with my genuine turmoil. He kept on needling me with what he
called the unforgivable crime of the chance seers, which makes us focus our
irreplaceable energy on something that has no power whatsoever to do
anything. The more he talked, the greater my annoyance. When I became so
annoyed that I was about to shout at him, he had me change into yet a deeper
state of heightened awareness. He hit me on my right side, between my
hipbone and my rib cage. That blow sent me soaring into a radiant light,
into a diaphanous source of the most peaceful and exquisite beatitude. That
light was a haven, an oasis in the blackness around me.
From my subjective point of view, I saw that light for an immeasurable
length of time. The splendor of the sight was beyond anything I can say, and
yet I could not figure out what it was that made it so beautiful. Then the
idea came to me that its beauty grew out of a sense of harmony, a sense of
peace and rest, of having arrived, of being safe at long last. I felt myself
inhaling and exhaling in quietude and relief. What a gorgeous sense of
plenitude! I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I had come face to face with
God, the source of everything. And I knew that God loved me. God was love
and forgiveness. The light bathed me, and I felt clean, delivered. I wept
uncontrollably, mainly for myself. The sight of that resplendent light made
me feel unworthy, villainous.
Suddenly, I heard don Juan's voice in my ear. He said that I had to go
beyond the mold, that the mold was merely a stage, a stopover that brought
temporary peace and serenity to those who journey into the unknown, but that
it was sterile, static. It was at the same time a flat reflected image in a
mirror and the mirror itself. And the image was man's image.
I passionately resented what don Juan was saying; I rebelled against
his blasphemous, sacrilegious words. I wanted to tell him off, but I could
not break the binding power of my seeing. I was caught in it. Don Juan
seemed to know exactly how I felt and what I wanted to tell him.
"You can't tell the nagual off," he said in my ear. "It is the nagual
who's enabling you to see. It is the nagual's technique, the nagual's power.
The nagual is the guide."
It was at that point that I realized something about the voice in my
ear. It was not don Juan's, although it sounded very much like his voice.
Also, the voice was right. The instigator of that seeing was the nagual Juan
Matus. It was his technique and his power that was making me see God. He
said it was not God, but the mold of man; I knew that he was right. Yet I
could not admit that, not out of annoyance or stubbornness, but simply out
of a sense of ultimate loyalty to and love for the divinity that was in
front of me.
As I gazed into the light with all the passion I was capable of, the
light seemed to condense and I saw a man. A shiny man that exuded charisma,
love, understanding, sincerity, truth. A man that was the sum total of all
that is good.
The fervor I felt on seeing that man was well beyond anything I had
ever felt in my life. I did fall on my knees. I wanted to worship God
personified, but don Juan intervened and whacked me on my left upper chest,
close to my clavicle, and I lost sight of God.
I was left with a tantalizing feeling, a mixture of remorse, elation,
certainties, and doubts. Don Juan made fun of me. He called me pious and
careless and said I would make a great priest; now I could even pass for a
spiritual leader who had had a chance seeing of God. He urged me, in
ajocular way, to start preaching and describe what I had seen to everyone.
In a very casual but seemingly interested manner he made a statement
that was part question, part assertion.
"And the man?" he asked. "You can't forget that God is a male."
The immensity of something indefinable began to dawn on me as I entered
into a state of great clarity.
"Very cozy, eh?" don Juan added, smiling. "God is a male. What a
relief"
After recounting to don Juan what I had remembered, I asked him about
something that had just struck me as being terribly odd. To see the mold of
man, I had obviously gone through a shift of my assemblage point. The
recollection of the feelings and realizations I had had then was so vivid
that it gave me a sense of utter futility. Everything I had done and felt at
that time I was feeling now. I asked him how it was possible that having had
such a clear comprehension, I could have forgotten it so completely. It was
as if nothing of what had happened to me had mattered, for I always had to
start from point one regardless of how much I might have advanced in the
past.
"That's only an emotional impression," he said. "A total
misapprehension. Whatever you did years ago is solidly enclosed in some
unused emanations. That day when I made you see the mold of man, for
instance, I had a true misapprehension myself. I thought that if you saw it,
you would be able to understand it. It was a true misunderstanding on my
part."
Don Juan explained that he had always regarded himself as being very
slow to understand. He had never had any chance of testing his belief,
because he did not have a point of reference. When I came along and he
became a teacher, which was something totally new to him, he realized that
there is no way to speed up understanding and that to dislodge the
assemblage point is not enough. He had thought that it would be sufficient.
Soon he became aware that since the assemblage point normally shifts during
dreams, sometimes to extraordinarily distant positions, whenever we undergo
an induced shift we are all experts at immediately compensating for it. We
rebalance ourselves constantly and activity goes on as if nothing has
happened to us.
He remarked that the value of the new seers' conclusions does not
become evident until one tries to move someone else's assemblage point. The
new seers said that what counts in this respect is the effort to reinforce
the stability of the assemblage point in its new position. They considered
this to be the only teaching procedure worth discussing. And they knew that
it is a long process that has to be carried out little by little at a
snail's pace.
Don Juan said then that he had used power plants at the beginning of my
apprenticeship in accordance with a recommendation of the new seers. They
knew by experience and by seeing that power plants shake the assemblage
point way out of its normal setting. The effect of power plants on the
assemblage point is in principle very much like that of dreams: dreams make
it move; but power plants manage the shift on a greater and more engulfing
scale. A teacher then uses the disorienting effects of such a shift to
reinforce the notion that the perception of the world is never final.
I remembered then that I had seen the mold of man five more times over
the years. With each new time I had become less passionate about it. I could
never get over the fact, however, that I always saw God as a male. At the
end it stopped being God for me and became the mold of man, not because of
what don Juan had said, but because the position of a male God became
untenable. I could then understand don Juan's statements about it. They had
not been blasphemous or sacrilegious in the least; he had not made them from
within the context of the daily world. He was right in saying that the new
seers have an edge in being capable of seeing the mold of man as often as
they want. But what was more important to me was that they had sobriety in
order to examine what they saw.
I asked him why it was that I always saw the mold of man as a male. He
said that it was because my assemblage point did not have the stability then
to remain completely glued to its new position and shifted laterally in
man's band. It was the same case as seeing the barrier of perception as a
wall of fog. What made the assemblage point move laterally was a nearly
unavoidable desire, or necessity, to render the incomprehensible in terms of
what is most familiar to us: a barrier is a wall and the mold of man cannot
be anything else but a man. He thought that if I were a woman I would see
the mold as a woman.
Don Juan stood up then and said that it was time for us to take a
stroll in town, that I should see the mold of man among people. We walked in
silence to the square, but before we got there I had an uncontainable surge
of energy and ran down the street to the outskirts of town. I came to a
bridge, and right there, as if it had been waiting for me, I saw the mold of
man as a resplendent, warm, amber light.
I fell on my knees, not so much out of piety, but as physical reaction
to awe. The sight of the mold of man was more astonishing than ever. I felt,
without any arrogance, that I had gone through an enormous change since the
first time I had seen it. However, all the things I had seen and learned had
only given me a greater, more profound appreciation for the miracle that I
had in front of my eyes.
The mold of man was superimposed on the bridge at first, then I
refocused my eyes and saw that the mold of man extended up and down into
infinity; the bridge was but a meager shell, a tiny sketch superimposed on
the eternal. And so were the minute figures of people who moved around me,
looking at me with unabashed curiosity. But I was beyond their touch,
although at that moment I was as vulnerable as I could be. The mold of man
had no power to protect me or spare me, yet I loved it with a passion that
knew no limits.
I thought that I understood then something that don Juan had told me
repeatedly, that real affection cannot be an investment. I would have gladly
remained the servant of the mold of man, not for what it could give me, for
it has nothing to give, but for the sheer affection I felt for it.
I had the sensation of something pulling me away, and before I
disappeared from its presence I shouted a promise to the mold of man, but a
great force whisked me away before I could finish staling what I meant. I
was suddenly kneeling at the bridge while a group of peasants looked at me
and laughed.
Don Juan got to my side and helped me up and walked me back to the
house.
"There are two ways of seeing the mold of man," don Juan began as soon
as we sat down. "You can see it as a man or you can see it as a light. That
depends on the shift of the assemblage point. If the shift is lateral, the
mold is a human being; if the shift is in the midsection of man's band, the
mold is a light. The only value of what you've done today is that your
assemblage point shifted in the midsection."
He said that the position where one sees the mold of man is very close
to that where the dreaming body and the barrier of perception appear. That
was the reason the new seers recommend that the mold of man be seen and
understood.
"Are you sure you understand what the mold of man really is?" he asked
with a smile.
"I assure you, don Juan, that I'm perfectly aware of what the mold of
man is," I said.
"I heard you shouting inanities to the mold of man when I got to the
bridge," he said with a most malicious smile.
I told him that I had felt like a worthless servant worshiping a
worthless master, and yet I was moved out of sheer affection to promise
undying love.
He found it all hilarious and laughed until he was choking.
"The promise of a worthless servant to a worthless master is
worthless," he said and choked again with laughter.
I did not feel like defending my position. My affection for the mold of
man was offered freely without thought of recompense. It did not matter to
me that my promise was worthless.
17 The Journey of the Dreaming Body
Don Juan told me that the two of us were going to drive to the city of
Oaxaca for the last time. He made it very clear that we would never be there
together again. Perhaps his feeling might return to the place, he said, but
never again the totality of himself.
In Oaxaca, don Juan spent hours looking at mundane, trivial things, the
faded color of walls, the shape of distant mountains, the pattern on cracked
cement, the faces of people. Then we went to the square and sat on his
favorite bench, which was unoccupied, as it always was when he wanted it.
During our long walk in the city, I had tried my best to work myself
into a mood of sadness and moroseness, but I just could not do it. There was
something festive about his departure. He explained it as the unrestrainable
vigor of total freedom.
"Freedom is like a contagious disease," he said. "It is transmitted;
its carrier is an impeccable nagual. People might not appreciate that, and
that's because they don't want to be free. Freedom is frightening. Remember
that. But not for us. I've groomed myself nearly all my life for this
moment. And so will you."
He repeated over and over that at the stage where I was, no rational
assumptions should interfere with my actions. He said that the dreaming body
and the barrier of perception are positions of the assemblage point, and
that that knowledge is as vital to seers as knowing how to read and write is
to modern man. Both are accomplishments attained after years of practice.
"It is very important that you remember, right now, the time when your
assemblage point reached that position and it created your dreaming body,"
he said with tremendous urgency.
Then he smiled and remarked that time was extremely short; he said that
the recollection of the main journey of my dreaming body would put my
assemblage point in a position to break the barrier of perception in order
to assemble another world.
"The dreaming body is known by different names," he said after a long
pause. "The name I like the best is, the other. That term belongs to the old
seers, together with the mood. I don't particularly care for their mood, but
I have to admit that I like their term The other. It's mysterious and
forbidden. Just like the old seers, it gives me the feeling of darkness, of
shadows. The old seers said that the other always comes shrouded in wind."
Over the years don Juan and other members of his party had tried to
make me aware that we can be in two places at once, that we can experience a
sort of perceptual dualism.
As don Juan spoke, I began to remember something so deeply forgotten
that at first it was as if I had only heard about it. Then, step by step, I
realized that I had lived that experience myself.
I had been in two places at once. It happened one night in the
mountains of northern Mexico. I had been collecting plants with don Juan all
day. We had stopped for the night and I had nearly fallen asleep from
fatigue when suddenly there was a gust of wind and don Genaro sprang up from
the darkness right in front of me and nearly scared me to death.
My first thought was one of suspicion. I believed that don Genaro had
been hiding in the bushes all day, waiting for darkness to set in before
making his terrifying appearance. As I looked at him prancing around, I
noticed that there was something truly odd about him that night. Something
palpable, real, and yet something I could not pinpoint.
He joked with me and horsed around, performing acts that defied my
reason. Don Juan laughed like an idiot at my dismay. When he judged that the
time was right, he made me shift into heightened awareness and for a moment
I was able to see don Juan and don Genaro as two blobs of light. Genaro was
not the fleshand-blood don Genaro that I knew in my state of normal
awareness but his dreaming body. I could tell, because I saw him as a ball
of fire that was above the ground. He was not rooted as don Juan was. It was
as if Genaro, the blob of light, were on the verge of taking off, already up
in the air, a couple of feet off the ground, ready to zoom away.
Another thing I had done that night, which suddenly became clear to me
as I recollected the event, was that I knew automatically that I had to move
my eyes in order to make my assemblage point shift. I could, with my intent,
align the emanations that made me see Genaro as a blob of light, or I could
align the emanations that made me see him as merely odd, unknown, strange.
When I saw Genaro as odd, his eyes had a malevolent glare, like the
eyes of a beast in the darkness. But they were eyes, nonetheless. I did not
see them as points of amber light.
That night don Juan said that Genaro was going to help my assemblage
point shift very deeply, that I should imitate him and follow everything he
did. Genaro stuck out his rear end and then thrust his pelvis forward with
great force. I thought it was an obscene gesture. He repeated it over and
over again, moving around as if he were dancing.
Don Juan nudged me on the arm, urging me to imitate Genaro, and I did.
Both of us sort of romped around, performing that grotesque movement. After
a while, I had the feeling that my body was executing the movement on its
own, without what seemed to be the real me. The separation between my body
and the real me became even more pronounced, and then at a given instant I
was looking at some ludicrous scene where two men were making lewd gestures
at each other.
I watched in fascination and realized that I was one of the two men.
The moment I became aware of it I felt something pulling me and I found
myself again thrusting my pelvis backward and forward in unison with Genaro.
Almost immediately, I noticed that another man standing next to don Juan was
watching us. The wind was blowing around him. I could see his hair being
ruffled. He was naked and seemed embarrassed. The wind gathered around him
as if protecting him, or perhaps the opposite, as if trying to blow him
away.
I was slow to realize that I was the other man. When I did, I got the
shock of my life. An imponderable physical force pulled me apart as if I
were made out of fibers, and I was again looking at a man that was me,
romping around with Genaro, gaping at me while I looked. And at the same
time, I was looking at a naked man that was me, gaping at me while I made
lewd gestures with Genaro. The shock was so great that I broke the rhythm of
my movements and fell down.
The next thing I knew, don Juan was helping me to stand up. Genaro and
the other me, the naked one, had disappeared.
I had also remembered that don Juan had refused to discuss the event.
He did not explain it except to say that Genaro was an expert in creating
his double, or the other, and that I had had long interactions with Genaro's
double in states of normal awareness without ever detecting it.
"That night, as he has done hundreds of times before, Genaro made your
assemblage point shift very deep into your left side," don Juan commented
after I had recounted to him everything I had remembered. "His power was
such that he dragged your assemblage point to the position where the
dreaming body appears. You saw your dreaming body watching you. And his
dancing did the trick."
I asked him to explain to me how Genaro's lewd movement could have
produced such a drastic effect.
"You're a prude," he said. "Genaro used your immediate displeasure and
embarrassment at having to perform a lewd gesture. Since he was in his
dreaming body, he had the power to see the Eagle's emanations; from that
advantage it was a cinch to make your assemblage point move."
He said that whatever Genaro had helped me to do that night was minor,
that Genaro had moved my assemblage point and made it produce a dreaming
body many, many times, but that those events were not what he wanted me to
remember.
"I want you to realign the proper emanations and remember the time when
you really woke up in a dreaming position,"' he said.
A strange surge of energy seemed to explode inside me and I knew what
he wanted me to remember. I could not, however, focus my memory on the
complete event. I could only recall a fragment of it.
I remembered that one morning, don Juan, don Genaro. and I had sat on
that very same bench while I was in a state of normal awareness. Don Genaro
had said, all of a sudden, that he was going to make his body leave the
bench without getting up. The statement was completely out of the context of
what we had been discussing. I was accustomed to don Juan's orderly,
didactic words and actions. I turned to don Juan, expecting a clue, but he
remained impassive, looking straight ahead as if don Genaro and I were not
there at all.
Don Genaro nudged me to attract my attention, and then I witnessed a
most disturbing sight. I actually saw Genaro on the other side of the
square. He was beckoning me to come. But I also saw don Genaro sitting next
to me, looking straight ahead, just as don Juan was.
I wanted to say something, to express my awe, but I found myself
dumbstruck, imprisoned by some force around me that did not let me talk. I
again looked at Genaro across the park. He was still there, motioning to me
with a gesture of his head to join him.
My emotional distress mounted by the second. My stomach was getting
upset, and finally I had tunnel vision, a tunnel that led directly to Genaro
on the other side of the square. And then a great curiosity, or a great
fear, which seemed to be the same thing at that moment, pulled me to where
he was. I actually soared through the air and got to where he was. He made
me turn around and pointed to the three people who were sitting on a bench
in a static position, as if time had been suspended.
I felt a terrible discomfort, an internal itching, as if the soft
organs in the cavity of my body were on fire, and then I was back on the
bench, but Genaro was gone. He waved goodbye to me from across the square
and disappeared among the people going to the market.
Don Juan became very animated. He kept on looking at me. He stood up
and walked around me. He sat down again and could not keep a straight face
as he talked to me.
I realized why he was acting that way. I had entered into a state of
heightened awareness without being helped by don Juan. Genaro had succeeded
in making my assemblage point move by itself.
I laughed involuntarily upon seeing my writing pad, which don Juan
solemnly put inside his pocket. He said that he was going to use my state of
heightened awareness to show me that there is no end to the mystery of man
and to the mystery of the world.
I focused all my concentration on his words. However, don Juan said
something I did not understand. I asked him to repeat what he had said. He
began talking very softly. I thought he had lowered his voice so as not to
be overheard by other people. I listened carefully, but I could not
understand a word of what he was saying; he was either speaking in a
language foreign to me or it was mumbo jumbo. The strange part of it was
that something had caught my undivided attention, either the rhythm of his
voice or the fact that I had forced myself to understand. I had the feeling
that my mind was different from usual, although I could not figure out what
the difference was. I had a hard time thinking, reasoning out what was
taking place.
Don Juan talked to me very softly in my ear. He said that since I had
entered into heightened awareness without any help from him my assemblage
point was very loose, and that I could let it shift into the left side by
relaxing, by falling half asleep on that bench. He assured me that he was
watching over me, that I had nothing to fear. He urged me to relax, to let
my assemblage point move.
I instantly felt the heaviness of being deeply asleep. At one moment, I
became aware that I was having a dream. I saw a house that I had seen
before. I was approaching it as if I were walking on the street. There were
other houses, but I could not pay any attention to them. Something had fixed
my awareness on the particular house I was seeing. It was a big modern
stucco house with a front lawn.
When I got closer to that house, I had a feeling of familiarity with
it, as if I had dreamed of it before. I walked on a gravel path to the front
door; it was open and I walked inside. There was a dark hall and a large
living room to the right, furnished with a dark-red couch and matching
armchairs set in a corner. I was definitely having tunnel vision; I could
see only what was in front of my eyes.
A young woman was standing by the couch as if she had just stood up as
I came in. She was lean and tall, exquisitely dressed in a tailored green
suit. She was perhaps in her late twenties. She had dark-brown hair, burning
brown eyes that seemed to smile, and a pointed, finely chiseled nose. Her
complexion was fair but had been tanned to a gorgeous brown. I found her
ravishingly beautiful. She seemed to be an American. She nodded at me,
smiling, and extended her hands with the palms down as if she were helping
me up.
I clasped her hands in a most awkward movement. I scared myself and
tried to back away, but she held me firmly and yet so gently. Her hands were
long and beautiful. She spoke to me in Spanish with a faint trace of an
accent. She begged me to relax, to feel her hands, to concentrate my
attention on her face and to follow the movement of her mouth. I wanted to
ask her who she was, but I could not utter a word.
Then I heard don Juan's voice in my ear. He said, "Oh, there you are,"
as if he had just found me. I was sitting on the park bench with him. But I
could also hear the young woman's voice. She said, "Come and sit with me." I
did just that and began a most incredible shifting of points of view. I was
alternately with don Juan and with that young woman. I could see both of
them as clearly as anything.
Don Juan asked me if I liked her, if I found her appealing and
soothing. I could not speak, but somehow I conveyed to him the feeling that
I did like that lady immensely. I thought, without any overt reason, that
she was a paragon of kindness, that she was indispensable to what don Juan
was doing with me.
Don Juan spoke in my ear again and said that if I liked her that much I
should wake up in her house, that my feeling of warmth and affection for her
would guide me. I felt giggly and reckless. A sensation of overwhelming
excitation rippled through my body. I felt as if the excitation were
actually disintegrating me. I did not care what happened to me. I gladly
plunged into a blackness, black beyond words, and then I found myself in the
young woman's house. I was sitting with her on the couch.
After an instant of sheer animal panic, I realized that somehow I was
not complete. Something was missing in me. I did not, however, find the
situation threatening. The thought crossed my mind that I was dreaming and
that I was presently going to wake up on the park bench in Oaxaca with don
Juan, where I really was, where I really belonged.
The young woman helped me to get up and took me to a bathroom where a
large tub was filled with water. I realized then that I was stark naked. She
gently made me get into the tub and held my head up while I half floated in
it.
After a while she helped me out of the tub. I felt weak and flimsy. I
lay down on the living-room couch and she came close to me. I could hear the
beating of her heart and the pressure of blood rushing through her body. Her
eyes were like two radiant sources of something that was not light, or heat,
but curiously in between the two. I knew that I was seeing the force of life
projecting out of her body through her eyes. Her whole body was like a live
furnace; it glowed.
I felt a weird tremor that agitated my whole being. It was as if my
nerves were exposed and someone was plucking them. The sensation was
agonizing. Then I either fainted or fell asleep.
When I woke up, someone was putting face towels soaked in cold water on
my face and the back of my neck. I saw the young woman sitting by my head on
the bed where I was lying. She had a pail of water on a night table. Don
Juan was standing at the foot of the bed with my clothes draped over his
arm.
I was fully awake then. I sat up. They had covered me with a blanket.
"How's the traveler?" don Juan asked, smiling. "Are you in one piece
now?"
That was all I could remember. I narrated this episode to don Juan, and
as I talked, I recalled another fragment. I remembered that don Juan had
taunted and teased me about finding me naked in the lady's bed. I had gotten
terribly irritated at his remarks. I had put on my clothes and stomped out
of the house in a fury.
Don Juan had caught up with me on the front lawn. In a very serious
tone he had remarked that I was my ugly stupid self again, that I had put
myself together by being embarrassed, which had proved to him that there was
still no end to my self-importance. But he had added in a conciliatory tone
that that was not important at the moment; what was significant was the fact
that I had moved my assemblage point very deeply into the left side and
consequently I had traveled an enormous distance.
He had spoken of wonders and mysteries, but I had not been able to
listen to him, for I had been caught in the crossfire between fear and
self-importance. I was actually fuming. I was certain that don Juan had
hypnotized me in the park and had then taken me to that lady's house, and
that the two of them had done terrible things to me.
My fury was interrupted. Something out there in the street was so
horrifying, so shocking to me, that my anger stopped instantaneously. But
before my thoughts became fully rearranged, don Juan hit me on my back and
nothing of what had just taken place remained. I found myself back in my
blissful everyday-life stupidity, happily listening to don Juan, worrying
about whether or not he liked me.
As I was telling don Juan about the new fragment that I had just
remembered I realized that one of his methods for handling my emotional
turmoil was to make me shift into normal awareness.
"The only thing that soothes those who journey into the unknown is
oblivion," he said. "What a relief to be in the ordinary world!
"That day, you accomplished a marvelous feat. The sober thing for me to
do was not to let you focus on it at all. Just as you began to really panic
I made you shift into normal awareness; I moved your assemblage point beyond
the position where there are no more doubts. There are two such positions
for warriors. In one you have no more doubts because you know everything. In
the other, which is normal awareness, you have no doubts because you don't
know anything.
"It was too soon then for you to know what had really happened. But I
think the right time to know is now. Looking at that street, you were about
to find out where your dreaming position had been. You traveled an enormous
distance that day."
Don Juan scrutinized me with a mixture of glee and sadness. I was
trying my best to keep under control the strange agitation I was feeling. I
sensed that something terribly important to me was lost inside my memory,
or, as don Juan would have put it, inside some unused emanations that at one
time had been aligned.
My struggle to keep calm proved to be the wrong thing to do. All at
once, my knees wobbled and nervous spasms ran through my midsection. I
mumbled, unable to voice a question. I had to swallow hard and breathe
deeply before I regained my calmness.
"When we first sat down here to talk, I said that no rational
assumptions should interfere with the actions of a seer," he continued in a
stern tone. "I knew that in order to reclaim what you've done, you'd have to
dispense with rationality, but you'd have to do it in .the level of
awareness you are in now."
He explained that I had to understand that rationality is a condition
of alignment, merely the result of the position of the assemblage point. He
emphasized that I had to understand this when I was in a state of great
vulnerability, as I was at that moment. To understand it when my assemblage
point had reached the position where there are no doubts was useless,
because realizations of that nature are commonplace in that position. It was
equally useless to understand it in a state of normal awareness; in that
state, such realizations are emotional outbursts that are valid only for as
long as the emotion lasts.
"I've said that you traveled a great distance that day," he said
calmly. "And I said that because I know it. I was there, remember?"
I was sweating profusely out of nervousness and anxiety.
"You traveled because you woke up at a distant dreaming position," he
continued. "When Genaro pulled you across the plaza, right here from this
bench, he paved the way for your assemblage point to move from normal
awareness all the way to the position where the dreaming body appears. Your
dreaming body actually flew over an incredible distance in the blink of an
eyelid. Yet that's not the important part. The mystery is in the dreaming
position. If it is strong enough to pull you, you can go to the ends of this
world or beyond it, just as the old seers did. They disappeared from this
world because they woke up at a dreaming position beyond the limits of the
known. Your dreaming position that day was in this world, but quite a
distance from the city of Oaxaca."
"How does ajourney like that take place?" I asked.
"There is no way of knowing how it is done," he said. "Strong emotion,
or unbending intent, or great interest serves as a guide; then the
assemblage point gets powerfully fixed at the dreaming position, long enough
to drag there all the emanations that are inside the cocoon."
Don Juan said then that he had made me see countless times over the
years of our association, either in states of normal awareness or in states
of heightened awareness; I had seen countless things that I was now
beginning to understand in a more coherent fashion. This coherence was not
logical or rational, but it clarified, nonetheless, in whatever strange way,
everything I had done, everything that was done to me, and everything I had
seen in all those years with him. He said that now I needed to have one last
clarification: the coherent but irrational realization that everything in
the world we have learned to perceive is inextricably tied to the position
where the assemblage point is located, if the assemblage point is displaced
from that position, the world will cease to be what it is to us.
Don Juan stated that a displacement of the assemblage point beyond the
midline of the cocoon of man makes the entire world we know vanish from our
view in one instant, as if it had been erased-- for the stability, the
substantiality, that seems to belong to our perceivable world is just the
force of alignment. Certain emanations are routinely aligned because of the
fixation of the assemblage point on one specific spot; that is all there is
to our world.
"The soundness of the world is not the mirage," he continued, "the
mirage is the fixation of the assemblage point on any spot. When seers shift
their assemblage points, they are not confronted with an illusion, they are
confronted with another world; that new world is as real as the one we are
watching now, but the new fixation of their assemblage points, which
produces that new world, is as much of a mirage as the old fixation.
"Take yourself, for example; you are now in a state of heightened
awareness. Whatever you are capable of doing in such a state is not an
illusion; it is as real as the world you will face tomorrow in your daily
life, and yet tomorrow the world you are witnessing now won't exist. It
exists only when your assemblage point moves to the particular spot where
you are now."
He added that the task warriors are faced with, after they finish their
training, is one of integration. In the course of training, warriors,
especially nagual men, are made to shift to as many individual spots as
possible. He said that in my case I had moved to countless positions that I
would have to integrate someday into a coherent whole.
"For instance, if you would shift your assemblage point to a specific
position, you'd remember who that lady is," he continued with a strange
smile. "Your assemblage point has been at that spot hundreds of times. It
should be the easiest thing for you to integrate it."
As though my recollection depended on his suggestion, I began to have
vague memories, feelings of sorts. There was a feeling of boundless
affection that seemed to attract me; a most pleasant sweetness filled the
air, exactly as if someone had just come up from behind me and poured that
scent over me. I even turned around. And then I remembered. She was Carol,
the nagual woman' I had been with her only the day before. How could I have
forgotten her?
I had an indescribable moment in which I think all the feelings of my
psychological repertory ran through my mind. Was it possible, I asked
myself, that I had woken up in her house in Tucson, Arizona, two thousand
miles away? And are each of the instances of heightened awareness so
isolated that one cannot remember them?
Don Juan came to my side and put his arm on my shoulder. He said that
he knew exactly how I felt. His benefactor had made him go through a similar
experience. And just as he himself was now trying to do with me, his
benefactor had tried to do with him: soothe with words. He had appreciated
his benefactor's attempt, but he doubted then as he doubted now that there
is a way to soothe anyone who realizes the journey of the dreaming body.
There was no doubt in my mind now. Something in me had traveled the
distance between the cities of Oaxaca, Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona. I felt a
strange relief, as if I had been purged of guilt at long last.
During the years I had spent with don Juan, I had had lapses of
continuity in my memory. My being in Tucson with him on that day was one of
those lapses. I remembered not being able to recall how I had gotten to
Tucson. I did not pay any attention to it, however. I thought the lapse was
the result of my activities with don Juan. He was always very careful not to
arouse my rational suspicions in states of normal awareness, but if
suspicions were unavoidable he always curtly explained them away by
suggesting that the nature of our activities fostered serious disparities of
memory.
I told don Juan that since both of us had ended up that day in the same
place, I wondered whether it was possible for two or more people to wake up
at the same dreaming position.
"Of course," he said. "That's the way the old Toltec sorcerers took off
into the unknown in packs. They followed one another. There is no way of
knowing how one follows someone else. It's just done. The dreaming body just
does it. The presence of another dreamer spurs it to do it. That day you
pulled me with you. And I followed because I wanted to be with you."
I had so many questions to ask him, but every one of them seemed
superfluous.
"How is it possible that I didn't remember the nagual woman?" I
muttered, and a horrible anguish and longing gripped me. I was trying not to
feel sad anymore, but suddenly sadness ripped through me like pain.
"You still don't remember her," he said. "Only when your assemblage
point shifts can you recollect her. She is like a phantom to you, and so are
you to her. You've seen her once while you were in normal awareness, but
she's never seen you in her normal awareness. To her you are as much a
personage as she is to you. With the difference that you may wake up someday
and integrate it all. You may have enough time to do that, but she won't.
Her time here is short."
I felt like protesting a terrible injustice. I mentally prepared a
barrage of objections, but I never voiced them. Don Juan's smile was
beaming. His eyes shone with sheer glee and mischief. I had the sensation
that he was waiting for my statements, because he knew what I was going to
say. And that sensation stopped me, or rather I did not say anything because
my assemblage point had again moved by itself. And I knew then that the
nagual woman could not be pitied for not having time, nor could I rejoice
for having it.
Don Juan was reading me like a book. He urged me to finish my
realization and voice the reason for not feeling sorry or for not rejoicing.
I felt for an instant that I knew why. But then I lost the thread.
"The excitation of having time is equal to the excitation of not having
it," he said. "It's all the same."
"To feel sad is not the same as feeling sorry " I said. "And I feel
terribly sad."
"Who cares about sadness?" he said. "Think only of the mysteries;
mystery is all that matters. We are living beings; we have to die and
relinquish our awareness. But if we could change just a tinge of that, what
mysteries must await us! What mysteries!"
18 Breaking the Barrier of Perception
In the late afternoon, still in Oaxaca, don Juan and I strolled around
the square leisurely. As we approached his favorite bench the people who
were sitting there got up and left. We hurried over to it and sat down.
"We've come to the end of my explanation of awareness," he said. "And
today, you are going to assemble another world by yourself and leave all
doubts aside forever.
"There must be no mislake about what you are going to do. Today, from
the vantage point of heightened awareness, you are going to make your
assemblage point move and in one instant you are going to align the
emanations of another world.
"In a few days, when Genaro and I meet you on a mountaintop, you are
going to do the same from the disadvantage of normal awareness. You will
have to align the emanations of another world on a moment's notice; if you
don't you will die the death of an average man who falls from a precipice."
He was alluding to an act that he would have me perform as the last of
his teachings for the right side: the act of jumping from a mountaintop into
an abyss.
Don Juan stated that warriors ended their training when they were
of fiberlike elements, which we call man.
What he had said put me in a state of great distress. But he seemed
unconcerned with my genuine turmoil. He kept on needling me with what he
called the unforgivable crime of the chance seers, which makes us focus our
irreplaceable energy on something that has no power whatsoever to do
anything. The more he talked, the greater my annoyance. When I became so
annoyed that I was about to shout at him, he had me change into yet a deeper
state of heightened awareness. He hit me on my right side, between my
hipbone and my rib cage. That blow sent me soaring into a radiant light,
into a diaphanous source of the most peaceful and exquisite beatitude. That
light was a haven, an oasis in the blackness around me.
From my subjective point of view, I saw that light for an immeasurable
length of time. The splendor of the sight was beyond anything I can say, and
yet I could not figure out what it was that made it so beautiful. Then the
idea came to me that its beauty grew out of a sense of harmony, a sense of
peace and rest, of having arrived, of being safe at long last. I felt myself
inhaling and exhaling in quietude and relief. What a gorgeous sense of
plenitude! I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I had come face to face with
God, the source of everything. And I knew that God loved me. God was love
and forgiveness. The light bathed me, and I felt clean, delivered. I wept
uncontrollably, mainly for myself. The sight of that resplendent light made
me feel unworthy, villainous.
Suddenly, I heard don Juan's voice in my ear. He said that I had to go
beyond the mold, that the mold was merely a stage, a stopover that brought
temporary peace and serenity to those who journey into the unknown, but that
it was sterile, static. It was at the same time a flat reflected image in a
mirror and the mirror itself. And the image was man's image.
I passionately resented what don Juan was saying; I rebelled against
his blasphemous, sacrilegious words. I wanted to tell him off, but I could
not break the binding power of my seeing. I was caught in it. Don Juan
seemed to know exactly how I felt and what I wanted to tell him.
"You can't tell the nagual off," he said in my ear. "It is the nagual
who's enabling you to see. It is the nagual's technique, the nagual's power.
The nagual is the guide."
It was at that point that I realized something about the voice in my
ear. It was not don Juan's, although it sounded very much like his voice.
Also, the voice was right. The instigator of that seeing was the nagual Juan
Matus. It was his technique and his power that was making me see God. He
said it was not God, but the mold of man; I knew that he was right. Yet I
could not admit that, not out of annoyance or stubbornness, but simply out
of a sense of ultimate loyalty to and love for the divinity that was in
front of me.
As I gazed into the light with all the passion I was capable of, the
light seemed to condense and I saw a man. A shiny man that exuded charisma,
love, understanding, sincerity, truth. A man that was the sum total of all
that is good.
The fervor I felt on seeing that man was well beyond anything I had
ever felt in my life. I did fall on my knees. I wanted to worship God
personified, but don Juan intervened and whacked me on my left upper chest,
close to my clavicle, and I lost sight of God.
I was left with a tantalizing feeling, a mixture of remorse, elation,
certainties, and doubts. Don Juan made fun of me. He called me pious and
careless and said I would make a great priest; now I could even pass for a
spiritual leader who had had a chance seeing of God. He urged me, in
ajocular way, to start preaching and describe what I had seen to everyone.
In a very casual but seemingly interested manner he made a statement
that was part question, part assertion.
"And the man?" he asked. "You can't forget that God is a male."
The immensity of something indefinable began to dawn on me as I entered
into a state of great clarity.
"Very cozy, eh?" don Juan added, smiling. "God is a male. What a
relief"
After recounting to don Juan what I had remembered, I asked him about
something that had just struck me as being terribly odd. To see the mold of
man, I had obviously gone through a shift of my assemblage point. The
recollection of the feelings and realizations I had had then was so vivid
that it gave me a sense of utter futility. Everything I had done and felt at
that time I was feeling now. I asked him how it was possible that having had
such a clear comprehension, I could have forgotten it so completely. It was
as if nothing of what had happened to me had mattered, for I always had to
start from point one regardless of how much I might have advanced in the
past.
"That's only an emotional impression," he said. "A total
misapprehension. Whatever you did years ago is solidly enclosed in some
unused emanations. That day when I made you see the mold of man, for
instance, I had a true misapprehension myself. I thought that if you saw it,
you would be able to understand it. It was a true misunderstanding on my
part."
Don Juan explained that he had always regarded himself as being very
slow to understand. He had never had any chance of testing his belief,
because he did not have a point of reference. When I came along and he
became a teacher, which was something totally new to him, he realized that
there is no way to speed up understanding and that to dislodge the
assemblage point is not enough. He had thought that it would be sufficient.
Soon he became aware that since the assemblage point normally shifts during
dreams, sometimes to extraordinarily distant positions, whenever we undergo
an induced shift we are all experts at immediately compensating for it. We
rebalance ourselves constantly and activity goes on as if nothing has
happened to us.
He remarked that the value of the new seers' conclusions does not
become evident until one tries to move someone else's assemblage point. The
new seers said that what counts in this respect is the effort to reinforce
the stability of the assemblage point in its new position. They considered
this to be the only teaching procedure worth discussing. And they knew that
it is a long process that has to be carried out little by little at a
snail's pace.
Don Juan said then that he had used power plants at the beginning of my
apprenticeship in accordance with a recommendation of the new seers. They
knew by experience and by seeing that power plants shake the assemblage
point way out of its normal setting. The effect of power plants on the
assemblage point is in principle very much like that of dreams: dreams make
it move; but power plants manage the shift on a greater and more engulfing
scale. A teacher then uses the disorienting effects of such a shift to
reinforce the notion that the perception of the world is never final.
I remembered then that I had seen the mold of man five more times over
the years. With each new time I had become less passionate about it. I could
never get over the fact, however, that I always saw God as a male. At the
end it stopped being God for me and became the mold of man, not because of
what don Juan had said, but because the position of a male God became
untenable. I could then understand don Juan's statements about it. They had
not been blasphemous or sacrilegious in the least; he had not made them from
within the context of the daily world. He was right in saying that the new
seers have an edge in being capable of seeing the mold of man as often as
they want. But what was more important to me was that they had sobriety in
order to examine what they saw.
I asked him why it was that I always saw the mold of man as a male. He
said that it was because my assemblage point did not have the stability then
to remain completely glued to its new position and shifted laterally in
man's band. It was the same case as seeing the barrier of perception as a
wall of fog. What made the assemblage point move laterally was a nearly
unavoidable desire, or necessity, to render the incomprehensible in terms of
what is most familiar to us: a barrier is a wall and the mold of man cannot
be anything else but a man. He thought that if I were a woman I would see
the mold as a woman.
Don Juan stood up then and said that it was time for us to take a
stroll in town, that I should see the mold of man among people. We walked in
silence to the square, but before we got there I had an uncontainable surge
of energy and ran down the street to the outskirts of town. I came to a
bridge, and right there, as if it had been waiting for me, I saw the mold of
man as a resplendent, warm, amber light.
I fell on my knees, not so much out of piety, but as physical reaction
to awe. The sight of the mold of man was more astonishing than ever. I felt,
without any arrogance, that I had gone through an enormous change since the
first time I had seen it. However, all the things I had seen and learned had
only given me a greater, more profound appreciation for the miracle that I
had in front of my eyes.
The mold of man was superimposed on the bridge at first, then I
refocused my eyes and saw that the mold of man extended up and down into
infinity; the bridge was but a meager shell, a tiny sketch superimposed on
the eternal. And so were the minute figures of people who moved around me,
looking at me with unabashed curiosity. But I was beyond their touch,
although at that moment I was as vulnerable as I could be. The mold of man
had no power to protect me or spare me, yet I loved it with a passion that
knew no limits.
I thought that I understood then something that don Juan had told me
repeatedly, that real affection cannot be an investment. I would have gladly
remained the servant of the mold of man, not for what it could give me, for
it has nothing to give, but for the sheer affection I felt for it.
I had the sensation of something pulling me away, and before I
disappeared from its presence I shouted a promise to the mold of man, but a
great force whisked me away before I could finish staling what I meant. I
was suddenly kneeling at the bridge while a group of peasants looked at me
and laughed.
Don Juan got to my side and helped me up and walked me back to the
house.
"There are two ways of seeing the mold of man," don Juan began as soon
as we sat down. "You can see it as a man or you can see it as a light. That
depends on the shift of the assemblage point. If the shift is lateral, the
mold is a human being; if the shift is in the midsection of man's band, the
mold is a light. The only value of what you've done today is that your
assemblage point shifted in the midsection."
He said that the position where one sees the mold of man is very close
to that where the dreaming body and the barrier of perception appear. That
was the reason the new seers recommend that the mold of man be seen and
understood.
"Are you sure you understand what the mold of man really is?" he asked
with a smile.
"I assure you, don Juan, that I'm perfectly aware of what the mold of
man is," I said.
"I heard you shouting inanities to the mold of man when I got to the
bridge," he said with a most malicious smile.
I told him that I had felt like a worthless servant worshiping a
worthless master, and yet I was moved out of sheer affection to promise
undying love.
He found it all hilarious and laughed until he was choking.
"The promise of a worthless servant to a worthless master is
worthless," he said and choked again with laughter.
I did not feel like defending my position. My affection for the mold of
man was offered freely without thought of recompense. It did not matter to
me that my promise was worthless.
17 The Journey of the Dreaming Body
Don Juan told me that the two of us were going to drive to the city of
Oaxaca for the last time. He made it very clear that we would never be there
together again. Perhaps his feeling might return to the place, he said, but
never again the totality of himself.
In Oaxaca, don Juan spent hours looking at mundane, trivial things, the
faded color of walls, the shape of distant mountains, the pattern on cracked
cement, the faces of people. Then we went to the square and sat on his
favorite bench, which was unoccupied, as it always was when he wanted it.
During our long walk in the city, I had tried my best to work myself
into a mood of sadness and moroseness, but I just could not do it. There was
something festive about his departure. He explained it as the unrestrainable
vigor of total freedom.
"Freedom is like a contagious disease," he said. "It is transmitted;
its carrier is an impeccable nagual. People might not appreciate that, and
that's because they don't want to be free. Freedom is frightening. Remember
that. But not for us. I've groomed myself nearly all my life for this
moment. And so will you."
He repeated over and over that at the stage where I was, no rational
assumptions should interfere with my actions. He said that the dreaming body
and the barrier of perception are positions of the assemblage point, and
that that knowledge is as vital to seers as knowing how to read and write is
to modern man. Both are accomplishments attained after years of practice.
"It is very important that you remember, right now, the time when your
assemblage point reached that position and it created your dreaming body,"
he said with tremendous urgency.
Then he smiled and remarked that time was extremely short; he said that
the recollection of the main journey of my dreaming body would put my
assemblage point in a position to break the barrier of perception in order
to assemble another world.
"The dreaming body is known by different names," he said after a long
pause. "The name I like the best is, the other. That term belongs to the old
seers, together with the mood. I don't particularly care for their mood, but
I have to admit that I like their term The other. It's mysterious and
forbidden. Just like the old seers, it gives me the feeling of darkness, of
shadows. The old seers said that the other always comes shrouded in wind."
Over the years don Juan and other members of his party had tried to
make me aware that we can be in two places at once, that we can experience a
sort of perceptual dualism.
As don Juan spoke, I began to remember something so deeply forgotten
that at first it was as if I had only heard about it. Then, step by step, I
realized that I had lived that experience myself.
I had been in two places at once. It happened one night in the
mountains of northern Mexico. I had been collecting plants with don Juan all
day. We had stopped for the night and I had nearly fallen asleep from
fatigue when suddenly there was a gust of wind and don Genaro sprang up from
the darkness right in front of me and nearly scared me to death.
My first thought was one of suspicion. I believed that don Genaro had
been hiding in the bushes all day, waiting for darkness to set in before
making his terrifying appearance. As I looked at him prancing around, I
noticed that there was something truly odd about him that night. Something
palpable, real, and yet something I could not pinpoint.
He joked with me and horsed around, performing acts that defied my
reason. Don Juan laughed like an idiot at my dismay. When he judged that the
time was right, he made me shift into heightened awareness and for a moment
I was able to see don Juan and don Genaro as two blobs of light. Genaro was
not the fleshand-blood don Genaro that I knew in my state of normal
awareness but his dreaming body. I could tell, because I saw him as a ball
of fire that was above the ground. He was not rooted as don Juan was. It was
as if Genaro, the blob of light, were on the verge of taking off, already up
in the air, a couple of feet off the ground, ready to zoom away.
Another thing I had done that night, which suddenly became clear to me
as I recollected the event, was that I knew automatically that I had to move
my eyes in order to make my assemblage point shift. I could, with my intent,
align the emanations that made me see Genaro as a blob of light, or I could
align the emanations that made me see him as merely odd, unknown, strange.
When I saw Genaro as odd, his eyes had a malevolent glare, like the
eyes of a beast in the darkness. But they were eyes, nonetheless. I did not
see them as points of amber light.
That night don Juan said that Genaro was going to help my assemblage
point shift very deeply, that I should imitate him and follow everything he
did. Genaro stuck out his rear end and then thrust his pelvis forward with
great force. I thought it was an obscene gesture. He repeated it over and
over again, moving around as if he were dancing.
Don Juan nudged me on the arm, urging me to imitate Genaro, and I did.
Both of us sort of romped around, performing that grotesque movement. After
a while, I had the feeling that my body was executing the movement on its
own, without what seemed to be the real me. The separation between my body
and the real me became even more pronounced, and then at a given instant I
was looking at some ludicrous scene where two men were making lewd gestures
at each other.
I watched in fascination and realized that I was one of the two men.
The moment I became aware of it I felt something pulling me and I found
myself again thrusting my pelvis backward and forward in unison with Genaro.
Almost immediately, I noticed that another man standing next to don Juan was
watching us. The wind was blowing around him. I could see his hair being
ruffled. He was naked and seemed embarrassed. The wind gathered around him
as if protecting him, or perhaps the opposite, as if trying to blow him
away.
I was slow to realize that I was the other man. When I did, I got the
shock of my life. An imponderable physical force pulled me apart as if I
were made out of fibers, and I was again looking at a man that was me,
romping around with Genaro, gaping at me while I looked. And at the same
time, I was looking at a naked man that was me, gaping at me while I made
lewd gestures with Genaro. The shock was so great that I broke the rhythm of
my movements and fell down.
The next thing I knew, don Juan was helping me to stand up. Genaro and
the other me, the naked one, had disappeared.
I had also remembered that don Juan had refused to discuss the event.
He did not explain it except to say that Genaro was an expert in creating
his double, or the other, and that I had had long interactions with Genaro's
double in states of normal awareness without ever detecting it.
"That night, as he has done hundreds of times before, Genaro made your
assemblage point shift very deep into your left side," don Juan commented
after I had recounted to him everything I had remembered. "His power was
such that he dragged your assemblage point to the position where the
dreaming body appears. You saw your dreaming body watching you. And his
dancing did the trick."
I asked him to explain to me how Genaro's lewd movement could have
produced such a drastic effect.
"You're a prude," he said. "Genaro used your immediate displeasure and
embarrassment at having to perform a lewd gesture. Since he was in his
dreaming body, he had the power to see the Eagle's emanations; from that
advantage it was a cinch to make your assemblage point move."
He said that whatever Genaro had helped me to do that night was minor,
that Genaro had moved my assemblage point and made it produce a dreaming
body many, many times, but that those events were not what he wanted me to
remember.
"I want you to realign the proper emanations and remember the time when
you really woke up in a dreaming position,"' he said.
A strange surge of energy seemed to explode inside me and I knew what
he wanted me to remember. I could not, however, focus my memory on the
complete event. I could only recall a fragment of it.
I remembered that one morning, don Juan, don Genaro. and I had sat on
that very same bench while I was in a state of normal awareness. Don Genaro
had said, all of a sudden, that he was going to make his body leave the
bench without getting up. The statement was completely out of the context of
what we had been discussing. I was accustomed to don Juan's orderly,
didactic words and actions. I turned to don Juan, expecting a clue, but he
remained impassive, looking straight ahead as if don Genaro and I were not
there at all.
Don Genaro nudged me to attract my attention, and then I witnessed a
most disturbing sight. I actually saw Genaro on the other side of the
square. He was beckoning me to come. But I also saw don Genaro sitting next
to me, looking straight ahead, just as don Juan was.
I wanted to say something, to express my awe, but I found myself
dumbstruck, imprisoned by some force around me that did not let me talk. I
again looked at Genaro across the park. He was still there, motioning to me
with a gesture of his head to join him.
My emotional distress mounted by the second. My stomach was getting
upset, and finally I had tunnel vision, a tunnel that led directly to Genaro
on the other side of the square. And then a great curiosity, or a great
fear, which seemed to be the same thing at that moment, pulled me to where
he was. I actually soared through the air and got to where he was. He made
me turn around and pointed to the three people who were sitting on a bench
in a static position, as if time had been suspended.
I felt a terrible discomfort, an internal itching, as if the soft
organs in the cavity of my body were on fire, and then I was back on the
bench, but Genaro was gone. He waved goodbye to me from across the square
and disappeared among the people going to the market.
Don Juan became very animated. He kept on looking at me. He stood up
and walked around me. He sat down again and could not keep a straight face
as he talked to me.
I realized why he was acting that way. I had entered into a state of
heightened awareness without being helped by don Juan. Genaro had succeeded
in making my assemblage point move by itself.
I laughed involuntarily upon seeing my writing pad, which don Juan
solemnly put inside his pocket. He said that he was going to use my state of
heightened awareness to show me that there is no end to the mystery of man
and to the mystery of the world.
I focused all my concentration on his words. However, don Juan said
something I did not understand. I asked him to repeat what he had said. He
began talking very softly. I thought he had lowered his voice so as not to
be overheard by other people. I listened carefully, but I could not
understand a word of what he was saying; he was either speaking in a
language foreign to me or it was mumbo jumbo. The strange part of it was
that something had caught my undivided attention, either the rhythm of his
voice or the fact that I had forced myself to understand. I had the feeling
that my mind was different from usual, although I could not figure out what
the difference was. I had a hard time thinking, reasoning out what was
taking place.
Don Juan talked to me very softly in my ear. He said that since I had
entered into heightened awareness without any help from him my assemblage
point was very loose, and that I could let it shift into the left side by
relaxing, by falling half asleep on that bench. He assured me that he was
watching over me, that I had nothing to fear. He urged me to relax, to let
my assemblage point move.
I instantly felt the heaviness of being deeply asleep. At one moment, I
became aware that I was having a dream. I saw a house that I had seen
before. I was approaching it as if I were walking on the street. There were
other houses, but I could not pay any attention to them. Something had fixed
my awareness on the particular house I was seeing. It was a big modern
stucco house with a front lawn.
When I got closer to that house, I had a feeling of familiarity with
it, as if I had dreamed of it before. I walked on a gravel path to the front
door; it was open and I walked inside. There was a dark hall and a large
living room to the right, furnished with a dark-red couch and matching
armchairs set in a corner. I was definitely having tunnel vision; I could
see only what was in front of my eyes.
A young woman was standing by the couch as if she had just stood up as
I came in. She was lean and tall, exquisitely dressed in a tailored green
suit. She was perhaps in her late twenties. She had dark-brown hair, burning
brown eyes that seemed to smile, and a pointed, finely chiseled nose. Her
complexion was fair but had been tanned to a gorgeous brown. I found her
ravishingly beautiful. She seemed to be an American. She nodded at me,
smiling, and extended her hands with the palms down as if she were helping
me up.
I clasped her hands in a most awkward movement. I scared myself and
tried to back away, but she held me firmly and yet so gently. Her hands were
long and beautiful. She spoke to me in Spanish with a faint trace of an
accent. She begged me to relax, to feel her hands, to concentrate my
attention on her face and to follow the movement of her mouth. I wanted to
ask her who she was, but I could not utter a word.
Then I heard don Juan's voice in my ear. He said, "Oh, there you are,"
as if he had just found me. I was sitting on the park bench with him. But I
could also hear the young woman's voice. She said, "Come and sit with me." I
did just that and began a most incredible shifting of points of view. I was
alternately with don Juan and with that young woman. I could see both of
them as clearly as anything.
Don Juan asked me if I liked her, if I found her appealing and
soothing. I could not speak, but somehow I conveyed to him the feeling that
I did like that lady immensely. I thought, without any overt reason, that
she was a paragon of kindness, that she was indispensable to what don Juan
was doing with me.
Don Juan spoke in my ear again and said that if I liked her that much I
should wake up in her house, that my feeling of warmth and affection for her
would guide me. I felt giggly and reckless. A sensation of overwhelming
excitation rippled through my body. I felt as if the excitation were
actually disintegrating me. I did not care what happened to me. I gladly
plunged into a blackness, black beyond words, and then I found myself in the
young woman's house. I was sitting with her on the couch.
After an instant of sheer animal panic, I realized that somehow I was
not complete. Something was missing in me. I did not, however, find the
situation threatening. The thought crossed my mind that I was dreaming and
that I was presently going to wake up on the park bench in Oaxaca with don
Juan, where I really was, where I really belonged.
The young woman helped me to get up and took me to a bathroom where a
large tub was filled with water. I realized then that I was stark naked. She
gently made me get into the tub and held my head up while I half floated in
it.
After a while she helped me out of the tub. I felt weak and flimsy. I
lay down on the living-room couch and she came close to me. I could hear the
beating of her heart and the pressure of blood rushing through her body. Her
eyes were like two radiant sources of something that was not light, or heat,
but curiously in between the two. I knew that I was seeing the force of life
projecting out of her body through her eyes. Her whole body was like a live
furnace; it glowed.
I felt a weird tremor that agitated my whole being. It was as if my
nerves were exposed and someone was plucking them. The sensation was
agonizing. Then I either fainted or fell asleep.
When I woke up, someone was putting face towels soaked in cold water on
my face and the back of my neck. I saw the young woman sitting by my head on
the bed where I was lying. She had a pail of water on a night table. Don
Juan was standing at the foot of the bed with my clothes draped over his
arm.
I was fully awake then. I sat up. They had covered me with a blanket.
"How's the traveler?" don Juan asked, smiling. "Are you in one piece
now?"
That was all I could remember. I narrated this episode to don Juan, and
as I talked, I recalled another fragment. I remembered that don Juan had
taunted and teased me about finding me naked in the lady's bed. I had gotten
terribly irritated at his remarks. I had put on my clothes and stomped out
of the house in a fury.
Don Juan had caught up with me on the front lawn. In a very serious
tone he had remarked that I was my ugly stupid self again, that I had put
myself together by being embarrassed, which had proved to him that there was
still no end to my self-importance. But he had added in a conciliatory tone
that that was not important at the moment; what was significant was the fact
that I had moved my assemblage point very deeply into the left side and
consequently I had traveled an enormous distance.
He had spoken of wonders and mysteries, but I had not been able to
listen to him, for I had been caught in the crossfire between fear and
self-importance. I was actually fuming. I was certain that don Juan had
hypnotized me in the park and had then taken me to that lady's house, and
that the two of them had done terrible things to me.
My fury was interrupted. Something out there in the street was so
horrifying, so shocking to me, that my anger stopped instantaneously. But
before my thoughts became fully rearranged, don Juan hit me on my back and
nothing of what had just taken place remained. I found myself back in my
blissful everyday-life stupidity, happily listening to don Juan, worrying
about whether or not he liked me.
As I was telling don Juan about the new fragment that I had just
remembered I realized that one of his methods for handling my emotional
turmoil was to make me shift into normal awareness.
"The only thing that soothes those who journey into the unknown is
oblivion," he said. "What a relief to be in the ordinary world!
"That day, you accomplished a marvelous feat. The sober thing for me to
do was not to let you focus on it at all. Just as you began to really panic
I made you shift into normal awareness; I moved your assemblage point beyond
the position where there are no more doubts. There are two such positions
for warriors. In one you have no more doubts because you know everything. In
the other, which is normal awareness, you have no doubts because you don't
know anything.
"It was too soon then for you to know what had really happened. But I
think the right time to know is now. Looking at that street, you were about
to find out where your dreaming position had been. You traveled an enormous
distance that day."
Don Juan scrutinized me with a mixture of glee and sadness. I was
trying my best to keep under control the strange agitation I was feeling. I
sensed that something terribly important to me was lost inside my memory,
or, as don Juan would have put it, inside some unused emanations that at one
time had been aligned.
My struggle to keep calm proved to be the wrong thing to do. All at
once, my knees wobbled and nervous spasms ran through my midsection. I
mumbled, unable to voice a question. I had to swallow hard and breathe
deeply before I regained my calmness.
"When we first sat down here to talk, I said that no rational
assumptions should interfere with the actions of a seer," he continued in a
stern tone. "I knew that in order to reclaim what you've done, you'd have to
dispense with rationality, but you'd have to do it in .the level of
awareness you are in now."
He explained that I had to understand that rationality is a condition
of alignment, merely the result of the position of the assemblage point. He
emphasized that I had to understand this when I was in a state of great
vulnerability, as I was at that moment. To understand it when my assemblage
point had reached the position where there are no doubts was useless,
because realizations of that nature are commonplace in that position. It was
equally useless to understand it in a state of normal awareness; in that
state, such realizations are emotional outbursts that are valid only for as
long as the emotion lasts.
"I've said that you traveled a great distance that day," he said
calmly. "And I said that because I know it. I was there, remember?"
I was sweating profusely out of nervousness and anxiety.
"You traveled because you woke up at a distant dreaming position," he
continued. "When Genaro pulled you across the plaza, right here from this
bench, he paved the way for your assemblage point to move from normal
awareness all the way to the position where the dreaming body appears. Your
dreaming body actually flew over an incredible distance in the blink of an
eyelid. Yet that's not the important part. The mystery is in the dreaming
position. If it is strong enough to pull you, you can go to the ends of this
world or beyond it, just as the old seers did. They disappeared from this
world because they woke up at a dreaming position beyond the limits of the
known. Your dreaming position that day was in this world, but quite a
distance from the city of Oaxaca."
"How does ajourney like that take place?" I asked.
"There is no way of knowing how it is done," he said. "Strong emotion,
or unbending intent, or great interest serves as a guide; then the
assemblage point gets powerfully fixed at the dreaming position, long enough
to drag there all the emanations that are inside the cocoon."
Don Juan said then that he had made me see countless times over the
years of our association, either in states of normal awareness or in states
of heightened awareness; I had seen countless things that I was now
beginning to understand in a more coherent fashion. This coherence was not
logical or rational, but it clarified, nonetheless, in whatever strange way,
everything I had done, everything that was done to me, and everything I had
seen in all those years with him. He said that now I needed to have one last
clarification: the coherent but irrational realization that everything in
the world we have learned to perceive is inextricably tied to the position
where the assemblage point is located, if the assemblage point is displaced
from that position, the world will cease to be what it is to us.
Don Juan stated that a displacement of the assemblage point beyond the
midline of the cocoon of man makes the entire world we know vanish from our
view in one instant, as if it had been erased-- for the stability, the
substantiality, that seems to belong to our perceivable world is just the
force of alignment. Certain emanations are routinely aligned because of the
fixation of the assemblage point on one specific spot; that is all there is
to our world.
"The soundness of the world is not the mirage," he continued, "the
mirage is the fixation of the assemblage point on any spot. When seers shift
their assemblage points, they are not confronted with an illusion, they are
confronted with another world; that new world is as real as the one we are
watching now, but the new fixation of their assemblage points, which
produces that new world, is as much of a mirage as the old fixation.
"Take yourself, for example; you are now in a state of heightened
awareness. Whatever you are capable of doing in such a state is not an
illusion; it is as real as the world you will face tomorrow in your daily
life, and yet tomorrow the world you are witnessing now won't exist. It
exists only when your assemblage point moves to the particular spot where
you are now."
He added that the task warriors are faced with, after they finish their
training, is one of integration. In the course of training, warriors,
especially nagual men, are made to shift to as many individual spots as
possible. He said that in my case I had moved to countless positions that I
would have to integrate someday into a coherent whole.
"For instance, if you would shift your assemblage point to a specific
position, you'd remember who that lady is," he continued with a strange
smile. "Your assemblage point has been at that spot hundreds of times. It
should be the easiest thing for you to integrate it."
As though my recollection depended on his suggestion, I began to have
vague memories, feelings of sorts. There was a feeling of boundless
affection that seemed to attract me; a most pleasant sweetness filled the
air, exactly as if someone had just come up from behind me and poured that
scent over me. I even turned around. And then I remembered. She was Carol,
the nagual woman' I had been with her only the day before. How could I have
forgotten her?
I had an indescribable moment in which I think all the feelings of my
psychological repertory ran through my mind. Was it possible, I asked
myself, that I had woken up in her house in Tucson, Arizona, two thousand
miles away? And are each of the instances of heightened awareness so
isolated that one cannot remember them?
Don Juan came to my side and put his arm on my shoulder. He said that
he knew exactly how I felt. His benefactor had made him go through a similar
experience. And just as he himself was now trying to do with me, his
benefactor had tried to do with him: soothe with words. He had appreciated
his benefactor's attempt, but he doubted then as he doubted now that there
is a way to soothe anyone who realizes the journey of the dreaming body.
There was no doubt in my mind now. Something in me had traveled the
distance between the cities of Oaxaca, Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona. I felt a
strange relief, as if I had been purged of guilt at long last.
During the years I had spent with don Juan, I had had lapses of
continuity in my memory. My being in Tucson with him on that day was one of
those lapses. I remembered not being able to recall how I had gotten to
Tucson. I did not pay any attention to it, however. I thought the lapse was
the result of my activities with don Juan. He was always very careful not to
arouse my rational suspicions in states of normal awareness, but if
suspicions were unavoidable he always curtly explained them away by
suggesting that the nature of our activities fostered serious disparities of
memory.
I told don Juan that since both of us had ended up that day in the same
place, I wondered whether it was possible for two or more people to wake up
at the same dreaming position.
"Of course," he said. "That's the way the old Toltec sorcerers took off
into the unknown in packs. They followed one another. There is no way of
knowing how one follows someone else. It's just done. The dreaming body just
does it. The presence of another dreamer spurs it to do it. That day you
pulled me with you. And I followed because I wanted to be with you."
I had so many questions to ask him, but every one of them seemed
superfluous.
"How is it possible that I didn't remember the nagual woman?" I
muttered, and a horrible anguish and longing gripped me. I was trying not to
feel sad anymore, but suddenly sadness ripped through me like pain.
"You still don't remember her," he said. "Only when your assemblage
point shifts can you recollect her. She is like a phantom to you, and so are
you to her. You've seen her once while you were in normal awareness, but
she's never seen you in her normal awareness. To her you are as much a
personage as she is to you. With the difference that you may wake up someday
and integrate it all. You may have enough time to do that, but she won't.
Her time here is short."
I felt like protesting a terrible injustice. I mentally prepared a
barrage of objections, but I never voiced them. Don Juan's smile was
beaming. His eyes shone with sheer glee and mischief. I had the sensation
that he was waiting for my statements, because he knew what I was going to
say. And that sensation stopped me, or rather I did not say anything because
my assemblage point had again moved by itself. And I knew then that the
nagual woman could not be pitied for not having time, nor could I rejoice
for having it.
Don Juan was reading me like a book. He urged me to finish my
realization and voice the reason for not feeling sorry or for not rejoicing.
I felt for an instant that I knew why. But then I lost the thread.
"The excitation of having time is equal to the excitation of not having
it," he said. "It's all the same."
"To feel sad is not the same as feeling sorry " I said. "And I feel
terribly sad."
"Who cares about sadness?" he said. "Think only of the mysteries;
mystery is all that matters. We are living beings; we have to die and
relinquish our awareness. But if we could change just a tinge of that, what
mysteries must await us! What mysteries!"
18 Breaking the Barrier of Perception
In the late afternoon, still in Oaxaca, don Juan and I strolled around
the square leisurely. As we approached his favorite bench the people who
were sitting there got up and left. We hurried over to it and sat down.
"We've come to the end of my explanation of awareness," he said. "And
today, you are going to assemble another world by yourself and leave all
doubts aside forever.
"There must be no mislake about what you are going to do. Today, from
the vantage point of heightened awareness, you are going to make your
assemblage point move and in one instant you are going to align the
emanations of another world.
"In a few days, when Genaro and I meet you on a mountaintop, you are
going to do the same from the disadvantage of normal awareness. You will
have to align the emanations of another world on a moment's notice; if you
don't you will die the death of an average man who falls from a precipice."
He was alluding to an act that he would have me perform as the last of
his teachings for the right side: the act of jumping from a mountaintop into
an abyss.
Don Juan stated that warriors ended their training when they were