the water and the power of the first level, plus the magnetic influence of
the creature at the window."
"But I heard a voice in my ear saying that I was dying," I said.
"The voice was right. You were dying, and you would have if I hadn't
been there. That is the danger of practicing the Toltecs' techniques. They
are extremely effective but most of the time they are deadly."
I told him that I was ashamed to confess that I was terrified. Seeing
that shape in the mirror and having the sensation of an enveloping force
around me had proved too much for me the day before.
"I don't want to alarm you," he said, "but nothing has happened to you
yet. If what happened to me is going to be the guideline of what will happen
to you, you'd better prepare yourself for the shock of your life. It's
better to shake in your boots now than to die of fright tomorrow."
My fear was so terrifying that I couldn't even voice the questions that
came to my mind. I had a hard lime swallowing. Don Juan laughed until he was
coughing. His face got purple. When I got my voice back, every one of my
questions prompted another attack of coughing laughter.
"You have no idea how funny this all is to me," he finally said. "I'm
not laughing at you. It's just the situation. My benefactor made me go
through the same motions, and looking at you I can't help seeing myself."
I told him that I felt sick to my stomach. He said that that was fine,
that it was natural to be scared, and that to control fear was wrong and
senseless. The ancient seers got trapped by suppressing their terror when
they should have been scared out of their wits. Since they did not want to
stop their pursuits or abandon their comforting constructs they controlled
their fear instead.
"What else are we going to do with the mirror?" I asked.
"That mirror is going to be used for a face-to-face meeting between you
and that creature you only gazed at yesterday."
"What happens in a face-to-face meeting?"
"What happens is that one form of life, the human form, meets another
form of life. The old seers said that in this case, it is a creature from
the first level of the fluidity of water."
He explained that the ancient seers surmised that the seven levels
below ours were levels of the fluidity of water. For them a spring had
untold significance, because they thought that in such a case the fluidity
of water is reversed and goes from the depth to the surface. They took that
to be the means whereby creatures from other levels, these other forms of
life, come to our plane to peer at us, to observe us.
"In this respect those old seers were not mistaken," he went on. "They
hit the nail right on the head. Entities that the new seers call allies do
appear around waterholes."
"Was the creature in the mirror an ally?" I asked.
"Of course. But not one that can be utilized. The tradition of the
allies, which I have acquainted you with in the past, comes directly from
the ancient seers. They did wonders with allies, but nothing they did was
worth anything when the real enemy came along: their fellow men."
"Since those creatures are allies, they must be very dangerous," I
said.
"As dangerous as we men are, no more, no less."
"Can they kill us?"
"Not directly, but they certainly can frighten us to death. They can
cross the boundaries themselves, or they can just come to the window. As you
may have realized by now, the ancient Toltecs didn't stop at the window,
either. They found weird ways to go beyond it."
The second stage of the technique proceeded very much as had the first
except that it took perhaps twice as long for me to relax and stop my
internal turmoil. When that was done, the reflection of don Juan's face and
mine became instantly clear. I gazed from his reflection to mine for perhaps
an hour. I expected the ally to appear any moment, but nothing happened. My
neck hurt. My back was stiff and my legs were numb. I wanted to kneel on the
rock to relieve the pain in my lower back. Don Juan whispered that the
moment the ally showed its shape my discomfort would vanish.
He was absolutely right. The shock of witnessing a round shape appear
on the edge of the mirror dispelled every discomfort of mine.
"What do we do now?" I whispered.
"Relax and don't focus your gaze on anything, not even for an instant,"
he replied. "Watch everything that appears in the mirror. Gaze without
staring."
I obeyed him. I glanced at everything within the frame of the mirror.
There was a peculiar buzzing in my ears. Don Juan whispered that I should
move my eyes in a clockwise direction if I felt that I was being enveloped
by an unusual force; but under no circumstances, he stressed, should I lift
my head to look at him.
After a moment I noticed that the mirror was reflecting more than the
reflection of our faces and the round shape. Its surface had become dark.
Spots of an intense violet light appeared. They grew large. There were also
spots of jet blackness. Then it turned into something like a flat picture of
a cloudy sky at night, in the moonlight. Suddenly, the whole surface came
into focus, as if it were a moving picture. The new sight was a
three-dimensional, breathtaking view of the depths.
I knew that it was absolutely impossible for me to fight off the
tremendous attraction of that sight. It began to pull me in.
Don Juan whispered forcefully that I should roll my eyes for dear life.
The movement brought immediate relief. I could again distinguish our
reflections and that of the ally. Then the ally disappeared and reappeared
again on the other end of the mirror.
Don Juan commanded me to grip the mirror with all my might. He warned
me to be calm and not make any sudden movements.
"What's going to happen?" I whispered.
"The ally will try to come out," he replied.
As soon as he had said that I felt a powerful tug. Something jerked my
arms. The tug was from underneath the mirror. It was like a suction force
that created a uniform pressure all around the frame.
"Hold the mirror tightly but don't break it," don Juan ordered. "Fight
the suction. Don't let the ally sink the mirror too deep."
The force pulling down on us was enormous. I felt that my fingers were
going to break or be crushed against the rocks on the bottom. Don Juan and I
both lost our balance at one point and had to step down from the flat rocks
into the stream. The water was quite shallow, but the thrashing of the
ally's force around the frame of the mirror was as frightening as if we had
been in a large river. The water around our feet was being swirled around
madly, but the images in the mirror were undisturbed.
"Watch out!" don Juan yelled. "Here it comes!"
The tugging changed into a thrust from underneath. Something was
grabbing the edge of the mirror; not the outer edge of the frame where we
were holding it, but from the inside of the glass. It was as if the glass
surface were indeed an open window and something or somebody were just
climbing through it.
Don Juan and I fought desperately either to push the mirror down when
it was being thrust up or pull it up when it was being tugged downward. In a
stoopedover position we slowly moved downstream from the original spot. The
water was deeper and the bottom was covered with slippery rocks.
"Let's lift the mirror out of the water and shake him loose," don Juan
said in a harsh voice.
The loud thrashing continued unremittingly. It was as if we had caught
an enormous fish with our bare hands and it was swimming around wildly.
It occurred to me that the mirror was in essence a hatch. A strange
shape was actually trying to climb up through it. It was leaning on the edge
of the hatch with a mighty weight and was big enough to displace the
reflection of don Juan's face and mine. I could not see us anymore. I could
only distinguish a mass trying to push itself up.
The mirror was not resting on the bottom anymore. My fingers were not
compressed against the rocks. The mirror was in mid-depth, held by the
opposing forces of the ally's tugs and ours. Don Juan said he was going to
extend his hands underneath the mirror and that I should very quickly grab
them in order to have a better leverage to lift the mirror with our
forearms. When he let go it tilled to his side. I quickly reached for his
hands but there was nothing underneath. I vacillated a second too long and
the mirror flew out of my hands.
"Grab it! Grab it!" don Juan yelled.
I caught the mirror just as it was going to land on the rocks. I lifted
it out of the water, but not quickly enough. The water seemed to be like
glue. As I pulled the mirror out, I also pulled a portion of a heavy rubbery
substance that simply pulled the mirror out of my hands and back into the
water.
Don Juan, displaying extraordinary nimbleness, caught the mirror and
lifted it up edgewise without any difficulty.
Never in my life had I had such an attack of melancholy. It was a
sadness that had no precise foundation; I associated it with the memory of
the depths I had seen in the mirror. It was a mixture of pure longing for
those depths plus an absolute fear of their chilling solitude.
Don Juan remarked that in the life of warriors it was extremely natural
to be sad for no overt reason. Seers say that the luminous egg, as a field
of energy, senses its final destination whenever the boundaries of the known
are broken. A mere glimpse of the eternity outside the cocoon is enough to
disrupt the coziness of our inventory. The resulting melancholy is sometimes
so intense that it can bring about death.
He said that the best way to get rid of melancholy is to make fun of
it. He commented in a mocking tone that my first attention was doing
everything to restore the order that had been disrupted by my contact with
the ally. Since there was no way of restoring it by rational means, my first
attention was doing it by focusing all its power on sadness.
I told him that the fact remained the melancholy was real. Indulging in
it, moping around, being gloomy, were not part of the feeling of aloneness
that I had felt upon remembering those depths.
"Something is finally getting through to you," he said. "You're right.
There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us
than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-- how can man
keep the bonds of his humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully
into the absolute loneliness of eternity? Whenever you resolve this riddle,
you'll be ready for the definitive journey."
I knew then with total certainty the reason for my sadness. It was a
recurrent feeling with me, one that I would always forget until I again
realized the same thing: the puniness of humanity against the immensity of
that thing-in-itself which I had seen reflected in the mirror.
"Human beings are truly nothing, don Juan," I said.
"I know exactly what you're thinking," he said. "Sure, we're nothing,
but that's exactly what makes it the ultimate challenge, that we nothings
could actually face the loneliness of eternity."
He abruptly changed the subject, leaving me with my mouth open, my next
question unsaid. He began to discuss our bout with the ally. He said that
first of all, the struggle with the ally had been no joke. It had not really
been a matter of life or death, but it had not been a picnic either.
"I chose that technique," he went on, "because my benefactor showed it
to me. When I asked him to give me an example of the old seers' techniques,
he nearly split a gut laughing; my request reminded him so much of his own
experience. His benefactor, the nagual Elias, had also given him a harsh
demonstration of the same technique."
Don Juan said that as he had made the frame for his mirror out of wood,
he should have asked me to do the same, but he wanted to know what would
happen if the frame was sturdier than his or his benefactor's. Both of their
frames broke, and both times the ally came out.
He explained that during his own bout the ally ripped the frame apart.
He and his benefactor were left holding two pieces of wood while the mirror
sank and the ally climbed out of it.
His benefactor knew what kind of trouble to expect. In the reflection
of mirrors, allies are not really frightening because one sees only a shape,
a mass of sorts. But when they are out, besides being truly fearsome-looking
things, they are a pain in the neck. He remarked that once the allies get
out of their level it is very difficult for them to go back. The same
prevails for man. If seers venture into a level of those creatures, chances
are they are never heard of again.
"My mirror was shattered with the ally's force," he said. "There was no
more window and the ally couldn't go back, so it came after me. It actually
ran after me, rolling on itself. I scrambled on all fours at top speed,
screaming with terror. I went up and down hills like a possessed man. The
ally was inches away from me the whole time."
Don Juan said that his benefactor ran after him, but he was too old and
could not move fast enough; he had the good sense, however, to tell don Juan
to backtrack, and in that way was able to take measures to get rid of the
ally. He shouted that he was going to build a fire and that don Juan should
run in circles until everything was ready. He went ahead to gather dry
branches while don Juan ran around a hill, driven mad with fear.
Don Juan confessed that the thought had occurred to him, as he ran
around in circles, that his benefactor was actually enjoying the whole
thing. He knew that his benefactor was a warrior capable of finding delight
in any conceivable situation. Why not also in this one? For a moment he got
so angry at his benefactor that the ally stopped chasing him, and don Juan,
in no uncertain terms, accused his benefactor of malice. His benefactor
didn't answer, but made a gesture of genuine horror as he looked past don
Juan at the ally, which was looming over the two of them. Don Juan forgot
his anger and began running around in circles again.
"My benefactor was indeed a devilish old man," don Juan said, laughing.
"He had learned to laugh internally. It wouldn't show on his face, so he
could pretend to be weeping or raging when he was really laughing. That day,
as the ally chased me in circles, my benefactor stood there and defended
himself from my accusations. I only heard bits of his long speech every time
I ran by him. When he was through with that, I heard bits of another long
explanation: that he had to gather a great deal of wood, that the ally was
big, that the fire had to be as big as the ally itself, that the maneuver
might not work.
"Only my maddening fear kept me going. Finally he must have realized
that I was about to drop dead from exhaustion; he built the fire and with
the flames he shielded me from the ally."
Don Juan said that they stayed by the fire for the entire night. The
worst time for him was when his benefactor had to go away to look for more
dry branches and left him alone. He was so afraid that he promised to God
that he was going to leave the path of knowledge and become a farmer.
"In the morning, after I had exhausted all my energy, the ally managed
to shove me into the fire, and I was badly burned," don Juan added.
"What happened to the ally?" I asked.
"My benefactor never told me what happened to it," he replied. "But I
have the feeling that it is still running around aimlessly, trying to find
its way back."
"And what happened to your promise to God?"
"My benefactor said not to worry, that it had been a good promise, but
that I didn't know yet that there is no one to hear such promises, because
there is no God. All there is is the Eagle's emanations, and there is no way
to make promises to them."
"What would have happened if the ally had caught you?" I asked.
"I might have died of fright," he said. "If I had known what was
entailed in being caught I would've let it catch me. At that time I was a
reckless man. Once an ally catches you, you either have a heart attack and
die or you wrestle with it. Then after a moment of thrashing around in sham
ferocity, the ally's energy wanes. There is nothing that an ally can do to
us, or vice versa. We are separated by an abyss.
"The ancient seers believed that at the moment the ally's energy
dwindles the ally surrenders its power to man. Power, my eye! The old seers
had allies coming out of their ears and their allies' power didn't mean a
thing."
Don Juan explained that once again it had been up to the new seers to
straighten out this confusion. They had found that the only thing that
counts is impeccability, that is, freed energy. There were indeed some among
the ancient seers who were saved by their allies, but that had had nothing
to do with the allies' power to fend off anything; rather, it was the
impeccability of the men that had permitted them to use the energy of those
other forms of life.
The new seers also found out the most important thing yet about the
allies: what makes them useless or usable to man. Useless allies, of which
there are staggering numbers, are those that have emanations inside them for
which we have no match inside ourselves. They are so different from us as to
be thoroughly unusable. Other allies, which are remarkably few in number,
are akin to us, meaning that they possess occasional emanations that match
ours.
"How is that kind utilized by man?" I asked.
"We should use another word instead of 'utilize, ' " he replied. "I'd
say that what takes place between seers and allies of this kind is a fair
exchange of energy."
"How does the exchange take place?" I asked.
"Through their matching emanations," he said. "Those emanations are,
naturally, on the left-side awareness of man; the side that the average man
never uses. For this reason, allies are totally barred from the world of the
right-side awareness, or the side of rationality."
He said that the matching emanations give both a common ground. Then,
with familiarity, a deeper link is established, which allows both forms of
life to profit. Seers seek the allies' ethereal quality; they make fabulous
scouts and guardians. Allies seek the greater energy field of man, and with
it they can even materialize themselves.
He assured me that experienced seers play those shared emanations until
they bring them into total focus; the exchange lakes place at that time. The
ancient seers did not understand this process, and they developed complex
techniques of gazing in order to descend into the depths that I had seen in
the mirror.
"The old seers had a very elaborate tool to help them in their
descent," he went on. "It was a rope of special twine that they tied around
their waist. It had a soft butt soaked in resin which fitted into the navel
itself, like a plug. The seers had an assistant or a number of them who held
them by the rope while they were lost in their gazing. Naturally, to gaze
directly into the reflection of a deep, clear pond or lake is infinitely
more overwhelming and dangerous than what we did with the mirror."
"But did they actually descend bodily?" I asked.
"You'd be surprised what men are capable of, especially if they control
awareness," he replied. "The old seers were aberrant. In their excursions to
the depths they found marvels. It was routine for them to encounter allies.
"Of course, by now you realize that to say the depths is a figure of
speech. There are no depths, there is only the handling of awareness. Yet
the old seers never made that realization."
I told don Juan that from what he had said about his experience with
the ally, plus my own subjective impression on feeling the ally's thrashing
force in the water, I had concluded that allies are very aggressive.
"Not really," he said. "It is not that they don't have enough energy to
be aggressive, but rather that they have a different kind of energy. They
are more like an electric current. Organic beings are more like heat waves."
"But why did it chase you for such a long time?" I asked.
"That's no mystery," he said. "They are attracted to emotions. Animal
fear is what attracts them the most; it releases the kind of energy that
suits them. The emanations inside them are rallied by animal fear. Since my
fear was relentless the ally went after it, or rather, my fear hooked the
ally and didn't let it go."
He said that it was the old seers who found out that allies enjoy
animal fear more than anything else. They even went to the extreme of
purposely feeding it to their allies by actually scaring people to death.
The old seers were convinced that the allies had human feelings, but the new
seers saw it differently. They saw that allies are attracted to the energy
released by emotions; love is equally effective, as well as hatred, or
sadness.
Don Juan added that if he had felt love for that ally, the ally would
have come after him anyway, although the chase would have had a different
mood. I asked him whether the ally would have stopped going after him if he
had controlled his fear. He answered that controlling fear was a trick of
the old seers. They learned to control it to the point of being able to
parcel it out. They hooked their allies with their own fear and by gradually
doling it out. like food, they actually held the allies in bondage.
"Those old seers were terrifying men," don Juan continued. "I shouldn't
use the past tense-- they are terrifying even today. Their bid is to
dominate, to master everybody and everything."
"Even today, don Juan?" I asked, trying to get him to explain further.
He changed the subject by commenting that I had missed the opportunity
of being really scared beyond measure. He said that doubtless the way I had
sealed the frame of the mirror with tar had prevented the water from seeping
behind the glass. He counted that as the deciding factor that had kept the
ally from smashing the mirror.
"Too bad," he said. "You might even have liked that ally. By the way,
it was not the same one that came the day before. The second one was
perfectly akin to you."
"Don't you have some allies yourself, don Juan?" I asked.
"As you know, I have my benefactor's allies," he said. "I can't say
that I have the same feeling for them that my benefactor did. He was a
serene but thoroughly passionate man, who lavishly gave away everything he
possessed, including his energy. He loved his allies. To him it was no sweat
to allow the allies to use his energy and materialize themselves. There was
one in particular that could even take a grotesque human form."
Don Juan went on to say that since he was not partial to allies, he had
never given me a real taste of them, as his benefactor had done to him while
he was still recovering from the wound in his chest. It all began with the
thought that his benefactor was a strange man. Having barely escaped from
the clutches of the petty tyrant, don Juan suspected that he had fallen into
another trap. His intention was to wait a few days to get his strength back
and then run away when the old man was not home. But the old man must have
read his thoughts, because one day, in a confidential tone, he whispered to
don Juan that he ought to get well as quickly as possible so that the two of
them could escape from his captor and tormentor. Then, shaking with fear and
impotence, the old man flung the door open and a monstrous fish-faced man
came into the room, as if he had been listening behind the door. He was a
grayish-green, had only one huge unblinking eye, and was as big as a door.
Don Juan said that he was so surprised and terrified that he passed out, and
it took him years to get out from under the spell of that fright.
"Are your allies useful to you, don Juan?" I asked.
"That's a very difficult thing to decide," he said.
"In some way, I love the allies my benefactor gave me. They are capable
of giving back inconceivable affection. But they are incomprehensible to me.
They were given to me for companionship in case I am ever stranded alone in
that immensity that is the Eagle's emanations."
7 The Assemblage Point
Don Juan discontinued his explanation of the mastery of awareness for
several months after my bout with the allies. One day he started it again. A
strange event triggered it.
Don Juan was in northern Mexico. It was late afternoon. I had just
arrived at the house he kept there, and he immediately had me shift into
heightened awareness. And I had instantly remembered that don Juan always
came back to Sonora as means of renewal. He had explained that a nagual,
being a leader who has tremendous responsibilities, has to have a physical
point of reference, a place where an amenable confluence of energies occurs.
The Sonoran desert was such a place for him.
On entering into heightened awareness, I had noticed that there was
another person hiding in the semidarkness inside the house. I asked don Juan
if Genaro was with him. He replied that he was alone, that what I had
noticed was one of his allies, the one that guarded the house.
Don Juan then made a strange gesture. He contorted his face as if he
were surprised or terrified. And instantly the frightening shape of a
strange man appeared at the door of the room where we were. The presence of
the strange man scared me so much that I actually felt dizzy. And before I
could recuperate from my fright, the man lurched at me with a chilling
ferocity. As he grabbed my forearms, I felt ajolt of something quite like a
discharge of an electric current.
I was speechless, caught in a terror I could not dispel. Don Juan was
smiling at me. I mumbled and groaned, trying to voice a plea for help, while
I felt an even greater jolt.
The man tightened his grip and tried to throw me backward on the
ground. Don Juan, with no hurry in his voice, urged me to pull myself
together and not fight my fear, but roll with it. "Be afraid without being
terrified," he said. Don Juan came to my side and, without intervening in my
struggle, whispered in my ear that I should put all my concentration on the
midpoint of my body.
Over the years, he had insisted that I measure my body to the hundredth
of an inch and establish its exact midpoint, lengthwise as well as in width.
He had always said that such a point is a true center of energy in all of
us.
As soon as I had focused my attention on that midpoint, the man let go
of me. At that instant I became aware that what I had thought was a human
being was something that only looked like one. The moment it lost its human
shape to me, the ally became an amorphous blob of opaque light. It moved
away. I went after it, moved by a great force that made me follow that
opaque light.
Don Juan stopped me. He gently walked me to the porch of his house and
made me sit down on a sturdy crate he used as a bench.
I was terribly disturbed by the experience, but even more disturbed by
the fact that my paralyzing fear had disappeared so fast and so completely.
I commented on my abrupt change of mood. Don Juan said that there was
nothing strange about my volatile change, and that fear did not exist as
soon as the glow of awareness moved beyond a certain threshold inside man's
cocoon.
He then began his explanation. He briefly outlined the truths about
awareness he had discussed: that there is no objective world, but only a
universe of energy fields which seers call the Eagle's emanations. That
human beings are made of the Eagle's emanations and are in essence bubbles
of luminescent energy; each of us is wrapped in a cocoon that encloses a
small portion of these emanations. That awareness is achieved by the
constant pressure that the emanations outside our cocoons, which are called
emanations at large, exert on those inside our cocoons. That awareness gives
rise to perception, which happens when the emanations inside our cocoons
align themselves with the corresponding emanations at large.
"The next truth is that perception takes place," he went on, "because
there is in each of us an agent called the assemblage point that selects
internal and external emanations for alignment. The particular alignment
that we perceive as the world is the product of the specific spot where our
assemblage point is located on our cocoon."
He repeated this several times, allowing me time to grasp it. Then he
said that in order to corroborate the truths about awareness, I needed
energy.
"I've mentioned to you," he continued, "that dealing with petty tyrants
helps seers accomplish a sophisticated maneuver: that maneuver is to move
their assemblage points."
He said that for me to have perceived an ally meant that I had moved my
assemblage point away from its customary position. In other words, my glow
of awareness had moved beyond a certain threshold, also erasing my fear. And
all this had happened because I had enough surplus energy.
Later that night, after we had returned from a trip into the
surrounding mountains, which had been part of his teachings for the right
side, don Juan had me shift again into heightened awareness and then
continued his explanation. He told me that in order to discuss the nature of
the assemblage point, he had to start with a discussion of the first
attention.
He said that the new seers looked into the unnoticed ways in which the
first attention functions, and as they tried to explain them to others, they
devised an order for the truths about awareness. He assured me that not
every seer is given to explaining. For instance, his benefactor, the nagual
Julian, could not have cared less about explanations. But the nagual
Julian's benefactor, the nagual Elias, whom don Juan was fortunate enough to
meet, did care. Between the nagual Elias's detailed, lengthy explanations,
the nagual Julian's scanty ones, and his own personal seeing, don Juan came
to understand and to corroborate those truths.
Don Juan explained that in order for our first attention to bring into
focus the world that we perceive, it has to emphasize certain emanations
selected from the narrow band of emanations where man's awareness is
located. The discarded emanations are still within our reach but remain
dormant, unknown to us for the duration of our lives.
The new seers call the emphasized emanations the right side, normal
awareness, the tonal, this world, the known, the first attention. The
average man calls it reality, rationality, common sense.
The emphasized emanations compose a large portion of man's band of
awareness, but a very small piece of the total spectrum of emanations
present inside the cocoon of man. The disregarded emanations within man's
band are thought of as a sort of preamble to the unknown, the unknown proper
consisting of the bulk of emanations which are not part of the human band
and which are never emphasized. Seers call them the left-side awareness, the
nagual, the other world, the unknown, the second attention.
"This process of emphasizing certain emanations," don Juan went on,
"was discovered and practiced by the old seers. They realized that a nagual
man or a nagual woman, by the fact that they have extra strength, can push
the emphasis away from the usual emanations and make it shift to neighboring
ones. That push is known as the nagual's blow."
Don Juan said that the shift was utilized by the old seers in practical
ways to keep their apprentices in bondage. With that blow they made their
apprentices enter into a state of heightened, keenest, most impressionable
awareness; while they were helplessly pliable, the old seers taught them
aberrant techniques that made the apprentices into sinister men, just like
their teachers.
The new seers employ the same technique, but instead of using it for
sordid purposes, they use it to guide their apprentices to learn about man's
possibilities.
Don Juan explained that the nagual's blow has to be delivered on a
precise spot, on the assemblage point, which varies minutely from person to
person. Also, the blow has to be delivered by a nagual who sees. He assured
me that it is equally useless to have the strength of a nagual and not see,
as it is to see and not have the strength of a nagual, in either case the
results are just blows. A seer could strike on the precise spot over and
over without the strength to move awareness. and a non-seeing nagual would
not be able to strike the precise spot.
He also said that the old seers discovered that the assemblage point is
not in the physical body, but in the luminous shell, in the cocoon itself.
The nagual identifies that spot by its intense luminosity and pushes it,
rather than striking it. The force of the push creates a dent in the cocoon
and it is felt like a blow to the right shoulder blade, a blow that knocks
all the air out of the lungs.
"Are there different types of dents?" I asked.
"There are only two types," he responded. "One is a concavity and the
other is a crevice; each has a distinct effect. The concavity is a temporary
feature and produces a temporary shift-- but the crevice is a profound and
permanent feature of the cocoon and produces a permanent shift."
He explained that usually a luminous cocoon hardened by self-reflection
is not affected at all by the nagual's blow. Sometimes, however, the cocoon
of man is very pliable and the smallest force creates a bowl-like dent
ranging in size from a small depression to one that is a third the size of
the total cocoon; or it creates a crevice that may run across the width of
the egglike shell, or along its length, making the cocoon look as if it has
curled in on itself.
Some luminous shells, after being dented, go back to their original
shape instantly. Others remain dented for hours or even days at a time, but
they revert back by themselves. Still others get a firm, impervious dent
that requires another blow from the nagual on a bordering area to restore
the original shape of the luminous cocoon. And a few never lose their
indentation once they get it. No matter how many blows they get from a
nagual they never revert back to their egglike shapes.
Don Juan further said that the dent acts on the first attention
bydisplacing the glow of awareness. The dent presses the emanations inside
the luminous shell, and the seers witness how the first attention shifts its
emphasis under the force of that pressure. The dent, by displacing the
Eagle's emanations inside the cocoon, makes the glow of awareness fall on
other emanations from areas that are ordinarily inaccessible to the first
attention.
I asked him if the glow of awareness is seen only on the surface of the
luminous cocoon. He did not answer me right away. He seemed to immerse
himself in thought. After perhaps ten minutes he answered my question; he
said that normally the glow of awareness is seen on the surface of the
cocoon of all sentient beings. After man develops attention, however, the
glow of awareness acquires depth. In other words, it is transmitted from the
surface of the cocoon to quite a number of emanations inside the cocoon.
"The old seers knew what they were doing when they handled awareness,"
he went on. "They realized that by creating a dent in the cocoon of man,
they could force the glow of awareness, since it is already glowing on the
emanations inside the cocoon, to spread to other neighboring ones."
'You make it all sound as if it's a physical affair," I said. "How can
dents be made in something that is just aglow?"
"In some inexplicable way, it is a matter of a glow that creates a dent
in another glow," he replied. "Your flaw is to remain glued to the inventory
of reason. Reason doesn't deal with man as energy. Reason deals with
instruments that create energy, but it has never seriously occurred to
reason that we are better than instruments: we are organisms that create
energy. We are a bubble of energy. It isn't farfetched, then, that a bubble
of energy would make a dent in another bubble of energy."
He said that the glow of awareness created by the dent should
rightfully be called temporary heightened attention, because it emphasizes
emanations that are so proximal to the habitual ones that the change is
minimal, yet the shift produces a greater capacity to understand and to
concentrate and, above all, a greater capacity to forget. Seers knew exactly
how to use this upshift in the scale of quality. They saw that only the
emanations surrounding those we use daily suddenly become bright after the
nagual's blow. The more distant ones remain unmoved, which meant to them
that while being in a state of heightened attention, human beings could work
as if they were in the world of everyday life. The need of a nagual man and
a nagual woman became paramount to them, because that state lasts only for
as long as the depression remains, after which the experiences are
immediately forgotten.
"Why does one have to forget?" I asked.
"Because the emanations that account for greater clarity cease to be
emphasized once warriors are out of heightened awareness," he replied.
"Without that emphasis whatever they experience or witness vanishes."
Don Juan said that one of the tasks the new seers had devised for their
students was to force them to remember, that is, to reemphasize by
themselves, at a later time, those emanations used during states of
heightened awareness.
He reminded me that Genaro was always recommending to me that I learn
to write with the tip of my finger instead of a pencil so as not to
accumulate notes. Don Juan said that what Genaro had actually meant was that
while I was in states of heightened awareness I should utilize some unused
emanations for storage of dialogue and experience, and someday recall it all
by reemphasizing the emanations that were used.
He went on to explain that a state of heightened awareness is seen not
only as a glow that goes deeper inside the egglike shape of human beings,
but also as a more intense glow on the surface of the cocoon. Yet it is
nothing in comparison to the glow produced by a state of total awareness,
which is seen as a burst of incandescence in the entire luminous egg. It is
an explosion of light of such a magnitude that the boundaries of the shell
are diffused and the inside emanations extend themselves beyond anything
imaginable.
"Are those special cases, don Juan?"
"Certainly. They happen only to seers. No other men or any other living
creatures brighten up like that. Seers who deliberately attain total
awareness are a sight to behold. That is the moment when they burn from
within. The fire from within consumes them. And in full awareness they fuse
themselves to the emanations at large, and glide into eternity."
After a few days in Sonora I drove don Juan back to the town in the
southern part of Mexico where he and his party of warriors lived.
The next day was hot and hazy. I felt lazy and somehow annoyed. In
midafternoon, there was a most unpleasant quietude in that town. Don Juan
and I were sitting on the comfortable chairs in the big room. I told him
that life in rural Mexico was not my cup of tea. I disliked the feeling I
had that the silence of that town was forced. The only noise I ever heard
was the sound of children's voices yelling in the distance. I was never able
to find out whether they were playing or yelling in pain.
"When you're here, you're always in a state of heightened awareness,"
don Juan said. "That makes a great difference. But no matter what, you
should be getting used to living in a town like this. Someday you will live
in one."
"Why should I have to live in a town like this, don Juan?"
"I've explained to you that the new seers aim to be free. And freedom
has the most devastating implications. Among them is the implication that
warriors must purposely seek change. Your predilection is to live the way
you do. You stimulate your reason by running through your inventory and
pitting it against your friends' inventories. Those maneuvers leave you very
little time to examine yourself and your fate. You will have to give up all
that. Likewise, if all you knew were the dead calm of this town, you'd have
to seek, sooner or later, the other side of the coin."
"Is that what you're doing here, don Juan?"
"Our case is a little bit different, because we are at the end of our
trail. We are not seeking anything. What all of us do here is something
comprehensible only to a warrior. We go from day to day doing nothing. We
are waiting. I will not tire of repeating this: we know that we are waiting
and we know what we are waiting for. We are waiting for freedom!
"And now that you know that," he added with a grin, "let's get back to
our discussion of awareness."
Usually, when we were in that room we were never interrupted by anyone
and don Juan would always decide on the length of our discussions. But this
time there was a polite knock on the door and Genaro walked in and sat down.
I had not seen Genaro since the day after we had run out of his house in a
great hurry. I embraced him.
"Genaro has something to tell you," don Juan said. "I've told you that
he is the master of awareness. Now I can tell you what all that means. He
can make the assemblage point move deeper into the luminous egg after that
point has been jolted out of its position by the nagual's blow."
He explained that Genaro had pushed my assemblage point countless times
after I had attained heightened awareness. The day we had gone to the
gigantic flat rock to talk, Genaro had made my assemblage point move
dramatically into the left side-- so dramatically, in fact, that it had been
a bit dangerous.
Don Juan stopped talking and seemed to be ready to give Genaro the
spotlight. He nodded as if to signal Genaro to say something. Genaro stood
up and came to my side.
"Flame is very important," he said softly. "Do you remember that day
the creature at the window."
"But I heard a voice in my ear saying that I was dying," I said.
"The voice was right. You were dying, and you would have if I hadn't
been there. That is the danger of practicing the Toltecs' techniques. They
are extremely effective but most of the time they are deadly."
I told him that I was ashamed to confess that I was terrified. Seeing
that shape in the mirror and having the sensation of an enveloping force
around me had proved too much for me the day before.
"I don't want to alarm you," he said, "but nothing has happened to you
yet. If what happened to me is going to be the guideline of what will happen
to you, you'd better prepare yourself for the shock of your life. It's
better to shake in your boots now than to die of fright tomorrow."
My fear was so terrifying that I couldn't even voice the questions that
came to my mind. I had a hard lime swallowing. Don Juan laughed until he was
coughing. His face got purple. When I got my voice back, every one of my
questions prompted another attack of coughing laughter.
"You have no idea how funny this all is to me," he finally said. "I'm
not laughing at you. It's just the situation. My benefactor made me go
through the same motions, and looking at you I can't help seeing myself."
I told him that I felt sick to my stomach. He said that that was fine,
that it was natural to be scared, and that to control fear was wrong and
senseless. The ancient seers got trapped by suppressing their terror when
they should have been scared out of their wits. Since they did not want to
stop their pursuits or abandon their comforting constructs they controlled
their fear instead.
"What else are we going to do with the mirror?" I asked.
"That mirror is going to be used for a face-to-face meeting between you
and that creature you only gazed at yesterday."
"What happens in a face-to-face meeting?"
"What happens is that one form of life, the human form, meets another
form of life. The old seers said that in this case, it is a creature from
the first level of the fluidity of water."
He explained that the ancient seers surmised that the seven levels
below ours were levels of the fluidity of water. For them a spring had
untold significance, because they thought that in such a case the fluidity
of water is reversed and goes from the depth to the surface. They took that
to be the means whereby creatures from other levels, these other forms of
life, come to our plane to peer at us, to observe us.
"In this respect those old seers were not mistaken," he went on. "They
hit the nail right on the head. Entities that the new seers call allies do
appear around waterholes."
"Was the creature in the mirror an ally?" I asked.
"Of course. But not one that can be utilized. The tradition of the
allies, which I have acquainted you with in the past, comes directly from
the ancient seers. They did wonders with allies, but nothing they did was
worth anything when the real enemy came along: their fellow men."
"Since those creatures are allies, they must be very dangerous," I
said.
"As dangerous as we men are, no more, no less."
"Can they kill us?"
"Not directly, but they certainly can frighten us to death. They can
cross the boundaries themselves, or they can just come to the window. As you
may have realized by now, the ancient Toltecs didn't stop at the window,
either. They found weird ways to go beyond it."
The second stage of the technique proceeded very much as had the first
except that it took perhaps twice as long for me to relax and stop my
internal turmoil. When that was done, the reflection of don Juan's face and
mine became instantly clear. I gazed from his reflection to mine for perhaps
an hour. I expected the ally to appear any moment, but nothing happened. My
neck hurt. My back was stiff and my legs were numb. I wanted to kneel on the
rock to relieve the pain in my lower back. Don Juan whispered that the
moment the ally showed its shape my discomfort would vanish.
He was absolutely right. The shock of witnessing a round shape appear
on the edge of the mirror dispelled every discomfort of mine.
"What do we do now?" I whispered.
"Relax and don't focus your gaze on anything, not even for an instant,"
he replied. "Watch everything that appears in the mirror. Gaze without
staring."
I obeyed him. I glanced at everything within the frame of the mirror.
There was a peculiar buzzing in my ears. Don Juan whispered that I should
move my eyes in a clockwise direction if I felt that I was being enveloped
by an unusual force; but under no circumstances, he stressed, should I lift
my head to look at him.
After a moment I noticed that the mirror was reflecting more than the
reflection of our faces and the round shape. Its surface had become dark.
Spots of an intense violet light appeared. They grew large. There were also
spots of jet blackness. Then it turned into something like a flat picture of
a cloudy sky at night, in the moonlight. Suddenly, the whole surface came
into focus, as if it were a moving picture. The new sight was a
three-dimensional, breathtaking view of the depths.
I knew that it was absolutely impossible for me to fight off the
tremendous attraction of that sight. It began to pull me in.
Don Juan whispered forcefully that I should roll my eyes for dear life.
The movement brought immediate relief. I could again distinguish our
reflections and that of the ally. Then the ally disappeared and reappeared
again on the other end of the mirror.
Don Juan commanded me to grip the mirror with all my might. He warned
me to be calm and not make any sudden movements.
"What's going to happen?" I whispered.
"The ally will try to come out," he replied.
As soon as he had said that I felt a powerful tug. Something jerked my
arms. The tug was from underneath the mirror. It was like a suction force
that created a uniform pressure all around the frame.
"Hold the mirror tightly but don't break it," don Juan ordered. "Fight
the suction. Don't let the ally sink the mirror too deep."
The force pulling down on us was enormous. I felt that my fingers were
going to break or be crushed against the rocks on the bottom. Don Juan and I
both lost our balance at one point and had to step down from the flat rocks
into the stream. The water was quite shallow, but the thrashing of the
ally's force around the frame of the mirror was as frightening as if we had
been in a large river. The water around our feet was being swirled around
madly, but the images in the mirror were undisturbed.
"Watch out!" don Juan yelled. "Here it comes!"
The tugging changed into a thrust from underneath. Something was
grabbing the edge of the mirror; not the outer edge of the frame where we
were holding it, but from the inside of the glass. It was as if the glass
surface were indeed an open window and something or somebody were just
climbing through it.
Don Juan and I fought desperately either to push the mirror down when
it was being thrust up or pull it up when it was being tugged downward. In a
stoopedover position we slowly moved downstream from the original spot. The
water was deeper and the bottom was covered with slippery rocks.
"Let's lift the mirror out of the water and shake him loose," don Juan
said in a harsh voice.
The loud thrashing continued unremittingly. It was as if we had caught
an enormous fish with our bare hands and it was swimming around wildly.
It occurred to me that the mirror was in essence a hatch. A strange
shape was actually trying to climb up through it. It was leaning on the edge
of the hatch with a mighty weight and was big enough to displace the
reflection of don Juan's face and mine. I could not see us anymore. I could
only distinguish a mass trying to push itself up.
The mirror was not resting on the bottom anymore. My fingers were not
compressed against the rocks. The mirror was in mid-depth, held by the
opposing forces of the ally's tugs and ours. Don Juan said he was going to
extend his hands underneath the mirror and that I should very quickly grab
them in order to have a better leverage to lift the mirror with our
forearms. When he let go it tilled to his side. I quickly reached for his
hands but there was nothing underneath. I vacillated a second too long and
the mirror flew out of my hands.
"Grab it! Grab it!" don Juan yelled.
I caught the mirror just as it was going to land on the rocks. I lifted
it out of the water, but not quickly enough. The water seemed to be like
glue. As I pulled the mirror out, I also pulled a portion of a heavy rubbery
substance that simply pulled the mirror out of my hands and back into the
water.
Don Juan, displaying extraordinary nimbleness, caught the mirror and
lifted it up edgewise without any difficulty.
Never in my life had I had such an attack of melancholy. It was a
sadness that had no precise foundation; I associated it with the memory of
the depths I had seen in the mirror. It was a mixture of pure longing for
those depths plus an absolute fear of their chilling solitude.
Don Juan remarked that in the life of warriors it was extremely natural
to be sad for no overt reason. Seers say that the luminous egg, as a field
of energy, senses its final destination whenever the boundaries of the known
are broken. A mere glimpse of the eternity outside the cocoon is enough to
disrupt the coziness of our inventory. The resulting melancholy is sometimes
so intense that it can bring about death.
He said that the best way to get rid of melancholy is to make fun of
it. He commented in a mocking tone that my first attention was doing
everything to restore the order that had been disrupted by my contact with
the ally. Since there was no way of restoring it by rational means, my first
attention was doing it by focusing all its power on sadness.
I told him that the fact remained the melancholy was real. Indulging in
it, moping around, being gloomy, were not part of the feeling of aloneness
that I had felt upon remembering those depths.
"Something is finally getting through to you," he said. "You're right.
There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us
than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-- how can man
keep the bonds of his humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully
into the absolute loneliness of eternity? Whenever you resolve this riddle,
you'll be ready for the definitive journey."
I knew then with total certainty the reason for my sadness. It was a
recurrent feeling with me, one that I would always forget until I again
realized the same thing: the puniness of humanity against the immensity of
that thing-in-itself which I had seen reflected in the mirror.
"Human beings are truly nothing, don Juan," I said.
"I know exactly what you're thinking," he said. "Sure, we're nothing,
but that's exactly what makes it the ultimate challenge, that we nothings
could actually face the loneliness of eternity."
He abruptly changed the subject, leaving me with my mouth open, my next
question unsaid. He began to discuss our bout with the ally. He said that
first of all, the struggle with the ally had been no joke. It had not really
been a matter of life or death, but it had not been a picnic either.
"I chose that technique," he went on, "because my benefactor showed it
to me. When I asked him to give me an example of the old seers' techniques,
he nearly split a gut laughing; my request reminded him so much of his own
experience. His benefactor, the nagual Elias, had also given him a harsh
demonstration of the same technique."
Don Juan said that as he had made the frame for his mirror out of wood,
he should have asked me to do the same, but he wanted to know what would
happen if the frame was sturdier than his or his benefactor's. Both of their
frames broke, and both times the ally came out.
He explained that during his own bout the ally ripped the frame apart.
He and his benefactor were left holding two pieces of wood while the mirror
sank and the ally climbed out of it.
His benefactor knew what kind of trouble to expect. In the reflection
of mirrors, allies are not really frightening because one sees only a shape,
a mass of sorts. But when they are out, besides being truly fearsome-looking
things, they are a pain in the neck. He remarked that once the allies get
out of their level it is very difficult for them to go back. The same
prevails for man. If seers venture into a level of those creatures, chances
are they are never heard of again.
"My mirror was shattered with the ally's force," he said. "There was no
more window and the ally couldn't go back, so it came after me. It actually
ran after me, rolling on itself. I scrambled on all fours at top speed,
screaming with terror. I went up and down hills like a possessed man. The
ally was inches away from me the whole time."
Don Juan said that his benefactor ran after him, but he was too old and
could not move fast enough; he had the good sense, however, to tell don Juan
to backtrack, and in that way was able to take measures to get rid of the
ally. He shouted that he was going to build a fire and that don Juan should
run in circles until everything was ready. He went ahead to gather dry
branches while don Juan ran around a hill, driven mad with fear.
Don Juan confessed that the thought had occurred to him, as he ran
around in circles, that his benefactor was actually enjoying the whole
thing. He knew that his benefactor was a warrior capable of finding delight
in any conceivable situation. Why not also in this one? For a moment he got
so angry at his benefactor that the ally stopped chasing him, and don Juan,
in no uncertain terms, accused his benefactor of malice. His benefactor
didn't answer, but made a gesture of genuine horror as he looked past don
Juan at the ally, which was looming over the two of them. Don Juan forgot
his anger and began running around in circles again.
"My benefactor was indeed a devilish old man," don Juan said, laughing.
"He had learned to laugh internally. It wouldn't show on his face, so he
could pretend to be weeping or raging when he was really laughing. That day,
as the ally chased me in circles, my benefactor stood there and defended
himself from my accusations. I only heard bits of his long speech every time
I ran by him. When he was through with that, I heard bits of another long
explanation: that he had to gather a great deal of wood, that the ally was
big, that the fire had to be as big as the ally itself, that the maneuver
might not work.
"Only my maddening fear kept me going. Finally he must have realized
that I was about to drop dead from exhaustion; he built the fire and with
the flames he shielded me from the ally."
Don Juan said that they stayed by the fire for the entire night. The
worst time for him was when his benefactor had to go away to look for more
dry branches and left him alone. He was so afraid that he promised to God
that he was going to leave the path of knowledge and become a farmer.
"In the morning, after I had exhausted all my energy, the ally managed
to shove me into the fire, and I was badly burned," don Juan added.
"What happened to the ally?" I asked.
"My benefactor never told me what happened to it," he replied. "But I
have the feeling that it is still running around aimlessly, trying to find
its way back."
"And what happened to your promise to God?"
"My benefactor said not to worry, that it had been a good promise, but
that I didn't know yet that there is no one to hear such promises, because
there is no God. All there is is the Eagle's emanations, and there is no way
to make promises to them."
"What would have happened if the ally had caught you?" I asked.
"I might have died of fright," he said. "If I had known what was
entailed in being caught I would've let it catch me. At that time I was a
reckless man. Once an ally catches you, you either have a heart attack and
die or you wrestle with it. Then after a moment of thrashing around in sham
ferocity, the ally's energy wanes. There is nothing that an ally can do to
us, or vice versa. We are separated by an abyss.
"The ancient seers believed that at the moment the ally's energy
dwindles the ally surrenders its power to man. Power, my eye! The old seers
had allies coming out of their ears and their allies' power didn't mean a
thing."
Don Juan explained that once again it had been up to the new seers to
straighten out this confusion. They had found that the only thing that
counts is impeccability, that is, freed energy. There were indeed some among
the ancient seers who were saved by their allies, but that had had nothing
to do with the allies' power to fend off anything; rather, it was the
impeccability of the men that had permitted them to use the energy of those
other forms of life.
The new seers also found out the most important thing yet about the
allies: what makes them useless or usable to man. Useless allies, of which
there are staggering numbers, are those that have emanations inside them for
which we have no match inside ourselves. They are so different from us as to
be thoroughly unusable. Other allies, which are remarkably few in number,
are akin to us, meaning that they possess occasional emanations that match
ours.
"How is that kind utilized by man?" I asked.
"We should use another word instead of 'utilize, ' " he replied. "I'd
say that what takes place between seers and allies of this kind is a fair
exchange of energy."
"How does the exchange take place?" I asked.
"Through their matching emanations," he said. "Those emanations are,
naturally, on the left-side awareness of man; the side that the average man
never uses. For this reason, allies are totally barred from the world of the
right-side awareness, or the side of rationality."
He said that the matching emanations give both a common ground. Then,
with familiarity, a deeper link is established, which allows both forms of
life to profit. Seers seek the allies' ethereal quality; they make fabulous
scouts and guardians. Allies seek the greater energy field of man, and with
it they can even materialize themselves.
He assured me that experienced seers play those shared emanations until
they bring them into total focus; the exchange lakes place at that time. The
ancient seers did not understand this process, and they developed complex
techniques of gazing in order to descend into the depths that I had seen in
the mirror.
"The old seers had a very elaborate tool to help them in their
descent," he went on. "It was a rope of special twine that they tied around
their waist. It had a soft butt soaked in resin which fitted into the navel
itself, like a plug. The seers had an assistant or a number of them who held
them by the rope while they were lost in their gazing. Naturally, to gaze
directly into the reflection of a deep, clear pond or lake is infinitely
more overwhelming and dangerous than what we did with the mirror."
"But did they actually descend bodily?" I asked.
"You'd be surprised what men are capable of, especially if they control
awareness," he replied. "The old seers were aberrant. In their excursions to
the depths they found marvels. It was routine for them to encounter allies.
"Of course, by now you realize that to say the depths is a figure of
speech. There are no depths, there is only the handling of awareness. Yet
the old seers never made that realization."
I told don Juan that from what he had said about his experience with
the ally, plus my own subjective impression on feeling the ally's thrashing
force in the water, I had concluded that allies are very aggressive.
"Not really," he said. "It is not that they don't have enough energy to
be aggressive, but rather that they have a different kind of energy. They
are more like an electric current. Organic beings are more like heat waves."
"But why did it chase you for such a long time?" I asked.
"That's no mystery," he said. "They are attracted to emotions. Animal
fear is what attracts them the most; it releases the kind of energy that
suits them. The emanations inside them are rallied by animal fear. Since my
fear was relentless the ally went after it, or rather, my fear hooked the
ally and didn't let it go."
He said that it was the old seers who found out that allies enjoy
animal fear more than anything else. They even went to the extreme of
purposely feeding it to their allies by actually scaring people to death.
The old seers were convinced that the allies had human feelings, but the new
seers saw it differently. They saw that allies are attracted to the energy
released by emotions; love is equally effective, as well as hatred, or
sadness.
Don Juan added that if he had felt love for that ally, the ally would
have come after him anyway, although the chase would have had a different
mood. I asked him whether the ally would have stopped going after him if he
had controlled his fear. He answered that controlling fear was a trick of
the old seers. They learned to control it to the point of being able to
parcel it out. They hooked their allies with their own fear and by gradually
doling it out. like food, they actually held the allies in bondage.
"Those old seers were terrifying men," don Juan continued. "I shouldn't
use the past tense-- they are terrifying even today. Their bid is to
dominate, to master everybody and everything."
"Even today, don Juan?" I asked, trying to get him to explain further.
He changed the subject by commenting that I had missed the opportunity
of being really scared beyond measure. He said that doubtless the way I had
sealed the frame of the mirror with tar had prevented the water from seeping
behind the glass. He counted that as the deciding factor that had kept the
ally from smashing the mirror.
"Too bad," he said. "You might even have liked that ally. By the way,
it was not the same one that came the day before. The second one was
perfectly akin to you."
"Don't you have some allies yourself, don Juan?" I asked.
"As you know, I have my benefactor's allies," he said. "I can't say
that I have the same feeling for them that my benefactor did. He was a
serene but thoroughly passionate man, who lavishly gave away everything he
possessed, including his energy. He loved his allies. To him it was no sweat
to allow the allies to use his energy and materialize themselves. There was
one in particular that could even take a grotesque human form."
Don Juan went on to say that since he was not partial to allies, he had
never given me a real taste of them, as his benefactor had done to him while
he was still recovering from the wound in his chest. It all began with the
thought that his benefactor was a strange man. Having barely escaped from
the clutches of the petty tyrant, don Juan suspected that he had fallen into
another trap. His intention was to wait a few days to get his strength back
and then run away when the old man was not home. But the old man must have
read his thoughts, because one day, in a confidential tone, he whispered to
don Juan that he ought to get well as quickly as possible so that the two of
them could escape from his captor and tormentor. Then, shaking with fear and
impotence, the old man flung the door open and a monstrous fish-faced man
came into the room, as if he had been listening behind the door. He was a
grayish-green, had only one huge unblinking eye, and was as big as a door.
Don Juan said that he was so surprised and terrified that he passed out, and
it took him years to get out from under the spell of that fright.
"Are your allies useful to you, don Juan?" I asked.
"That's a very difficult thing to decide," he said.
"In some way, I love the allies my benefactor gave me. They are capable
of giving back inconceivable affection. But they are incomprehensible to me.
They were given to me for companionship in case I am ever stranded alone in
that immensity that is the Eagle's emanations."
7 The Assemblage Point
Don Juan discontinued his explanation of the mastery of awareness for
several months after my bout with the allies. One day he started it again. A
strange event triggered it.
Don Juan was in northern Mexico. It was late afternoon. I had just
arrived at the house he kept there, and he immediately had me shift into
heightened awareness. And I had instantly remembered that don Juan always
came back to Sonora as means of renewal. He had explained that a nagual,
being a leader who has tremendous responsibilities, has to have a physical
point of reference, a place where an amenable confluence of energies occurs.
The Sonoran desert was such a place for him.
On entering into heightened awareness, I had noticed that there was
another person hiding in the semidarkness inside the house. I asked don Juan
if Genaro was with him. He replied that he was alone, that what I had
noticed was one of his allies, the one that guarded the house.
Don Juan then made a strange gesture. He contorted his face as if he
were surprised or terrified. And instantly the frightening shape of a
strange man appeared at the door of the room where we were. The presence of
the strange man scared me so much that I actually felt dizzy. And before I
could recuperate from my fright, the man lurched at me with a chilling
ferocity. As he grabbed my forearms, I felt ajolt of something quite like a
discharge of an electric current.
I was speechless, caught in a terror I could not dispel. Don Juan was
smiling at me. I mumbled and groaned, trying to voice a plea for help, while
I felt an even greater jolt.
The man tightened his grip and tried to throw me backward on the
ground. Don Juan, with no hurry in his voice, urged me to pull myself
together and not fight my fear, but roll with it. "Be afraid without being
terrified," he said. Don Juan came to my side and, without intervening in my
struggle, whispered in my ear that I should put all my concentration on the
midpoint of my body.
Over the years, he had insisted that I measure my body to the hundredth
of an inch and establish its exact midpoint, lengthwise as well as in width.
He had always said that such a point is a true center of energy in all of
us.
As soon as I had focused my attention on that midpoint, the man let go
of me. At that instant I became aware that what I had thought was a human
being was something that only looked like one. The moment it lost its human
shape to me, the ally became an amorphous blob of opaque light. It moved
away. I went after it, moved by a great force that made me follow that
opaque light.
Don Juan stopped me. He gently walked me to the porch of his house and
made me sit down on a sturdy crate he used as a bench.
I was terribly disturbed by the experience, but even more disturbed by
the fact that my paralyzing fear had disappeared so fast and so completely.
I commented on my abrupt change of mood. Don Juan said that there was
nothing strange about my volatile change, and that fear did not exist as
soon as the glow of awareness moved beyond a certain threshold inside man's
cocoon.
He then began his explanation. He briefly outlined the truths about
awareness he had discussed: that there is no objective world, but only a
universe of energy fields which seers call the Eagle's emanations. That
human beings are made of the Eagle's emanations and are in essence bubbles
of luminescent energy; each of us is wrapped in a cocoon that encloses a
small portion of these emanations. That awareness is achieved by the
constant pressure that the emanations outside our cocoons, which are called
emanations at large, exert on those inside our cocoons. That awareness gives
rise to perception, which happens when the emanations inside our cocoons
align themselves with the corresponding emanations at large.
"The next truth is that perception takes place," he went on, "because
there is in each of us an agent called the assemblage point that selects
internal and external emanations for alignment. The particular alignment
that we perceive as the world is the product of the specific spot where our
assemblage point is located on our cocoon."
He repeated this several times, allowing me time to grasp it. Then he
said that in order to corroborate the truths about awareness, I needed
energy.
"I've mentioned to you," he continued, "that dealing with petty tyrants
helps seers accomplish a sophisticated maneuver: that maneuver is to move
their assemblage points."
He said that for me to have perceived an ally meant that I had moved my
assemblage point away from its customary position. In other words, my glow
of awareness had moved beyond a certain threshold, also erasing my fear. And
all this had happened because I had enough surplus energy.
Later that night, after we had returned from a trip into the
surrounding mountains, which had been part of his teachings for the right
side, don Juan had me shift again into heightened awareness and then
continued his explanation. He told me that in order to discuss the nature of
the assemblage point, he had to start with a discussion of the first
attention.
He said that the new seers looked into the unnoticed ways in which the
first attention functions, and as they tried to explain them to others, they
devised an order for the truths about awareness. He assured me that not
every seer is given to explaining. For instance, his benefactor, the nagual
Julian, could not have cared less about explanations. But the nagual
Julian's benefactor, the nagual Elias, whom don Juan was fortunate enough to
meet, did care. Between the nagual Elias's detailed, lengthy explanations,
the nagual Julian's scanty ones, and his own personal seeing, don Juan came
to understand and to corroborate those truths.
Don Juan explained that in order for our first attention to bring into
focus the world that we perceive, it has to emphasize certain emanations
selected from the narrow band of emanations where man's awareness is
located. The discarded emanations are still within our reach but remain
dormant, unknown to us for the duration of our lives.
The new seers call the emphasized emanations the right side, normal
awareness, the tonal, this world, the known, the first attention. The
average man calls it reality, rationality, common sense.
The emphasized emanations compose a large portion of man's band of
awareness, but a very small piece of the total spectrum of emanations
present inside the cocoon of man. The disregarded emanations within man's
band are thought of as a sort of preamble to the unknown, the unknown proper
consisting of the bulk of emanations which are not part of the human band
and which are never emphasized. Seers call them the left-side awareness, the
nagual, the other world, the unknown, the second attention.
"This process of emphasizing certain emanations," don Juan went on,
"was discovered and practiced by the old seers. They realized that a nagual
man or a nagual woman, by the fact that they have extra strength, can push
the emphasis away from the usual emanations and make it shift to neighboring
ones. That push is known as the nagual's blow."
Don Juan said that the shift was utilized by the old seers in practical
ways to keep their apprentices in bondage. With that blow they made their
apprentices enter into a state of heightened, keenest, most impressionable
awareness; while they were helplessly pliable, the old seers taught them
aberrant techniques that made the apprentices into sinister men, just like
their teachers.
The new seers employ the same technique, but instead of using it for
sordid purposes, they use it to guide their apprentices to learn about man's
possibilities.
Don Juan explained that the nagual's blow has to be delivered on a
precise spot, on the assemblage point, which varies minutely from person to
person. Also, the blow has to be delivered by a nagual who sees. He assured
me that it is equally useless to have the strength of a nagual and not see,
as it is to see and not have the strength of a nagual, in either case the
results are just blows. A seer could strike on the precise spot over and
over without the strength to move awareness. and a non-seeing nagual would
not be able to strike the precise spot.
He also said that the old seers discovered that the assemblage point is
not in the physical body, but in the luminous shell, in the cocoon itself.
The nagual identifies that spot by its intense luminosity and pushes it,
rather than striking it. The force of the push creates a dent in the cocoon
and it is felt like a blow to the right shoulder blade, a blow that knocks
all the air out of the lungs.
"Are there different types of dents?" I asked.
"There are only two types," he responded. "One is a concavity and the
other is a crevice; each has a distinct effect. The concavity is a temporary
feature and produces a temporary shift-- but the crevice is a profound and
permanent feature of the cocoon and produces a permanent shift."
He explained that usually a luminous cocoon hardened by self-reflection
is not affected at all by the nagual's blow. Sometimes, however, the cocoon
of man is very pliable and the smallest force creates a bowl-like dent
ranging in size from a small depression to one that is a third the size of
the total cocoon; or it creates a crevice that may run across the width of
the egglike shell, or along its length, making the cocoon look as if it has
curled in on itself.
Some luminous shells, after being dented, go back to their original
shape instantly. Others remain dented for hours or even days at a time, but
they revert back by themselves. Still others get a firm, impervious dent
that requires another blow from the nagual on a bordering area to restore
the original shape of the luminous cocoon. And a few never lose their
indentation once they get it. No matter how many blows they get from a
nagual they never revert back to their egglike shapes.
Don Juan further said that the dent acts on the first attention
bydisplacing the glow of awareness. The dent presses the emanations inside
the luminous shell, and the seers witness how the first attention shifts its
emphasis under the force of that pressure. The dent, by displacing the
Eagle's emanations inside the cocoon, makes the glow of awareness fall on
other emanations from areas that are ordinarily inaccessible to the first
attention.
I asked him if the glow of awareness is seen only on the surface of the
luminous cocoon. He did not answer me right away. He seemed to immerse
himself in thought. After perhaps ten minutes he answered my question; he
said that normally the glow of awareness is seen on the surface of the
cocoon of all sentient beings. After man develops attention, however, the
glow of awareness acquires depth. In other words, it is transmitted from the
surface of the cocoon to quite a number of emanations inside the cocoon.
"The old seers knew what they were doing when they handled awareness,"
he went on. "They realized that by creating a dent in the cocoon of man,
they could force the glow of awareness, since it is already glowing on the
emanations inside the cocoon, to spread to other neighboring ones."
'You make it all sound as if it's a physical affair," I said. "How can
dents be made in something that is just aglow?"
"In some inexplicable way, it is a matter of a glow that creates a dent
in another glow," he replied. "Your flaw is to remain glued to the inventory
of reason. Reason doesn't deal with man as energy. Reason deals with
instruments that create energy, but it has never seriously occurred to
reason that we are better than instruments: we are organisms that create
energy. We are a bubble of energy. It isn't farfetched, then, that a bubble
of energy would make a dent in another bubble of energy."
He said that the glow of awareness created by the dent should
rightfully be called temporary heightened attention, because it emphasizes
emanations that are so proximal to the habitual ones that the change is
minimal, yet the shift produces a greater capacity to understand and to
concentrate and, above all, a greater capacity to forget. Seers knew exactly
how to use this upshift in the scale of quality. They saw that only the
emanations surrounding those we use daily suddenly become bright after the
nagual's blow. The more distant ones remain unmoved, which meant to them
that while being in a state of heightened attention, human beings could work
as if they were in the world of everyday life. The need of a nagual man and
a nagual woman became paramount to them, because that state lasts only for
as long as the depression remains, after which the experiences are
immediately forgotten.
"Why does one have to forget?" I asked.
"Because the emanations that account for greater clarity cease to be
emphasized once warriors are out of heightened awareness," he replied.
"Without that emphasis whatever they experience or witness vanishes."
Don Juan said that one of the tasks the new seers had devised for their
students was to force them to remember, that is, to reemphasize by
themselves, at a later time, those emanations used during states of
heightened awareness.
He reminded me that Genaro was always recommending to me that I learn
to write with the tip of my finger instead of a pencil so as not to
accumulate notes. Don Juan said that what Genaro had actually meant was that
while I was in states of heightened awareness I should utilize some unused
emanations for storage of dialogue and experience, and someday recall it all
by reemphasizing the emanations that were used.
He went on to explain that a state of heightened awareness is seen not
only as a glow that goes deeper inside the egglike shape of human beings,
but also as a more intense glow on the surface of the cocoon. Yet it is
nothing in comparison to the glow produced by a state of total awareness,
which is seen as a burst of incandescence in the entire luminous egg. It is
an explosion of light of such a magnitude that the boundaries of the shell
are diffused and the inside emanations extend themselves beyond anything
imaginable.
"Are those special cases, don Juan?"
"Certainly. They happen only to seers. No other men or any other living
creatures brighten up like that. Seers who deliberately attain total
awareness are a sight to behold. That is the moment when they burn from
within. The fire from within consumes them. And in full awareness they fuse
themselves to the emanations at large, and glide into eternity."
After a few days in Sonora I drove don Juan back to the town in the
southern part of Mexico where he and his party of warriors lived.
The next day was hot and hazy. I felt lazy and somehow annoyed. In
midafternoon, there was a most unpleasant quietude in that town. Don Juan
and I were sitting on the comfortable chairs in the big room. I told him
that life in rural Mexico was not my cup of tea. I disliked the feeling I
had that the silence of that town was forced. The only noise I ever heard
was the sound of children's voices yelling in the distance. I was never able
to find out whether they were playing or yelling in pain.
"When you're here, you're always in a state of heightened awareness,"
don Juan said. "That makes a great difference. But no matter what, you
should be getting used to living in a town like this. Someday you will live
in one."
"Why should I have to live in a town like this, don Juan?"
"I've explained to you that the new seers aim to be free. And freedom
has the most devastating implications. Among them is the implication that
warriors must purposely seek change. Your predilection is to live the way
you do. You stimulate your reason by running through your inventory and
pitting it against your friends' inventories. Those maneuvers leave you very
little time to examine yourself and your fate. You will have to give up all
that. Likewise, if all you knew were the dead calm of this town, you'd have
to seek, sooner or later, the other side of the coin."
"Is that what you're doing here, don Juan?"
"Our case is a little bit different, because we are at the end of our
trail. We are not seeking anything. What all of us do here is something
comprehensible only to a warrior. We go from day to day doing nothing. We
are waiting. I will not tire of repeating this: we know that we are waiting
and we know what we are waiting for. We are waiting for freedom!
"And now that you know that," he added with a grin, "let's get back to
our discussion of awareness."
Usually, when we were in that room we were never interrupted by anyone
and don Juan would always decide on the length of our discussions. But this
time there was a polite knock on the door and Genaro walked in and sat down.
I had not seen Genaro since the day after we had run out of his house in a
great hurry. I embraced him.
"Genaro has something to tell you," don Juan said. "I've told you that
he is the master of awareness. Now I can tell you what all that means. He
can make the assemblage point move deeper into the luminous egg after that
point has been jolted out of its position by the nagual's blow."
He explained that Genaro had pushed my assemblage point countless times
after I had attained heightened awareness. The day we had gone to the
gigantic flat rock to talk, Genaro had made my assemblage point move
dramatically into the left side-- so dramatically, in fact, that it had been
a bit dangerous.
Don Juan stopped talking and seemed to be ready to give Genaro the
spotlight. He nodded as if to signal Genaro to say something. Genaro stood
up and came to my side.
"Flame is very important," he said softly. "Do you remember that day