when I made you look at the reflection of the sunlight on a piece of quartz,
when we were sitting on that big flat rock?"
When Genaro mentioned it I remembered. On that day just after don Juan
had stopped talking, Genaro had pointed to the refraction of light as it
went through a piece of polished quartz that he had taken out of his pocket
and placed on the flat rock. The shine of the quartz had immediately caught
my attention. The next thing I knew, I was crouching on the flat rock as don
Juan stood by with a worried look on his face.
I was about to tell Genaro what I had remembered when he began to talk.
He put his mouth to my ear and pointed to one of the two gasoline lamps in
the room.
"Look at the flame," he said. "There is no heat in it. It's pure flame.
Pure flame can take you to the depths of the unknown."
As he talked, I began to feel a strange pressure; it was a physical
heaviness. My ears were buzzing; my eyes teared to the point that I could
hardly make out the shape of the furniture. My vision seemed to be totally
out of focus. Although my eyes were open, I could not see the intense light
of the gasoline lamps. Everything around me was dark. There were streaks of
chartreuse phosphorescence that illuminated dark, moving clouds. Then, as
abruptly as it had faded away, my eyesight returned.
I could not make out where I was. I seemed to be floating like a
balloon. I was alone. I had a pang of terror, and my reason rushed in to
construct an explanation that made sense to me at that moment: Genaro had
hypnotized me, using the flame of the gasoline lamp. I felt almost
satisfied. I quietly floated, trying not to worry; I thought that a way to
avoid worrying was to concentrate on the stages that I would have to go
through to wake up.
The first thing I noticed was that I was not myself. I could not really
look at anything because I had nothing to look with. When I tried to examine
my body I realized that I could only be aware and yet it was as if I were
looking down into infinite space. There were portentous clouds of brilliant
light and masses of blackness; both were in motion. I clearly saw a ripple
of amber glow that was coming at me, like an enormous, slow ocean wave. I
knew then that I was like a buoy floating in space and that the wave was
going to overtake me and carry me. I accepted it as unavoidable. But just
before it hit me something thoroughly unexpected happened-- a wind blew me
out of the wave's path.
The force of that wind carried me with tremendous speed. I went through
an immense tunnel of intense colored lights. My vision blurred completely
and then I felt that I was waking up, that I had been having a dream, a
hypnotic dream brought about by Genaro, in the next instant I was back in
the room with don Juan and Genaro.
I slept most of the following day. In the late afternoon, don Juan and
I again sat down to talk. Genaro had been with me earlier but had refused to
comment on my experience.
"Genaro again pushed your assemblage point last night," don Juan said.
"But perhaps the shove was too forceful."
I eagerly told don Juan the content of my vision. He smiled, obviously
bored.
"Your assemblage point moved away from its normal position," he said.
"And that made you perceive emanations that are not ordinarily perceived.
Sounds like nothing, doesn't it? And yet it is a supreme accomplishment that
the new seers strive to elucidate."
He explained that human beings repeatedly choose the same emanations
for perceiving because of two reasons. First, and most important, because we
have been taught that those emanations are perceivable, and second because
our assemblage points select and prepare those emanations for being used.
"Every living being has an assemblage point," he went on, "which
selects emanations for emphasis. Seers can see whether sentient beings share
the same view of the world, by seeing if the emanations their assemblage
points have selected are the same."
He affirmed that one of the most important breakthroughs for the new
seers was to find that the spot where that point is located on the cocoon of
all living creatures is not a permanent feature, but is established on that
specific spot by habit. Hence the tremendous stress the new seers put on new
actions, on new practicalities. They want desperately to arrive at new
usages, new habits.
"The nagual's blow is of great importance," he went on, "because it
makes that point move. It alters its location. Sometimes it even creates a
permanent crevice there. The assemblage point is totally dislodged, and
awareness changes dramatically. But what is a matter of even greater
importance is the proper understanding of the truths about awareness in
order to realize that that point can be moved from within. The unfortunate
truth is that human beings always lose by default. They simply don't know
about their possibilities."
"How can one accomplish that change from within?" I asked.
"The new seers say that realization is the technique," he said. "They
say that, first of all, one must become aware that the world we perceive is
the result of our assemblage points' being located on a specific spot on the
cocoon. Once that is understood, the assemblage point can move almost at
will, as a consequence of new habits."
I did not quite understand what he meant by habits. I asked him to
clarify his point.
"The assemblage point of man appears around a definite area of the
cocoon, because the Eagle commands it," he said. "But the precise spot is
determined by habit, by repetitious acts. First we learn that it can be
placed there and then we ourselves command it to be there. Our command
becomes the Eagle's command and that point is fixated at that spot. Consider
this very carefully; our command becomes the Eagle's command. The old seers
paid dearly for that finding. We'll come back to that later on."
He stated once again that the old seers had concentrated exclusively on
developing thousands of the most complex techniques of sorcery. He added
that what they never realized was that their intricate devices, as bizarre
as they were, had no other value than being the means to break the fixation
of their assemblage points and make them move.
I asked him to explain what he had said.
"I've mentioned to you that sorcery is something like entering a
dead-end street," he replied. "What I meant was that sorcery practices have
no intrinsic value. Their worth is indirect, for their real function is to
make the assemblage point shift by making the first attention release its
control on that point.
"The new seers realized the true role those sorcery practices played
and decided to go directly into the process of making their assemblage
points shift, avoiding all the other nonsense of rituals and incantations.
Yet rituals and incantations are indeed necessary at one time in every
warrior's life. I personally have initiated you in all kinds of sorcery
procedures, but only for purposes of luring your first attention away from
the power of self-absorption, which keeps your assemblage point rigidly
fixed."
He added that the obsessive entanglement of the first attention in
self-absorption or reason is a powerful binding force, and that ritual
behavior, because it is repetitive, forces the first attention to free some
energy from watching the inventory, as a consequence of which the assemblage
point loses its rigidity.
"What happens to the persons whose assemblage points lose rigidity?" I
asked.
"If they're not warriors, they think they're losing their minds," he
said, smiling. "Just as you thought you were going crazy at one time. If
they're warriors, they know they've gone crazy, but they patiently wait. You
see, to be healthy and sane means that the assemblage point is immovable.
When it shifts, it literally means that one is deranged."
He said that two options are opened to warriors whose assemblage points
have shifted. One is to acknowledge being ill and to behave in deranged
ways, reacting emotionally to the strange worlds that their shifts force
them to witness; the other is to remain impassive, untouched, knowing that
the assemblage point always returns to its original position.
"What if the assemblage point doesn't return to its original position?"
I asked.
"Then those people are lost," he said. "They are either incurably
crazy, because their assemblage points could never assemble the world as we
know it, or they are peerless seers who have begun their movement toward the
unknown."
"What determines whether it is one or the other?"
"Energy! Impeccability! Impeccable warriors don't lose their marbles.
They remain untouched. I've said to you many times that impeccable warriors
may see horrifying worlds and yet the next moment they are telling a joke,
laughing with their friends or with strangers."
I said to him then what I had told him many times before, that what
made me think I was ill was a series of disruptive sensorial experiences
that I had had as aftereffects of ingesting hallucinogenic plants. I went
through states of total space and time discordance, very annoying lapses of
mental concentration, actual visions or hallucinations of places and people
I would be staring at as if they really existed. I could not help thinking
that I was losing my mind.
"By all ordinary measures, you were indeed losing your mind," he said,
"but in the seers' view, if you had lost it, you wouldn't have lost much.
The mind, for a seer, is nothing but the self-reflection of the inventory of
man. If you lose that self-reflection, but don't lose your underpinnings,
you actually live an infinitely stronger life than if you had kept it."
He remarked that my flaw was my emotional reaction, which prevented me
from realizing that the oddity of my sensorial experiences was determined by
the depth to which my assemblage point had moved into man's band of
emanations.
I told him that I couldn't understand what he was explaining because
the configuration that he had called man's band of emanations was something
incomprehensible to me. I had pictured it to be like a ribbon placed on the
surface of a ball.
He said that calling it a band was misleading, and that he was going to
use an analogy to illustrate what he meant. He explained that the luminous
shape of man is like a ball of jack cheese with a thick disk of darker
cheese injected into it. He looked at me and chuckled. He knew that I did
not like cheese.
He made a diagram on a small blackboard. He drew an egglike shape and
divided it in four longitudinal sections, saying that he would immediately
erase the division lines because he had drawn them only to give me an idea
where the band was located in the cocoon of man. He then drew a thick band
at the line between the first and second sections and erased the division
lines. He explained that the band was like a disk of cheddar cheese that had
been inserted into the ball of jack cheese.
"Now if that ball of jack cheese were transparent," he went on, "you
would have the perfect replica of man's cocoon. The cheddar cheese goes all
the way inside the ball of jack cheese. It's a disk that goes from the
surface on one side to the surface on the other side.
"The assemblage point of man is located high up, three-fourths of the
way toward the top of the egg on the surface of the cocoon. When a nagual
presses on that point of intense luminosity, the point moves into the disk
of the cheddar cheese. Heightened awareness comes about when the intense
glow of the assemblage point lights up dormant emanations way inside the
disk of cheddar cheese. To see the glow of the assemblage point moving
inside that disk gives the feeling that it is shifting toward the left on
the surface of the cocoon."
He repeated his analogy three or four times, but I did not understand
it and he had to explain it further. He said that the transparency of the
luminous egg creates the impression of a movement toward the left, when in
fact every movement of the assemblage point is in depth, into the center of
the luminous egg along the thickness of man's band.
I remarked that what he was saying made it sound as if seers would be
using their eyes when they see the assemblage point move.
"Man is not the unknowable," he said. "Man's luminosity can be seen
almost as if one were using the eyes alone."
He further explained that the old seers had seen the movement of the
assemblage point but it never occurred to them that it was a movement in
depth; instead they followed their seeing and coined the phrase "shift to
the left," which the new seers retained although they knew that it was
erroneous to call it a shift to the left.
He also said that in the course of my activity with him he had made my
assemblage point move countless times, as was the case at that very moment.
Since the shift of the assemblage point was always in depth, I had never
lost my sense of identity, in spite of the fact that I was always using
emanations I had never used before.
"When the nagual pushes that point," he went on, "the point ends up any
which way along man's band, but it absolutely doesn't matter where, because
wherever it ends up is always virgin ground.
"The grand test that the new seers developed for their
warrior-apprentices is to retrace the journey that their assemblage points
took under the influence of the nagual. This retracing, when it is
completed, is called regaining the totality of oneself."
He went on to say that the contention of the new seers is that in the
course of our growth, once the glow of awareness focuses on man's band of
emanations and selects some of them for emphasis, it enters into a vicious
circle. The more it emphasizes certain emanations, the more stable the
assemblage point gets to be. This is equivalent to saying that our command
becomes the Eagle's command. It goes without saying that when our awareness
develops into first attention the command is so strong that to break that
circle and make the assemblage point shift is a genuine triumph.
Don Juan said that the assemblage point is also responsible for making
the first attention perceive in terms of clusters. An example of a cluster
of emanations that receive emphasis together is the human body as we
perceive it. Another part of our total being, our luminous cocoon, never
receives emphasis and is relegated to oblivion; for the effect of the
assemblage point is not only to make us perceive clusters of emanations, but
also to make us disregard emanations.
When I pressed hard for an explanation of clustering he replied that
the assemblage point radiates a glow that groups together bundles of encased
emanations. These bundles then become aligned, as bundles, with the
emanations at large. Clustering is carried out even when seers deal with the
emanations that are never used. Whenever they are emphasized, we perceive
them just as we perceive the clusters of the first attention.
"One of the greatest moments the new seers had," he continued, "was
when they found out that the unknown is merely the emanations discarded by
the first attention, it's a huge affair, but an affair, mind you, where
clustering can be done. The unknowable, on the other hand, is an eternity
where our assemblage point has no way of clustering anything."
He explained that the assemblage point is like a luminous magnet that
picks emanations and groups them together wherever it moves within the
bounds of man's band of emanations. This discovery was the glory of the new
seers, for it put the unknown in a new light. The new seers noticed that
some of the obsessive visions of seers, the ones that were almost impossible
to conceive, coincided with a shift of the assemblage point to the region of
man's band which is diametrically opposed to where it is ordinarily located.
"Those were visions of the dark side of man," he asserted.
"Why do you call it the dark side of man?" I asked.
"Because it is somber and foreboding," he said. "It's not only the
unknown, but the who-cares-toknow-it."
"How about the emanations that are inside the cocoon but out of the
bounds of man's band?" I asked. "Can they be perceived?"
"Yes, but in really indescribable ways," he said. "They're not the
human unknown, as is the case with the unused emanations in the band of man,
but the nearly immeasurable unknown where human traits do not figure at all.
It is really an area of such an overpowering vastness that the best of seers
would be hard put to describe it."
I insisted once more that it seemed to me that the mystery is obviously
within us.
"The mystery is outside us," he said, "Inside us we have only
emanations trying to break the cocoon. And this fact aberrates us, one way
or another, whether we're average men or warriors. Only the new seers get
around this. They struggle to see. And by means of the shifts of their
assemblage points, they get to realize that the mystery is perceiving. Not
so much what we perceive, but what makes us perceive.
"I've mentioned to you that the new seers believe that our senses are
capable of detecting anything. They believe this because they see that the
position of the assemblage point is what dictates what our senses perceive.
"If the assemblage point aligns emanations inside the cocoon in a
position different from its normal one the human senses perceive in
inconceivable ways."
8 The Position of the Assemblage Point
The next time don Juan resumed his explanation of the mastery of
awareness we were again in his house in southern Mexico. That house was
actually owned by all the members of the nagual's party, but Silvio Manuel
officiated as the owner and everyone openly referred to it as Silvio
Manuel's house, although I, for some inexplicable reason, had gotten used to
calling it don Juan's house.
Don Juan, Genaro, and I had returned to the house from a trip to the
mountains. That day, as we relaxed after the long drive and ate a late
lunch, I asked don Juan the reason for the curious deception. He assured me
that no deception was involved, and that to call it Silvio Manuel's house
was an exercise in the art of stalking to be performed by all the members of
the nagual's party under any circumstances, even in the privacy of their own
thoughts. For any of them to insist on thinking about the house in any other
terms was tantamount to denying their links to the nagual's party.
I protested that he had never told me that. I did not want to cause any
dissension with my habits.
"Don't worry about it," he said, smiling at me and patting my back.
"You can call this house whatever you want. The nagual has authority. The
nagual woman, for instance, calls it the house of shadows."
Our conversation was interrupted, and I did not see him until he sent
for me to come to the back patio a couple of hours later.
He and Genaro were strolling around at the far end of the corridor; I
could see them moving their hands in what seemed to be an animated
conversation.
It was a clear sunny day. The midafternoon sun shone directly on some
of the flower pots that hung from the eaves of the roof around the corridor
and projected their shadows on the north and east walls of the patio. The
combination of intense yellow sunlight, the massive black shadows of the
pots, and the lovely, delicate, bare shadows of the frail flowering plants
that grew in them was stunning. Someone with a keen eye for balance and
order had pruned those plants to create such an exquisite effect.
"The nagual woman has done that," don Juan said as if reading my
thoughts. "She gazes at these shadows in the afternoons."
The thought of her gazing at shadows in the afternoons had a swift and
devastating effect on me. The intense yellow light of that hour, the
quietness of that town, and the affection that I felt for the nagual woman
conjured up for me in one instant all the solitude of the warriors' endless
path.
Don Juan had defined the scope of that path when he said to me that the
new seers are the warriors of total freedom, that their only search is the
ultimate liberation that comes when they attain total awareness. I
understood with unimpaired clarity, as I looked at those haunting shadows on
the wall, what it meant to the nagual woman when she said that to read poems
out loud was the only release that her spirit had.
I remember that the day before she had read something to me, there in
the patio, but I had not quite understood her urgency, her longing. It was a
poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, "Hora Inmensa," which she told me synthesized
for her the solitude of warriors who live to escape to total freedom.
Only a bell and a bird break the stillness. . . It seems that the two
talk with the setting sun. Golden colored silence, the afternoon is made of
crystals. A roving purity sways the cool trees, and beyond all that, a
transparent river dreams that trampling over pearls it breaks loose and
flows into infinity.
Don Juan and Genaro came to my side and looked at me with an expression
of surprise.
"What are we really doing, don Juan?" I asked. "Is it possible that
warriors are only preparing themselves for death?"
"No way," he said, gently patting my shoulder. "Warriors prepare
themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only when there is
no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are nothing do they
become everything."
We were quiet for a moment. Then don Juan asked me if I was in the
throes of self-pity. I did not answer because I was not sure.
"You're not sorry that you're here, are you?" don Juan asked with a
faint smile.
"He's certainly not," Genaro assured him. Then he seemed to have a
moment of doubt. He scratched his head, then looked at me and arched his
brows. "Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"
"He's certainly not," don Juan assured Genaro this time. He went
through the same gestures of scratching his head and arching his brows.
"Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"
"He's certainly not!" Genaro boomed, and both of them exploded into
uncontrolled laughter.
When they had calmed down, don Juan said that self-importance is the
motivating force for every attack of melancholy. He added that warriors are
entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only
to make them laugh.
"Genaro has something to show you which is more exciting than all the
self-pity you can muster up," don Juan continued, "it has to do with the
position of the assemblage point."
Genaro immediately began to walk around the corridor, arching his back
and lifting his thighs to his chest.
"The nagual Julian showed him how to walk that way," don Juan said in a
whisper, "it's called the gait of power. Genaro knows several gaits of
power. Watch him fixedly."
Genaro's movements were indeed mesmeric. I found myself following his
gait, first with my eyes and then irresistibly with my feet. I imitated his
gait. We walked once around the patio and stopped.
While walking, I had noticed the extraordinary lucidity that each step
brought to me. When we stopped, I was in a state of keen alertness. I could
hear every sound; I could detect every change in the light or in the shadows
around me. I became enthralled with a feeling of urgency, of impending
action. I felt extraordinarily aggressive, muscular, daring. At that moment
I saw an enormous span of flat land in front of me; right behind me I saw a
forest. Huge trees were lined up as straight as a wall. The forest was dark
and green; the plain was sunny and yellow.
My breathing was deep and strangely accelerated, but not in an abnormal
way. Yet it was the rhythm of my breathing that was forcing me to trot on
the spot. I wanted to take off running, or rather my body wanted to, but
just as I was taking off something stopped me.
Don Juan and Genaro were suddenly by my side. We walked down the
corridor with Genaro to my right. He nudged me with his shoulder. I felt the
weight of his body on me. He gently shoved me to the left and we angled off
straight for the east wall of the patio. For a moment I had the weird
impression that we were going to go through the wall, and I even braced
myself for the impact, but we stopped right in front of the wall.
While my face was still against the wall, they both examined me with
great care. I knew what they were searching for; they wanted to make sure
that I had shifted my assemblage point. I knew that I had because my mood
had changed. They obviously knew it too. They gently took me by the arms and
walked in silence with me to the other side of the corridor, to a dark
passageway, a narrow hall that connected the patio with the rest of the
house. We stopped there. Don Juan and Genaro moved a few feet away from me.
I was left facing the side of the house that was in dark shadows. I
looked into an empty dark room. I had a sense of physical weariness. I felt
languid, indifferent, and yet I experienced a sense of spiritual strength. I
realized then that I had lost something. There was no strength in my body. I
could hardly stand. My legs finally gave in and I sat down and then I lay
down on my side. While I lay there, I had the most wonderful, fulfilling
thoughts of love for God, for goodness.
Then all at once I was in front of the main altar of a church. The
bas-reliefs covered with gold leaf glittered with the light of thousands of
candles. I saw the dark figures of men and women carrying an enormous
crucifix mounted on a huge palanquin. I moved out of their way and stepped
outside the church. I saw a multitude of people, a sea of candles, coming
toward me. I felt elated. I ran to join them. I was moved by profound love.
I wanted to be with them, to pray to the Lord. I was only a few feet away
from the mass of people when something swished me away.
The next instant, I was with don Juan and Genaro. They flanked me as we
walked lazily around the patio.
While we were having lunch the next day, don Juan said that Genaro had
pushed my assemblage point with his gait of power, and that he had been able
to do that because I had been in a state of inner silence. He explained that
the articulation point of everything seers do is something he had talked
about since the day we met: stopping the internal dialogue. He stressed over
and over that the internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point fixed
to its original position.
"Once silence is attained, everything is possible," he said.
I told him I was very conscious of the fact that in general I had
stopped talking to myself, but did not know how I had done it. If asked to
explain the procedure I would not know what to say.
"The explanation is simplicity itself," he said. "You willed it, and
thus you set a new intent, a new command. Then your command became the
Eagle's command.
"This is one of the most extraordinary things that the new seers found
out: that our command can become the Eagle's command. The internal dialogue
stops in the same way it begins: by an act of will. After all, we are forced
to start talking to ourselves by those who teach us. As they teach us, they
engage their will
and we engage ours, both without knowing it. As we learn to talk to
ourselves, we learn to handle will. We will ourselves to talk to ourselves.
The way to stop talking to ourselves is to use exactly the same method: we
must will it, we must inlend it."
We were silent for a few minutes. I asked him to whom he was referring
when he said that we had teachers who taught us to talk to ourselves.
"I was talking about what happens to human beings when they are
infants," he replied, "a time when they are taught by everyone around them
to repeat an endless dialogue about themselves. The dialogue becomes
internalized, and that force alone keeps the assemblage point fixed.
"The new seers say that infants have hundreds of teachers who teach
them exactly where to place their assemblage point."
He said that seers see that infants have no fixed assemblage point at
first. Their encased emanations are in a state of great turmoil, and their
assemblage points shift everywhere in the band of man, giving children a
great capacity to focus on emanations that later will be thoroughly
disregarded. Then as they grow, the older humans around them, through their
considerable power over them, force the children's assemblage points to
become more steady by means of an increasingly complex internal dialogue.
The internal dialogue is a process that constantly strengthens the position
of the assemblage point, because that position is an arbitrary one and needs
steady reinforcement.
"The fact of the matter is that many children see," he went on. "Most
of those who see are considered to be oddballs and every effort is made to
correct them, to make them solidify the position of their assemblage
points."
"But would it be possible to encourage children to keep their
assemblage points more fluid?" I asked.
"Only if they live among the new seers," he said. "Otherwise they would
get entrapped, as the old seers did, in the intricacies of the silent side
of man. And, believe me, that's worse than being caught in the clutches of
rationality."
Don Juan went on to express his profound admiration for the human
capacity to impart order to the chaos of the Eagle's emanations. He
maintained that every one of us, in his own right, is a masterful magician
and that our magic is to keep our assemblage point unwaveringly fixed.
"The force of the emanations at large," he went on, "makes our
assemblage point select certain emanations and cluster them for alignment
and perception. That's the command of the Eagle, but all the meaning that we
give to what we perceive is our command, our gift of magic."
He said that in the light of what he had explained, what Genaro had
made me do the day before was something extraordinarily complex and yet very
simple. It was complex because it required a tremendous discipline on
everybody's part; it required that the internal dialogue be stopped, that a
state of heightened awareness be reached, and that someone walk away with
one's assemblage point. The explanation behind all these complex procedures
was very simple; the new seers say that since the exact position of the
assemblage point is an arbitrary position chosen for us by our ancestors, it
can move with a relatively small effort; once it moves, it forces new
alignments of emanations, thus new perceptions.
"I used to give you power plants in order to make your assemblage point
move," don Juan continued. "Power plants have that effect; but hunger,
tiredness, fever, and other things like that can have a similar effect. The
flaw of the average man is that he thinks the result of a shift is purely
mental. It isn't, as you yourself can attest."
He explained that my assemblage point had shifted scores of times in
the past, just as it had shifted the day before, and that most of the time
the worlds it had assembled had been so close to the world of everyday life
as to be virtually phantom worlds. He emphatically added that visions of
that kind are automatically rejected by the new seers.
"Those visions are the product of man's inventory," he went on. "They
are of no value for warriors in search of total freedom, because they are
produced by a lateral shift of the assemblage point."
He stopped talking and looked at me. I knew that by "lateral shift" he
had meant a shift of the point from one side to the other along the width of
man's band of emanations instead of a shift in depth. I asked him if I was
right.
"That's exactly what I meant," he said. "On both edges of man's band of
emanations there is a strange storage of refuse, an incalculable pile of
human junk. It's a very morbid, sinister storehouse. It had great value for
the old seers but not for us.
"One of the easiest things one can do is to fall into it. Yesterday
Genaro and I wanted to give you a quick example of that lateral shift; that
was why we walked your assemblage point, but any person can reach that
storehouse by simply stopping his internal dialogue. If the shift is
minimal, the results are explained as fantasies of the mind. If the shift is
considerable, the results are called hallucinations."
I asked him to explain the act of walking the assemblage point. He said
that once warriors have attained inner silence by stopping their internal
dialogue, the sound of the gait of power, more than the sight of it, is what
traps their assemblage points. The rhythm of muffled steps instantly catches
the alignment force of the emanations inside the cocoon, which has been
disconnected by inner silence.
"That force hooks itself immediately to the edges of the band," he went
on. "On the right edge we find endless visions of physical activity,
violence, killing, sensuality. On the left edge we find spirituality,
religion, God. Genaro and I walked your assemblage point to both edges, so
as to give you a complete view of that human junk pile."
Don Juan restated, as if on second thought, that one of the most
mysterious aspects of the seers' knowledge is the incredible effects of
inner silence. He said that once inner silence is attained, the bonds that
tie the assemblage point to the particular spot where it is placed begin to
break and the assemblage point is free to move.
He said that the movement ordinarily is toward the left, that such a
directional preference is a natural reaction of most human beings, but that
there are seers who can direct that movement to positions below the
customary spot where the point is located. The new seers call that shift
"the shift below."
"Seers also suffer accidental shifts below," he went on. "The
assemblage point doesn't remain there long, and that's fortunate, because
that is the place of the beast. To go below is counter to our interest,
although the easiest thing to do."
Don Juan also said that among the many errors of judgment the old seers
had committed, one of the most grievous was moving their assemblage points
to the immeasurable area below, which made them experts at adopting animal
forms. They chose different animals as their point of reference and called
those animals their nagual. They believed that by moving their assemblage
points to specific spots they would acquire the characteristics of the
animal of their choice, its strength or wisdom or cunning or agility or
ferocity.
Don Juan assured me that there are many dreadful examples of such
practices even among the seers of our day. The relative facility with which
the assemblage point of man moves toward any lower position poses a great
temptation to seers, especially to those whose inclination leans toward that
end. It is the duty of a nagual, therefore, to test his warriors.
He told me then that he had put me to the test by moving my assemblage
point to a position below, while I was under the influence of a power plant.
He then guided my assemblage point until I could isolate the crows' band of
emanations, which resulted in my changing into a crow.
I again asked don Juan the question I had asked him dozens of times. I
wanted to know whether I had physically turned into a crow or had merely
thought and felt like one. He explained that a shift of the assemblage point
to the area below always results in a total transformation. He added that if
the assemblage point moves beyond a crucial threshold, the world vanishes;
it ceases to be what it is to us at man's level.
He conceded that my transformation was indeed horrifying by any
standards. My reaction to that experience proved to him that I had no
leanings toward that direction. Had it not been that way, I would have had
to employ enormous energy in order to fight off a tendency to remain in that
area below, which some seers find most comfortable.
He further said that an unwitting downshift occurs periodically to
every seer, but that such a downshift becomes less and less frequent as
their assemblage points move farther toward the left. Every time it occurs,
however, the power of a seer undergoing it diminishes considerably. It is a
drawback that takes time and great effort to correct.
"Those lapses make seers extremely morose and narrow-minded," he
continued, "and in certain cases, extremely rational."
"How can seers avoid those downshifts?" I asked.
"It all depends on the warrior," he said. "Some of them are naturally
inclined to indulge in their quirks-- yourself, for instance. They are the
ones who are hard hit. For those like you, I recommend a twenty-fourhour
vigil of everything they do. Disciplined men or women are less prone to that
kind of shift; for those I would recommend a twenty-three-hour vigil."
He looked at me with shiny eyes and laughed.
"Female seers have downshifts more often than males," he said. "But
they are also capable of bouncing out of that position with no effort at
all. while males linger dangerously in it."
He also said that women seers have an extraordinary capacity to make
their assemblage points hold on to any position in the area below. Men
cannot. Men have sobriety and purpose, but very little talent; that is the
reason why a nagual must have eight women seers in his party. Women give the
impulse to cross the immeasurable vastness of the unknown. Together with
that natural capacity, or as a consequence of it, women have a most fierce
intensity. They can, therefore, reproduce an animal form with flare, ease,
and a matchless ferocity.
"If you think about scary things," he continued, "about something
unnamable lurking in the darkness, you're thinking, without knowing it,
about a woman seer holding a position in the immeasurable area below. True
horror lies right there. If you ever find an aberrant woman seer, run for
the hills!"
I asked him whether other organisms were capable of shifting their
assemblage points.
"Their points can shift," he said, "but the shift is not a voluntary
thing with them."
"Is the assemblage point of other organisms also trained to appear
where it does?" I asked.
"Every newborn organism is trained, one way or another," he replied.
"We may not understand how their training is done-- after all, we don't even
understand how it is done to us-- but seers see that the newborn are coaxed
to do what their kind does. That's exactly what happens to human infants:
seers see their assemblage points shifting every which way and then they see
how the presence of adults fastens each point to one spot. The same happens
to every other organism."
Don Juan seemed to reflect for a moment and then added that there was
indeed one unique effect that man's assemblage point has. He pointed to a
tree outside.
"When we, as serious adult human beings, look at a tree," he said, "our
assemblage points align an infinite number of emanations and achieve a
miracle. Our assemblage points make us perceive a cluster of emanations that
we call tree."
He explained that the assemblage point not only effects the alignment
needed for perception, but also obliterates the alignment of certain
emanations in order to arrive at a greater refinement of perception, a
skimming, a tricky human construct with no parallel.
He said that the new seers had observed that only human beings were
capable of further clustering the clusters of emanations. He used the
Spanish word for skimming, desnate, to describe the act of collecting the
most palatable cream off the top of a container of boiled milk after it
cools. Likewise, in terms of perception, man's assemblage point takes some
part of the emanations already selected for alignment and makes a more
palatable construct with it.
"The skimmings of men," don Juan continued, "are more real than what
other creatures perceive. That is our pitfall. They are so real to us that
we forget we have constructed them by commanding our assemblage points to
appear where they do. We forget they are real to us only because it is our
command to perceive them as real. We have the power to skim the top off the
alignments, but we don't have the power to protect ourselves from our own
commands. That has to be learned. To give our skimmings a free hand, as we
do, is an error of judgment for which we pay as dearly as the old seers paid
for theirs."
9 The Shift Below
Don Juan and Genaro made their yearly trip to the northern part of
Mexico, to the Sonoran desert, to look for medicinal plants. One of the
seers of the nagual's party, Vicente Medrano, the herbalist among them, used
those plants to make medicines.
I had joined don Juan and Genaro in Sonora, at the last stage of their
journey, just in time to drive them south, back to their home.
The day before we started on our drive, don Juan abruptly continued his
explanation of the mastery of awareness. We were resting in the shade of
some tall bushes in the foothills of the mountains. It was late afternoon,
almost dark. Each of us carried a large burlap sack filled with plants. As
soon as we had put them down, Genaro lay down on the ground and fell asleep,
using his folded jacket as a pillow.
Don Juan spoke to me in a low voice, as if he didn't want to wake up
Genaro. He said that by now he had explained most of the truths about
awareness, and that there was only one truth left to discuss. The last
truth, he assured me, was the best of the old seers' findings, although they
never knew that themselves. Its tremendous value was only recognized, ages
later, by the new seers.
"I've explained to you that man has an assemblage point," he went on,
"and that that assemblage point aligns emanations for perception. We've also
discussed that that point moves from its fixed position. Now, the last truth
is that once that assemblage point moves beyond a certain limit, it can
when we were sitting on that big flat rock?"
When Genaro mentioned it I remembered. On that day just after don Juan
had stopped talking, Genaro had pointed to the refraction of light as it
went through a piece of polished quartz that he had taken out of his pocket
and placed on the flat rock. The shine of the quartz had immediately caught
my attention. The next thing I knew, I was crouching on the flat rock as don
Juan stood by with a worried look on his face.
I was about to tell Genaro what I had remembered when he began to talk.
He put his mouth to my ear and pointed to one of the two gasoline lamps in
the room.
"Look at the flame," he said. "There is no heat in it. It's pure flame.
Pure flame can take you to the depths of the unknown."
As he talked, I began to feel a strange pressure; it was a physical
heaviness. My ears were buzzing; my eyes teared to the point that I could
hardly make out the shape of the furniture. My vision seemed to be totally
out of focus. Although my eyes were open, I could not see the intense light
of the gasoline lamps. Everything around me was dark. There were streaks of
chartreuse phosphorescence that illuminated dark, moving clouds. Then, as
abruptly as it had faded away, my eyesight returned.
I could not make out where I was. I seemed to be floating like a
balloon. I was alone. I had a pang of terror, and my reason rushed in to
construct an explanation that made sense to me at that moment: Genaro had
hypnotized me, using the flame of the gasoline lamp. I felt almost
satisfied. I quietly floated, trying not to worry; I thought that a way to
avoid worrying was to concentrate on the stages that I would have to go
through to wake up.
The first thing I noticed was that I was not myself. I could not really
look at anything because I had nothing to look with. When I tried to examine
my body I realized that I could only be aware and yet it was as if I were
looking down into infinite space. There were portentous clouds of brilliant
light and masses of blackness; both were in motion. I clearly saw a ripple
of amber glow that was coming at me, like an enormous, slow ocean wave. I
knew then that I was like a buoy floating in space and that the wave was
going to overtake me and carry me. I accepted it as unavoidable. But just
before it hit me something thoroughly unexpected happened-- a wind blew me
out of the wave's path.
The force of that wind carried me with tremendous speed. I went through
an immense tunnel of intense colored lights. My vision blurred completely
and then I felt that I was waking up, that I had been having a dream, a
hypnotic dream brought about by Genaro, in the next instant I was back in
the room with don Juan and Genaro.
I slept most of the following day. In the late afternoon, don Juan and
I again sat down to talk. Genaro had been with me earlier but had refused to
comment on my experience.
"Genaro again pushed your assemblage point last night," don Juan said.
"But perhaps the shove was too forceful."
I eagerly told don Juan the content of my vision. He smiled, obviously
bored.
"Your assemblage point moved away from its normal position," he said.
"And that made you perceive emanations that are not ordinarily perceived.
Sounds like nothing, doesn't it? And yet it is a supreme accomplishment that
the new seers strive to elucidate."
He explained that human beings repeatedly choose the same emanations
for perceiving because of two reasons. First, and most important, because we
have been taught that those emanations are perceivable, and second because
our assemblage points select and prepare those emanations for being used.
"Every living being has an assemblage point," he went on, "which
selects emanations for emphasis. Seers can see whether sentient beings share
the same view of the world, by seeing if the emanations their assemblage
points have selected are the same."
He affirmed that one of the most important breakthroughs for the new
seers was to find that the spot where that point is located on the cocoon of
all living creatures is not a permanent feature, but is established on that
specific spot by habit. Hence the tremendous stress the new seers put on new
actions, on new practicalities. They want desperately to arrive at new
usages, new habits.
"The nagual's blow is of great importance," he went on, "because it
makes that point move. It alters its location. Sometimes it even creates a
permanent crevice there. The assemblage point is totally dislodged, and
awareness changes dramatically. But what is a matter of even greater
importance is the proper understanding of the truths about awareness in
order to realize that that point can be moved from within. The unfortunate
truth is that human beings always lose by default. They simply don't know
about their possibilities."
"How can one accomplish that change from within?" I asked.
"The new seers say that realization is the technique," he said. "They
say that, first of all, one must become aware that the world we perceive is
the result of our assemblage points' being located on a specific spot on the
cocoon. Once that is understood, the assemblage point can move almost at
will, as a consequence of new habits."
I did not quite understand what he meant by habits. I asked him to
clarify his point.
"The assemblage point of man appears around a definite area of the
cocoon, because the Eagle commands it," he said. "But the precise spot is
determined by habit, by repetitious acts. First we learn that it can be
placed there and then we ourselves command it to be there. Our command
becomes the Eagle's command and that point is fixated at that spot. Consider
this very carefully; our command becomes the Eagle's command. The old seers
paid dearly for that finding. We'll come back to that later on."
He stated once again that the old seers had concentrated exclusively on
developing thousands of the most complex techniques of sorcery. He added
that what they never realized was that their intricate devices, as bizarre
as they were, had no other value than being the means to break the fixation
of their assemblage points and make them move.
I asked him to explain what he had said.
"I've mentioned to you that sorcery is something like entering a
dead-end street," he replied. "What I meant was that sorcery practices have
no intrinsic value. Their worth is indirect, for their real function is to
make the assemblage point shift by making the first attention release its
control on that point.
"The new seers realized the true role those sorcery practices played
and decided to go directly into the process of making their assemblage
points shift, avoiding all the other nonsense of rituals and incantations.
Yet rituals and incantations are indeed necessary at one time in every
warrior's life. I personally have initiated you in all kinds of sorcery
procedures, but only for purposes of luring your first attention away from
the power of self-absorption, which keeps your assemblage point rigidly
fixed."
He added that the obsessive entanglement of the first attention in
self-absorption or reason is a powerful binding force, and that ritual
behavior, because it is repetitive, forces the first attention to free some
energy from watching the inventory, as a consequence of which the assemblage
point loses its rigidity.
"What happens to the persons whose assemblage points lose rigidity?" I
asked.
"If they're not warriors, they think they're losing their minds," he
said, smiling. "Just as you thought you were going crazy at one time. If
they're warriors, they know they've gone crazy, but they patiently wait. You
see, to be healthy and sane means that the assemblage point is immovable.
When it shifts, it literally means that one is deranged."
He said that two options are opened to warriors whose assemblage points
have shifted. One is to acknowledge being ill and to behave in deranged
ways, reacting emotionally to the strange worlds that their shifts force
them to witness; the other is to remain impassive, untouched, knowing that
the assemblage point always returns to its original position.
"What if the assemblage point doesn't return to its original position?"
I asked.
"Then those people are lost," he said. "They are either incurably
crazy, because their assemblage points could never assemble the world as we
know it, or they are peerless seers who have begun their movement toward the
unknown."
"What determines whether it is one or the other?"
"Energy! Impeccability! Impeccable warriors don't lose their marbles.
They remain untouched. I've said to you many times that impeccable warriors
may see horrifying worlds and yet the next moment they are telling a joke,
laughing with their friends or with strangers."
I said to him then what I had told him many times before, that what
made me think I was ill was a series of disruptive sensorial experiences
that I had had as aftereffects of ingesting hallucinogenic plants. I went
through states of total space and time discordance, very annoying lapses of
mental concentration, actual visions or hallucinations of places and people
I would be staring at as if they really existed. I could not help thinking
that I was losing my mind.
"By all ordinary measures, you were indeed losing your mind," he said,
"but in the seers' view, if you had lost it, you wouldn't have lost much.
The mind, for a seer, is nothing but the self-reflection of the inventory of
man. If you lose that self-reflection, but don't lose your underpinnings,
you actually live an infinitely stronger life than if you had kept it."
He remarked that my flaw was my emotional reaction, which prevented me
from realizing that the oddity of my sensorial experiences was determined by
the depth to which my assemblage point had moved into man's band of
emanations.
I told him that I couldn't understand what he was explaining because
the configuration that he had called man's band of emanations was something
incomprehensible to me. I had pictured it to be like a ribbon placed on the
surface of a ball.
He said that calling it a band was misleading, and that he was going to
use an analogy to illustrate what he meant. He explained that the luminous
shape of man is like a ball of jack cheese with a thick disk of darker
cheese injected into it. He looked at me and chuckled. He knew that I did
not like cheese.
He made a diagram on a small blackboard. He drew an egglike shape and
divided it in four longitudinal sections, saying that he would immediately
erase the division lines because he had drawn them only to give me an idea
where the band was located in the cocoon of man. He then drew a thick band
at the line between the first and second sections and erased the division
lines. He explained that the band was like a disk of cheddar cheese that had
been inserted into the ball of jack cheese.
"Now if that ball of jack cheese were transparent," he went on, "you
would have the perfect replica of man's cocoon. The cheddar cheese goes all
the way inside the ball of jack cheese. It's a disk that goes from the
surface on one side to the surface on the other side.
"The assemblage point of man is located high up, three-fourths of the
way toward the top of the egg on the surface of the cocoon. When a nagual
presses on that point of intense luminosity, the point moves into the disk
of the cheddar cheese. Heightened awareness comes about when the intense
glow of the assemblage point lights up dormant emanations way inside the
disk of cheddar cheese. To see the glow of the assemblage point moving
inside that disk gives the feeling that it is shifting toward the left on
the surface of the cocoon."
He repeated his analogy three or four times, but I did not understand
it and he had to explain it further. He said that the transparency of the
luminous egg creates the impression of a movement toward the left, when in
fact every movement of the assemblage point is in depth, into the center of
the luminous egg along the thickness of man's band.
I remarked that what he was saying made it sound as if seers would be
using their eyes when they see the assemblage point move.
"Man is not the unknowable," he said. "Man's luminosity can be seen
almost as if one were using the eyes alone."
He further explained that the old seers had seen the movement of the
assemblage point but it never occurred to them that it was a movement in
depth; instead they followed their seeing and coined the phrase "shift to
the left," which the new seers retained although they knew that it was
erroneous to call it a shift to the left.
He also said that in the course of my activity with him he had made my
assemblage point move countless times, as was the case at that very moment.
Since the shift of the assemblage point was always in depth, I had never
lost my sense of identity, in spite of the fact that I was always using
emanations I had never used before.
"When the nagual pushes that point," he went on, "the point ends up any
which way along man's band, but it absolutely doesn't matter where, because
wherever it ends up is always virgin ground.
"The grand test that the new seers developed for their
warrior-apprentices is to retrace the journey that their assemblage points
took under the influence of the nagual. This retracing, when it is
completed, is called regaining the totality of oneself."
He went on to say that the contention of the new seers is that in the
course of our growth, once the glow of awareness focuses on man's band of
emanations and selects some of them for emphasis, it enters into a vicious
circle. The more it emphasizes certain emanations, the more stable the
assemblage point gets to be. This is equivalent to saying that our command
becomes the Eagle's command. It goes without saying that when our awareness
develops into first attention the command is so strong that to break that
circle and make the assemblage point shift is a genuine triumph.
Don Juan said that the assemblage point is also responsible for making
the first attention perceive in terms of clusters. An example of a cluster
of emanations that receive emphasis together is the human body as we
perceive it. Another part of our total being, our luminous cocoon, never
receives emphasis and is relegated to oblivion; for the effect of the
assemblage point is not only to make us perceive clusters of emanations, but
also to make us disregard emanations.
When I pressed hard for an explanation of clustering he replied that
the assemblage point radiates a glow that groups together bundles of encased
emanations. These bundles then become aligned, as bundles, with the
emanations at large. Clustering is carried out even when seers deal with the
emanations that are never used. Whenever they are emphasized, we perceive
them just as we perceive the clusters of the first attention.
"One of the greatest moments the new seers had," he continued, "was
when they found out that the unknown is merely the emanations discarded by
the first attention, it's a huge affair, but an affair, mind you, where
clustering can be done. The unknowable, on the other hand, is an eternity
where our assemblage point has no way of clustering anything."
He explained that the assemblage point is like a luminous magnet that
picks emanations and groups them together wherever it moves within the
bounds of man's band of emanations. This discovery was the glory of the new
seers, for it put the unknown in a new light. The new seers noticed that
some of the obsessive visions of seers, the ones that were almost impossible
to conceive, coincided with a shift of the assemblage point to the region of
man's band which is diametrically opposed to where it is ordinarily located.
"Those were visions of the dark side of man," he asserted.
"Why do you call it the dark side of man?" I asked.
"Because it is somber and foreboding," he said. "It's not only the
unknown, but the who-cares-toknow-it."
"How about the emanations that are inside the cocoon but out of the
bounds of man's band?" I asked. "Can they be perceived?"
"Yes, but in really indescribable ways," he said. "They're not the
human unknown, as is the case with the unused emanations in the band of man,
but the nearly immeasurable unknown where human traits do not figure at all.
It is really an area of such an overpowering vastness that the best of seers
would be hard put to describe it."
I insisted once more that it seemed to me that the mystery is obviously
within us.
"The mystery is outside us," he said, "Inside us we have only
emanations trying to break the cocoon. And this fact aberrates us, one way
or another, whether we're average men or warriors. Only the new seers get
around this. They struggle to see. And by means of the shifts of their
assemblage points, they get to realize that the mystery is perceiving. Not
so much what we perceive, but what makes us perceive.
"I've mentioned to you that the new seers believe that our senses are
capable of detecting anything. They believe this because they see that the
position of the assemblage point is what dictates what our senses perceive.
"If the assemblage point aligns emanations inside the cocoon in a
position different from its normal one the human senses perceive in
inconceivable ways."
8 The Position of the Assemblage Point
The next time don Juan resumed his explanation of the mastery of
awareness we were again in his house in southern Mexico. That house was
actually owned by all the members of the nagual's party, but Silvio Manuel
officiated as the owner and everyone openly referred to it as Silvio
Manuel's house, although I, for some inexplicable reason, had gotten used to
calling it don Juan's house.
Don Juan, Genaro, and I had returned to the house from a trip to the
mountains. That day, as we relaxed after the long drive and ate a late
lunch, I asked don Juan the reason for the curious deception. He assured me
that no deception was involved, and that to call it Silvio Manuel's house
was an exercise in the art of stalking to be performed by all the members of
the nagual's party under any circumstances, even in the privacy of their own
thoughts. For any of them to insist on thinking about the house in any other
terms was tantamount to denying their links to the nagual's party.
I protested that he had never told me that. I did not want to cause any
dissension with my habits.
"Don't worry about it," he said, smiling at me and patting my back.
"You can call this house whatever you want. The nagual has authority. The
nagual woman, for instance, calls it the house of shadows."
Our conversation was interrupted, and I did not see him until he sent
for me to come to the back patio a couple of hours later.
He and Genaro were strolling around at the far end of the corridor; I
could see them moving their hands in what seemed to be an animated
conversation.
It was a clear sunny day. The midafternoon sun shone directly on some
of the flower pots that hung from the eaves of the roof around the corridor
and projected their shadows on the north and east walls of the patio. The
combination of intense yellow sunlight, the massive black shadows of the
pots, and the lovely, delicate, bare shadows of the frail flowering plants
that grew in them was stunning. Someone with a keen eye for balance and
order had pruned those plants to create such an exquisite effect.
"The nagual woman has done that," don Juan said as if reading my
thoughts. "She gazes at these shadows in the afternoons."
The thought of her gazing at shadows in the afternoons had a swift and
devastating effect on me. The intense yellow light of that hour, the
quietness of that town, and the affection that I felt for the nagual woman
conjured up for me in one instant all the solitude of the warriors' endless
path.
Don Juan had defined the scope of that path when he said to me that the
new seers are the warriors of total freedom, that their only search is the
ultimate liberation that comes when they attain total awareness. I
understood with unimpaired clarity, as I looked at those haunting shadows on
the wall, what it meant to the nagual woman when she said that to read poems
out loud was the only release that her spirit had.
I remember that the day before she had read something to me, there in
the patio, but I had not quite understood her urgency, her longing. It was a
poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, "Hora Inmensa," which she told me synthesized
for her the solitude of warriors who live to escape to total freedom.
Only a bell and a bird break the stillness. . . It seems that the two
talk with the setting sun. Golden colored silence, the afternoon is made of
crystals. A roving purity sways the cool trees, and beyond all that, a
transparent river dreams that trampling over pearls it breaks loose and
flows into infinity.
Don Juan and Genaro came to my side and looked at me with an expression
of surprise.
"What are we really doing, don Juan?" I asked. "Is it possible that
warriors are only preparing themselves for death?"
"No way," he said, gently patting my shoulder. "Warriors prepare
themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only when there is
no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are nothing do they
become everything."
We were quiet for a moment. Then don Juan asked me if I was in the
throes of self-pity. I did not answer because I was not sure.
"You're not sorry that you're here, are you?" don Juan asked with a
faint smile.
"He's certainly not," Genaro assured him. Then he seemed to have a
moment of doubt. He scratched his head, then looked at me and arched his
brows. "Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"
"He's certainly not," don Juan assured Genaro this time. He went
through the same gestures of scratching his head and arching his brows.
"Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"
"He's certainly not!" Genaro boomed, and both of them exploded into
uncontrolled laughter.
When they had calmed down, don Juan said that self-importance is the
motivating force for every attack of melancholy. He added that warriors are
entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only
to make them laugh.
"Genaro has something to show you which is more exciting than all the
self-pity you can muster up," don Juan continued, "it has to do with the
position of the assemblage point."
Genaro immediately began to walk around the corridor, arching his back
and lifting his thighs to his chest.
"The nagual Julian showed him how to walk that way," don Juan said in a
whisper, "it's called the gait of power. Genaro knows several gaits of
power. Watch him fixedly."
Genaro's movements were indeed mesmeric. I found myself following his
gait, first with my eyes and then irresistibly with my feet. I imitated his
gait. We walked once around the patio and stopped.
While walking, I had noticed the extraordinary lucidity that each step
brought to me. When we stopped, I was in a state of keen alertness. I could
hear every sound; I could detect every change in the light or in the shadows
around me. I became enthralled with a feeling of urgency, of impending
action. I felt extraordinarily aggressive, muscular, daring. At that moment
I saw an enormous span of flat land in front of me; right behind me I saw a
forest. Huge trees were lined up as straight as a wall. The forest was dark
and green; the plain was sunny and yellow.
My breathing was deep and strangely accelerated, but not in an abnormal
way. Yet it was the rhythm of my breathing that was forcing me to trot on
the spot. I wanted to take off running, or rather my body wanted to, but
just as I was taking off something stopped me.
Don Juan and Genaro were suddenly by my side. We walked down the
corridor with Genaro to my right. He nudged me with his shoulder. I felt the
weight of his body on me. He gently shoved me to the left and we angled off
straight for the east wall of the patio. For a moment I had the weird
impression that we were going to go through the wall, and I even braced
myself for the impact, but we stopped right in front of the wall.
While my face was still against the wall, they both examined me with
great care. I knew what they were searching for; they wanted to make sure
that I had shifted my assemblage point. I knew that I had because my mood
had changed. They obviously knew it too. They gently took me by the arms and
walked in silence with me to the other side of the corridor, to a dark
passageway, a narrow hall that connected the patio with the rest of the
house. We stopped there. Don Juan and Genaro moved a few feet away from me.
I was left facing the side of the house that was in dark shadows. I
looked into an empty dark room. I had a sense of physical weariness. I felt
languid, indifferent, and yet I experienced a sense of spiritual strength. I
realized then that I had lost something. There was no strength in my body. I
could hardly stand. My legs finally gave in and I sat down and then I lay
down on my side. While I lay there, I had the most wonderful, fulfilling
thoughts of love for God, for goodness.
Then all at once I was in front of the main altar of a church. The
bas-reliefs covered with gold leaf glittered with the light of thousands of
candles. I saw the dark figures of men and women carrying an enormous
crucifix mounted on a huge palanquin. I moved out of their way and stepped
outside the church. I saw a multitude of people, a sea of candles, coming
toward me. I felt elated. I ran to join them. I was moved by profound love.
I wanted to be with them, to pray to the Lord. I was only a few feet away
from the mass of people when something swished me away.
The next instant, I was with don Juan and Genaro. They flanked me as we
walked lazily around the patio.
While we were having lunch the next day, don Juan said that Genaro had
pushed my assemblage point with his gait of power, and that he had been able
to do that because I had been in a state of inner silence. He explained that
the articulation point of everything seers do is something he had talked
about since the day we met: stopping the internal dialogue. He stressed over
and over that the internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point fixed
to its original position.
"Once silence is attained, everything is possible," he said.
I told him I was very conscious of the fact that in general I had
stopped talking to myself, but did not know how I had done it. If asked to
explain the procedure I would not know what to say.
"The explanation is simplicity itself," he said. "You willed it, and
thus you set a new intent, a new command. Then your command became the
Eagle's command.
"This is one of the most extraordinary things that the new seers found
out: that our command can become the Eagle's command. The internal dialogue
stops in the same way it begins: by an act of will. After all, we are forced
to start talking to ourselves by those who teach us. As they teach us, they
engage their will
and we engage ours, both without knowing it. As we learn to talk to
ourselves, we learn to handle will. We will ourselves to talk to ourselves.
The way to stop talking to ourselves is to use exactly the same method: we
must will it, we must inlend it."
We were silent for a few minutes. I asked him to whom he was referring
when he said that we had teachers who taught us to talk to ourselves.
"I was talking about what happens to human beings when they are
infants," he replied, "a time when they are taught by everyone around them
to repeat an endless dialogue about themselves. The dialogue becomes
internalized, and that force alone keeps the assemblage point fixed.
"The new seers say that infants have hundreds of teachers who teach
them exactly where to place their assemblage point."
He said that seers see that infants have no fixed assemblage point at
first. Their encased emanations are in a state of great turmoil, and their
assemblage points shift everywhere in the band of man, giving children a
great capacity to focus on emanations that later will be thoroughly
disregarded. Then as they grow, the older humans around them, through their
considerable power over them, force the children's assemblage points to
become more steady by means of an increasingly complex internal dialogue.
The internal dialogue is a process that constantly strengthens the position
of the assemblage point, because that position is an arbitrary one and needs
steady reinforcement.
"The fact of the matter is that many children see," he went on. "Most
of those who see are considered to be oddballs and every effort is made to
correct them, to make them solidify the position of their assemblage
points."
"But would it be possible to encourage children to keep their
assemblage points more fluid?" I asked.
"Only if they live among the new seers," he said. "Otherwise they would
get entrapped, as the old seers did, in the intricacies of the silent side
of man. And, believe me, that's worse than being caught in the clutches of
rationality."
Don Juan went on to express his profound admiration for the human
capacity to impart order to the chaos of the Eagle's emanations. He
maintained that every one of us, in his own right, is a masterful magician
and that our magic is to keep our assemblage point unwaveringly fixed.
"The force of the emanations at large," he went on, "makes our
assemblage point select certain emanations and cluster them for alignment
and perception. That's the command of the Eagle, but all the meaning that we
give to what we perceive is our command, our gift of magic."
He said that in the light of what he had explained, what Genaro had
made me do the day before was something extraordinarily complex and yet very
simple. It was complex because it required a tremendous discipline on
everybody's part; it required that the internal dialogue be stopped, that a
state of heightened awareness be reached, and that someone walk away with
one's assemblage point. The explanation behind all these complex procedures
was very simple; the new seers say that since the exact position of the
assemblage point is an arbitrary position chosen for us by our ancestors, it
can move with a relatively small effort; once it moves, it forces new
alignments of emanations, thus new perceptions.
"I used to give you power plants in order to make your assemblage point
move," don Juan continued. "Power plants have that effect; but hunger,
tiredness, fever, and other things like that can have a similar effect. The
flaw of the average man is that he thinks the result of a shift is purely
mental. It isn't, as you yourself can attest."
He explained that my assemblage point had shifted scores of times in
the past, just as it had shifted the day before, and that most of the time
the worlds it had assembled had been so close to the world of everyday life
as to be virtually phantom worlds. He emphatically added that visions of
that kind are automatically rejected by the new seers.
"Those visions are the product of man's inventory," he went on. "They
are of no value for warriors in search of total freedom, because they are
produced by a lateral shift of the assemblage point."
He stopped talking and looked at me. I knew that by "lateral shift" he
had meant a shift of the point from one side to the other along the width of
man's band of emanations instead of a shift in depth. I asked him if I was
right.
"That's exactly what I meant," he said. "On both edges of man's band of
emanations there is a strange storage of refuse, an incalculable pile of
human junk. It's a very morbid, sinister storehouse. It had great value for
the old seers but not for us.
"One of the easiest things one can do is to fall into it. Yesterday
Genaro and I wanted to give you a quick example of that lateral shift; that
was why we walked your assemblage point, but any person can reach that
storehouse by simply stopping his internal dialogue. If the shift is
minimal, the results are explained as fantasies of the mind. If the shift is
considerable, the results are called hallucinations."
I asked him to explain the act of walking the assemblage point. He said
that once warriors have attained inner silence by stopping their internal
dialogue, the sound of the gait of power, more than the sight of it, is what
traps their assemblage points. The rhythm of muffled steps instantly catches
the alignment force of the emanations inside the cocoon, which has been
disconnected by inner silence.
"That force hooks itself immediately to the edges of the band," he went
on. "On the right edge we find endless visions of physical activity,
violence, killing, sensuality. On the left edge we find spirituality,
religion, God. Genaro and I walked your assemblage point to both edges, so
as to give you a complete view of that human junk pile."
Don Juan restated, as if on second thought, that one of the most
mysterious aspects of the seers' knowledge is the incredible effects of
inner silence. He said that once inner silence is attained, the bonds that
tie the assemblage point to the particular spot where it is placed begin to
break and the assemblage point is free to move.
He said that the movement ordinarily is toward the left, that such a
directional preference is a natural reaction of most human beings, but that
there are seers who can direct that movement to positions below the
customary spot where the point is located. The new seers call that shift
"the shift below."
"Seers also suffer accidental shifts below," he went on. "The
assemblage point doesn't remain there long, and that's fortunate, because
that is the place of the beast. To go below is counter to our interest,
although the easiest thing to do."
Don Juan also said that among the many errors of judgment the old seers
had committed, one of the most grievous was moving their assemblage points
to the immeasurable area below, which made them experts at adopting animal
forms. They chose different animals as their point of reference and called
those animals their nagual. They believed that by moving their assemblage
points to specific spots they would acquire the characteristics of the
animal of their choice, its strength or wisdom or cunning or agility or
ferocity.
Don Juan assured me that there are many dreadful examples of such
practices even among the seers of our day. The relative facility with which
the assemblage point of man moves toward any lower position poses a great
temptation to seers, especially to those whose inclination leans toward that
end. It is the duty of a nagual, therefore, to test his warriors.
He told me then that he had put me to the test by moving my assemblage
point to a position below, while I was under the influence of a power plant.
He then guided my assemblage point until I could isolate the crows' band of
emanations, which resulted in my changing into a crow.
I again asked don Juan the question I had asked him dozens of times. I
wanted to know whether I had physically turned into a crow or had merely
thought and felt like one. He explained that a shift of the assemblage point
to the area below always results in a total transformation. He added that if
the assemblage point moves beyond a crucial threshold, the world vanishes;
it ceases to be what it is to us at man's level.
He conceded that my transformation was indeed horrifying by any
standards. My reaction to that experience proved to him that I had no
leanings toward that direction. Had it not been that way, I would have had
to employ enormous energy in order to fight off a tendency to remain in that
area below, which some seers find most comfortable.
He further said that an unwitting downshift occurs periodically to
every seer, but that such a downshift becomes less and less frequent as
their assemblage points move farther toward the left. Every time it occurs,
however, the power of a seer undergoing it diminishes considerably. It is a
drawback that takes time and great effort to correct.
"Those lapses make seers extremely morose and narrow-minded," he
continued, "and in certain cases, extremely rational."
"How can seers avoid those downshifts?" I asked.
"It all depends on the warrior," he said. "Some of them are naturally
inclined to indulge in their quirks-- yourself, for instance. They are the
ones who are hard hit. For those like you, I recommend a twenty-fourhour
vigil of everything they do. Disciplined men or women are less prone to that
kind of shift; for those I would recommend a twenty-three-hour vigil."
He looked at me with shiny eyes and laughed.
"Female seers have downshifts more often than males," he said. "But
they are also capable of bouncing out of that position with no effort at
all. while males linger dangerously in it."
He also said that women seers have an extraordinary capacity to make
their assemblage points hold on to any position in the area below. Men
cannot. Men have sobriety and purpose, but very little talent; that is the
reason why a nagual must have eight women seers in his party. Women give the
impulse to cross the immeasurable vastness of the unknown. Together with
that natural capacity, or as a consequence of it, women have a most fierce
intensity. They can, therefore, reproduce an animal form with flare, ease,
and a matchless ferocity.
"If you think about scary things," he continued, "about something
unnamable lurking in the darkness, you're thinking, without knowing it,
about a woman seer holding a position in the immeasurable area below. True
horror lies right there. If you ever find an aberrant woman seer, run for
the hills!"
I asked him whether other organisms were capable of shifting their
assemblage points.
"Their points can shift," he said, "but the shift is not a voluntary
thing with them."
"Is the assemblage point of other organisms also trained to appear
where it does?" I asked.
"Every newborn organism is trained, one way or another," he replied.
"We may not understand how their training is done-- after all, we don't even
understand how it is done to us-- but seers see that the newborn are coaxed
to do what their kind does. That's exactly what happens to human infants:
seers see their assemblage points shifting every which way and then they see
how the presence of adults fastens each point to one spot. The same happens
to every other organism."
Don Juan seemed to reflect for a moment and then added that there was
indeed one unique effect that man's assemblage point has. He pointed to a
tree outside.
"When we, as serious adult human beings, look at a tree," he said, "our
assemblage points align an infinite number of emanations and achieve a
miracle. Our assemblage points make us perceive a cluster of emanations that
we call tree."
He explained that the assemblage point not only effects the alignment
needed for perception, but also obliterates the alignment of certain
emanations in order to arrive at a greater refinement of perception, a
skimming, a tricky human construct with no parallel.
He said that the new seers had observed that only human beings were
capable of further clustering the clusters of emanations. He used the
Spanish word for skimming, desnate, to describe the act of collecting the
most palatable cream off the top of a container of boiled milk after it
cools. Likewise, in terms of perception, man's assemblage point takes some
part of the emanations already selected for alignment and makes a more
palatable construct with it.
"The skimmings of men," don Juan continued, "are more real than what
other creatures perceive. That is our pitfall. They are so real to us that
we forget we have constructed them by commanding our assemblage points to
appear where they do. We forget they are real to us only because it is our
command to perceive them as real. We have the power to skim the top off the
alignments, but we don't have the power to protect ourselves from our own
commands. That has to be learned. To give our skimmings a free hand, as we
do, is an error of judgment for which we pay as dearly as the old seers paid
for theirs."
9 The Shift Below
Don Juan and Genaro made their yearly trip to the northern part of
Mexico, to the Sonoran desert, to look for medicinal plants. One of the
seers of the nagual's party, Vicente Medrano, the herbalist among them, used
those plants to make medicines.
I had joined don Juan and Genaro in Sonora, at the last stage of their
journey, just in time to drive them south, back to their home.
The day before we started on our drive, don Juan abruptly continued his
explanation of the mastery of awareness. We were resting in the shade of
some tall bushes in the foothills of the mountains. It was late afternoon,
almost dark. Each of us carried a large burlap sack filled with plants. As
soon as we had put them down, Genaro lay down on the ground and fell asleep,
using his folded jacket as a pillow.
Don Juan spoke to me in a low voice, as if he didn't want to wake up
Genaro. He said that by now he had explained most of the truths about
awareness, and that there was only one truth left to discuss. The last
truth, he assured me, was the best of the old seers' findings, although they
never knew that themselves. Its tremendous value was only recognized, ages
later, by the new seers.
"I've explained to you that man has an assemblage point," he went on,
"and that that assemblage point aligns emanations for perception. We've also
discussed that that point moves from its fixed position. Now, the last truth
is that once that assemblage point moves beyond a certain limit, it can