Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

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The position of the assemblage point on man’s cocoon is maintained by the internal dialogue, and because of that, it is a flimsy position at best.

We are going to talk about the great bands of emanations. It is another key discovery that the old seers made, but in their aberration they relegated it to oblivion until it was rescued by the new seers.

The Indescribable Force ‘s emanations are always grouped in clusters. The old seers called those clusters the great bands of emanations. They aren’t really bands, but the name stuck.

For instance, there is an immeasurable cluster that produces organic beings. The emanations of that organic band have a sort of fluffiness. They are transparent and have a unique light of their own, a peculiar energy. They are aware, they jump. That’s the reason why all organic beings are filled with a peculiar consuming energy. The other bands are darker, less fluffy. Some of them have no light at all, but a quality of opaqueness.

Organic beings belong to the same great band. Think of it as an enormously wide band of luminous filaments, luminous strings with no end. Organic beings are bubbles that grow around a group of luminous filaments. Imagine that in this band of organic life some bubbles are formed around the luminous filaments in the center of the band, others are formed close to the edges; the band is wide enough to accommodate every kind of organic being with room to spare. In such an arrangement, bubbles that are close to the edges of the band miss altogether the emanations that are in the center of the band, which are shared only by bubbles that are aligned with the center. By the same token, bubbles in the center miss the emanations from the edges.

As you can understand, organic beings share the emanations of one band; yet seers see that within that organic band beings are as different as they can be.

There are as many of these great bands as infinity itself. Seers have found out, however, that in the earth there are only forty-eight such bands.

For seers, that means there are forty-eight types of organizations on the earth, forty-eight types of clusters or structures. Organic life is one of them.

The old seers counted seven bands that produced inorganic bubbles of awareness. In other words, there are forty bands that produce bubbles without awareness; those are bands that generate only organization.

Think of the great bands as being like trees. All of them bear fruit; they produce containers filled with emanations; yet only eight of those trees bear edible fruit, that is, bubbles of awareness. Seven have sour fruit, but edible nonetheless, and one has the most juicy, luscious fruit there is.

What makes those eight bands produce awareness is the Indescribable Force ; which bestows awareness through its emanations. To say that the Indescribable Force bestows awareness through its emanations is like what a religious man would say about God, that God bestows life through love. However, the two statements are not made from the same point of view. And yet I think they mean the same thing. The difference is that seers see how the Indescribable Force bestows awareness through its emanations and religious men don’t see how God bestows life through his love.

The Indescribable Force bestows awareness by means of three giant bundles of emanations that run through eight great bands. These bundles are quite peculiar, because they make seers feel a hue. One bundle gives the feeling of being beige-pink, something like the glow of pink-colored street lamps; another gives the feeling of being peach, like buff neon lights; and the third bundle gives the feeling of being amber, like clear honey.

So, it is a matter of seeing a hue when seers see that the Indescribable Force bestows awareness through its emanations. Religious men don’t see God’s love, but if they would see it, they would know that it is either pink, peach, or amber.

Man, for example, is attached to the amber bundle, but so are other beings. To know which beings share those emanations with man is something you will have to find out for yourself through your own seeing . There is no point in my telling you which ones; you would only be making another inventory. Suffice it to say that finding that out for yourself will be one of the most exciting things you’ll ever do.

The pink and peach bundles belong to other living beings. I’ve told you that the glow of awareness in man has different colors. They are not really colors but casts of amber.

The amber bundle of awareness has an infinitude of subtle variants, which always denote differences in quality of awareness. Pink and pale-green amber are the most common casts. Blue amber is more unusual, but pure amber is by far the most rare.

Seers say that the amount of energy that one saves and stores determines the cast. Countless numbers of warriors have begun with an ordinary pink amber cast and have finished with the purest of all ambers.

The three bundles with all their casts crisscross the eight bands. In the organic band, the pink bundle belongs mainly to plants, the peach band belongs to insects, and the amber band belongs to man and other animals.

The same situation is prevalent in the inorganic bands. The three bundles of awareness produce specific kinds of inorganic beings in each of the seven great bands.

You may want me to elaborate on the kinds of inorganic beings that exist, however, that is another thing that you must see for yourself. The seven bands and what they produce are indeed inaccessible to human reason, but not to human seeing .

The great bands are neither flat nor round, but indescribably clustered together, like a pile of hay, which is held together in midair by the force of the hand that pitched it. Thus, there is no order to the emanations; to say that there is a central part or that there are edges is misleading, but necessary to understanding.

Inorganic beings produced by the seven other bands of awareness are characterized by having a container that has no motion; it is rather a formless receptacle with a low degree of luminosity. It does not look like the cocoon of organic beings. It lacks the tautness, the inflated quality that makes organic beings look like luminous balls bursting with energy.

The only similarity between inorganic and organic beings is that all of them have the awareness-bestowing pink or peach or amber emanations.

Those emanations, under certain circumstances make possible the most fascinating communication between the beings of those eight great bands.

Usually the organic beings, with their greater fields of energy, are the initiators of communication with inorganic beings, but a subtle and sophisticated follow-up is always the province of the inorganic beings. Once the barrier is broken, inorganic beings change and become what seers call allies. From that moment inorganic beings can anticipate the seers most subtle thoughts or moods or fears.

The old seers became mesmerized by such devotion from their allies. Stories are that the old seers could make their allies do anything they wanted. That was one of the reasons they believed in their own invulnerability. They got fooled by their self-importance. The allies have power only if the seer who sees them is the paragon of impeccability; and those old seers just weren’t.

Inorganic beings are not as plentiful as organic ones, but this is offset by the greater number of bands of inorganic awareness. Also, the differences among the inorganic beings themselves are more vast than the differences among organisms, because organisms belong to only one band while inorganic beings belong to seven bands. Besides, inorganic beings live infinitely longer than organisms.

The old seers also came to realize that it is the high energy of organisms and the subsequent high development of their awareness that make them delectable morsels for the Indescribable Force . In the old seers’ view, gluttony was the reason the Indescribable Force produced as many organisms as possible.

The product of the other forty great bands is not awareness at all, but a configuration of inanimate energy. The old seers chose to call whatever is produced by those bands, vessels. While cocoons and containers are fields of energetic awareness, which accounts for their independent luminosity, vessels are rigid receptacles that hold emanations without being fields of energetic awareness. Their luminosity comes only from the energy of the encased emanations.

You must bear in mind that everything on the earth is encased. Whatever we perceive is made up of portions of cocoons or vessels with emanations. Ordinarily, we don’t perceive the containers of inorganic beings at all.

The total world is made of the forty-eight bands. The world that our assemblage point assembles for our normal perception is made up of two bands; one is the organic band, the other is a band that has only structure, but no awareness. The other forty-six great bands are not part of the world we normally perceive.