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 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.
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. It is somber and foreboding. It’s not only the unknown, but the who-cares-to-know-it.
The emanations that are inside the cocoon but out of the bounds of man’s band can be perceived, but in really indescribable ways. 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.
The mystery is outside us. 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.
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.
The new seers are the warriors of total freedom, and their only search is the ultimate liberation that comes when they attain total awareness.
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.
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Self-importance is the motivating force for every attack of melancholy. Warriors are entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh.
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The articulation point of everything seers do is stopping the internal dialogue. The internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point fixed to its original position.
Once silence is attained, everything is possible. You stop talking to yourself by willing it, and thus you set a new intent , a new command. Then your command becomes the Indescribable Force ‘s command.
This is one of the most extraordinary things that the new seers found out: that our command can become the Indescribable Force ‘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 intend it.
Infants 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 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.
I have profound admiration for the human capacity to impart order to the chaos of the Indescribable Force ‘s emanations. Every one of us, in his own right, is a masterful magician and our magic is to keep our assemblage point unwaveringly fixed.
The force of the emanations at large makes our assemblage point select certain emanations and cluster them for alignment and perception. That’s the command of the Indescribable Force , but all the meaning that we give to what we perceive is our command, our gift of magic.
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.
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.
On both edges of man’s band of emanations there is a strange storage of refuse, an incalculable pile of human junk.
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.
One of the most mysterious aspects of the seers’ knowledge is the incredible effects of inner silence. 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.
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.
I’ve explained to you that man has an assemblage point 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 assemble worlds entirely different from the world we know.
Without enough energy, the force of alignment is crushing. You have to have energy to sustain the pressure of alignments which never take place under ordinary circumstances.
Warriors are in the world to train themselves to be unbiased witnesses, so as to understand the mystery of ourselves and relish the exultation of finding what we really are. This is the highest of the new seers’ goals. And not every warrior attains it.
To be a peerless nagual, one has to love freedom, and one has to have supreme detachment. What makes the warrior’s path so very dangerous is that it is the opposite of the life situation of modern man. Modern man has left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and the exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom.
To be given a chance to go back again to the mystery of the world is sometimes too much for warriors, and they succumb; they are waylaid by what I’ve called the high adventure of the unknown. They forget the quest for freedom; they forget to be unbiased witnessed. They sink into the unknown and love it.
In order to be unbiased witnesses, we begin by understanding that the fixation or the movement of the assemblage point is all there is to us and the world we witness, whatever that world might be.
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The new seers say that when we were taught to talk to ourselves, we were taught the means to dull ourselves in order to keep the assemblage point fixed on one spot.
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I’ll tell you what my teacher said to me when I got to a certain point. He told me that I had been evicted from the home where I had lived all my live. A result of having saved energy had been the disruption of my cozy but utterly limiting and boring nest in the world of everyday life. My depression, he told me, was not so much the sadness of having lost my nest, but the annoyance of having to look for new quarters. “The new quarters are not as cozy,” he said, “but they are infinitely more roomy.”
My eviction notice came in the form of a great depression, a loss of the desire to live. When I told my teacher that I didn’t want to live, he couldn’t help laughing.