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 nor-mal 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 break-throughs 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 odd-ity 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.