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-to-know-it.”
“How about the emanations that are inside the co-coon 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.”