He asked me then to describe all the details I could remember about the balls of fire. I told him that I had seen them so briefly I was not sure I could describe them in detail.
He pointed out that seeing is a euphemism for mov-ing the assemblage point, and that if I moved mine a fraction more to the left I would have a clear picture of the balls of fire, a picture which I could interpret then as having remembered them.
I tried to have a clear picture, but I couldn’t, so I described what I remembered.
He listened attentively and then urged me to recall if they were balls or circles of fire. I told him I didn’t remember.
He explained that those balls of fire are of crucial importance to human beings because they are the expression of a force that pertains to all details of life and death, something that the new seers call the rolling force.
I asked him to clarify what he meant by all the details of life and death.
“The rolling force is the means through which the Eagle distributes life and awareness for safekeeping,” he said. “But it also is the force that, let’s say, collects the rent. It makes all living beings die. What you saw today was called by the ancient seers the tumbler.”
He said that seers describe it as an eternal line of iridescent rings, or balls of fire, that roll onto living beings ceaselessly. Luminous organic beings meet the rolling force head on, until the day when the force proves to be too much for them and the creatures finally collapse. The old seers were mesmerized by seeing how the tumbler then tumbles them into the beak of the Eagle to be devoured. That was the reason they called it the tumbler.
“You said that it is a mesmerizing sight. Have you yourself seen it rolling human beings?” I asked.
“Certainly I’ve seen it,” he replied, and after a pause he added, “You and I saw it only a short while ago in Mexico City.”
His assertion was so farfetched that I felt obliged to tell him that this time he was wrong. He laughed and reminded me that on that occasion, while both of us were sitting on a bench in the Alameda Park in Mexico City, we had witnessed the death of a man. He said that I had recorded the event in my everyday-life memory as well as in my left-side emanations.
As don Juan spoke to me I had the sensation of something inside me becoming lucid by degrees, and I could visualize with uncanny clarity the whole scene in the park. The man was lying on the grass with three policemen standing by him to keep onlookers away. I distinctly remembered don Juan hitting me on my back to make me change levels of awareness. And then I saw. My seeing was imperfect. I was unable to shake off the sight of the world of everyday life. What I ended up with was a composite of filaments of the most gorgeous colors superimposed on the buildings and the traffic. The filaments were actually lines of colored light that came from above. They had inner life; they were bright and bursting with energy.
When I looked at the dying man, I saw what don Juan was talking about; something that was at once like circles of fire, or iridescent tumbleweeds, was rolling everywhere I focused my eyes. The circles were rolling on people, on don Juan, on me. I felt them in my stomach and became ill.
Don Juan told me to focus my eyes on the dying man. I saw him at one moment curling up, just as a sowbug curls itself up upon being touched. The incandescent circles pushed him away, as if they were cast-ing him aside, out of their majestic, inalterable path.
I had not liked the feeling. The circles of fire had not scared me; they were not awesome, or sinister. I did not feel morbid or somber. The circles rather had nauseated me. I’d felt them in the pit of my stomach. It was a revulsion that I’d felt that day.
Remembering them conjured up again the total feeling of discomfort I had experienced on that occasion. As I got ill, don Juan laughed until he was out of breath.
“You’re such an exaggerated fellow.” he said. “The rolling force is not that bad. It’s lovely, in fact. The new seers recommend that we open ourselves to it. The old seers also opened themselves to it, but for reasons and purposes guided mostly by self-impor- tance and obsession.
“The new seers, on the other hand, make friends with it. They become familiar with that force by handling it without any self-importance. The result is staggering in its consequences.”
He said that a shift of the assemblage point is all that is needed to open oneself to the rolling force. He added that if the force is seen in a deliberate manner, there is minimal danger. A situation that is extremely dangerous, however, is an involuntary shift of the assemblage point owing, perhaps, to physical fatigue, emotional exhaustion, disease, or simply a minor emotional or physical crisis, such as being frightened or being drunk.
“When the assemblage point shifts involuntarily, the rolling force cracks the cocoon,” he went on. “I’ve talked many times about a gap that man has below his navel. It’s not really below the navel itself, but in the cocoon, at the height of the navel. The gap is more like a dent, a natural flaw in the otherwise smooth cocoon. It is there where the tumbler hits us ceaselessly and where the cocoon cracks.”
He went on to explain that if it is a minor shift of the assemblage point, the crack is very small, the co-coon quickly repairs itself, and people experience what everybody has at one time or another: blotches of color and contorted shapes, which remain even if the eyes are closed.
If the shift is considerable, the crack also is extensive and it takes time for the cocoon to repair itself, as in the case of warriors who purposely use power plants to elicit that shift or people who take drugs and unwittingly do the same. In these cases men feel numb and cold; they have difficulty talking or even thinking; it is as if they have been frozen from inside.
Don Juan said that in cases in which the assemblage point shifts drastically because of the effects of trauma or of a mortal disease, the rolling force produces a crack the length of the cocoon; the cocoon collapses and curls in on itself, and the individual dies.
“Can a voluntary shift also produce a gap of that nature?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he replied. “We’re really frail. As the tumbler hits us over and over, death comes to us through the gap. Death is the rolling force. When it finds weakness in the gap of a luminous being it automatically cracks it open and makes it collapse.”
“Does every living being have a gap?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “If it didn’t have one it wouldn’t die. The gaps are different, however, in size and configuration. Man’s gap is a bowl-like depression the size of a fist, a very frail vulnerable configuration. The gaps of other organic creatures are very much like man’s; some are stronger than ours and others are weaker. But the gap of inorganic beings is really different. It’s more like a long thread, a hair of luminosity; consequently, inorganic beings are infinitely more durable than we are.
“There is something hauntingly appealing about the long life of those creatures, and the old seers could not resist being carried away by that appeal.”
He said that the same force can produce two effects that are diametrically opposed. The old seers were imprisoned by the rolling force, and the new seers are rewarded for their toils with the gift of freedom. By becoming familiar with the rolling force through the mastery of intent, the new seers, at a given moment, open their own cocoons and the force floods them rather than rolling them up like a curled-up sowbug. The final result is their total and instantaneous disintegration.
I asked him a lot of questions about the survival of awareness after the luminous being is consumed by the fire from within. He did not answer. He simply chuckled, shrugged his shoulders, and went on to say that the old seers’ obsession with the tumbler blinded them to the other side of that force. The new seers, with their usual thoroughness in refusing tradition, went to the other extreme. They were at first totally averse to focusing their seeing on the tumbler; they argued that they needed to understand the force of the emanations at large in its aspect of life-giver and enhancer of awareness.
“They realized that it is infinitely easier to destroy something,” don Juan went on, “than it is to build it and maintain it. To roll life away is nothing compared to giving it and nourishing it. Of course, the new seers were wrong on this count, but in due course they corrected their mistake.”