The Art of Dreaming (3 page)

The effect
of the assemblage point's displacement was another energy configuration the
sorcerers of antiquity were able to
see
and study. Don Juan said that
when the assemblage point is displaced to another position, a new conglomerate
of millions of luminous energy filaments come together on that point. The
sorcerers of antiquity
saw
this and concluded that since the glow of
awareness is always present wherever the assemblage point is, perception is
automatically assembled there. Because of the different position of the
assemblage point, the resulting world, however, cannot be our world of daily
affairs.

Don Juan
explained that the old sorcerers were capable of distinguishing two types of
assemblage point displacement. One was a displacement to any position on the
surface or in the interior of the luminous ball; this displacement they called
a
shift
of the assemblage point. The other was a displacement to a
position outside the luminous ball; they called this displacement a
movement
of the assemblage point. They found out that the difference between a shift and
a movement was the nature of the perception each allows.

Since the
shifts of the assemblage point are displacements within the luminous ball, the
worlds engendered by them, no matter how bizarre or wondrous or unbelievable
they might be, are still worlds within the human domain. The human domain is
the energy filaments that pass through the entire luminous ball. By contrast,
movements of the assemblage point, since they are displacements to positions
outside the luminous ball, engage filaments of energy that are beyond the human
realm. Perceiving such filaments engenders worlds that are beyond
comprehension, inconceivable worlds with no trace of human antecedents in them.

The problem
of validation always played a key role in my mind in those days. "Forgive
me, don Juan," I said to him on one occasion, "but this business of
the assemblage point is an idea so farfetched, so inadmissible that I don't
know how to deal with it or what to think of it."

"There
is only one thing for you to do," he retorted. "
See
the assemblage point! It
isn't that difficult to
see
. The difficulty is in breaking the retaining wall we all
have in our minds that holds us in place. To break it, all we need is energy.
Once we have energy,
seeing
happens to us by itself. The trick is in abandoning our
fort of self-complacency and false security."

"It is
obvious to me, don Juan, that it takes a lot of knowledge to
see
. It isn't just a matter
of having energy."

"It
is
just a matter of having
energy, believe me. The hard part is convincing yourself that it can be done.
For this, you need to trust the nagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every
sorcerer has to prove everything with his own experience. I am telling you
about the principles of sorcery not with the hope that you will memorize them
but with the hope that you will practice them."

Don Juan
was certainly right about the need for trusting. In the beginning stages of my
thirteen-year apprenticeship with him, the hardest thing for me was to
affiliate myself with his world and his person. This affiliating meant that I
had to learn to trust him implicitly and accept him without bias as the nagual.

Don Juan's
total role in the sorcerers' world was synthesized in the title accorded to him
by his peers; he was called the
nagual
. It was explained to me that this concept refers to
any person, male or female, who possesses a specific kind of energy
configuration, which to a seer appears as a double luminous ball. Seers believe
that when one of these people enters into the sorcerers' world, that extra load
of energy is turned into a measure of strength and the capacity for leadership.
Thus, the nagual is the natural guide, the leader of a party of sorcerers.

At first,
to feel such a trust for don Juan was quite disturbing to me, if not altogether
odious. When I discussed it with him, he assured me that to trust his teacher
in such a manner had been just as difficult for him.

"I
told my teacher the same thing you are saying to me now," don Juan said.
"He replied that without trusting the nagual there is no possibility of
relief and thus no possibility of clearing the debris from our lives in order
to be free."

Don Juan
reiterated how right his teacher had been. And I reiterated my profound
disagreement. I told him that being reared in a stifling religious environment
had had dreadful effects on me, and that his teacher's statements and his own
acquiescence to his teacher reminded me of the obedience dogma that I had to
learn as a child and that I abhorred.

"It
sounds like you're voicing a religious belief when you talk about the
nagual," I said.

"You
may believe whatever you want," don Juan replied undauntedly. "The
fact remains, there is no game without the nagual. I know this and I say so.
And so did all the naguals who preceded me. But they didn't say it from the
standpoint of self-importance, and neither do I. To say there is no path
without the nagual is to refer totally to the fact that the man, the nagual, is
a nagual because he can reflect the abstract, the spirit, better than others.
But that's all. Our link is with the spirit itself and only incidentally with the
man who brings us its message."

I did learn
to trust don Juan implicitly as the nagual, and this, as he had stated it,
brought me an immense sense of relief and a greater capacity to accept what he
was striving to teach me.

In his
teachings, he put a great emphasis on explaining and discussing the assemblage
point. I asked him once if the assemblage point had anything to do with the
physical body.

"It
has nothing to do with what we normally perceive as the body," he said.
"It's part of the luminous egg, which is our energy self."

"How
is it displaced?" I asked.

"Through
energy currents. Jolts of energy, originating outside or inside our energy
shape. These are usually unpredictable currents that happen randomly, but with
sorcerers they are very predictable currents that obey the sorcerer's
intent."

"Can
you yourself feel these currents?"

"Every
sorcerer feels them. Every human being does, for that matter, but average human
beings are too busy with their own pursuits to pay any attention to feelings
like that."

"What
do those currents feel like?"

"Like
a mild discomfort, a vague sensation of sadness followed immediately by
euphoria. Since neither the sadness nor the euphoria has an explainable cause,
we never regard them as veritable onslaughts of the unknown but as
unexplainable, ill-founded moodiness."

"What
happens when the assemblage point moves outside the energy shape? Does it hang
outside? Or is it attached to the luminous ball?"

"It
pushes the contours of the energy shape out, without breaking its energy
boundaries."

Don Juan
explained that the end result of a movement of the assemblage point is a total
change in the energy shape of a human being. Instead of a ball or an egg, he
becomes something resembling a smoking pipe. The tip of the stem is the assemblage
point, and the bowl of the pipe is what remains of the luminous ball. If the
assemblage point keeps on moving, a moment comes when the luminous ball becomes
a thin line of energy.

Don Juan
went on to explain that the old sorcerers were the only ones who accomplished
this feat of energy shape transformation. And I asked him whether in their new
energetic shape those sorcerers were still men.

"Of
course they were still men," he said. "But I think what you want to
know is if they were still men of reason, trustworthy persons. Well, not
quite."

"In
what way were they different?"

"In
their concerns. Human endeavors and preoccupations had no meaning whatsoever to
them. They also had a definite new appearance."

"Do
you mean that they didn't look like men?"

"It's
very hard to tell what was what about those sorcerers. They certainly looked
like men. What else would they look like? But they were not quite like what you
or I would expect. Yet if you pressed me to tell in what way they were
different, I would go in circles, like a dog chasing its tail."

"Have
you ever met one of those men, don Juan?"

"Yes,
I have met one."

"What
did he look like?"

"As
far as looks, he looked like a regular person. Now, it was his behavior that
was unusual." "In what way was it unusual?"

"All I
can tell you is that the behavior of the sorcerer I met is something that
defies the imagination. But to make it a matter of merely behavior is
misleading. It is really something you must see to appreciate."

"Were
all those sorcerers like the one you met?"

"Certainly
not. I don't know how the others were, except through sorcerers' stories handed
down from generation to generation. And those stories portray them as being
quite bizarre." "Do you mean monstrous?"

"Not
at all. They say that they were very likable but extremely scary. They were
more like unknown creatures. What makes mankind homogeneous is the fact that we
are all luminous balls. And those sorcerers were no longer balls of energy but
lines of energy that were trying to bend themselves into circles, which they
couldn't quite make."

"What
finally happened to them, don Juan? Did they die?"

"Sorcerers'
stories say that because they had succeeded in stretching their shapes, they
had also succeeded in stretching the duration of their consciousness. So they
are alive and conscious to this day. There are stories about their periodic
appearances on the earth."

"What
do you think of all this yourself, don Juan?"

"It is
too bizarre for me. I want freedom. Freedom to retain my awareness and yet
disappear into the vastness. In my personal opinion, those old sorcerers were
extravagant, obsessive, capricious men who got pinned down by their own
machinations.

"But
don't let my personal feelings sway you. The old sorcerers' accomplishment is
unparalleled. If nothing else, they proved to us that man's potentials are
nothing to sneeze at."

Another
topic of don Juan's explanations was the indispensability of energetic
uniformity and cohesion for the purpose of perceiving. His contention was that
mankind perceives the world we know, in the terms we do, only because we share
energetic uniformity and cohesion. He said that we automatically attain these
two conditions of energy in the course of our rearing and that they are so
taken for granted we do not realize their vital importance until we are faced
with the possibility of perceiving worlds other than the world we know. At
those moments, it becomes evident that we need a new appropriate energetic
uniformity and cohesion to perceive coherently and totally.

I asked him
what uniformity and cohesion were, and he explained that man's energetic shape
has uniformity in the sense that every human being on earth has the form of a
ball or an egg. And the fact that man's energy holds itself together as a ball
or an egg proves it has cohesion. He said that an example of a new uniformity
and cohesion was the old sorcerers' energetic shape when it became a line:
every one of them uniformly became a line and cohesively remained a line.
Uniformity and cohesion at a line level permitted those old sorcerers to
perceive a homogeneous new world.

"How
are uniformity and cohesion acquired?" I asked.

"The
key is the position of the assemblage point, or rather the fixation of the
assemblage point," he said.

He did not
want to elaborate any further at that time, so I asked him if those old
sorcerers could have reverted to being egglike. He replied that at one point
they could have, but that they did not. And then the line cohesion set in and
made it impossible for them to go back. He believed that what really
crystallized that line cohesion and prevented them from making the journey back
was a matter of choice and greed. The scope of what those sorcerers were able
to perceive and do as lines of energy was astronomically greater than what an
average man or any average sorcerer can do or perceive.

He
explained that the human domain when one is an energy ball is whatever energy
filaments pass through the space within the ball's boundaries. Normally, we
perceive not all the human domain but perhaps only one thousandth of it. He was
of the opinion that, if we take this into consideration, the enormity of what
the old sorcerers did becomes apparent; they extended themselves into a line a
thousand times the size of a man as an energy ball and perceived all the energy
filaments that passed through that line.

On his
insistence, I made giant efforts to understand the new model of energy
configuration he was outlining for me. Finally, after much pounding, I could
follow the idea of energy filaments inside the luminous ball and outside it.
But if I thought of a multitude of luminous balls, the model broke down in my
mind. In a multitude of luminous balls, I reasoned, the energy filaments that
are outside one of them will perforce be inside the adjacent one. So in a
multitude there could not possibly be any energy filaments outside any luminous
ball.