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The Assemblage Point

Don Juan discontinued his explanation of the mastery of awareness for several months after my bout with the allies. One day he started it again. A strange event triggered it.

Don Juan was in northern Mexico. It was late afternoon. I had just arrived at the house he kept there, and he immediately had me shift into heightened awareness. And I had instantly remembered that don Juan always came back to Sonora as means of renewal. He had explained that a nagual, being a leader who has tremendous responsibilities, has to have a physical point of reference, a place where an amenable confluence of energies occurs. The Sonoran desert was such a place for him.

On entering into heightened awareness, I had noticed that there was another person hiding in the semidarkness inside the house. I asked don Juan if Genaro was with him. He replied that he was alone, that what I had noticed was one of his allies, the one that guarded the house.

Don Juan then made a strange gesture. He contorted his face as if he were surprised or terrified. And instantly the frightening shape of a strange man appeared at the door of the room where we were. The presence of the strange man scared me so much that I actually felt dizzy. And before I could recuperate from my fright, the man lurched at me with a chilling ferocity. As he grabbed my forearms, I felt ajolt of something quite like a discharge of an electric current.

I was speechless, caught in a terror I could not dispel. Don Juan was smiling at me. I mumbled and groaned, trying to voice a plea for help, while I felt an even greater jolt.

The man tightened his grip and tried to throw me backward on the ground. Don Juan, with no hurry in his voice, urged me to pull myself together and not fight my fear, but roll with it. "Be afraid without being terrified," he said. Don Juan came to my side and, without intervening in my struggle, whispered in my ear that I should put all my concentration on the midpoint of my body.

Over the years, he had insisted that I measure my body to the hundredth of an inch and establish its exact midpoint, lengthwise as well as in width. He had always said that such a point is a true center of energy in all of us.

As soon as I had focused my attention on that midpoint, the man let go of me. At that instant I became aware that what I had thought was a human being was something that only looked like one. The moment it lost its human shape to me, the ally became an amorphous blob of opaque light. It moved away. I went after it, moved by a great force that made me follow that opaque light.

Don Juan stopped me. He gently walked me to the porch of his house and made me sit down on a sturdy crate he used as a bench.

I was terribly disturbed by the experience, but even more disturbed by the fact that my paralyzing fear had disappeared so fast and so completely.

I commented on my abrupt change of mood. Don Juan said that there was nothing strange about my volatile change, and that fear did not exist as soon as the glow of awareness moved beyond a certain threshold inside man's cocoon.

He then began his explanation. He briefly outlined the truths about awareness he had discussed: that there is no objective world, but only a universe of energy fields which seers call the Eagle's emanations. That human beings are made of the Eagle's emanations and are in essence bubbles of luminescent energy; each of us is wrapped in a cocoon that encloses a small portion of these emanations. That awareness is achieved by the constant pressure that the emanations outside our cocoons, which are called emanations at large, exert on those inside our cocoons. That awareness gives rise to perception, which happens when the emanations inside our cocoons align themselves with the corresponding emanations at large.

"The next truth is that perception takes place," he went on, "because there is in each of us an agent called the assemblage point that selects internal and external emanations for alignment. The particular alignment that we perceive as the world is the product of the specific spot where our assemblage point is located on our cocoon."

He repeated this several times, allowing me time to grasp it. Then he said that in order to corroborate the truths about awareness, I needed energy.

"I've mentioned to you," he continued, "that dealing with petty tyrants helps seers accomplish a sophisticated maneuver: that maneuver is to move their assemblage points."

He said that for me to have perceived an ally meant that I had moved my assemblage point away from its customary position. In other words, my glow of awareness had moved beyond a certain threshold, also erasing my fear. And all this had happened because I had enough surplus energy.

Later that night, after we had returned from a trip into the surrounding mountains, which had been part of his teachings for the right side, don Juan had me shift again into heightened awareness and then continued his explanation. He told me that in order to discuss the nature of the assemblage point, he had to start with a discussion of the first attention.

He said that the new seers looked into the unnoticed ways in which the first attention functions, and as they tried to explain them to others, they devised an order for the truths about awareness. He assured me that not every seer is given to explaining. For instance, his benefactor, the nagual Julian, could not have cared less about explanations. But the nagual Julian's benefactor, the nagual Elias, whom don Juan was fortunate enough to meet, did care. Between the nagual Elias's detailed, lengthy explanations, the nagual Julian's scanty ones, and his own personal seeing, don Juan came to understand and to corroborate those truths.

Don Juan explained that in order for our first attention to bring into focus the world that we perceive, it has to emphasize certain emanations selected from the narrow band of emanations where man's awareness is located. The discarded emanations are still within our reach but remain dormant, unknown to us for the duration of our lives.

The new seers call the emphasized emanations the right side, normal awareness, the tonal, this world, the known, the first attention. The average man calls it reality, rationality, common sense.

The emphasized emanations compose a large portion of man's band of awareness, but a very small piece of the total spectrum of emanations present inside the cocoon of man. The disregarded emanations within man's band are thought of as a sort of preamble to the unknown, the unknown proper consisting of the bulk of emanations which are not part of the human band and which are never emphasized. Seers call them the left-side awareness, the nagual, the other world, the unknown, the second attention.

"This process of emphasizing certain emanations," don Juan went on, "was discovered and practiced by the old seers. They realized that a nagual man or a nagual woman, by the fact that they have extra strength, can push the emphasis away from the usual emanations and make it shift to neighboring ones. That push is known as the nagual's blow."

Don Juan said that the shift was utilized by the old seers in practical ways to keep their apprentices in bondage. With that blow they made their apprentices enter into a state of heightened, keenest, most impressionable awareness; while they were helplessly pliable, the old seers taught them aberrant techniques that made the apprentices into sinister men, just like their teachers.

The new seers employ the same technique, but instead of using it for sordid purposes, they use it to guide their apprentices to learn about man's possibilities.

Don Juan explained that the nagual's blow has to be delivered on a precise spot, on the assemblage point, which varies minutely from person to person. Also, the blow has to be delivered by a nagual who sees. He assured me that it is equally useless to have the strength of a nagual and not see, as it is to see and not have the strength of a nagual, in either case the results are just blows. A seer could strike on the precise spot over and over without the strength to move awareness. and a non-seeing nagual would not be able to strike the precise spot.

He also said that the old seers discovered that the assemblage point is not in the physical body, but in the luminous shell, in the cocoon itself. The nagual identifies that spot by its intense luminosity and pushes it, rather than striking it. The force of the push creates a dent in the cocoon and it is felt like a blow to the right shoulder blade, a blow that knocks all the air out of the lungs.

"Are there different types of dents?" I asked.

"There are only two types," he responded. "One is a concavity and the other is a crevice; each has a distinct effect. The concavity is a temporary feature and produces a temporary shift?but the crevice is a profound and permanent feature of the cocoon and produces a permanent shift."

He explained that usually a luminous cocoon hardened by self-reflection is not affected at all by the nagual's blow. Sometimes, however, the cocoon of man is very pliable and the smallest force creates a bowl-like dent ranging in size from a small depression to one that is a third the size of the total cocoon; or it creates a crevice that may run across the width of the egglike shell, or along its length, making the cocoon look as if it has curled in on itself.

Some luminous shells, after being dented, go back to their original shape instantly. Others remain dented for hours or even days at a time, but they revert back by themselves. Still others get a firm, impervious dent that requires another blow from the nagual on a bordering area to restore the original shape of the luminous cocoon. And a few never lose their indentation once they get it. No matter how many blows they get from a nagual they never revert back to their egglike shapes.

Don Juan further said that the dent acts on the first attention bydisplacing the glow of awareness. The dent presses the emanations inside the luminous shell, and the seers witness how the first attention shifts its emphasis under the force of that pressure. The dent, by displacing the Eagle's emanations inside the cocoon, makes the glow of awareness fall on other emanations from areas that are ordinarily inaccessible to the first attention.

I asked him if the glow of awareness is seen only on the surface of the luminous cocoon. He did not answer me right away. He seemed to immerse himself in thought. After perhaps ten minutes he answered my question; he said that normally the glow of awareness is seen on the surface of the cocoon of all sentient beings. After man develops attention, however, the glow of awareness acquires depth. In other words, it is transmitted from the surface of the cocoon to quite a number of emanations inside the cocoon.

"The old seers knew what they were doing when they handled awareness," he went on. "They realized that by creating a dent in the cocoon of man, they could force the glow of awareness, since it is already glowing on the emanations inside the cocoon, to spread to other neighboring ones."

'You make it all sound as if it's a physical affair," I said. "How can dents be made in something that is just aglow?"

"In some inexplicable way, it is a matter of a glow that creates a dent in another glow," he replied. "Your flaw is to remain glued to the inventory of reason. Reason doesn't deal with man as energy. Reason deals with instruments that create energy, but it has never seriously occurred to reason that we are better than instruments: we are organisms that create energy. We are a bubble of energy. It isn't farfetched, then, that a bubble of energy would make a dent in another bubble of energy."

He said that the glow of awareness created by the dent should rightfully be called temporary heightened attention, because it emphasizes emanations that are so proximal to the habitual ones that the change is minimal, yet the shift produces a greater capacity to understand and to concentrate and, above all, a greater capacity to forget. Seers knew exactly how to use this upshift in the scale of quality. They saw that only the emanations surrounding those we use daily suddenly become bright after the nagual's blow. The more distant ones remain unmoved, which meant to them that while being in a state of heightened attention, human beings could work as if they were in the world of everyday life. The need of a nagual man and a nagual woman became paramount to them, because that state lasts only for as long as the depression remains, after which the experiences are immediately forgotten.

"Why does one have to forget?" I asked.

"Because the emanations that account for greater clarity cease to be emphasized once warriors are out of heightened awareness," he replied. "Without that emphasis whatever they experience or witness vanishes."

Don Juan said that one of the tasks the new seers had devised for their students was to force them to remember, that is, to reemphasize by themselves, at a later time, those emanations used during states of heightened awareness.

He reminded me that Genaro was always recommending to me that I learn to write with the tip of my finger instead of a pencil so as not to accumulate notes. Don Juan said that what Genaro had actually meant was that while I was in states of heightened awareness I should utilize some unused emanations for storage of dialogue and experience, and someday recall it all by reemphasizing the emanations that were used.

He went on to explain that a state of heightened awareness is seen not only as a glow that goes deeper inside the egglike shape of human beings, but also as a more intense glow on the surface of the cocoon. Yet it is nothing in comparison to the glow produced by a state of total awareness, which is seen as a burst of incandescence in the entire luminous egg. It is an explosion of light of such a magnitude that the boundaries of the shell are diffused and the inside emanations extend themselves beyond anything imaginable.

"Are those special cases, don Juan?"

"Certainly. They happen only to seers. No other men or any other living creatures brighten up like that. Seers who deliberately attain total awareness are a sight to behold. That is the moment when they burn from within. The fire from within consumes them. And in full awareness they fuse themselves to the emanations at large, and glide into eternity."

After a few days in Sonora I drove don Juan back to the town in the southern part of Mexico where he and his party of warriors lived.

The next day was hot and hazy. I felt lazy and somehow annoyed. In midafternoon, there was a most unpleasant quietude in that town. Don Juan and I were sitting on the comfortable chairs in the big room. I told him that life in rural Mexico was not my cup of tea. I disliked the feeling I had that the silence of that town was forced. The only noise I ever heard was the sound of children's voices yelling in the distance. I was never able to find out whether they were playing or yelling in pain.

"When you're here, you're always in a state of heightened awareness," don Juan said. "That makes a great difference. But no matter what, you should be getting used to living in a town like this. Someday you will live in one."

"Why should I have to live in a town like this, don Juan?"

"I've explained to you that the new seers aim to be free. And freedom has the most devastating implications. Among them is the implication that warriors must purposely seek change. Your predilection is to live the way you do. You stimulate your reason by running through your inventory and pitting it against your friends' inventories. Those maneuvers leave you very little time to examine yourself and your fate. You will have to give up all that. Likewise, if all you knew were the dead calm of this town, you'd have to seek, sooner or later, the other side of the coin."

"Is that what you're doing here, don Juan?"

"Our case is a little bit different, because we are at the end of our trail. We are not seeking anything. What all of us do here is something comprehensible only to a warrior. We go from day to day doing nothing. We are waiting. I will not tire of repeating this: we know that we are waiting and we know what we are waiting for. We are waiting for freedom!

"And now that you know that," he added with a grin, "let's get back to our discussion of awareness."

Usually, when we were in that room we were never interrupted by anyone and don Juan would always decide on the length of our discussions. But this time there was a polite knock on the door and Genaro walked in and sat down. I had not seen Genaro since the day after we had run out of his house in a great hurry. I embraced him.

"Genaro has something to tell you," don Juan said. "I've told you that he is the master of awareness. Now I can tell you what all that means. He can make the assemblage point move deeper into the luminous egg after that point has been jolted out of its position by the nagual's blow."

He explained that Genaro had pushed my assemblage point countless times after I had attained heightened awareness. The day we had gone to the gigantic flat rock to talk, Genaro had made my assemblage point move dramatically into the left side?so dramatically, in fact, that it had been a bit dangerous.

Don Juan stopped talking and seemed to be ready to give Genaro the spotlight. He nodded as if to signal Genaro to say something. Genaro stood up and came to my side.

"Flame is very important," he said softly. "Do you remember that day when I made you look at the reflection of the sunlight on a piece of quartz, when we were sitting on that big flat rock?"

When Genaro mentioned it I remembered. On that day just after don Juan had stopped talking, Genaro had pointed to the refraction of light as it went through a piece of polished quartz that he had taken out of his pocket and placed on the flat rock. The shine of the quartz had immediately caught my attention. The next thing I knew, I was crouching on the flat rock as don Juan stood by with a worried look on his face.

I was about to tell Genaro what I had remembered when he began to talk. He put his mouth to my ear and pointed to one of the two gasoline lamps in the room.

"Look at the flame," he said. "There is no heat in it. It's pure flame. Pure flame can take you to the depths of the unknown."

As he talked, I began to feel a strange pressure; it was a physical heaviness. My ears were buzzing; my eyes teared to the point that I could hardly make out the shape of the furniture. My vision seemed to be totally out of focus. Although my eyes were open, I could not see the intense light of the gasoline lamps. Everything around me was dark. There were streaks of chartreuse phosphorescence that illuminated dark, moving clouds. Then, as abruptly as it had faded away, my eyesight returned.

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 normal 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 breakthroughs 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 oddity 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.

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-toknow-it."

"How about the emanations that are inside the cocoon 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."

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."

Our conversation was interrupted, and I did not see him until he sent for me to come to the back patio a couple of hours later.

He and Genaro were strolling around at the far end of the corridor; I could see them moving their hands in what seemed to be an animated conversation.

It was a clear sunny day. The midafternoon sun shone directly on some of the flower pots that hung from the eaves of the roof around the corridor and projected their shadows on the north and east walls of the patio. The combination of intense yellow sunlight, the massive black shadows of the pots, and the lovely, delicate, bare shadows of the frail flowering plants that grew in them was stunning. Someone with a keen eye for balance and order had pruned those plants to create such an exquisite effect.

"The nagual woman has done that," don Juan said as if reading my thoughts. "She gazes at these shadows in the afternoons."

The thought of her gazing at shadows in the afternoons had a swift and devastating effect on me. The intense yellow light of that hour, the quietness of that town, and the affection that I felt for the nagual woman conjured up for me in one instant all the solitude of the warriors' endless path.

Don Juan had defined the scope of that path when he said to me that the new seers are the warriors of total freedom, that their only search is the ultimate liberation that comes when they attain total awareness. I understood with unimpaired clarity, as I looked at those haunting shadows on the wall, what it meant to the nagual woman when she said that to read poems out loud was the only release that her spirit had.

I remember that the day before she had read something to me, there in the patio, but I had not quite understood her urgency, her longing. It was a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez, "Hora Inmensa," which she told me synthesized for her the solitude of warriors who live to escape to total freedom.

Only a bell and a bird break the stillness. . . It seems that the two talk with the setting sun. Golden colored silence, the afternoon is made of crystals. A roving purity sways the cool trees, and beyond all that, a transparent river dreams that trampling over pearls it breaks loose and flows into infinity.

Don Juan and Genaro came to my side and looked at me with an expression of surprise.

"What are we really doing, don Juan?" I asked. "Is it possible that warriors are only preparing themselves for death?"

"No way," he said, gently patting my shoulder. "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."

We were quiet for a moment. Then don Juan asked me if I was in the throes of self-pity. I did not answer because I was not sure.

"You're not sorry that you're here, are you?" don Juan asked with a faint smile.

"He's certainly not," Genaro assured him. Then he seemed to have a moment of doubt. He scratched his head, then looked at me and arched his brows. "Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"

"He's certainly not," don Juan assured Genaro this time. He went through the same gestures of scratching his head and arching his brows. "Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"

"He's certainly not!" Genaro boomed, and both of them exploded into uncontrolled laughter.

When they had calmed down, don Juan said that self-importance is the motivating force for every attack of melancholy. He added that warriors are entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh.

"Genaro has something to show you which is more exciting than all the self-pity you can muster up," don Juan continued, "it has to do with the position of the assemblage point."

Genaro immediately began to walk around the corridor, arching his back and lifting his thighs to his chest.

"The nagual Julian showed him how to walk that way," don Juan said in a whisper, "it's called the gait of power. Genaro knows several gaits of power. Watch him fixedly."

Genaro's movements were indeed mesmeric. I found myself following his gait, first with my eyes and then irresistibly with my feet. I imitated his gait. We walked once around the patio and stopped.

While walking, I had noticed the extraordinary lucidity that each step brought to me. When we stopped, I was in a state of keen alertness. I could hear every sound; I could detect every change in the light or in the shadows around me. I became enthralled with a feeling of urgency, of impending action. I felt extraordinarily aggressive, muscular, daring. At that moment I saw an enormous span of flat land in front of me; right behind me I saw a forest. Huge trees were lined up as straight as a wall. The forest was dark and green; the plain was sunny and yellow.

My breathing was deep and strangely accelerated, but not in an abnormal way. Yet it was the rhythm of my breathing that was forcing me to trot on the spot. I wanted to take off running, or rather my body wanted to, but just as I was taking off something stopped me.

Don Juan and Genaro were suddenly by my side. We walked down the corridor with Genaro to my right. He nudged me with his shoulder. I felt the weight of his body on me. He gently shoved me to the left and we angled off straight for the east wall of the patio. For a moment I had the weird impression that we were going to go through the wall, and I even braced myself for the impact, but we stopped right in front of the wall.

While my face was still against the wall, they both examined me with great care. I knew what they were searching for; they wanted to make sure that I had shifted my assemblage point. I knew that I had because my mood had changed. They obviously knew it too. They gently took me by the arms and walked in silence with me to the other side of the corridor, to a dark passageway, a narrow hall that connected the patio with the rest of the house. We stopped there. Don Juan and Genaro moved a few feet away from me.

I was left facing the side of the house that was in dark shadows. I looked into an empty dark room. I had a sense of physical weariness. I felt languid, indifferent, and yet I experienced a sense of spiritual strength. I realized then that I had lost something. There was no strength in my body. I could hardly stand. My legs finally gave in and I sat down and then I lay down on my side. While I lay there, I had the most wonderful, fulfilling thoughts of love for God, for goodness.

Then all at once I was in front of the main altar of a church. The bas-reliefs covered with gold leaf glittered with the light of thousands of candles. I saw the dark figures of men and women carrying an enormous crucifix mounted on a huge palanquin. I moved out of their way and stepped outside the church. I saw a multitude of people, a sea of candles, coming toward me. I felt elated. I ran to join them. I was moved by profound love. I wanted to be with them, to pray to the Lord. I was only a few feet away from the mass of people when something swished me away.

The next instant, I was with don Juan and Genaro. They flanked me as we walked lazily around the patio.

While we were having lunch the next day, don Juan said that Genaro had pushed my assemblage point with his gait of power, and that he had been able to do that because I had been in a state of inner silence. He explained that the articulation point of everything seers do is something he had talked about since the day we met: stopping the internal dialogue. He stressed over and over that the internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point fixed to its original position.

"Once silence is attained, everything is possible," he said.

I told him I was very conscious of the fact that in general I had stopped talking to myself, but did not know how I had done it. If asked to explain the procedure I would not know what to say.

"The explanation is simplicity itself," he said. "You willed it, and thus you set a new intent, a new command. Then your command became the Eagle's command.

"This is one of the most extraordinary things that the new seers found out: that our command can become the Eagle'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 inlend it."

We were silent for a few minutes. I asked him to whom he was referring when he said that we had teachers who taught us to talk to ourselves.

"I was talking about what happens to human beings when they are infants," he replied, "a time when they 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 new seers say that infants have hundreds of teachers who teach them exactly where to place their assemblage point."

He said that seers see that infants have no fixed assemblage point at first. Their encased emanations are in a state of great turmoil, and their assemblage points shift everywhere in the band of man, giving children a great capacity to focus on emanations that later will be thoroughly disregarded. Then as they grow, the older humans around them, through their considerable power over them, force the children's assemblage points to become more steady by means of an increasingly complex internal dialogue. 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.

"The fact of the matter is that many children see," he went on. "Most of those who see are considered to be oddballs and every effort is made to correct them, to make them solidify the position of their assemblage points."

"But would it be possible to encourage children to keep their assemblage points more fluid?" I asked.

"Only if they live among the new seers," he said. "Otherwise they would get entrapped, as the old seers did, in the intricacies of the silent side of man. And, believe me, that's worse than being caught in the clutches of rationality."

Don Juan went on to express his profound admiration for the human capacity to impart order to the chaos of the Eagle's emanations. He maintained that every one of us, in his own right, is a masterful magician and that our magic is to keep our assemblage point unwaveringly fixed.

"The force of the emanations at large," he went on, "makes our assemblage point select certain emanations and cluster them for alignment and perception. That's the command of the Eagle, but all the meaning that we give to what we perceive is our command, our gift of magic."

He said that in the light of what he had explained, what Genaro had made me do the day before was something extraordinarily complex and yet very simple. It was complex because it required a tremendous discipline on everybody's part; it required that the internal dialogue be stopped, that a state of heightened awareness be reached, and that someone walk away with one's assemblage point. The explanation behind all these complex procedures was very simple; 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.

"I used to give you power plants in order to make your assemblage point move," don Juan continued. "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, as you yourself can attest."

He explained that my assemblage point had shifted scores of times in the past, just as it had shifted the day before, and that most of the time the worlds it had assembled had been so close to the world of everyday life as to be virtually phantom worlds. He emphatically added that visions of that kind are automatically rejected by the new seers.

"Those visions are the product of man's inventory," he went on. "They are of no value for warriors in search of total freedom, because they are produced by a lateral shift of the assemblage point."

He stopped talking and looked at me. I knew that by "lateral shift" he had meant a shift of the point from one side to the other along the width of man's band of emanations instead of a shift in depth. I asked him if I was right.

"That's exactly what I meant," he said. "On both edges of man's band of emanations there is a strange storage of refuse, an incalculable pile of human junk. It's a very morbid, sinister storehouse. It had great value for the old seers but not for us.

"One of the easiest things one can do is to fall into it. Yesterday Genaro and I wanted to give you a quick example of that lateral shift; that was why we walked your assemblage point, but 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."

I asked him to explain the act of walking the assemblage point. He said that once warriors have attained inner silence by stopping their internal dialogue, the sound of the gait of power, more than the sight of it, is what traps their assemblage points. The rhythm of muffled steps instantly catches the alignment force of the emanations inside the cocoon, which has been disconnected by inner silence.

"That force hooks itself immediately to the edges of the band," he went on. "On the right edge we find endless visions of physical activity, violence, killing, sensuality. On the left edge we find spirituality, religion, God. Genaro and I walked your assemblage point to both edges, so as to give you a complete view of that human junk pile."

Don Juan restated, as if on second thought, that one of the most mysterious aspects of the seers' knowledge is the incredible effects of inner silence. He said that 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.

He said that the movement ordinarily is toward the left, that such a directional preference is a natural reaction of most human beings, but that there are seers who can direct that movement to positions below the customary spot where the point is located. The new seers call that shift "the shift below."

"Seers also suffer accidental shifts below," he went on. "The assemblage point doesn't remain there long, and that's fortunate, because that is the place of the beast. To go below is counter to our interest, although the easiest thing to do."

Don Juan also said that among the many errors of judgment the old seers had committed, one of the most grievous was moving their assemblage points to the immeasurable area below, which made them experts at adopting animal forms. They chose different animals as their point of reference and called those animals their nagual. They believed that by moving their assemblage points to specific spots they would acquire the characteristics of the animal of their choice, its strength or wisdom or cunning or agility or ferocity.

Don Juan assured me that there are many dreadful examples of such practices even among the seers of our day. The relative facility with which the assemblage point of man moves toward any lower position poses a great temptation to seers, especially to those whose inclination leans toward that end. It is the duty of a nagual, therefore, to test his warriors.

He told me then that he had put me to the test by moving my assemblage point to a position below, while I was under the influence of a power plant. He then guided my assemblage point until I could isolate the crows' band of emanations, which resulted in my changing into a crow.

I again asked don Juan the question I had asked him dozens of times. I wanted to know whether I had physically turned into a crow or had merely thought and felt like one. He explained that a shift of the assemblage point to the area below always results in a total transformation. He added that 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.

He conceded that my transformation was indeed horrifying by any standards. My reaction to that experience proved to him that I had no leanings toward that direction. Had it not been that way, I would have had to employ enormous energy in order to fight off a tendency to remain in that area below, which some seers find most comfortable.

He further said that an unwitting downshift occurs periodically to every seer, but that such a downshift becomes less and less frequent as their assemblage points move farther toward the left. Every time it occurs, however, the power of a seer undergoing it diminishes considerably. It is a drawback that takes time and great effort to correct.

"Those lapses make seers extremely morose and narrow-minded," he continued, "and in certain cases, extremely rational."

"How can seers avoid those downshifts?" I asked.

"It all depends on the warrior," he said. "Some of them are naturally inclined to indulge in their quirks? yourself, for instance. They are the ones who are hard hit. For those like you, I recommend a twenty-fourhour vigil of everything they do. Disciplined men or women are less prone to that kind of shift; for those I would recommend a twenty-three-hour vigil."

He looked at me with shiny eyes and laughed.

"Female seers have downshifts more often than males," he said. "But they are also capable of bouncing out of that position with no effort at all. while males linger dangerously in it."

He also said that women seers have an extraordinary capacity to make their assemblage points hold on to any position in the area below. Men cannot. Men have sobriety and purpose, but very little talent; that is the reason why a nagual must have eight women seers in his party. Women give the impulse to cross the immeasurable vastness of the unknown. Together with that natural capacity, or as a consequence of it, women have a most fierce intensity. They can, therefore, reproduce an animal form with flare, ease, and a matchless ferocity.

"If you think about scary things," he continued, "about something unnamable lurking in the darkness, you're thinking, without knowing it, about a woman seer holding a position in the immeasurable area below. True horror lies right there. If you ever find an aberrant woman seer, run for the hills!"

I asked him whether other organisms were capable of shifting their assemblage points.

"Their points can shift," he said, "but the shift is not a voluntary thing with them."

"Is the assemblage point of other organisms also trained to appear where it does?" I asked.

"Every newborn organism is trained, one way or another," he replied. "We may not understand how their training is done?after all, we don't even understand how it is done to us?but seers see that the newborn are coaxed to do what their kind does. That's exactly what happens to human infants: seers see their assemblage points shifting every which way and then they see how the presence of adults fastens each point to one spot. The same happens to every other organism."

Don Juan seemed to reflect for a moment and then added that there was indeed one unique effect that man's assemblage point has. He pointed to a tree outside.

"When we, as serious adult human beings, look at a tree," he said, "our assemblage points align an infinite number of emanations and achieve a miracle. Our assemblage points make us perceive a cluster of emanations that we call tree."

He explained that the assemblage point not only effects the alignment needed for perception, but also obliterates the alignment of certain emanations in order to arrive at a greater refinement of perception, a skimming, a tricky human construct with no parallel.

He said that the new seers had observed that only human beings were capable of further clustering the clusters of emanations. He used the Spanish word for skimming, desnate, to describe the act of collecting the most palatable cream off the top of a container of boiled milk after it cools. Likewise, in terms of perception, man's assemblage point takes some part of the emanations already selected for alignment and makes a more palatable construct with it.

"The skimmings of men," don Juan continued, "are more real than what other creatures perceive. That is our pitfall. They are so real to us that we forget we have constructed them by commanding our assemblage points to appear where they do. We forget they are real to us only because it is our command to perceive them as real. We have the power to skim the top off the alignments, but we don't have the power to protect ourselves from our own commands. That has to be learned. To give our skimmings a free hand, as we do, is an error of judgment for which we pay as dearly as the old seers paid for theirs."

The Shift Below

Don Juan and Genaro made their yearly trip to the northern part of Mexico, to the Sonoran desert, to look for medicinal plants. One of the seers of the nagual's party, Vicente Medrano, the herbalist among them, used those plants to make medicines.

I had joined don Juan and Genaro in Sonora, at the last stage of their journey, just in time to drive them south, back to their home.

The day before we started on our drive, don Juan abruptly continued his explanation of the mastery of awareness. We were resting in the shade of some tall bushes in the foothills of the mountains. It was late afternoon, almost dark. Each of us carried a large burlap sack filled with plants. As soon as we had put them down, Genaro lay down on the ground and fell asleep, using his folded jacket as a pillow.

Don Juan spoke to me in a low voice, as if he didn't want to wake up Genaro. He said that by now he had explained most of the truths about awareness, and that there was only one truth left to discuss. The last truth, he assured me, was the best of the old seers' findings, although they never knew that themselves. Its tremendous value was only recognized, ages later, by the new seers.

"I've explained to you that man has an assemblage point," he went on, "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."

Still in a whisper, he said that certain geographical areas not only help that precarious movement of the assemblage point, but also select specific directions for that movement. For instance, the Sonoran desert helps the assemblage point move downward from its customary position, to the place of the beast.

"That's why there are true sorcerers in Sonora," he continued. "Especially sorceresses. You already know one, la Catalina. In the past, I have arranged bouts between the two of you. I wanted to make your assemblage point shift, and la Catalina, with her sorcery antics, jolted it loose."

Don Juan explained that the chilling experiences I had had with la Catalina had been part of a prearranged agreement between the two of them.

"What would you think if we invited her to join us?" Genaro asked me in a loud voice, as he sat up.

The abruptness of his question and the strange sound of his voice plunged me into instant terror.

Don Juan laughed and shook me by the arms. He assured me that there was no need for alarm. He said that la Catalina was like a cousin or an aunt to us. She was part of our world, although she did not quite follow our quests. She was infinitely closer to the ancient seers.

Genaro smiled and winked at me.

"I understand that you've got hot pants for her," he said to me. "She herself confessed to me that every time you have had a confrontation with her, the greater your fright, the hotter your pants."

Don Juan and Genaro laughed to near hysteria.

I had to admit that somehow I had always found la Catalina to be a very scary but at the same time an extremely appealing woman. What impressed me the most about her was her exuding energy.

"She has so much energy saved," don Juan commented, "that you didn't have to be in heightened awareness for her to move your assemblage point all the way to the depths of the left side."

Don Juan said again that la Catalina was very closely related to us, because she belonged to the nagual Julian's party. He explained that usually the nagual and all the members of his party leave the world together, but that there are instances when they leave either in smaller groups or one by one. The nagual Julian and his party were an example of the latter. Although he had left the world nearly forty years ago, la Catalina was still here.

He reminded me about something he mentioned to me before, that the nagual Julian's party consisted of a group of three thoroughly inconsequential men and eight superb women. Don Juan had always maintained that such a disparity was one of the reasons why the members of the nagual Julian's party left the world one by one.

He said that la Catalina had been attached to one of the superb women seers of the nagual Julian's party, who taught her extraordinary maneuvers to shift her assemblage point to the area below. That seer was one of the last to leave the world. She lived to an extremely old age, and since both she and la Catalina were originally from Sonora, they returned, in her advanced years, to the desert and lived together until the seer left the world. In the years they spent together, la Catalina became her most dedicated helper and disciple, a disciple who was willing to learn the extravagant ways the old seers knew to make the assemblage point shift.

I asked don Juan if la Catalina's knowledge was inherently different from his own.

"We are exactly the same," he replied. "She's more like Silvio Manuel or Genaro; she is really the female version of them, but, of course, being a woman she's infinitely more aggressive and dangerous than both of them."

Genaro assented with a nod of his head. "Infinitely more," he said and winked again.

"Is she attached to your party?" I asked don Juan.

"I said that she's like a cousin or an aunt to us," he replied. "I meant she belongs to the older generation, although she's younger than all of us. She is the last of that group. She is rarely in contact with us. She doesn't quite like us. We are too stiff for her, because she's used to the nagual Julian's touch. She prefers the high adventure of the unknown to the quest for freedom."

"What is the difference between the two?" I asked don Juan.

"In the last part of my explanation of the truths about awareness," he replied, "we are going to discuss that difference slowly and thoroughly. What's important for you to know. at this moment, is that you're jealously guarding weird secrets in your leftside awareness; that is why la Catalina and you like each other."

I insisted again that it was not that I liked her, it was rather that I admired her great strength.

Don Juan and Genaro laughed and patted me as if they knew something I did not.

"She likes you because she knows what you're like," Genaro said and smacked his lips. "She knew the nagual Julian very well."

Both of them gave me a long look that made me feel embarrassed.

"What are you driving at?" I asked Genaro in a belligerent tone.

He grinned at me and moved his eyebrows up and down in a comical gesture. But he kept quiet.

Don Juan spoke and broke the silence.

"There are very strange points in common between the nagual Julian and you," he said. "Genaro is just trying to figure out if you're aware of it."

I asked both of them how on earth I would be aware of something so farfetched.

"La Catalina thinks you are," Genaro said. "She says so because she knew the nagual Julian better than any of us here."

I commented that I couldn't believe that she knew the nagual Julian, since he had left the world nearly forty years ago.

"La Catalina is no spring chicken," Genaro said. "She just looks young; that's part of her knowledge. Just as it was part of the nagual Julian's knowledge. You've seen her only when she looks young. If you see her when she looks old, she'll scare the living daylights out of you."

"What la Catalina does," don Juan interrupted, "can be explained only in terms of the three masteries: the mastery of awareness, the mastery of stalking, and the mastery of intent.

"But today, we are going to examine what she does only in light of the last truth about awareness: the truth that says that the assemblage point can assemble worlds different from our own after it moves from its original position."

Don Juan signaled me to get up. Genaro also stood up. I automatically grabbed the burlap sack filled with medicinal plants. Genaro stopped me as I was about to put it on my shoulders.

"Leave the sack alone," he said, smiling. "We have to take a little hike up the hill and meet la Catalina."

"Where is she?" I asked.

"Up there," Genaro said, pointing to the top of a small hill. "If you stare with your eyes half-closed, you'll see her as a very dark spot against the green shrubbery."

I strained to see the dark spot, but I couldn't see anything.

"Why don't you walk up there?" don Juan suggested to me.

I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach. Don Juan urged me with a movement of his hand to go up, but I didn't dare move. Finally, Genaro took me by the arm and both of us climbed toward the top of the hill. When we got there, I realized that don Juan had come up right behind us. The three of us reached the top at the same time.

Don Juan very calmly began to talk to Genaro. He asked him if he remembered the many times the nagual Julian was about to choke both of them to death, because they indulged in their fears.

Genaro turned to me and assured me that the nagual Julian had been a ruthless teacher. He and his own teacher, the nagual Elias, who was still in the world then, used to push everyone's assemblage points beyond a crucial limit and let them fend for themselves.

"I once told you that the nagual Julian recommended us not to waste our sexual energy," Genaro went on. "He meant that for the assemblage point to shift, one needs energy. If one doesn't have it, the nagual's blow is not the blow of freedom, but the blow of death."

"Without enough energy," don Juan said, "the force of alignment is crushing. You have to have energy to sustain the pressure of alignments which never take place under ordinary circumstances."

Genaro said that the nagual Julian was an inspiring teacher. He always found ways to teach and at the same time entertain himself. One of his favorite teaching devices was to catch them unawares once or twice, in their normal awareness, and make their assemblage points shift. From then on, all he had to do to have their undivided attention was to threaten them with an unexpected nagual's blow.

"The nagual Julian was really an unforgettable man," don Juan said. "He had a great touch with people. He would do the worst things in the world, but done by him they were great. Done by anyone else, they would have been crude and callous.

"The nagual Ellas, on the other hand, had no touch, but he was indeed a great, great teacher."

"The nagual Elias was very much like the nagual Juan Matus," Genaro said to me. "They got along very fine. And the nagual Elias taught him everything without ever raising his voice, or playing tricks on him.

"But the nagual Julian was quite different," Genaro went on, giving me a friendly shove. "I'd say that he jealously guarded strange secrets in his left side, just like you. Wouldn't you say so?" he asked don Juan.

Don Juan did not answer, but nodded affirmatively. He seemed to be holding back his laughter.

"He had a playful nature," don Juan said, and both of them broke into a great laughter.

The fact that they were obviously alluding to something they knew made me feel even more threatened.

Don Juan matter-of-factly said that they were referring to the bizarre sorcery techniques that the nagual Julian had learned in the course of his life. Genaro added that the nagual Julian had a unique teacher besides the nagual Elias. A teacher who had liked him immensely and had taught him novel and complex ways of moving his assemblage point. As a result of this, the nagual Julian was extraordinarily eccentric in his behavior.

"Who was that teacher, don Juan?" I asked.

Don Juan and Genaro looked at each other and giggled like two children.

"That is a very tough question to answer," don Juan replied. "All I can say is that he was the teacher that deviated the course of our line. He taught us many things, good and bad, but among the worst, he taught us what the old seers did. So, some of us got trapped. The nagual Julian was one of them, and so is la Catalina. We only hope that you won't follow them."

I immediately began to protest. Don Juan interrupted me. He said that I did not know what I was protesting.

As don Juan spoke, I became terribly angry with him and Genaro. Suddenly, I was raging, yelling at them at the top of my voice. My reaction was so out of tone with me that it scared me. It was as if I were someone else. I stopped and looked at them for help.

Genaro had his hands on don Juan's shoulders as if he needed support. Both of them were laughing uncontrollably.

I became so despondent I was nearly in tears. Don Juan came to my side. He reassuringly put his hand on my shoulder. He said that the Sonoran desert, for reasons incomprehensible to him, fostered definite belligerence in man or any other organism.

"People may say that it's because the air is too dry here," he continued, "or because it's too hot. Seers would say that there is a particular confluence of the Eagle's emanations here, which, as I've already said, helps the assemblage point to shift below.

"Be that as it may, 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. We believe that the nagual Julian didn't attain it. He was waylaid, and so was la Catalina."

He further said that to be a peerless nagual, one has to love freedom, and one has to have supreme detachment. He explained that what makes the warrior's path so very dangerous is that it is the opposite of the life situation of modern man. He said that 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," don Juan continued, "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 witnesses. They sink into the unknown and love it."

"And you think i'm like that, don't you?" I asked don Juan.

"We don't think, we know," Genaro replied. "And la Catalina knows better than anyone else."

"Why would she know it?" I demanded.

"Because she's like you," Genaro replied, pronouncing his words with a comical intonation.

I was about to get into a heated argument again when don Juan interrupted me.

"There's no need to get so worked up," he said to me. "You are what you are. The fight for freedom is harder for some. You are one of them.

"In order to be unbiased witnesses," he went on, "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.

"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."

Genaro clapped his hands noisily and let out a piercing whistle that imitated the whistle of a football coach.

"Let's get that assemblage point moving!" he yelled. "Up, up, up! Move, move, move!"

We were all still laughing when the bushes by my right side were suddenly stirred. Don Juan and Genaro immediately sat down with the left leg tucked under the seat. The right leg, with the knee up, was like a shield in front of them. Don Juan signaled me to do the same. He raised his brows and made a gesture of resignation at the corner of his mouth.

"Sorcerers have their own quirks," he said in a whisper. "When the assemblage point moves to the regions below its normal position, the vision of sorcerers becomes limited. If they see you standing, they'll attack you."

"The nagual Julian kept me once for two days in this warrior's position," Genaro whispered to me. "I even had to urinate while I sat in this position."

"And defecate," don Juan added.

"Right," Genaro said. And then he whispered to me, as if on second thought, "I hope you did your kaka earlier. If your bowels aren't empty when la Catalina shows up, you'll shit in your pants, unless I show you how to take them off. If you have to shit in this position, you've got to get your pants off."

He began to show me how to maneuver out of my trousers. He did it in a most serious and concerned manner. All my concentration was focused on his movements. It was only when I had gotten out of my pants that I became aware that don Juan was roaring with laughter. I realized that Genaro was again poking fun at me. I was about to stand up to put on my pants, when don Juan stopped me. He was laughing so hard that he could hardly articulate his words. He told me to stay put, that Genaro did things only half in fun, and that la Catalina was really there behind the bushes.

His tone of urgency, in the midst of laughter, got to me. I froze on the spot. A moment later a rustle in the bushes sent me into such a panic that I forgot about my pants. I looked at Genaro. He was again wearing his pants. He shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't have time to show you how to put them back on without getting up."

I did not have time to get angry or to join them in their mirth. Suddenly, right in front of me, the bushes separated and a most horrendous creature came out. It was so outlandish I was no longer afraid. I was spellbound. Whatever was in front of me was not a human being; it was something not even remotely resembling one. It was more like a reptile. Or a bulky grotesque insect. Or even a hairy, ultimately repulsive bird. Its body was dark and had coarse reddish hair. I could not see any legs, just the ugly enormous head. The nose was flat and the nostrils were two enormous lateral holes. It had something like a beak with teeth. Horrifying as that thing was, its eyes were magnificent. They were like two mesmeric pools of inconceivable clarity. They had knowledge. They were not human eyes, or bird eyes, or any kind of eyes I had ever seen.

The creature moved toward my left, rustling the bushes. As I moved my head to follow it, I noticed that don Juan and Genaro seemed to be as spellbound by its presence as I was. It occurred to me that they had never seen anything like that either.

In an instant, the creature had moved completely out of sight. But a moment later there was a growl and its gigantic shape again loomed in front of us.

I was fascinated and at the same time worried by the fact that I was not in the least afraid of that grotesque creature. It was as if my early panic had been experienced by someone else.

I felt, at one moment, that I was beginning to stand up. Against my volition, my legs straightened up and I found myself standing up, facing the creature. I vaguely felt that I was taking off my jacket, my shirt, and my shoes. Then I was naked. The muscles of my legs tensed with a tremendously powerful contraction. I jumped up and down with colossal agility, and then the creature and I raced toward some ineffable greenness in the distance.

The creature raced ahead of me, coiling on itself, like a serpent. But then I caught up with it. As we speeded together, I became aware of something I already knew?the creature was really la Catalina. All of a sudden, la Catalina, in the flesh, was next to me. We moved effortlessly. It was as if we were stationary, only posed in a bodily gesture of movement and speed, while the scenery around us was being moved, giving the impression of enormous acceleration.

Our racing stopped as suddenly as it had started, and then I was alone with la Catalina in a different world. There was not a single recognizable feature in it. There was an intense glare and heat coming from what seemed to be the ground, a ground covered with huge rocks. Or at least they seemed to be rocks. They had the color of sandstone, but they had no weight; they were like chunks of sponge tissue. I could send them hurling around by only leaning on them.

I became so fascinated with my strength that I was oblivious to anything else. I had assessed, in whatever way, that the chunks of seemingly weightless material opposed resistance to me. It was my superior strength that sent them hurling around.

I tried to grab them with my hands, and I realized that my entire body had changed. La Catalina was looking at me. She was again the grotesque creature she had been before, and so was I. I could not see myself, but I knew that both of us were exactly alike.

An indescribable joy possessed me, as if joy were some force that came from outside me. La Catalina and I cavorted, and twisted, and played until I had no more thoughts, or feelings, or human awareness in any degree. Yet, I was definitely aware. My awareness was a vague knowledge that gave me confidence; it was a limitless trust, a physical certainty of my existence, not in the sense of a human feeling of individuality, but in the sense of a presence that was everything.

Then, everything came again into human focus all at once. La Catalina was holding my hand. We were walking on the desert floor among the desert shrubs. I had the immediate and painful realization that the desert rocks and hard clumps of dirt were horribly injurious to my bare feet.

We came to a spot clear of vegetation. Don Juan and Genaro were there. I sat down and put on my clothes.

My experience with la Catalina delayed our trip back to the south of Mexico. It had unhinged me in some indescribable way. In my normal state of awareness, I became disassociated. It was as if I had lost a point of reference. I had become despondent. I told don Juan that I had even lost my desire to live.

We were sitting around in the ramada of don Juan's house. My car was loaded with sacks and we were ready to leave, but my feeling of despair got the best of me and I began to weep.

Don Juan and Genaro laughed until their eyes were tearing. The more desperate I felt, the greater was their enjoyment. Finally, don Juan had me shift into heightened awareness and explained that their laughter was not unkindness on their part, or the result of a weird sense of humor, but the genuine expression of happiness at seeing me advance in the path of knowledge.

"I'll tell you what the nagual Julian used to say to us when we got to where you are," don Juan went on. "That way, you'll know that you're not alone. What's happening to you happens to anyone who stores enough energy to catch a glimpse of the unknown."

He said that the nagual Julian used to tell them that they had been evicted from the homes where they had lived all their lives. A result of having saved energy had been the disruption of their cozy but utterly limiting and boring nest in the world of everyday life. Their depression, the nagual Julian told them, was not so much the sadness of having lost their nest, but the annoyance of having to look for new quarters.

"The new quarters," don Juan went on, "are not as cozy. But they are infinitely more roomy.

"Your eviction notice came in the form of a great depression, a loss of the desire to live, just as it happened to us. When you told us that you didn't want to live, we couldn't help laughing."

"What's going to happen to me now?" I asked.

"Using the vernacular, you got to get another pad," don Juan replied.

Don Juan and Genaro again entered into a state of great euphoria. Every one of their statements and remarks made them laugh hysterically.

"It's all very simple," don Juan said. "Your new level of energy will create a new spot to house your assemblage point. And the warriors' dialogue you carry on with us every time we get together will solidify that new position."

Genaro adopted a serious look and in a booming voice he asked me, "Did you shit today?"

He urged me with a movement of his head to answer. "Did you, did you?" he demanded. "Let's get going with our warriors' dialogue."

When their laughter had subsided, Genaro said that I had to be aware of a drawback, the fact that from time to time the assemblage point returns to its original position. He told me that in his own case, the normal position of his assemblage point had forced him to see people as threatening and often terrifying beings. To his utter amazement, one day he realized that he had changed. He was considerably more daring and had successfully dealt with a situation that would have ordinarily thrown him into chaos and fear.

"I found myself making love," Genaro continued, and he winked at me. "Usually I was afraid to death of women. But one day I found myself in bed with a most ferocious woman, it was so unlike me that when I realized what I was doing I nearly had a heart attack. The jolt made my assemblage point return to its miserable normal position and I had to run out of the house, shaking like a scared rabbit.

"You'd better watch out for the recoil of the assemblage point," Genaro added, and they were laughing again.

"The position of the assemblage point on man's cocoon," don Juan explained, "is maintained by the internal dialogue, and because of that, it is a flimsy position at best. That's why men and women lose their minds so easily, especially those whose internal dialogue is repetitious, boring, and without any depth.

"The new seers say that the more resilient human beings are those whose internal dialogue is more fluid and varied."

He said that the position of the warrior's assemblage point is infinitely stronger, because as soon as the assemblage point begins to move in the cocoon, it creates a dimple in the luminosity, a dimple that houses the assemblage point from then on.

"That's the reason why we can't say that warriors lose their minds," don Juan went on. "If they lose anything, they lose their dimple."

Don Juan and Genaro found that statement so hilarious that they rolled on the floor laughing.

I asked don Juan to explain my experience with la Catalina. And both of them again howled with laughter.

"Women are definitely more bizarre than men," don Juan finally said. "The fact that they have an extra opening between their legs makes them fall prey to strange influences. Strange, powerful forces possess them through that opening. That's the only way I can understand their quirks."

He kept silent for a while, and I asked what he meant by that.

"La Catalina came to us as a giant worm," he replied.

Don Juan's expression when he said that, and Genaro's explosion of laughter, took me into sheer mirth. I laughed until I was nearly sick.

Don Juan said that la Catalina's skill was so extraordinary that she could do anything she wanted in the realm of the beast. Her unparalleled display had been motivated by her affinity with me. The final result of all that, he said, was that la Catalina pulled my assemblage point with her.

"What did you two do as worms?" Genaro asked and slapped me on the back.

Don Juan seemed to be close to choking with laughter.

"That's why I've said that women are more bizarre than men," he commented at last.

"I don't agree with you," Genaro said to don Juan. "The nagual Julian didn't have an extra hole between his legs and he was more weird than la Catalina. I believe she learned the worm bit from him. He used to do that to her."

Don Juan jumped up and down, like a child who is trying to keep from wetting his pants.

When he had regained a measure of calm, don Juan said that the nagual Julian had a knack for creating and exploiting the most bizarre situations. He also said that la Catalina had given me a superb example of the shift below. She had let me see her as the being whose form she had adopted by moving her assemblage point, and she had then helped me move mine to the same position that gave her her monstrous appearance.

"The other teacher that the nagual Julian had," don Juan went on, "taught him how to get to specific spots in that immensity of the area below. None of us could follow him there, but all the members of his party did, especially la Catalina and the woman seer who taught her."

Don Juan further said that a shift below entailed a view, not of another world proper, but of our same world of everyday life seen from a different perspective. He added that in order for me to see another world I had to perceive another great band of the Eagle's emanations.

He then brought his explanation to an end. He said that he had no time to elaborate on the subject of the great bands of emanations, because we had to be on our way. I wanted to stay a bit longer and keep on talking, but he argued that he would need a good deal of time to explain that topic and I would need fresh concentration.

Continued