Again he retorted that sorcerers have foolproof
methods of their own.
"I'm not trying to be contrary or argue you down," he continued, "but
someday soon you may be able to ask someone who knows for sure."
"No one can know this for sure, don Juan."
"This is another of those impossible things to believe, but there is
somebody who can verify all this. You'll meet that person someday."
"Come on, don Juan, you've got to be joking. Who can verify, what
happened seven thousand years ago?"
"Very simple, one of the old sorcerers we've been talking about. The
one I met. He's the one who told me all about the old sorcerers. I hope you
remember what I am going to tell you about that particular man. He is the
key to many of our endeavors, and he's also the one you have to meet."
"I told don Juan that I was hanging on every word he said, I even
though I did not understand what he was saying. He accused me of humoring
him and not believing a word about the old sorcerers. I admitted that in my
state of daily consciousness, of course, I had not believed those farfetched
stories. But neither had I in the second attention, although there I should
have had a different reaction.
"Only when you ponder what I said does it become a farfetched story,"
he remarked. "If you don't involve your common sense, it remains purely a
matter of energy."
"Why did you say, don Juan, that I am going to meet one of the old
sorcerers?"
"Because you are. It is vital that the two of you meet, someday. But,
for the moment, just let me tell you another farfetched story about one of
the naguals of my line, the nagual Sebastian."
Don Juan told me then that the nagual Sebastian had been a sexton in a
church in southern Mexico around the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
his account, don Juan stressed how sorcerers, past or present, seek and find
refuge in established institutions, such as the Church. It was his idea that
because of their superior discipline, sorcerers are trustworthy employees
and that they are avidly sought by institutions that are always in dire need
of such persons. Don Juan maintained that as long as no one is aware of the
sorcerers' doings, their lack of ideological sympathies makes them appear as
model workers.
Don Juan continued his story and said that one day, while Sebastian was
performing his duties as a sexton, a strange man came to the church, an old
Indian who seemed to be ill. In a weak voice he told Sebastian that he
needed help. The nagual thought that the Indian wanted the parish priest,
but the man, making a great effort, addressed the nagual. In a harsh and
direct tone, he told him that he knew that Sebastian was not only a sorcerer
but a nagual.
Sebastian, quite alarmed by this sudden turn of events, pulled the
Indian aside and demanded an apology. The man replied that he was not there
to apologize but to get specialized help. He needed, he said, to receive the
nagual's energy in order to maintain his life, which, he assured Sebastian,
had spanned thousands of years but at the moment was ebbing away.
Sebastian, who was a very intelligent man, unwilling to pay attention
to such nonsense, urged the Indian to stop clowning around. The old man
became angry and threatened Sebastian with exposing him and his group to the
ecclesiastical authorities if he did not comply with his request.
Don Juan reminded me that those were the times when the ecclesiastical
authorities were brutally and systematically eradicating heretical practices
among the Indians of the New Worlds The man's threat was not something to be
taken lightly; the nagual and his group were indeed in mortal danger.
Sebastian asked the Indian how he could give him energy. The man explained
that naguals, by means of their discipline, gain a peculiar energy that they
store in their bodies and that he would get it painlessly from Sebastian's
energy center on his navel. In return for it, Sebastian would get not only
the opportunity to continue his activities unscathed but also a gift of
power.
The knowledge that he was being manipulated by the old Indian did not
sit right with the nagual, but the man was inflexible and left him no
alternative but to comply with his request.
Don Juan assured me that the old Indian was not exaggerating about his
claims at all. He turned out to be one of the sorcerers of ancient times,
one of those known as the death defiers. He had apparently survived to the
present by manipulating his assemblage point in ways that only he knew
about.
Don Juan said that what transpired between Sebastian and that man later
became the ground for an agreement that had bound all six naguals who
followed Sebastian. The death defier, kept his word; in exchange for energy
from every one of those men, he made a donation to the giver, a gift of
power. Sebastian had to accept such a gift, although reluctantly; he had
been cornered and had no other choice. All the other naguals who followed
him, however, gladly and proudly accepted their gifts.
Don Juan concluded his story, saying that over time the death defier
came to be known as the tenant. And for over two hundred years, the naguals
of don Juan's line honored that binding agreement, creating a symbiotic
relationship that changed the course and final goal of their lineage.
Don Juan did not care to explain the story any further, and I was left
with a strange sensation of truthfulness, which was more bothersome to me
than I could have imagined.
"How did he get to live that long?" I asked.
"No one knows," don Juan replied. "All we've known about him, for
generations, is what he tells us. The death defier is the one I asked about
the old sorcerers, and he told me that they were at their peak three
thousand years ago."
"How do you know he was telling you the truth?" I asked.
Don Juan shook his head in amazement, if not revulsion. "When you're
facing that inconceivable unknown out there," he said, pointing all around
him, "you don't fool around with petty lies. Petty lies are only for people
who have never witnessed what's out there, waiting for them."
"What's waiting for us out there, don Juan?"
His answer, a seemingly innocuous phrase, was more terrifying to me
than if he had described the most horrendous thing.
"Something utterly impersonal," he said. He must have noticed that I
was coming apart. He made me change levels of awareness to make my fright
vanish.
A few months later, my dreaming practices took a strange turn. I began
to get, in my dreams, replies to questions I was planning to ask don Juan.
The most impressive part of this oddity was that it quickly lapsed into my
waking hours. And one day, while I was sitting at my desk, I got a reply to
an unvoiced question about the realness of inorganic beings. I had seen
inorganic beings in dreams so many times I had begun to think of them as
real. I reminded myself I had even touched one, in a state of seminormal
consciousness in the Sonoran desert. And my dreams had been periodically
deviated to views of worlds I seriously doubted could have been products of
my mentality. I wished to give don Juan my best shot, in terms of a concise
query, so I molded a question in my mind: if one is to accept that inorganic
beings are as real as people, where, in the physicality of the universe, is
the realm in which they exist?
After formulating the question to myself, I heard a strange laughter,
just as I had the day I wrestled with the inorganic being. Then a man's
voice answered me. "That realm exists in a particular position of the
assemblage point," it said. "Just like your world exists in the habitual
position of the assemblage point."
The last thing I wanted was to enter into a dialogue with a disembodied
voice, so I stood up and ran out of my house. The thought occurred to me
that I was losing my mind. Another worry to add to my collection of worries.
The voice had been so clear and authoritative that it not only
intrigued me but terrified me. I waited with great trepidation for oncoming
barrages of that voice, but the event was never repeated. At the first
opportunity I had, I consulted with don Juan.
He was not impressed in the least. "You must understand, once and for
all, that things like this are very normal in the life of a sorcerer," he
said. "You are not going mad; you are simply hearing the voice of the
dreaming emissary. Upon crossing the first or second gate of dreaming,
dreamers reach a threshold of energy and begin to see things or to hear
voices. Not really plural voices, but a singular voice. Sorcerers call it
the voice of the dreaming emissary."
"What is the dreaming emissary?"
"Alien energy that has conciseness. Alien energy that purports to aid
dreamers by telling them things. The problem with the dreaming emissary is
that it can tell only what the sorcerers already know or should know, were
they worth their salt."
"To say that it's alien energy that has conciseness doesn't help me at
all, don Juan. What kind of energy - benign, malignant, right, wrong, what?"
"It's just what I said, alien energy. An impersonal force that we turn
into a very personal one because it has voice. Some sorcerers swear by it.
They even see it. Or, as you yourself have done, they simply hear it as a
man's or a woman's voice. And the voice can tell them about the state of
things, which most of the time they take as sacred advice."
"Why do some of us hear it as a voice?"
"We see it or hear it because we maintain our assemblage points fixed
on a specific new position; the more intense this fixation, the more intense
our experience of the emissary. Watch out! You may see it and feel it as a
naked woman."
Don Juan laughed at his own remark, but I was too scared for levity.
"Is this force capable of materializing itself?" I asked.
"Certainly," he replied. "And it all depends on how fixed the
assemblage point is. But, rest assured, if you are capable of maintaining a
degree of detachment, nothing happens. The emissary remains what it is: an
impersonal force that acts on us because of the fixation of our assemblage
points."
"Is its advice safe and sound?"
"It cannot be advice. It only tells us what's what, and then we draw
the inferences ourselves."
I told don Juan then about what the voice had said to me.
"It's just like I said," don Juan remarked. "The emissary didn't tell
you anything new. Its statements were correct, but it only seemed to be
revealing things to you. What the emissary did was merely repeat what you
already knew."
"I'm afraid I can't claim that I knew all that, don Juan."
"Yes, you can. You know now infinitely more about the mystery of the
universe than what you rationally suspect. But that's our human malady, to
know more about the mystery of the universe than we suspect."
Having experienced this incredible phenomenon all by myself, without
don Juan's coaching, made me feel elated. I wanted more information about
the emissary. I began to ask don Juan whether he also heard the emissary's
voice.
He interrupted me and with a broad smile said, "Yes, yes. The emissary
also talks to me. In my youth I used to see it as a friar with a black cowl.
A talking friar who used to scare the daylights out of me, every time. Then,
when my fear was more manageable, it became a disembodied voice, which tells
me things to this day."
"What kinds of things, don Juan?"
"Anything I focus my intent on, things I don't want to take the trouble
of following up myself. Like, for example, details about the behavior of my
apprentices. What they do when I am not around. It tells me things about
you, in particular. The emissary tells me everything you do."
At that point, I really did not care for the direction our conversation
had taken. I frantically searched my mind for questions about other topics
while he roared with laughter.
"Is the dreaming emissary an inorganic being?" I asked.
"Let's say that the dreaming emissary is a force that comes from the
realm of inorganic beings. This is the reason dreamers always encounter it."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that every dreamer hears or sees the emissary?"
"Everyone hears the emissary; very few see it or feel it."
"Do you have any explanation for this?"
"No. Besides, I really don't care about the emissary. At one point in
my life, I had to make a decision whether to concentrate on the inorganic
beings and follow in the footsteps of the old sorcerers or to refuse it all.
My teacher, the nagual Julian, helped me make up my mind to refuse it. I've
never regretted that decision."
"Do you think I should refuse the inorganic beings myself, don Juan?"
He did not answer me; instead, he explained that the whole realm of
inorganic beings is always poised to teach. Perhaps because inorganic beings
have a deeper consciousness than ours, they feel compelled to take us under
their wings.
"I didn't see any point in becoming their pupil," he added. "Their
price is too high."
"What is their price?"
"Our lives, our energy, our devotion to them. In other words, our
freedom."
"But what do they teach?"
"Things pertinent to their world. The same way we ourselves would teach
them, if we were capable of teaching them, things pertinent to our world.
Their method, however, is to take our basic self as a gauge of what we need
and then teach us accordingly. A most dangerous affair!"
"I don't see why it would be dangerous."
"If someone was going to take your basic self as a gauge, with all your
fears and greed and envy, et cetera, et cetera, and teach you what fulfills
that horrible state of being, what do you think the result would be?"
I had no comeback. I thought I understood perfectly well the reasons
for his rejection.
"The problem with the old sorcerers was that they learned wonderful
things, but on the basis of their unadulterated lower selves," don Juan went
on. "The inorganic beings became their allies, and, by means of deliberate
examples, they taught the old sorcerers marvels. Their allies performed the
actions, and the old sorcerers were guided step by step to copy those
actions, without changing anything about their basic nature."
"Do these relationships with inorganic beings exist today?"
"I can't answer that truthfully. All I can say is that I can't conceive
of having a relationship like that myself. Involvements of this nature
curtail our search for freedom by consuming all our available energy. In
order to really follow their allies' example, the old sorcerers had to spend
their lives in the realm of the inorganic beings. The amount of energy
needed to accomplish such a sustained journey is staggering."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that the old sorcerers were able to exist in
those realms like we exist here?"
"Not quite like we exist here, but certainly they lived: they retained
their awareness, their individuality. The dreaming emissary became the most
vital entity for those sorcerers. If a sorcerer wants to live in the realm
of the inorganic beings, the emissary is the perfect bridge; it speaks, and
its bent is to teach, to guide."
"Have you ever been in that realm, don Juan?"
"Countless times. And so have you. But there is no point in talking
about it now. You haven't cleared all the debris from your dreaming
attention yet. We'll talk about that realm some day."
"Do I gather, don Juan, that you don't approve of or like the
emissary?"
"I neither approve of it nor like it. It belongs to another mood, the
old sorcerers' mood. Besides, its teachings and guidance in our world are
nonsense. And for that nonsense the emissary charges us enormities in terms
of energy. One day you will agree with me. You'll see."
In the tone of don Juan's words, I caught a veiled implication of his
belief that I disagreed with him about the emissary. I was about to confront
him with it when I heard the emissary's voice in my ears. "He's right," the
voice said. "You like me because you find nothing wrong with exploring all
possibilities. You want knowledge; knowledge is power. You don't want to
remain safe in the routines and beliefs of your daily world."
The emissary said all that in English with a marked Pacific Coast
intonation. Then it shifted into Spanish. I heard a slight Argentine accent.
I had never heard the emissary speaking like this before. It fascinated me.
The emissary told me about fulfillment, knowledge; about how far away I was
from my birthplace; about my craving for adventure and my near obsession
with new things, new horizons. The voice even talked to me in Portuguese,
with a definite inflection from the southern pampas.
To hear that voice pouring out all this flattery not only scared me but
nauseated me. I told don Juan, right on the spot, that I had to stop my
dreaming training. He looked up at me, caught by surprise. But when I
repeated what I had heard, he agreed I should stop, although I sensed he was
doing it only to appease me. A few weeks later, I found my reaction a bit
hysterical and my decision to withdraw unsound. I went back to my dreaming
practices. I was sure don Juan was aware that I had canceled out my
withdrawal.
On one of my visits to him, quite abruptly, he spoke about dreams.
"Just because we haven't been taught to emphasize dreams as a genuine field
for exploration doesn't mean they are not one," he began. "Dreams are
analyzed for their meaning or are taken as portents, but never are they
taken as a realm of real events."
"To my knowledge, only the old sorcerers did that," don Juan went on,
"but at the end they flubbed it. They got greedy, and when they came to a
crucial crossroads, they took the wrong fork. They put all their eggs in one
basket: the fixation of the assemblage point on the thousands of positions
it can adopt."
Don Juan expressed his bewilderment at the fact that out of all the
marvelous things the old sorcerers learned exploring those thousands of
positions, only the art of dreaming and the art of stalking remain. He
reiterated that the art of dreaming is concerned with the displacement of
the assemblage point. Then he defined stalking as the art that deals with
the fixation of the assemblage point on any location to which it is
displaced.
"To fixate the assemblage point on any new spot means to acquire
cohesion," he said. "You have been doing just that in your dreaming
practices."
"I thought I was perfecting my energy body," I said, somehow surprised
at his statement.
"You are doing that and much more, you are learning to have cohesion.
Dreaming does it by forcing dreamers to fixate the assemblage point. The
dreaming attention, the energy body, the second attention, the relationship
with inorganic beings, the dreaming emissary are but by-products of
acquiring cohesion; in other words, they are all by-products of fixating the
assemblage point on a number of dreaming positions."
"What is a dreaming position, don Juan?"
"Any new position to which the assemblage point has been displaced
during sleep."
"How do we fixate the assemblage point on a dreaming position?"
"By sustaining the view of any item in your dreams, or by changing
dreams at will. Through your dreaming practices, you are really exercising
your capacity to be cohesive; that is to say, you are exercising your
capacity to maintain a new energy shape by holding the assemblage point
fixed on the position of any particular dream you are having."
"Do I really maintain a new energy shape?"
"Not exactly, and not because you can't but only because you are
shifting the assemblage point instead of moving it. Shifts of the assemblage
point give rise to minute changes, which are practically unnoticeable. The
challenge of shifts is that they are so small and so numerous that to
maintain cohesiveness in all of them is a triumph."
"How do we know we are maintaining cohesion?"
"We know it by the clarity of our perception. The clearer the view of
our dreams, the greater our cohesion."
He said then that it was time for me to have a practical application of
what I had learned in dreaming. Without giving me a chance to ask anything,
he urged me to focus my attention, as if I were in a dream, on the foliage
of a desert tree growing nearby: a mesquite tree. "Do you want me to just
gaze at it?" I asked. "I don't want you to just gaze at it; I want you to do
something very special with that foliage," he said. "Remember that, in your
dreams, once you are able to hold the view of any item, you are really
holding the dreaming position of your assemblage point. Now, gaze at those
leaves as if you were in a dream, but with a slight yet most meaningful
variation: you are going to hold your dreaming attention on the leaves of
the mesquite tree in the awareness of our daily world." My nervousness made
it impossible for me to follow his line of thought. He patiently explained
that by staring at the foliage, I would accomplish a minute displacement of
my assemblage point. Then, by summoning my dreaming attention through
staring at individual leaves, I would actually fixate that minute
displacement, and my cohesion would make me perceive in terms of the second
attention. He added, with a chuckle, that the process was so simple it was
ridiculous.
Don Juan was right. All I needed was to focus my sight on the leaves,
maintain it, and in one instant I was drawn into a vortex-like sensation,
extremely like the vortexes in my dreams. The foliage of the mesquite tree
became a universe of sensory data. It was as if the foliage had swallowed
me, but it was not only my sight that was engaged; if I touched the leaves,
I actually felt them. I could also smell them. My dreaming attention was
multisensorial instead of solely visual, as in my regular dreaming.
What had begun as gazing at the foliage of the mesquite tree had turned
into a dream. I believed I was in a dreamt tree, as I had been in trees of
countless dreams. And, naturally, I behaved in this dreamt tree as I had
learned to behave in my dreams; I moved from item to item, pulled by the
force of a vortex that took shape on whatever part of the tree I focused my
multisensorial dreaming attention. Vortexes were formed not only on gazing
but also on touching anything with any part of my body.
In the midst of this vision or dream, I had an attack of rational
doubts. I began to wonder if I had really climbed the tree in a daze and was
actually hugging the leaves, lost in the foliage, without knowing what I was
doing. Or perhaps I had fallen asleep, possibly mesmerized by the fluttering
of leaves in the wind, and was having a dream. But just like in dreaming, I
didn't have enough energy to ponder for too long. My thoughts were fleeting.
They lasted an instant; then the force of direct experience blanketed them
out completely. A sudden motion around me shook everything and virtually
made me emerge from a clump of leaves, as if I had broken away from the
tree's magnetic pull. I was facing then, from an elevation, an immense
horizon. Dark mountains and green vegetation surrounded me. Another jolt of
energy made me shake from my bones out; then I was somewhere else. Enormous
trees loomed everywhere. They were bigger than the Douglas firs of Oregon
and Washington State. Never had I seen a forest like that. The scenery was
such a contrast to the aridness of the Sonoran desert that it left me with
no doubt that I was having a dream.
I held on to that extraordinary view, afraid to let go, knowing that it
was indeed a dream and would disappear once I had run out of dreaming
attention. But the images lasted, even when I thought I should have run out
of dreaming attention. A horrifying thought crossed my mind then: what if
this was neither a dream nor the daily world?
Frightened, as an animal must experience fright, I recoiled into the
clump of leaves I had emerged from. The momentum of my backward motion kept
me going through the tree foliage and around the hard branches. It pulled me
away from the tree, and in one split second I was standing next to don Juan,
at the door of his house, in the desert in Sonora.
I instantly realized I had entered again into a state in which I could
think coherently, but I could not talk. Don Juan told me not to worry. He
said that our speech faculty is extremely flimsy and attacks of muteness are
common among sorcerers who venture beyond the limits of normal perception.
My gut feeling was that don Juan had taken pity on me and had decided
to give me a pep talk. But the voice of the dreaming emissary, which I
clearly heard at that instant, said that in a few hours and after some rest
I was going to be perfectly well.
Upon awakening I gave don Juan, at his request, a complete description
of what I had seen and done. He warned me that it was not possible to rely
on my rationality to understand my experience, not because my rationality
was in any way impaired but because what had taken place was a phenomenon
outside the parameters of reason.
I, naturally, argued that nothing can be outside the limits of reason;
things can be obscure, but sooner or later reason always finds a way to shed
light on anything. And I really believed this.
Don Juan, with extreme patience, pointed out that reason is only a
by-product of the habitual position of the assemblage point; therefore,
knowing what is going on, being of sound mind, having our feet on the ground
- sources of great pride to us and assumed to be a natural consequence of
our worth - are merely the result of the fixation of the assemblage point on
its habitual place. The more rigid and stationary it is, the greater our
confidence in ourselves, the greater our feeling of knowing the world, of
being able to predict.
He added that what dreaming does is give us the fluidity to enter into
other worlds by destroying our sense of knowing this world. He called
dreaming a journey of unthinkable dimensions, a journey that, after making
us perceive everything we can humanly perceive, makes the assemblage point
jump outside the human domain and perceive the inconceivable.
"We are back again, harping on the most important topic of the
sorcerers' world," he went on, "the position of the assemblage point. The
old sorcerers' curse, as well as mankind's thorn in the side."
"Why do you say that, don Juan?"
"Because both, mankind in general and the old sorcerers, fell prey to
the position of the assemblage point: mankind, because by not knowing that
the assemblage point exists we are obliged to take the by-product of its
habitual position as something final and indisputable. And the old sorcerers
because, although they knew all about the assemblage point, they fell for
its facility to be manipulated.
"You must avoid falling into those traps," he continued. "It'd be
really disgusting if you sided with mankind, as if you didn't know about the
existence of the assemblage point. But it'd be even more insidious if you
sided with the old sorcerers and cynically manipulate the assemblage point
for gain."
"I still don't understand. What is the connection of all this with what
I experienced yesterday?"
"Yesterday, you were in a different world. But if you ask me where that
world is, and I tell you that it is in the position of the assemblage point,
my answer won't make any sense to you."
Don Juan's argument was that I had two choices. One was to follow
mankind's rationales and be faced with a predicament: my experience would
tell me that other worlds exist, but my reason would say that such worlds do
not and cannot exist. The other choice was to follow the old sorcerers'
rationales, in which case I would automatically accept the existence of
other worlds, and my greed alone would make my assemblage point hold on to
the position that creates those worlds. The result would be another kind of
predicament: that of having to move physically into visionlike realms,
driven by expectations of power and gain.
I was too numb to follow his argument, but then I realized I did not
have to follow it because I agreed with him completely, despite the fact
that I did not have a total picture of what I was agreeing about. Agreeing
with him was rather a feeling that came from far away, an ancient certainty
I had lost, which was now slowly finding its way back to me.
The return to my dreaming practices eliminated these turmoils, but
created new ones. For example, after months of hearing it daily, I stopped
finding the dreaming emissary's voice an annoyance or a wonder. It became a
matter of course for me. And I made so many mistakes influenced by what it
said that I almost understood don Juan's reluctance to take it seriously. A
psychoanalyst would have had a field day interpreting the emissary according
to all the possible permutations of my intrapersonal dynamics.
Don Juan maintained a steadfast view on it: it is an impersonal but
constant force from the realm of inorganic beings; thus, every dreamer
experiences it, in more or less the same terms. And if we choose to take its
words as advice, we are incurable fools.
I was definitely one of them. There was no way I could have remained
impassive being in direct contact with such an extraordinary event: a voice
that clearly and concisely told me in three languages hidden things about
anything or anyone I focused my attention on. Its only drawback, which was
of no consequence to me, was that we were not synchronized. The emissary
used to tell me things about people or events when I had honestly forgotten
I had been interested in them.
I asked don Juan about this oddity, and he said that it had to do with
the rigidity of my assemblage point. He explained that I had been reared by
old adults and that they had imbued me with old people's views; therefore, I
was dangerously righteous. His urge to give me potions of hallucinogenic
plants was but an effort, he said, to shake my assemblage point and allow it
to have a minimal margin of fluidity.
"If you don't develop this margin," he went on, "either you'll become
more righteous or you'll become a hysterical sorcerer. My interest in
telling you about the old sorcerers is not to bad-mouth them but to pit them
against you. Sooner or later, your assemblage point will be more fluid, but
not fluid enough to offset your facility to be like them: righteous and
hysterical."
"How can I avoid all that, don Juan?"
"There is only one way. Sorcerers call it sheer understanding. I call
it a romance with knowledge. It's the drive sorcerers use to know, to
discover, to be bewildered."
Don Juan changed the subject and continued to explain the fixation of
the assemblage point. He said that seeing children's assemblage points
constantly fluttering, as if moved by tremors, changing their place with
ease, the old sorcerers came to the conclusion that the assemblage point's
habitual location is not innate but brought about by habituation. Seeing
also that only in adults is it fixed on one spot, they surmised that the
specific location of the assemblage point fetters a specific way of
perceiving. Through usage, this specific way of perceiving becomes a system
of interpreting sensory data.
Don Juan pointed out that, since we are drafted into that system by
being born into it, from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to
adjust our perceiving to conform to the demands of this system, a system
that rules us for life. Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly
right in believing that the act of countermanding it and perceiving energy
directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.
Don Juan expressed wonder at what he called the greatest accomplishment
of our human upbringing: to lock our assemblage point on its habitual
position. For, once it is immobilized there, our perception can be coached
and guided to interpret what we perceive. In other words, we can then be
guided to perceive more in terms of our system than in terms of our senses.
He assured me that human perception is universally homogeneous, because the
assemblage points of the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.
He went on to say that sorcerers prove all this to themselves when they
see that at the moment the assemblage point is displaced beyond a certain
threshold, and new universal filaments of energy begin to be perceived,
there is no sense to what we perceive. The immediate cause is that new
sensory data has rendered our system inoperative; it can no longer be used
to interpret what we are perceiving.
"Perceiving without our system is, of course, chaotic," don Juan
continued. "But strangely enough, when we think we have truly lost our
bearings, our old system rallies; it comes to our rescue and transforms our
new incomprehensible perception into a thoroughly comprehensible new world.
Just like what happened to you when you gazed at the leaves of the mesquite
tree."
"What exactly happened to me, don Juan?"
"Your perception was chaotic for a while; everything came to you at
once, and your system for interpreting the world didn't function. Then, the
chaos cleared up, and there you were in front of a new world."
"We are again, don Juan, at the same place we were before. Does that
world exist, or is it merely my mind that concocted it?"
"We certainly are back, and the answer is still the same. It exists in
the precise position your assemblage point was at that moment. In order to
perceive it, you needed cohesion, that is, you needed to maintain your
assemblage point fixed on that position, which you did. The result was that
you totally perceived a new world for a while."
"But would others perceive that same world?"
"If they had uniformity and cohesion, they would. Uniformity is to
hold, in unison, the same position of the assemblage point. The old
sorcerers called the entire act of acquiring uniformity and cohesion outside
the normal world stalking perception.
"The art of stalking," he continued, "as I have already said, deals
with the fixation of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers discovered,
through practice, that important as it is to displace the assemblage point,
it is even more important to make it stay fixed on its new position,
wherever that new position might be."
He explained that if the assemblage point does not become stationary,
there is no way that we can perceive coherently. We would experience then a
kaleidoscope of disassociated images. This is the reason the old sorcerers
put as much emphasis on dreaming as they did on stalking. One art cannot
exist without the other, especially for the kinds of activities in which the
old sorcerers were involved.
"What were those activities, don Juan?"
"The old sorcerers called them the intricacies of the second attention
or the grand adventure of the unknown."
Don Juan said that these activities stem from the displacements of the
assemblage point. Not only had the old sorcerers learned to displace their
assemblage points to thousands of positions on the surface or on the inside
of their energy masses but they had also learned to fixate their assemblage
points on those positions, and thus retain their cohesiveness, indefinitely.
"What was the benefit of that, don Juan?"
"We can't talk about benefits. We can talk only about end results."
He explained that the cohesiveness of the old sorcerers was such that
it allowed them to become perceptually and physically everything the
specific position of their assemblage points dictated. They could transform
themselves into anything for which they had a specific inventory. An
inventory is, he said, all the details of perception involved in becoming,
for example, a jaguar, a bird, an insect, et cetera, et cetera.
"It's very hard for me to believe that this transformation can be
possible," I said.
"It is possible," he assured me. "Not so much for you and me, but for
them. For them, it was nothing."
He said that the old sorcerers had superb fluidity. All they needed was
the slightest shift of their assemblage points, the slightest perceptual cue
from their dreaming, and they would instantaneously stalk their perception,
rearrange their cohesiveness to fit their new state of awareness, and be an
animal, another person, a bird, or anything.
"But isn't that what mentally ill people do? Make up their own reality
as they go along?" I said.
"No, it isn't the same. Insane people imagine a reality of their own
because they don't have any preconceived purpose at all. Insane people bring
chaos into the chaos. Sorcerers, on the contrary, bring order to the chaos.
Their preconceived, transcendental purpose is to free their perception.
Sorcerers don't make lip the world they are perceiving; they perceive energy
directly, and then they discover that what they are perceiving is an unknown
new world, which can swallow them whole, because it is as real as anything
we know to be real."
Don Juan then gave me a new version of what had happened to me as I
gazed at the mesquite tree. He said that I began by perceiving the energy of
the tree. On the subjective level, however, I believed I was dreaming
because I employed dreaming techniques to perceive energy. He asserted that
to use dreaming techniques in the world of everyday life was one of the old
sorcerers' most effective devices. It made perceiving energy directly
dreamlike, instead of totally chaotic, until a moment when something
rearranged perception and the sorcerer found himself facing a new world -
the very thing that had happened to me.
I told him about the thought I'd had, which I had barely dared to
think: that the scenery I was viewing was not a dream, nor was it our daily
world.
"It wasn't," he said. "I've been saying this to you over and over, and
you think that I am merely repeating myself. I know how difficult it is for
the mind to allow mindless possibilities to become real. But new worlds
exist! They are wrapped one around the other, like the skins of an onion.
The world we exist in is but one of those skins."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that the goal of your teaching is to prepare me
to go into those worlds?"
"No. I don't mean that. We go into those worlds only as an exercise.
Those journeys are the antecedents of the sorcerers of today. We do the same
dreaming that the old sorcerers used to do, but at one moment we deviate
into new ground. The old sorcerers preferred the shifts of the assemblage
point, so they were always on more or less known, predictable ground. We
prefer the movements of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers were after
the human unknown. We are after the nonhuman unknown."
"I haven't gotten to that yet, have I?"
"No. You are only beginning. And at the beginning everyone has to go
through the old sorcerers' steps. After all, they were the ones who invented
dreaming."
"At what point will I then begin to learn the new sorcerers' brand of
dreaming?"
"You have enormous ground yet to cover. Years from now perhaps.
Besides, in your case, I have to be extraordinarily careful. In character,
you are definitely linked to the old sorcerers. I've said this to you
before, but you always manage to avoid my probes. Sometimes I even think
that some alien energy is advising you, but then I discard the idea. You are
not devi