r. That term belongs to the old
seers, together with the mood. I don't particularly care for their mood, but
I  have to  admit  that  I  like their term The other. It's  mysterious  and
forbidden. Just like the old seers, it gives me the  feeling of darkness, of
shadows. The old seers said that the other always comes shrouded in wind."
     Over  the  years don Juan and other  members of his party had  tried to
make me aware that we can be in two places at once, that we can experience a
sort of perceptual dualism.
     As don Juan spoke,  I began to remember  something so  deeply forgotten
that at first it was as  if I had only heard about it. Then, step by step, I
realized that I had lived that experience myself.
     I had  been  in  two  places at  once.  It happened  one  night  in the
mountains of northern Mexico. I had been collecting plants with don Juan all
day.  We had  stopped for the  night and  I  had nearly fallen  asleep  from
fatigue when suddenly there was a gust of wind and don Genaro sprang up from
the darkness right in front of me and nearly scared me to death.
     My first thought was one of  suspicion.  I believed that don Genaro had
been  hiding in the bushes  all  day, waiting for darkness to set in  before
making  his terrifying appearance. As  I looked at  him prancing  around,  I
noticed that there was  something truly odd  about him that night. Something
palpable, real, and yet something I could not pinpoint.
     He  joked  with me  and horsed around, performing  acts that  defied my
reason. Don Juan laughed like an idiot at my dismay. When he judged that the
time was right, he made me shift  into heightened awareness and for a moment
I was able to see don Juan  and don Genaro as two blobs of light. Genaro was
not  the  fleshand-blood  don  Genaro  that I  knew  in my  state of  normal
awareness but his dreaming  body. I could tell,  because I saw him as a ball
of fire that was above the ground. He was not rooted as don Juan was. It was
as if Genaro, the blob of light, were on the verge of taking off, already up
in the air, a couple of feet off the ground, ready to zoom away.
     Another thing I had  done that night, which suddenly became clear to me
as I recollected the event, was that I knew automatically that I had to move
my eyes in order to make my assemblage point shift. I could, with my intent,
align the emanations that  made me see Genaro as a blob of light, or I could
align the emanations that made me see him as merely odd, unknown, strange.
     When I saw Genaro as  odd,  his  eyes had a malevolent glare,  like the
eyes of  a beast in the darkness. But they were eyes, nonetheless. I did not
see them as points of amber light.
     That night don Juan said that  Genaro  was going  to help my assemblage
point shift very deeply, that I should imitate him and  follow everything he
did. Genaro stuck out his rear end and then  thrust his  pelvis forward with
great force. I thought it was an obscene gesture.  He repeated  it over  and
over again, moving around as if he were dancing.
     Don Juan nudged me  on the arm, urging me to imitate Genaro, and I did.
Both of us sort  of romped around, performing that grotesque movement. After
a while, I had  the feeling that my body was executing  the movement on  its
own, without what seemed to be the real me. The  separation between  my body
and  the real me became even  more pronounced, and then at a given instant I
was looking at some ludicrous scene  where two men were making lewd gestures
at each other.
     I watched in fascination and  realized that I was  one of the two  men.
The  moment I  became aware of  it I  felt something pulling me and I  found
myself again thrusting my pelvis backward and forward in unison with Genaro.
Almost immediately, I noticed that another man standing next to don Juan was
watching us. The wind  was blowing around him. I  could see  his hair  being
ruffled. He was  naked and seemed embarrassed. The wind  gathered around him
as  if  protecting him, or perhaps  the opposite, as if trying to  blow  him
away.
     I was slow to realize that I  was the other man. When I did,  I got the
shock  of  my  life. An imponderable physical force pulled  me apart as if I
were made  out  of fibers, and  I was again  looking  at a man  that was me,
romping  around with Genaro,  gaping at  me while I looked. And at  the same
time, I was looking at a naked  man that  was me, gaping  at me while I made
lewd gestures with Genaro. The shock was so great that I broke the rhythm of
my movements and fell down.
     The  next thing I knew, don Juan was helping me to stand up. Genaro and
the other me, the naked one, had disappeared.
     I had  also remembered that don Juan  had refused to discuss the event.
He did not explain  it except  to say that Genaro was an expert  in creating
his double, or the other, and that I had had long interactions with Genaro's
double in states of normal awareness without ever detecting it.
     "That night, as he has done hundreds  of times before, Genaro made your
assemblage  point shift very deep into your left side,"  don  Juan commented
after I  had recounted to him everything  I had  remembered.  "His power was
such  that he  dragged  your assemblage  point  to  the  position where  the
dreaming  body  appears.  You saw your dreaming  body watching you.  And his
dancing did the trick."
     I asked him to explain  to me  how Genaro's  lewd movement  could  have
produced such a drastic effect.
     "You're a prude," he said. "Genaro used your immediate  displeasure and
embarrassment at  having  to  perform a lewd  gesture.  Since  he was in his
dreaming body,  he had  the power to  see the Eagle's emanations;  from that
advantage it was a cinch to make your assemblage point move."
     He said that whatever Genaro  had helped me to do that night was minor,
that Genaro had moved my  assemblage  point and made  it produce a  dreaming
body many, many  times, but that those events were not what  he wanted me to
remember.
     "I want you to realign the proper emanations and remember the time when
you really woke up in a dreaming position,"' he said.
     A strange  surge of energy seemed to explode inside me and I knew  what
he  wanted  me  to remember.  I could not,  however, focus  my memory on the
complete event. I could only recall a fragment of it.
     I remembered that one  morning, don Juan, don  Genaro. and I had sat on
that very same bench while I was in a state  of normal awareness. Don Genaro
had said, all  of  a  sudden, that  he was going  to make his body leave the
bench without getting up. The statement was completely out of the context of
what  we  had  been discussing.  I was  accustomed  to  don Juan's  orderly,
didactic words and actions. I turned to don  Juan, expecting  a clue, but he
remained impassive, looking straight  ahead as if don  Genaro and I were not
there at all.
     Don Genaro  nudged me  to attract my  attention, and then I witnessed a
most  disturbing sight. I  actually saw  Genaro on  the other  side  of  the
square. He was beckoning  me to come. But I also saw don Genaro sitting next
to me, looking straight ahead, just as don Juan was.
     I wanted to  say something,  to  express  my  awe, but I  found  myself
dumbstruck, imprisoned by some  force around me  that did not let me talk. I
again looked at Genaro across  the park. He was still there, motioning to me
with a gesture of his head to join him.
     My emotional distress mounted by the  second. My  stomach  was  getting
upset, and finally I had tunnel vision, a tunnel that led directly to Genaro
on  the other side of  the square. And then  a great  curiosity,  or a great
fear, which seemed  to be the same thing at that moment, pulled me  to where
he was. I actually soared through the air  and got to where he  was. He made
me turn  around and pointed to the three people  who were sitting on a bench
in a static position, as if time had been suspended.
     I felt a  terrible  discomfort,  an  internal  itching, as  if the soft
organs in the cavity  of my body were on  fire, and then  I was back  on the
bench, but Genaro was gone.  He  waved goodbye to me  from across the square
and disappeared among the people going to the market.
     Don  Juan became very animated.  He  kept on looking at me. He stood up
and walked around me. He  sat down again and could not keep a straight  face
as he talked to me.
     I realized  why he  was acting that way. I had  entered into a state of
heightened awareness  without being helped by don Juan. Genaro had succeeded
in making my assemblage point move by itself.
     I  laughed  involuntarily  upon seeing my  writing pad,  which don Juan
solemnly put inside his pocket. He said that he was going to use my state of
heightened awareness to  show me that there is no end to  the mystery of man
and to the mystery of the world.
     I  focused all my concentration on his words.  However,  don  Juan said
something I did not  understand. I asked him to  repeat what he had said. He
began talking very softly. I thought he had lowered  his voice so as not  to
be  overheard  by  other people.  I  listened  carefully,  but  I could  not
understand  a  word  of  what  he was saying;  he was either speaking  in  a
language foreign to me or  it was  mumbo  jumbo. The strange  part of it was
that something had caught my undivided attention, either  the rhythm  of his
voice or the fact that I had  forced myself to understand. I had the feeling
that my mind was different from usual, although I could not figure out  what
the  difference  was.  I had  a hard  time  thinking, reasoning out what was
taking place.
     Don Juan talked to me very softly in my ear.  He said  that since I had
entered into heightened awareness without  any help  from him my  assemblage
point was very loose,  and that I could let  it shift into  the left side by
relaxing, by falling half asleep  on that bench.  He assured  me that he was
watching over me, that  I had  nothing to fear. He urged me to relax, to let
my assemblage point move.
     I instantly felt the heaviness of being deeply asleep. At one moment, I
became aware that  I  was  having a  dream.  I  saw a house that I had  seen
before. I was approaching it as if I were walking  on the street. There were
other houses, but I could not pay any attention to them. Something had fixed
my  awareness on the particular house I  was  seeing. It was  a  big  modern
stucco house with a front lawn.
     When I got closer  to that house, I had a feeling of  familiarity  with
it, as if I had dreamed of it before. I walked on a gravel path to the front
door; it was open  and I walked inside.  There was a dark  hall  and a large
living  room to  the  right, furnished with  a dark-red  couch  and matching
armchairs set in a corner. I was  definitely having tunnel vision;  I  could
see only what was in front of my eyes.
     A young woman was standing by the couch as if she had just stood  up as
I  came in. She was  lean and tall, exquisitely dressed in  a tailored green
suit. She was perhaps in her late twenties. She had dark-brown hair, burning
brown eyes that  seemed to smile, and  a pointed, finely  chiseled nose. Her
complexion was fair but had  been tanned to a  gorgeous  brown.  I found her
ravishingly beautiful. She  seemed  to  be an American.  She  nodded at  me,
smiling,  and extended  her hands with the palms down as if she were helping
me up.
     I clasped her hands in  a  most  awkward movement. I  scared myself and
tried to back away, but she held me firmly and yet so gently. Her hands were
long and  beautiful.  She spoke to me in Spanish  with a faint  trace  of an
accent.  She begged me  to  relax,  to feel  her hands,  to  concentrate  my
attention on her face and  to follow the movement of her  mouth. I wanted to
ask her who she was, but I could not utter a word.
     Then I heard don Juan's voice in my ear. He  said, "Oh, there you are,"
as if he had  just found me. I was sitting on the park bench with him. But I
could also hear the young woman's voice. She said, "Come and sit with me." I
did just that  and began a most incredible shifting of points of view. I was
alternately with  don Juan and with that  young woman. I could  see  both of
them as clearly as anything.
     Don Juan  asked  me  if  I liked  her, if  I  found her  appealing  and
soothing. I could not speak, but somehow I conveyed to him  the feeling that
I  did like  that lady immensely. I thought, without any overt reason,  that
she was  a paragon of kindness, that she was indispensable  to what don Juan
was doing with me.
     Don Juan spoke in my ear again and said that if I liked her that much I
should wake up in her house, that my feeling of warmth and affection for her
would  guide me.  I  felt giggly  and reckless. A  sensation of overwhelming
excitation  rippled through  my  body.  I  felt  as if  the  excitation were
actually disintegrating me.  I  did  not care  what happened to me. I gladly
plunged into a blackness, black beyond words, and then I found myself in the
young woman's house. I was sitting with her on the couch.
     After an instant of sheer animal panic,  I realized that somehow I  was
not  complete. Something was missing  in  me.  I did not,  however, find the
situation threatening. The  thought  crossed my mind that I was dreaming and
that  I was presently going to wake up on the park  bench in Oaxaca with don
Juan, where I really was, where I really belonged.
     The young woman helped  me to get up and took me to  a bathroom where a
large tub was filled with water. I realized then that I was stark naked. She
gently made me get into the tub and held my head up while I  half floated in
it.
     After a while she helped  me out of  the tub. I felt weak and flimsy. I
lay down on the living-room couch and she came close to me. I could hear the
beating of her heart and the pressure of blood rushing through her body. Her
eyes were like two radiant sources of something that was not light, or heat,
but curiously in between the two. I knew that I was seeing the force of life
projecting out of her  body through her eyes. Her whole body was like a live
furnace; it glowed.
     I felt  a  weird tremor  that agitated my whole  being. It was as if my
nerves  were  exposed  and  someone was  plucking them.  The  sensation  was
agonizing. Then I either fainted or fell asleep.
     When I woke up, someone was putting face towels soaked in cold water on
my face and the back of my neck. I saw the young woman sitting by my head on
the bed where I was  lying. She  had a pail of water on  a  night table. Don
Juan was  standing  at the foot of  the bed with my clothes draped over  his
arm.
     I was fully awake then. I sat up. They had covered me with a blanket.
     "How's the traveler?" don  Juan  asked, smiling.  "Are you in one piece
now?"
     That was all I could remember. I narrated this episode to don Juan, and
as I talked,  I recalled  another fragment. I remembered that  don  Juan had
taunted and teased me about finding me naked in the lady's bed. I had gotten
terribly irritated  at  his remarks. I had put on my clothes and stomped out
of the house in a fury.
     Don Juan  had caught up with me on the  front  lawn.  In a very serious
tone he had remarked that  I was my ugly stupid self again,  that I had  put
myself together by being embarrassed, which had proved to him that there was
still no end to my self-importance. But he had added in a  conciliatory tone
that that was not important at the moment; what was significant was the fact
that I had  moved  my assemblage  point very  deeply  into the left side and
consequently I had traveled an enormous distance.
     He had spoken of wonders  and  mysteries,  but I had  not been  able to
listen to  him,  for  I had  been caught in the  crossfire between  fear and
self-importance.  I  was  actually fuming.  I was certain that don  Juan had
hypnotized  me in the park and had then  taken me to  that lady's house, and
that the two of them had done terrible things to me.
     My  fury was  interrupted.  Something out there in  the  street  was so
horrifying,  so shocking to me,  that  my anger stopped instantaneously. But
before my thoughts became fully rearranged, don Juan  hit  me on my back and
nothing of what had just  taken place  remained. I  found myself back in  my
blissful everyday-life stupidity,  happily listening to  don  Juan, worrying
about whether or not he liked me.
     As  I  was telling  don Juan  about  the new fragment that I  had  just
remembered I  realized that  one  of  his methods  for handling my emotional
turmoil was to make me shift into normal awareness.
     "The only thing  that soothes  those  who journey into  the  unknown is
oblivion," he said. "What a relief to be in the ordinary world!
     "That day, you accomplished a marvelous feat. The sober thing for me to
do was not to let you focus on  it at all. Just as you began to really panic
I made you shift into normal awareness; I moved your assemblage point beyond
the position where there  are no more doubts. There  are two  such positions
for warriors. In one you have no more doubts because you know everything. In
the other,  which is normal awareness, you have no doubts  because you don't
know anything.
     "It was too  soon then for  you to know what had really happened. But I
think the right time to know is now. Looking at  that street, you were about
to find out where your dreaming position  had been. You traveled an enormous
distance that day."
     Don Juan scrutinized  me  with  a mixture of  glee  and sadness.  I was
trying my best to keep under control  the strange agitation I was feeling. I
sensed  that something terribly  important to me was lost  inside my memory,
or, as don Juan would have put it, inside some unused emanations that at one
time had been aligned.
     My struggle to keep calm proved  to  be the  wrong thing to do.  All at
once, my  knees wobbled and  nervous  spasms  ran through  my midsection.  I
mumbled, unable to  voice a  question. I  had to  swallow hard  and  breathe
deeply before I regained my calmness.
     "When we  first  sat  down  here  to  talk,  I said  that  no  rational
assumptions should interfere with the  actions of a seer," he continued in a
stern tone. "I knew that in order to reclaim what you've done, you'd have to
dispense with  rationality,  but  you'd  have to  do  it  in .the  level  of
awareness you are in now."
     He  explained  that I had to understand that rationality is a condition
of alignment, merely the result of the  position of the assemblage point. He
emphasized  that I  had to understand this  when I was in  a state of  great
vulnerability, as I was at that moment.  To understand it when my assemblage
point  had  reached  the position where  there  are no doubts  was  useless,
because realizations of that nature are commonplace in that position. It was
equally  useless to understand  it in a state of  normal awareness;  in that
state,  such realizations are emotional outbursts that are valid only for as
long as the emotion lasts.
     "I've said  that you  traveled a  great  distance  that day,"  he  said
calmly. "And I said that because I know it. I was there, remember?"
     I was sweating profusely out of nervousness and anxiety.
     "You traveled  because you woke  up at a distant dreaming position," he
continued. "When  Genaro pulled you across the plaza, right here  from  this
bench, he  paved  the  way for  your assemblage  point  to move  from normal
awareness all the way to the position where  the dreaming body appears. Your
dreaming body actually  flew over an incredible  distance in the blink of an
eyelid.  Yet that's  not the important part.  The mystery is in the dreaming
position. If it is strong enough to pull you, you can go to the ends of this
world  or beyond it, just as the old seers  did. They disappeared  from this
world  because they woke up at a dreaming  position beyond the limits of the
known.  Your dreaming  position that  day  was in  this world, but  quite  a
distance from the city of Oaxaca."
     "How does ajourney like that take place?" I asked.
     "There is no way of  knowing how it is done," he said. "Strong emotion,
or  unbending  intent,  or  great  interest  serves  as  a guide;  then  the
assemblage point gets powerfully fixed at the dreaming position, long enough
to drag there all the emanations that are inside the cocoon."
     Don  Juan said then that he  had made me see  countless times over  the
years of our association, either in states of normal awareness  or in states
of  heightened  awareness;  I  had  seen  countless things  that I  was  now
beginning to understand in a more coherent fashion.  This  coherence was not
logical or rational, but it clarified, nonetheless, in whatever strange way,
everything I had done, everything that was done to me, and everything I  had
seen in all those years with him. He said that now I needed to have one last
clarification: the  coherent but irrational  realization  that everything in
the world we  have learned  to perceive is inextricably tied to the position
where the assemblage point is located, if the assemblage  point is displaced
from that position, the world will cease to be what it is to us.
     Don Juan stated that a displacement  of the assemblage point beyond the
midline of the cocoon of man  makes the entire world we know vanish from our
view  in  one instant, as if  it  had been erased--  for the  stability, the
substantiality, that seems to belong to  our perceivable  world  is just the
force of alignment. Certain emanations  are routinely aligned because of the
fixation of the assemblage point on one specific  spot; that is all there is
to our world.
     "The soundness  of  the  world  is not the mirage,"  he continued, "the
mirage is the fixation of the assemblage point on any spot. When seers shift
their assemblage points, they are not confronted with  an illusion, they are
confronted with another world; that new world is as  real as the one  we are
watching now,  but  the  new  fixation  of  their assemblage  points,  which
produces that new world, is as much of a mirage as the old fixation.
     "Take yourself,  for  example; you  are now in  a  state  of heightened
awareness. Whatever  you are  capable of  doing in  such  a state is  not an
illusion; it is as  real  as the world you will face tomorrow in your  daily
life,  and  yet tomorrow the world you are witnessing  now won't  exist.  It
exists only  when your assemblage  point moves to the  particular spot where
you are now."
     He added that the task warriors are faced with, after they finish their
training,  is  one  of  integration. In  the course  of  training, warriors,
especially nagual men, are  made  to shift  to  as many  individual spots as
possible. He said that in my case I had  moved to countless positions that I
would have to integrate someday into a coherent whole.
     "For instance, if  you would shift your  assemblage point to a specific
position,  you'd remember who that lady  is,"  he  continued with a  strange
smile. "Your assemblage point  has been at  that  spot hundreds of times. It
should be the easiest thing for you to integrate it."
     As though my recollection  depended on his suggestion, I began to  have
vague  memories,  feelings  of  sorts.  There was  a  feeling  of  boundless
affection  that  seemed to attract me; a most pleasant sweetness filled  the
air, exactly as if someone had  just come up  from behind me and poured that
scent over me. I even turned around. And then  I remembered. She was  Carol,
the nagual woman' I had been  with her only the day before. How could I have
forgotten her?
     I had an indescribable  moment in which  I think all the feelings of my
psychological  repertory  ran  through  my  mind.  Was  it possible, I asked
myself,  that I had woken up in her house  in Tucson, Arizona, two  thousand
miles  away?  And are each  of  the  instances of  heightened  awareness  so
isolated that one cannot remember them?
     Don  Juan came to my side and put his arm on  my shoulder. He said that
he knew exactly how I felt. His benefactor had made him go through a similar
experience.  And  just  as  he  himself  was now trying to do with  me,  his
benefactor had  tried to do with him: soothe  with words. He had appreciated
his benefactor's attempt, but he doubted then  as he doubted now that  there
is a way to soothe anyone who realizes the journey of the dreaming body.
     There  was  no doubt in my mind now. Something in me  had traveled  the
distance between the cities of Oaxaca, Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona. I felt a
strange relief, as if I had been purged of guilt at long last.
     During  the  years  I had  spent with  don Juan, I  had  had  lapses of
continuity in my memory. My being in Tucson with him on that day  was one of
those lapses. I remembered  not  being  able  to recall how I  had gotten to
Tucson.  I did not pay any attention to it, however. I thought the lapse was
the result of my activities with don Juan. He was always very careful not to
arouse  my  rational  suspicions  in  states  of normal  awareness,  but  if
suspicions  were  unavoidable  he  always  curtly  explained  them  away  by
suggesting that the nature of our activities fostered serious disparities of
memory.
     I told don Juan that since both of us had ended up that day in the same
place, I wondered whether it was possible for two  or more people to wake up
at the same dreaming position.
     "Of course," he said. "That's the way the old Toltec sorcerers took off
into  the unknown in  packs. They followed one  another. There is no way  of
knowing how one follows someone else. It's just done. The dreaming body just
does  it. The  presence of another dreamer spurs it to  do  it. That day you
pulled me with you. And I followed because I wanted to be with you."
     I  had so  many  questions  to ask him, but every  one of  them  seemed
superfluous.
     "How  is  it  possible  that I  didn't  remember the  nagual woman?"  I
muttered, and a horrible anguish and longing gripped me. I was trying not to
feel sad anymore, but suddenly sadness ripped through me like pain.
     "You  still don't remember  her,"  he said.  "Only when your assemblage
point shifts can you recollect her. She is like a phantom to you, and so are
you to  her. You've seen her once  while you were  in  normal awareness, but
she's never seen you  in  her normal awareness.  To  her you  are as much  a
personage as she is to you. With the difference that you may wake up someday
and integrate it all. You may have enough time to do  that, but  she  won't.
Her time here is short."
     I felt like  protesting a  terrible  injustice. I mentally  prepared  a
barrage of  objections,  but  I  never  voiced them.  Don  Juan's  smile was
beaming. His eyes  shone  with sheer glee and mischief. I  had the sensation
that  he was waiting for my statements, because he knew what I was  going to
say. And that sensation stopped me, or rather I did not say anything because
my assemblage point  had  again moved  by itself. And  I knew then that  the
nagual woman could not be  pitied for not  having time, nor  could I rejoice
for having it.
     Don Juan  was  reading me  like  a  book.  He  urged me  to  finish  my
realization and voice the reason for not feeling sorry or for not rejoicing.
I felt for an instant that I knew why. But then I lost the thread.
     "The excitation of having time is equal to the excitation of not having
it," he said. "It's all the same."
     "To  feel sad  is not the same as feeling sorry  " I said.  "And I feel
terribly sad."
     "Who cares  about sadness?" he  said. "Think  only  of  the  mysteries;
mystery  is all that  matters.  We  are living  beings;  we have  to die and
relinquish our awareness. But if  we could change just a tinge of that, what
mysteries must await us! What mysteries!"

     18 Breaking the Barrier of Perception

     In the late afternoon, still in Oaxaca, don Juan and I  strolled around
the  square leisurely. As we approached his  favorite bench the  people  who
were sitting there got up and left. We hurried over to it and sat down.
     "We've  come to the end of my explanation of awareness," he  said. "And
today, you  are  going to  assemble  another world by yourself and leave all
doubts aside forever.
     "There must be no mislake about what you are  going to  do. Today, from
the vantage  point  of  heightened awareness,  you are  going  to make  your
assemblage  point  move  and  in one  instant  you are  going to  align  the
emanations of another world.
     "In a few days, when  Genaro and I meet you  on  a mountaintop, you are
going to do the same  from  the disadvantage of  normal awareness.  You will
have to align  the emanations of another world on a  moment's notice; if you
don't you will die the death of an average man who falls from a precipice."
     He was alluding to an act that  he would have me perform as the last of
his teachings for the right side: the act of jumping from a mountaintop into
an abyss.
     Don Juan  stated  that warriors ended  their  training  when they  were
capable of  breaking  the  barrier of perception,  unaided,  starting from a
normal state of awareness. The  nagual led warriors  to  that threshold, but
success  was  up  to  the  individual. The  nagual  merely  tested  them  by
continually pushing them to fend for themselves.
     "The  only  force  that  can  temporarily   cancel  out  alignment   is
alignment,"  he continued. "You will have to cancel the alignment that keeps
you perceiving  the world of daily affairs. By inlending a new position  for
your assemblage point and  by  intending to keep it fixed there long enough,
you will assemble another world and escape this one.
     "The old seers  are still  defying death, to this day,  by  doing  just
that, intending their assemblage points  to  remain fixed on  positions that
place them in any of the seven worlds."
     "What will happen if I succeed in aligning another world?" I asked.
     "You will go to it," he replied. "As Genaro did, one night in this very
place when he was showing you the mystery of alignment."
     "Where will I be, don Juan?"
     "In another world, of course. Where else?"
     "What about the people around me, and the buildings, and the mountains,
and everything else?"
     "You'll  be separated from  all  that by the very barrier that you have
broken:  the barrier of perception. And just like the seers who have  buried
themselves to defy death, you won't be in this world."
     There  was a battle raging  inside me as I  heard his  statements. Some
part of me clamored  that don Juan's  position was untenable,  while another
part knew beyond any question that he was right.
     I asked  him what  would  happen if I moved my assemblage point while I
was in the street, in the middle of traffic in Los Angeles.
     "Los  Angeles will vanish,  like  a puff  of  air," he replied  with  a
serious expression. "But you will remain.
     "That  is the  mystery I've  been trying  to  explain  to  you.  You've
experienced it, but you haven't understood it yet, and today you will."
     He  said that I  could not as yet use the boost of  the earth  to shift
into another great band of emanations,  but  that since  I had an imperative
need to shift, that need was going to serve me as a launcher.
     Don Juan looked up at the sky. He stretched his arms  above his head as
if he  had been  sitting for too long and was pushing physical weariness out
of his body. He commanded me to turn off my internal dialogue and enter into
inner silence. Then he stood up and began to walk away  from the  square; he
signaled me to follow him.  He took a deserted  side street. I recognized it
as being  the  same street where  Genaro had  given me his  demonstration of
alignment.  The  moment I recollected that,  I found myself walking with don
Juan in a place that by then was  very familiar to me: a deserted plain with
yellow dunes of what seemed to be sulfur.
     I recalled then that don Juan  had made me perceive that world hundreds
of times. I  also recalled that beyond the desolate  landscape of the  dunes
there  was  another world  shining with  an exquisite, uniform,  pure  white
light.
     When don Juan and I entered into it this time, I sensed that the light,
which came from every direction,  was not an  invigorating light, but was so
soothing that it gave me the feeling that it was sacred.
     As  that sacred light bathed me a rational thought exploded in my inner
silence. I  thought it was quite  possible that mystics and saints  had made
this journey of the assemblage point. They had seen  God in the mold of man.
They had seen  hell in the sulfur dunes. And then they had seen the glory of
heaven in the diaphanous light.
     My rational thought  burned out almost immediately under the onslaughts
of what I was  perceiving. My awareness was taken by  a multitude of shapes,
figures of men, women, and children of  all ages, and other incomprehensible
apparitions gleaming with a blinding white light.
     I  saw don  Juan, walking  by my side, staring at  me  and  not  at the
apparitions, but the next instant I saw him as a ball of luminosity, bobbing
up and down a few feet away from me. The ball made an abrupt and frightening
movement and came closer to me and I saw inside it.
     Don  Juan was  working his glow of  awareness for  my benefit. The glow
suddenly shone on  four  or five threadlike filaments on  his  left side. It
remained fixed there. All  my  concentration was on it; something  pulled me
slowly  as if through a tube and I saw  the allies-- three dark, long, rigid
figures agitated by a tremor, like leaves in a breeze. They were  against an
almost  fluorescent pink background. The moment  I  focused my eyes on them,
they came to where  I was,  not walking or gliding or flying, but by pulling
themselves along some fibers of whiteness that came out of me. The whiteness
was not a  light  or a glow  but  lines that seemed to be  drawn  with heavy
powder chalk. They disintegrated quickly, yet not quickly enough. The allies
were on me before the lines faded away.
     They crowded  me. I became annoyed,  and  the allies  immediately moved
away  as  if I had  chastised  them. I felt sorry for  them,  and my feeling
pulled  them back  instantly.  And  they again  came and  rubbed  themselves
against me. I saw then something I had seen in the mirror at the stream. The
allies  had no inner glow. They had no inner mobility. There  was no life in
them. And yet they were  obviously alive. They were strange grotesque shapes
that resembled zippered-up  sleeping  bags. The  thin line in  the middle of
their elongated shapes made them look as if they had been sewed up.
     They were not  pleasing figures.  The sensation  that they were totally
alien to  me made me feel  uncomfortable,  impatient. I saw  that  the three
allies  were  moving as if they were jumping up and down; there was  a faint
glow  inside them. The glow grew in  intensity until, in at least one of the
allies, it was quite brilliant.
     The instant I saw that, I was facing a black world. I do not  mean that
it was dark as night is dark.  It  was rather that everything  around me was
pitch-black. I looked up at the sky and I could not find light anywhere. The
sky was also black and literally covered with lines and irregular circles of
various  degrees of  blackness.  The sky  looked like a  black piece of wood
where the grain showed in relief.
     I  looked down at the ground.  It  was fluffy.  It seemed to be made of
flakes  of agar-agar; they were  not dull flakes,  but they were  not  shiny
either.  It  was something in between, which  I had  never seen in  my life:
black agar-agar.
     I heard then the voice of seeing. It said that my  assemblage point had
assembled a total world with other great bands of emanations: a black world.
     I wanted to absorb every word I was hearing; in order to  do that I had
to split my concentration. The voice stopped; my  eyes became focused again.
I was standing with don Juan just a few blocks away from the square.
     I instantly felt that I had no time to  rest,  that it would be useless
to indulge in being shocked. I rallied all my strength and asked don Juan if
I had done what he had expected.
     "You did  exactly what you were expected to  do," he said reassuringly.
"Let's  go  back to the square and stroll  around it one  more time, for the
last time in this world."
     I  refused to think about don Juan's  leaving, so I asked him about the
black world. I had vague recollections of having seen it before.
     "It's the easiest  world  to  assemble,"  he said. "And of  all  you've
experienced, only the black  world is worth considering. It is the only true
alignment of another great band you have ever made. Everything else has been
a lateral shift along  man's band, but still within the same great band. The
wall of fog, the plain with yellow dunes, the world of the apparitions-- all
are  lateral alignments that our assemblage points make  as they approach  a
crucial position."
     He explained as  we walked back to  the square that  one of the strange
qualities of the black world  is  that it does not  have the same emanations
that  account  for time  in  our world. They  are different  emanations that
produce  a  different result. Seers  that  journey into the black world feel
that they  have been in it for an eternity, but in our world  that turns out
to be an instant.
     "The black world is a dreadful world because it ages the body," he said
emphatically.
     I asked  him  to  clarify his statements. He  slowed  down his pace and
looked  at me. He reminded me that Genaro, in  his direct way, had tried  to
point that out  to me once, when he told  me that we had plodded in hell for
an eternity while not even a minute had passed in the world we know.
     Don Juan  remarked that  in  his youth he had become obsessed with  the
black world.  He had wondered,  in front of his benefactor, about what would
happen to him if  he went  into it and stayed there  for a while. But as his
benefactor  was  not given to explanations, he  had  simply plunged don Juan
into the black world to let him find out for himself.
     "The nagual Julian's  power was so  extraordinary," don Juan continued,
"that it took me days to come back from that black world."
     "You  mean it took  you days  to return your  assemblage  point to  its
normal position, don't you?" I asked.
     "Yes. I mean that," he said.
     He explained that  in the few days that he was lost in the black  world
he aged at least  ten years, if  not  more. The emanations inside his cocoon
felt the strain of years of solitary struggle.
     Silvio Manuel was  a  totally different  case.  The nagual Julian  also
plunged him into the unknown, but Silvio Manuel assembled another world with
another set of bands,  a world also  without the  emanations of time but one
which has  the opposite effect on seers. He disappeared for seven  years and
yet he felt he had been gone only a moment.
     "To assemble  other worlds  is  not only a  matter  of practice,  but a
matter  of  intent,"  he  continued.  "And  it  isn't merely an exercise  of
bouncing out of those worlds, like being pulled by a rubber band. You see, a
seer has  to be daring. Once you break the barrier of perception, you  don't
have to come back to the same place in the world. See what I mean?"
     It slowly  dawned on me  what he was saying. I had an almost invincible
desire to laugh at such a preposterous idea,  but before the idea  coalesced
into a certainty, don Juan  spoke to me and  disrupted what I  was  about to
remember.
     He said that for warriors the danger of assembling other worlds is that
those worlds are as possessive as our world.  The force of alignment is such
that  once  the assemblage point breaks away  from its normal  position,  it
becomes fixed at  other positions, by other alignments. And warriors run the
risk of getting stranded in inconceivable aloneness.
     The inquisitive, rational part  of  me commented that I had seen him in
the black world as a ball of luminosity. It was  possible,  therefore, to be
in that world with people.
     "Only if people follow you around by moving their own assemblage points
when you move  yours," he replied. "I shifted mine in order  to be with you;
otherwise you would have been there alone with the allies."
     We stopped walking, and don Juan said that it was time for me to go.
     "I want you to bypass all lateral shifts," he