Version 2006.05.17

## "The Art of Dreaming" - ©1993 by Carlos Castaneda

### 4. The Fixation of the Assemblage Doing

Since our agreement had been to discuss dreaming only when don Juan considered it necessary, I rarely asked him about it and never insisted on continuing my questions beyond a certain point. I was more than eager, therefore, to listen to him whenever he decided to take up the subject. His comments or discussions on dreaming were invariably cushioned in other topics of his teachings, and they were always suddenly and abruptly brought in.

We were engaged in some unrelated conversation once while I was visiting with him in his house, when without any preamble he said that, by means of their dreaming contacts with inorganic beings, the old sorcerers became immensely well-versed in the manipulation of the assemblage point; a vast and ominous subject.

I immediately grabbed the opportunity and asked don Juan for an estimate of the time when the old sorcerers might have lived. At various opportunities before, I had asked the same question, but he never gave me a satisfactory answer. I was confident, however, that at the moment, perhaps because he had brought up the subject himself, he might be willing to oblige me.

"A most trying subject," he said. The way he said it made me believe he was discarding my question. I was quite surprised when he continued talking. "It'll tax your rationality as much as the topic of inorganic beings. By the way, what do you think about them now?"

"I have let my opinions rest," I said. "I can't afford to think one way or another."

My answer delighted him. He laughed and commented on his own fears of and aversions to the inorganic beings.

"They have never been my cup of tea," he said. "Of course, the main reason was my fear of them. I was unable to get over it when I had to, and then it became fixed."

"Do you fear them now, don Juan?"

"It's not quite fear I feel but revulsion. I don't want any part of them."

"Is there any particular reason for this revulsion?"

"The best reason in the world: we are antithetical. [* antithetical- sharply contrasted in character or purpose] They love slavery, and I love freedom. They love to buy, and I don't sell."

I became inexplicably agitated and brusquely told him that the subject was so farfetched for me that I could not take it seriously.

He stared at me, smiling, and said, "The best thing to do with inorganic beings is what you do: deny their existence, but visit with them regularly and maintain that you are dreaming; and that in dreaming anything is possible. This way you don't commit yourself."

I felt strangely guilty, although I could not figure out why. I felt compelled to ask, "What are you referring to, don Juan?"

"To your visits with the inorganic beings," he replied dryly.

"Are you kidding? What visits?"

"I didn't want to discuss this, but I think it's time I tell you that the nagging voice you heard, reminding you to fix your dreaming attention on the items of your dreams, was the voice of an inorganic being."

I thought don Juan was completely irrational. I became so irritated that I even yelled at him.

He laughed at me and asked me to tell him about my irregular dreaming sessions. That request surprised me. I had never mentioned to anyone that every so often I used to zoom out of a dream, pulled by a given item, but instead of my changing dreams, as I should have, the total mood of the dream changed and I would find myself in a dimension unknown to me.

I soared in it, directed by some invisible guide, which made me twirl around and around. I always awoke from one of these dreams still twirling, and I continued tossing and turning for a long time before I fully woke up.

"Those are bona fide meetings you are having with your inorganic being friends," don Juan said.

I did not want to argue with him, but neither did I want to agree. I remained silent. I had forgotten my question about the old sorcerers, but don Juan picked up the subject again.

"My understanding is that the old sorcerers existed perhaps as far back as ten thousand years ago," he said, smiling and watching my reaction.

Basing my response on current archaeological data on the migration of Asiatic nomadic tribes to the Americas, I said that I believed his date was incorrect. Ten thousand years was too far back.

"You have your knowledge and I have mine," he said. "My knowledge is that the old sorcerers ruled for four thousand years, from seven thousand to three thousand years ago. Three thousand years ago, they went to nothing. And from then on, sorcerers have been regrouping and restructuring what was left of the old ones."

"How can you be so sure about your dates?" I asked.

"How can you be so sure about yours?" he retorted.

I told him that archaeologists have foolproof methods to establish the date of past cultures. 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, even though I did not understand what he was saying. He accused me of humoring him, and of 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 [* sexton- an officer of the church who is in charge of sacred objects] 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 [* ecclesiastical- of or associated with a church] 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 the old Indian 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 naguals, 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.

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 it was on the basis of their unadulterated lower selves," don Juan went on. "The inorganic beings became their allies, and by means of deliberate examples, their allies taught the old sorcerers marvels. Their allies performed the actions, and the old sorcerers were guided step by step to copy those actions; but the old sorcerers did so 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, and 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, and 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," he went on, "harping on the most important topic of the sorcerers' world; 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 the old sorcerers fell prey and mankind in general falls prey to the position of the assemblage point: the old sorcerers because, although they knew all about the assemblage point, they fell for its facility to be manipulated; mankind in general, 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.

"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 the dreaming emissary: 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. If we choose to take its words as advice, we are incurable fools.

And 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 and 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 that system 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: The ability to lock our assemblage point on its habitual position. And furthermore, 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 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 conventional system inoperative; our formerly established system can no longer be used to interpret what we are newly perceiving.

"Perceiving without our customary 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 equallly 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 stalking as they did on dreaming. 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 up 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. Those journeys are the antecedents [* antecedent- someone from whom you are descended; something which preceedes and causes another result] of the sorcerers of today.

We go into those worlds only as an exercise. 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 devious."

"What are you talking about, don Juan?"

"You've done, unwittingly, two things that worry the hell out of me.

"You traveled with your energy body to a place outside this world the first time you dreamt; you even walked there!

"And then you traveled with your energy body to another place outside this world, but parting from the awareness of the daily world."

"Why would that worry you, don Juan?"

"Dreaming is too easy for you. That is a damnation if we don't watch it. It leads to the human unknown. As I said to you, modern-day sorcerers strive to get to the nonhuman unknown."

"What can the nonhuman unknown be?"

"Freedom from being human. Inconceivable worlds that are outside the band of man but that we still can perceive. This is where modern sorcerers take the side road. Their predilection is what's outside the human domain. And what are outside that domain are all-inclusive worlds; not merely the realm of birds or the realm of animals or the realm of man- even if it be the unknown man.

"What I am talking about are worlds, like the one where we live; total worlds with endless realms."

"Where are those worlds, don Juan? In different positions of the assemblage point?"

"Right. In different positions of the assemblage point, but positions sorcerers arrive at with a movement of the assemblage point, not a shift.

Entering into those worlds is the type of dreaming only sorcerers of today do. The old sorcerers stayed away from it because it requires a great deal of detachment and no self-importance whatsoever. A price they couldn't afford to pay.

"For the sorcerers who practice dreaming today, dreaming is freedom to perceive worlds beyond the imagination."

"But, what's the point of perceiving all that?"

"You already asked me, today, the same question. You speak like a true merchant. What's the risk? you ask. What's the percentage gain to my investment? Is it going to better me?"

"There is no way to answer that. The merchant mind does commerce. But freedom cannot be an investment. Freedom is an adventure with no end in which we risk our lives and much more for a few moments of something beyond words; beyond thoughts or feelings."

"I didn't ask that question in that spirit, don Juan. What I want to know is what can be the driving force to do all this for a lazy bum like myself?"

"To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle."