Carlos Castaneda - The Fire from Within

THE FIRE FROM WITHIN

7. The Assemblage Point

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

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

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

Don Juan then made a strange gesture. He contorted his face as if he were surprised or terrified. And instantly the frightening shape of a strange man appeared at the door of the room where we were.

The presence of the strange man scared me so much that I actually felt dizzy. And before I could recuperate from my fright, the man lurched at me with a chilling ferocity. As he grabbed my forearms, I felt ajolt of something quite like a discharge of an electric current.

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

The man tightened his grip and tried to throw me backward on the ground. Don Juan, with no hurry in his voice, urged me to pull myself together and not fight my fear, but roll with it.

"Be afraid without being terrified," he said. Don Juan came to my side and, without intervening in my struggle, whispered in my ear that I should put all my concentration on the midpoint of my body.

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

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

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

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

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

He then began his explanation. He briefly outlined the truths about awareness he had discussed:

...that there is no objective world, but only a universe of energy fields which seers call the Eagle's emanations;

...that human beings are made of the Eagle's emanations and are in essence bubbles of luminescent energy- each of us wrapped in a cocoon that encloses a small portion of these emanations;

...that awareness is achieved by the constant pressure that the emanations outside our cocoons, which are called emanations at large, exert on those inside our cocoons;

....and that that awareness gives rise to perception which happens when the emanations inside our cocoons align themselves with the corresponding emanations at large.

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

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

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

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

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

He said that the new seers looked into the unnoticed ways in which the first attention functions. Then, as they tried to explain them to others, they devised an order for the truths about awareness.

He assured me that not every seer is given to explaining. For instance, his benefactor, the nagual Julian, could not have cared less about explanations. But the nagual Julian's benefactor, the nagual Elias, whom don Juan was fortunate enough to meet, did care. Between the nagual Elias's detailed, lengthy explanations, the nagual Julian's scanty ones, and his own personal seeing, don Juan came to understand and to corroborate those truths.

Don Juan explained that in order for our first attention to bring into focus the world that we normally perceive, it has to emphasize certain emanations selected from the narrow band of emanations where mankind-in-general's awareness is located.

The discarded emanations are still within our reach, but remain dormant; and typically unknown to us for the duration of our lives.

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

The emphasized emanations compose a large portion of man's band of awareness, but a very small piece of the total spectrum of emanations present inside the cocoon of man.

The disregarded emanations within man's band are thought of as a sort of preamble to the unknown; with the unknown proper consisting of the bulk of our emanations which are not part of the human band and which are never emphasized by the average person. Seers call them the left-side awareness, the nagual, the other world, the unknown, the second attention.

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

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