the left-side awareness, the
nagual, the other world, the unknown, the second attention.
     "This process  of emphasizing  certain  emanations," don  Juan went on,
"was discovered and practiced by the old seers. They realized  that a nagual
man or a nagual woman, by  the fact that they  have extra strength, can push
the emphasis away from the usual emanations and make it shift to neighboring
ones. That push is known as the nagual's blow."
     Don Juan said that the shift was utilized by the old seers in practical
ways to keep their apprentices in bondage. With  that blow  they  made their
apprentices enter into  a  state of heightened, keenest, most impressionable
awareness; while they were helplessly pliable,  the  old  seers taught  them
aberrant techniques  that  made the apprentices into sinister men, just like
their teachers.
     The new seers employ the same  technique, but instead  of using  it for
sordid purposes, they use it to guide their apprentices to learn about man's
possibilities.
     Don  Juan explained that the nagual's blow  has  to be  delivered on  a
precise  spot, on the assemblage point, which varies minutely from person to
person. Also, the blow  has to be delivered by a nagual who sees. He assured
me that it is equally useless to have the strength of a  nagual and not see,
as it is  to see and not have the strength  of a nagual, in  either case the
results are just blows. A seer could strike  on  the  precise  spot over and
over  without the strength to move awareness. and  a non-seeing nagual would
not be able to strike the precise spot.
     He also said that the old seers discovered that the assemblage point is
not  in the physical body, but in  the luminous shell, in the cocoon itself.
The nagual identifies  that spot by its intense luminosity  and  pushes  it,
rather than striking it. The force of the push  creates a dent in the cocoon
and  it is felt like a blow to the right  shoulder blade, a blow that knocks
all the air out of the lungs.
     "Are there different types of dents?" I asked.
     "There are only two types," he responded. "One is a concavity  and  the
other is a crevice; each has a distinct effect. The concavity is a temporary
feature and produces a temporary  shift-- but the crevice is  a profound and
permanent feature of the cocoon and produces a permanent shift."
     He explained that usually a luminous cocoon hardened by self-reflection
is  not affected at all by the nagual's blow. Sometimes, however, the cocoon
of man is  very pliable and the  smallest force  creates  a  bowl-like  dent
ranging in size from a small  depression to one that is a third the size  of
the total cocoon; or it creates  a crevice  that may run across the width of
the egglike shell,  or along its length, making the cocoon look as if it has
curled in on itself.
     Some  luminous shells, after  being dented,  go back to  their original
shape instantly. Others remain dented for hours or even days at a time,  but
they  revert  back by  themselves.  Still others get a firm, impervious dent
that requires another  blow from the  nagual on a bordering area to  restore
the  original  shape  of  the  luminous cocoon.  And a few  never lose their
indentation  once they  get it.  No  matter  how many blows  they get from a
nagual they never revert back to their egglike shapes.
     Don  Juan  further said  that  the  dent acts  on  the first  attention
bydisplacing the glow of awareness.  The dent presses the  emanations inside
the luminous shell, and the seers witness how the first attention shifts its
emphasis  under the  force  of that pressure. The  dent,  by  displacing the
Eagle's  emanations inside the cocoon, makes the glow of  awareness  fall on
other  emanations from areas that are ordinarily inaccessible  to  the first
attention.
     I asked him if the glow of awareness is seen only on the surface of the
luminous  cocoon.  He did not answer me  right away.  He seemed  to  immerse
himself in thought.  After perhaps ten minutes he answered  my  question; he
said that normally  the glow  of awareness  is  seen on the  surface of  the
cocoon of  all sentient beings. After  man develops attention, however,  the
glow of awareness acquires depth. In other words, it is transmitted from the
surface of the cocoon to quite a number of emanations inside the cocoon.
     "The old seers knew what they were  doing when they handled awareness,"
he went on. "They  realized that by  creating a  dent in the  cocoon of man,
they could force the  glow of awareness, since it is already glowing  on the
emanations inside the cocoon, to spread to other neighboring ones."
     'You make it all sound as if it's a physical  affair," I said. "How can
dents be made in something that is just aglow?"
     "In some inexplicable way, it is a matter of a glow that creates a dent
in another glow," he replied. "Your flaw is to remain glued to the inventory
of  reason. Reason  doesn't  deal  with  man as  energy. Reason  deals  with
instruments that create  energy,  but  it has  never  seriously  occurred to
reason  that we are better  than instruments:  we are organisms  that create
energy. We are a bubble of energy. It isn't  farfetched, then, that a bubble
of energy would make a dent in another bubble of energy."
     He  said  that the  glow  of  awareness  created  by  the  dent  should
rightfully  be called  temporary heightened attention, because it emphasizes
emanations  that  are  so proximal to the habitual  ones that  the change is
minimal,  yet  the  shift produces  a greater capacity  to understand and to
concentrate and, above all, a greater capacity to forget. Seers knew exactly
how to use this  upshift in the scale of  quality.  They saw  that only  the
emanations  surrounding those we use daily suddenly become bright  after the
nagual's blow. The more  distant  ones  remain unmoved, which  meant to them
that while being in a state of heightened attention, human beings could work
as if they were in the world of  everyday life. The need of a nagual man and
a nagual woman became paramount to them, because  that state lasts  only for
as  long  as  the  depression  remains,  after  which  the  experiences  are
immediately forgotten.
     "Why does one have to forget?" I asked.
     "Because the emanations  that account for  greater clarity cease to  be
emphasized  once  warriors are  out of heightened  awareness,"  he  replied.
"Without that emphasis whatever they experience or witness vanishes."
     Don Juan said that one of the tasks the new seers had devised for their
students  was  to  force  them  to  remember,  that  is,  to reemphasize  by
themselves,  at  a  later  time,  those  emanations  used  during states  of
heightened awareness.
     He reminded me  that Genaro was always recommending to me that  I learn
to  write with  the  tip  of my finger instead  of a  pencil  so  as  not to
accumulate notes. Don Juan said that what Genaro had actually meant was that
while I was in states  of heightened awareness  I should utilize some unused
emanations for storage of dialogue and experience, and someday recall it all
by reemphasizing the emanations that were used.
     He went on  to explain that a state of heightened awareness is seen not
only as a glow that  goes  deeper inside  the egglike shape of human beings,
but  also  as a more intense glow  on the  surface of the cocoon.  Yet it is
nothing  in comparison to the glow  produced by  a state of total awareness,
which is seen as  a burst of incandescence in the entire luminous egg. It is
an explosion of light of such a  magnitude that  the boundaries of the shell
are  diffused and  the inside  emanations extend  themselves beyond anything
imaginable.
     "Are those special cases, don Juan?"
     "Certainly. They happen only to seers. No other men or any other living
creatures  brighten  up  like  that.  Seers  who  deliberately attain  total
awareness  are a sight to behold.  That is the  moment  when they  burn from
within. The fire from within consumes them. And in  full awareness they fuse
themselves to the emanations at large, and glide into eternity."

     After a few days in Sonora  I drove  don  Juan back to  the town in the
southern part of Mexico where he and his party of warriors lived.
     The  next day  was hot  and hazy.  I  felt lazy and somehow annoyed. In
midafternoon,  there was a most unpleasant quietude in  that  town. Don Juan
and I were sitting  on the  comfortable chairs  in the big room. I  told him
that life in rural  Mexico  was not my  cup of tea. I disliked the feeling I
had that the silence of that town was  forced.  The only  noise I ever heard
was the sound of children's voices yelling in the distance. I was never able
to find out whether they were playing or yelling in pain.
     "When  you're here, you're always in a state of heightened  awareness,"
don Juan said. "That  makes a  great difference.  But  no  matter what,  you
should be getting used to  living in a town like this. Someday you will live
in one."
     "Why should I have to live in a town like this, don Juan?"
     "I've explained  to you that the new seers  aim to be free. And freedom
has the  most devastating implications. Among  them is the implication  that
warriors  must purposely seek  change. Your predilection  is to live the way
you  do.  You stimulate your reason  by  running through  your inventory and
pitting it against your friends' inventories. Those maneuvers leave you very
little time to examine  yourself and your fate. You will have to give up all
that. Likewise, if all you knew were the dead calm of  this town, you'd have
to seek, sooner or later, the other side of the coin."
     "Is that what you're doing here, don Juan?"
     "Our case is a little bit  different, because  we are at the end of our
trail. We are  not  seeking  anything.  What all of us do here is  something
comprehensible only  to a warrior. We go from day to day  doing nothing.  We
are waiting. I  will not tire of repeating this: we know that we are waiting
and we know what we are waiting for. We are waiting for freedom!
     "And now that you know that," he added with  a grin, "let's get back to
our discussion of awareness."
     Usually, when we were in that room we were never interrupted by  anyone
and don Juan would always decide on the length  of our discussions. But this
time there was a polite knock on the door and Genaro walked in and sat down.
I  had not seen Genaro since the day after we had run out of  his house in a
great hurry. I embraced him.
     "Genaro has something  to tell you," don Juan said. "I've told you that
he is the master of  awareness.  Now  I can tell you what all that means. He
can  make the assemblage point move deeper into the luminous egg  after that
point has been jolted out of its position by the nagual's blow."
     He explained that Genaro had pushed my assemblage point countless times
after I  had attained  heightened  awareness.  The day we  had  gone  to the
gigantic  flat  rock  to talk,  Genaro  had made  my assemblage  point  move
dramatically into the left side-- so dramatically, in fact, that it had been
a bit dangerous.
     Don  Juan stopped talking  and seemed to  be ready  to give  Genaro the
spotlight. He nodded  as if to signal Genaro  to say something. Genaro stood
up and came to my side.
     "Flame is very  important," he said  softly. "Do you remember that  day
when I made you look at the reflection of the sunlight on a piece of quartz,
when we were sitting on that big flat rock?"
     When Genaro mentioned it I remembered. On that  day just after don Juan
had stopped talking, Genaro  had pointed to  the refraction  of  light as it
went through a piece of polished quartz that he had taken  out of his pocket
and placed on  the flat rock. The shine of the quartz had immediately caught
my attention. The next thing I knew, I was crouching on the flat rock as don
Juan stood by with a worried look on his face.
     I was about to tell Genaro what I had remembered when he began to talk.
He put  his mouth to my ear and pointed to  one of the two gasoline lamps in
the room.
     "Look at the flame," he said. "There is no heat in it. It's pure flame.
Pure flame can take you to the depths of the unknown."
     As  he  talked, I  began  to feel a strange pressure; it was a physical
heaviness. My  ears  were buzzing;  my eyes teared to the point that I could
hardly make  out the shape of the furniture.  My vision seemed to be totally
out of focus. Although my eyes were open, I could not see the  intense light
of the gasoline lamps. Everything around me was dark. There  were streaks of
chartreuse  phosphorescence that illuminated dark, moving clouds.  Then,  as
abruptly as it had faded away, my eyesight returned.
     I could  not make  out where  I  was.  I seemed to be  floating like  a
balloon.  I was alone. I  had a pang of terror, and  my reason rushed  in to
construct an explanation that made  sense to me  at that moment: Genaro  had
hypnotized  me,  using  the  flame  of  the gasoline  lamp.  I  felt  almost
satisfied. I quietly floated, trying not to  worry; I thought  that a way to
avoid worrying  was to  concentrate on the stages that I  would  have to  go
through to wake up.
     The first thing I noticed was that I was not myself. I could not really
look at anything because I had nothing to look with. When I tried to examine
my body I realized that  I could only be aware and yet it was  as if  I were
looking down into infinite space. There were portentous  clouds of brilliant
light and masses of blackness; both  were in motion.  I clearly saw a ripple
of amber glow that was coming at me, like an enormous,  slow  ocean  wave. I
knew  then  that I was like a buoy  floating in space and that  the wave was
going to  overtake me and  carry me. I accepted it as  unavoidable. But just
before it hit me  something thoroughly unexpected happened-- a  wind blew me
out of the wave's path.
     The force of that wind carried me with tremendous speed. I went through
an immense tunnel  of  intense colored lights. My vision  blurred completely
and then  I  felt that I  was waking up,  that I had been  having a dream, a
hypnotic dream brought about by Genaro, in  the  next instant I was  back in
the room with don Juan and Genaro.

     I slept most of the following day. In the late afternoon,  don Juan and
I again sat down to talk. Genaro had been with me earlier but had refused to
comment on my experience.
     "Genaro  again pushed your assemblage point last night," don Juan said.
"But perhaps the shove was too forceful."
     I eagerly told don  Juan the content of my vision. He smiled, obviously
bored.
     "Your assemblage point moved  away from its normal position," he  said.
"And that  made you  perceive emanations that are not ordinarily  perceived.
Sounds like nothing, doesn't it? And yet it is a supreme accomplishment that
the new seers strive to elucidate."
     He explained that human beings repeatedly  choose  the  same emanations
for perceiving because of two reasons. First, and most important, because we
have been taught  that those emanations are perceivable, and second  because
our assemblage points select and prepare those emanations for being used.
     "Every  living  being has an assemblage  point,"  he  went  on,  "which
selects emanations for emphasis. Seers can see whether sentient beings share
the  same view  of the world, by seeing if  the emanations  their assemblage
points have selected are the same."
     He affirmed that one  of the most important breakthroughs for  the  new
seers was to find that the spot where that point is located on the cocoon of
all living creatures is  not a permanent feature, but is established on that
specific spot by habit. Hence the tremendous stress the new seers put on new
actions,  on  new  practicalities.  They want desperately to  arrive at  new
usages, new habits.
     "The  nagual's blow is  of great importance," he went  on, "because  it
makes that point move. It alters its location. Sometimes it even  creates  a
permanent crevice there.  The assemblage  point  is totally  dislodged,  and
awareness  changes  dramatically.  But  what  is a  matter of  even  greater
importance  is the  proper  understanding of  the truths about  awareness in
order to realize that that point can be  moved from  within. The unfortunate
truth is  that human beings always lose by  default. They simply  don't know
about their possibilities."
     "How can one accomplish that change from within?" I asked.
     "The new seers say that  realization is the technique," he said.  "They
say that, first of all, one must become aware  that the world we perceive is
the result of our assemblage points' being located on a specific spot on the
cocoon. Once that  is understood,  the assemblage point  can move  almost at
will, as a consequence of new habits."
     I did  not  quite understand  what he meant by  habits. I asked him  to
clarify his point.
     "The  assemblage  point  of man appears around a definite  area  of the
cocoon, because  the  Eagle  commands it," he said. "But the precise spot is
determined by  habit, by repetitious  acts. First we learn that  it  can  be
placed there  and then  we  ourselves command it to  be  there. Our  command
becomes the Eagle's command and that point is fixated at that spot. Consider
this very carefully; our command becomes the Eagle's  command. The old seers
paid dearly for that finding. We'll come back to that later on."
     He stated once again that the old seers had concentrated exclusively on
developing  thousands of the most complex  techniques  of  sorcery. He added
that what  they never realized was that  their intricate devices, as bizarre
as they were, had no other value than being the means to  break the fixation
of their assemblage points and make them move.
     I asked him to explain what he had said.
     "I've  mentioned  to  you  that  sorcery  is something  like entering a
dead-end street,"  he replied. "What I meant was that sorcery practices have
no intrinsic value. Their worth is indirect, for  their  real function is to
make the assemblage point shift  by  making the first attention  release its
control on that point.
     "The new seers  realized  the true role those sorcery  practices played
and decided  to  go  directly  into the process  of making  their assemblage
points  shift, avoiding all the other  nonsense of rituals and incantations.
Yet  rituals  and  incantations  are indeed necessary at  one  time in every
warrior's life.  I  personally  have initiated you in all kinds  of  sorcery
procedures, but  only for purposes of luring your first  attention away from
the  power of  self-absorption, which  keeps your assemblage  point  rigidly
fixed."
     He added  that  the obsessive entanglement of  the  first attention  in
self-absorption or  reason is  a powerful  binding  force,  and that  ritual
behavior, because it is  repetitive, forces the first attention to free some
energy from watching the inventory, as a consequence of which the assemblage
point loses its rigidity.
     "What happens to  the persons whose assemblage points lose rigidity?" I
asked.
     "If they're  not warriors, they think they're losing  their minds,"  he
said, smiling. "Just  as you thought you  were  going crazy at  one time. If
they're warriors, they know they've gone crazy, but they patiently wait. You
see, to be  healthy  and sane means that the assemblage  point is immovable.
When it shifts, it literally means that one is deranged."
     He said that two options are opened to warriors whose assemblage points
have shifted.  One  is  to acknowledge being  ill and to  behave in deranged
ways,  reacting emotionally  to the  strange worlds that their shifts  force
them to witness; the  other is  to remain impassive, untouched, knowing that
the assemblage point always returns to its original position.
     "What if the assemblage point doesn't return to its original position?"
I asked.
     "Then  those  people  are lost," he  said.  "They  are either incurably
crazy, because their assemblage points could never assemble the world  as we
know it, or they are peerless seers who have begun their movement toward the
unknown."
     "What determines whether it is one or the other?"
     "Energy!  Impeccability! Impeccable warriors don't  lose their marbles.
They remain untouched. I've said  to you many times that impeccable warriors
may see horrifying worlds and yet the next moment they  are telling a  joke,
laughing with their friends or with strangers."
     I said to  him then what  I had told  him many times before,  that what
made me  think  I  was ill was a  series of disruptive sensorial experiences
that I had  had as aftereffects of ingesting  hallucinogenic plants. I  went
through states of total space and  time discordance, very annoying lapses of
mental concentration, actual visions  or hallucinations of places and people
I would be staring at  as if they really existed.  I could not help thinking
that I was losing my mind.
     "By all ordinary measures, you were indeed losing your  mind," he said,
"but in the seers' view, if you  had lost it, you wouldn't  have  lost much.
The mind, for a seer, is nothing but the self-reflection of the inventory of
man. If you lose that self-reflection,  but  don't  lose your underpinnings,
you actually live an infinitely stronger life than if you had kept it."
     He remarked that my flaw was  my emotional reaction, which prevented me
from realizing that the oddity of my sensorial experiences was determined by
the  depth  to  which  my  assemblage point  had  moved into  man's band  of
emanations.
     I  told him that I couldn't understand what  he was  explaining because
the configuration that he  had called man's band of emanations was something
incomprehensible to me. I had pictured it to  be like a ribbon placed on the
surface of a ball.
     He said that calling it a band was misleading, and that he was going to
use an analogy  to illustrate what he  meant. He explained that the luminous
shape of man  is  like a ball  of jack cheese  with  a thick disk of  darker
cheese injected  into  it. He looked at me and  chuckled. He knew that I did
not like cheese.
     He made  a  diagram on a small blackboard. He drew an egglike shape and
divided it in four longitudinal sections, saying that  he  would immediately
erase the division lines because he  had drawn them only to  give me an idea
where the band was located  in the cocoon of man. He  then drew a thick band
at  the  line between the first and second sections and erased  the division
lines. He explained that the band was like a disk of cheddar cheese that had
been inserted into the ball of jack cheese.
     "Now  if that ball of jack  cheese were  transparent," he went on, "you
would have the perfect replica of man's cocoon. The  cheddar cheese goes all
the way  inside  the ball of  jack cheese. It's a disk  that  goes from  the
surface on one side to the surface on the other side.
     "The assemblage point of man is located high  up, three-fourths of  the
way toward  the top of the egg on the surface of the cocoon.  When a  nagual
presses on  that point of intense luminosity, the  point moves into the disk
of the  cheddar cheese. Heightened  awareness  comes about when  the intense
glow of the  assemblage point  lights up dormant emanations way  inside  the
disk  of cheddar  cheese.  To  see the  glow of the assemblage point  moving
inside that disk gives the  feeling that it is  shifting  toward the left on
the surface of the cocoon."
     He repeated  his analogy three or  four times, but I did not understand
it  and he had to  explain it  further. He said that the transparency of the
luminous  egg creates the  impression of a movement toward the left, when in
fact every movement of the assemblage point is in  depth, into the center of
the luminous egg along the thickness of man's band.
     I remarked  that what  he was saying made it sound as if seers would be
using their eyes when they see the assemblage point move.
     "Man  is not the unknowable,"  he  said. "Man's luminosity  can be seen
almost as if one were using the eyes alone."
     He  further explained that the old seers  had seen  the movement of the
assemblage  point  but it never occurred to them that it  was a  movement in
depth; instead  they  followed their seeing  and coined the phrase "shift to
the  left,"  which the new  seers retained  although they knew  that  it was
erroneous to call it a shift to the left.
     He also said that in the  course of my activity with him he had made my
assemblage point move  countless times, as was the case at that very moment.
Since the  shift of the  assemblage point was  always in depth, I  had never
lost  my sense  of identity, in spite of the  fact that I  was always  using
emanations I had never used before.
     "When the nagual pushes that point," he went on, "the point ends up any
which way along  man's band, but it absolutely doesn't matter where, because
wherever it ends up is always virgin ground.
     "The   grand   test   that   the  new   seers   developed   for   their
warrior-apprentices is to retrace  the journey  that their assemblage points
took under  the  influence  of  the  nagual.  This  retracing,  when  it  is
completed, is called regaining the totality of oneself."
     He went on to say  that the contention of  the new seers is that in the
course  of our growth,  once the glow of awareness focuses on man's band  of
emanations and selects some of them for emphasis, it  enters into a  vicious
circle. The more  it  emphasizes certain emanations,  the  more  stable  the
assemblage  point gets to  be. This is equivalent to saying that our command
becomes the Eagle's command. It goes without  saying that when our awareness
develops into  first attention  the command  is so strong that to break that
circle and make the assemblage point shift is a genuine triumph.
     Don Juan said that the assemblage  point is also responsible for making
the first attention perceive  in terms of clusters. An example  of a cluster
of  emanations  that  receive  emphasis  together is  the  human body as  we
perceive it. Another part of  our total  being, our  luminous cocoon,  never
receives  emphasis and  is  relegated  to  oblivion; for the  effect  of the
assemblage point is not only to make us perceive clusters of emanations, but
also to make us disregard emanations.
     When  I pressed hard for an explanation of clustering he  replied  that
the assemblage point radiates a glow that groups together bundles of encased
emanations.  These  bundles  then  become  aligned,  as  bundles,  with  the
emanations at large. Clustering is carried out even when seers deal with the
emanations  that are never  used. Whenever they  are emphasized, we perceive
them just as we perceive the clusters of the first attention.
     "One of the  greatest moments  the new  seers had,"  he continued, "was
when they found out that the unknown  is merely the emanations discarded  by
the first attention,  it's  a huge affair, but  an  affair, mind  you, where
clustering can be  done. The unknowable, on the other  hand,  is an eternity
where our assemblage point has no way of clustering anything."
     He explained that the  assemblage point is like a  luminous magnet that
picks  emanations  and  groups them  together  wherever it moves  within the
bounds of man's band of emanations. This discovery was the  glory of the new
seers,  for it put the  unknown in a new  light. The  new seers noticed that
some of the obsessive visions of seers, the ones that were almost impossible
to conceive, coincided with a shift of the assemblage point to the region of
man's band which is diametrically opposed to where it is ordinarily located.
     "Those were visions of the dark side of man," he asserted.
     "Why do you call it the dark side of man?" I asked.
     "Because  it is  somber and foreboding,"  he  said.  "It's not only the
unknown, but the who-cares-toknow-it."
     "How about the emanations that are inside  the cocoon  but  out of  the
bounds of man's band?" I asked. "Can they be perceived?"
     "Yes,  but in  really indescribable  ways," he  said.  "They're not the
human unknown, as is the case with the unused emanations in the band of man,
but the nearly immeasurable unknown where human traits do not figure at all.
It is really an area of such an overpowering vastness that the best of seers
would be hard put to describe it."
     I insisted once more that it seemed to me that the mystery is obviously
within us.
     "The  mystery  is  outside  us,"  he  said, "Inside  us  we  have  only
emanations trying to  break the cocoon.  And this fact aberrates us, one way
or  another, whether we're average men or warriors. Only the new  seers  get
around this.  They struggle to see.  And  by  means of  the shifts of  their
assemblage points, they get to realize that the mystery  is perceiving.  Not
so much what we perceive, but what makes us perceive.
     "I've mentioned to you that  the  new seers believe that our senses are
capable  of  detecting anything. They believe this because they see that the
position of the assemblage point is what dictates what our senses perceive.
     "If the  assemblage point  aligns  emanations inside the  cocoon  in  a
position  different  from its  normal  one  the  human  senses  perceive  in
inconceivable ways."

     8 The Position of the Assemblage Point

     The  next time don Juan  resumed  his  explanation of  the  mastery  of
awareness  we were again in his house  in  southern Mexico.  That  house was
actually  owned by all the  members of the nagual's party, but Silvio Manuel
officiated  as  the owner  and  everyone openly referred  to  it  as  Silvio
Manuel's house, although I, for some inexplicable reason, had gotten used to
calling it don Juan's house.
     Don Juan,  Genaro, and I had returned to the  house from a trip to  the
mountains. That day,  as we  relaxed  after the  long drive and  ate  a late
lunch, I asked  don Juan the reason for the curious deception. He assured me
that  no deception was involved, and  that to call it Silvio  Manuel's house
was an exercise in the art of stalking to be performed by all the members of
the nagual's party under any circumstances, even in the privacy of their own
thoughts. For any of them to insist on thinking about the house in any other
terms was tantamount to denying their links to the nagual's party.
     I protested that he had never told me that. I did not want to cause any
dissension with my habits.
     "Don't worry about it," he said, smiling  at  me and patting  my  back.
"You  can call this house whatever  you want. The nagual has  authority. The
nagual woman, for instance, calls it the house of shadows."
     Our conversation was interrupted, and I  did  not see him until he sent
for me to come to the back patio a couple of hours later.
     He  and Genaro were strolling around at the far  end of the corridor; I
could  see  them  moving  their  hands  in what  seemed to  be  an  animated
conversation.
     It was a clear sunny  day. The  midafternoon sun shone directly on some
of the flower pots that hung  from the eaves of the roof around the corridor
and projected their shadows on the  north  and east walls of the  patio. The
combination  of intense yellow  sunlight,  the  massive black shadows of the
pots, and the lovely, delicate,  bare shadows of  the frail flowering plants
that grew  in them  was stunning. Someone  with a  keen eye for balance  and
order had pruned those plants to create such an exquisite effect.
     "The nagual  woman  has  done  that,"  don Juan said as if  reading  my
thoughts. "She gazes at these shadows in the afternoons."
     The thought of her gazing  at shadows in the afternoons had a swift and
devastating  effect  on  me.  The intense  yellow  light  of  that hour, the
quietness of that town,  and the  affection that I felt for the nagual woman
conjured up  for me in one instant all the solitude of the warriors' endless
path.
     Don Juan had defined the scope of that path when he said to me that the
new seers are the warriors of  total freedom, that  their only search is the
ultimate  liberation  that  comes  when   they  attain  total  awareness.  I
understood with unimpaired clarity, as I looked at those haunting shadows on
the wall, what it meant to the nagual woman when she said that to read poems
out loud was the only release that her spirit had.
     I remember that the day before she  had read something to me, there  in
the patio, but I had not quite understood her urgency, her longing. It was a
poem by Juan  Ramon Jimenez,  "Hora Inmensa," which she  told me synthesized
for her the solitude of warriors who live to escape to total freedom.

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

     Don Juan and Genaro came to my side and looked at me with an expression
of surprise.
     "What are we  really doing, don Juan?"  I  asked.  "Is it possible that
warriors are only preparing themselves for death?"
     "No  way,"  he  said,  gently patting  my  shoulder.  "Warriors prepare
themselves to be aware, and full awareness  comes to them only when there is
no more  self-importance left in  them.  Only when  they are nothing do they
become everything."
     We  were quiet  for  a  moment. Then don Juan asked me if I was in  the
throes of self-pity. I did not answer because I was not sure.
     "You're not sorry that you're here, are  you?"  don Juan asked  with  a
faint smile.
     "He's  certainly  not," Genaro assured him.  Then  he seemed to have  a
moment  of doubt. He scratched  his  head, then looked at me and  arched his
brows. "Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"
     "He's  certainly  not," don Juan  assured  Genaro  this  time.  He went
through the same  gestures of scratching  his head  and  arching  his brows.
"Maybe you are," he said. "Are you?"
     "He's  certainly not!" Genaro boomed, and  both of them  exploded  into
uncontrolled laughter.
     When they had calmed  down, don  Juan said that self-importance is  the
motivating force for every  attack of melancholy. He added that warriors are
entitled  to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only
to make them laugh.
     "Genaro has something  to  show you which is more exciting than all the
self-pity  you  can muster up," don Juan  continued, "it has to do with  the
position of the assemblage point."
     Genaro immediately began to walk around the corridor,  arching his back
and lifting his thighs to his chest.
     "The nagual Julian showed him how to walk that way," don Juan said in a
whisper,  "it's called  the gait of power.  Genaro  knows  several  gaits of
power. Watch him fixedly."
     Genaro's movements were indeed  mesmeric. I  found myself following his
gait, first with my eyes and then irresistibly with my feet. I imitated  his
gait. We walked once around the patio and stopped.
     While walking, I had noticed the extraordinary lucidity that  each step
brought to me. When we stopped, I was  in a state of keen alertness. I could
hear every sound; I could detect every change in the light or in the shadows
around  me.  I  became enthralled  with a feeling of  urgency, of  impending
action.  I felt extraordinarily aggressive, muscular, daring. At that moment
I saw an enormous span of flat land in front of me; right behind me  I saw a
forest. Huge trees were lined up as straight as a wall. The forest was  dark
and green; the plain was sunny and yellow.
     My breathing was deep and strangely accelerated, but not in an abnormal
way. Yet  it was the rhythm  of my breathing that was forcing me  to trot on
the spot. I wanted  to  take off running,  or rather my  body wanted to, but
just as I was taking off something stopped me.
     Don Juan  and  Genaro  were  suddenly by my  side.  We walked  down the
corridor with Genaro to my right. He nudged me with his shoulder. I felt the
weight of his body on me. He gently shoved me to the left and we angled  off
straight for the  east wall  of the patio.  For  a  moment I had  the  weird
impression  that  we  were going  to  go through the wall, and I even braced
myself for the impact, but we stopped right in front of the wall.
     While my face  was still against the  wall, they both examined  me with
great care. I knew what they were searching  for;  they wanted  to make sure
that I had shifted my assemblage point. I  knew that I  had  because my mood
had changed. They obviously knew it too. They gently took me by the arms and
walked in  silence  with me  to the other side  of the corridor, to  a  dark
passageway, a narrow hall  that connected the  patio  with the  rest of  the
house. We stopped there. Don Juan and Genaro moved a few feet away from me.
     I was left facing  the side of the house  that was in  dark  shadows. I
looked  into an empty dark room. I had a sense of physical weariness. I felt
languid, indifferent, and yet I experienced a sense of spiritual strength. I
realized then that I had lost something. There was no strength in my body. I
could hardly stand. My  legs  finally gave in and I  sat down and then I lay
down on  my  side. While I  lay there, I had the  most wonderful, fulfilling
thoughts of love for God, for goodness.
     Then all at once I  was  in front of the  main altar  of a  church. The
bas-reliefs covered with gold leaf glittered with the light of thousands  of
candles.  I saw the  dark figures of  men  and women  carrying  an  enormous
crucifix mounted on  a huge  palanquin. I moved out of their way and stepped
outside the church. I saw a  multitude of  people,  a sea of candles, coming
toward me. I felt elated. I ran to  join them. I was moved by profound love.
I wanted to be  with them, to pray to the Lord. I was only  a  few feet away
from the mass of people when something swished me away.
     The next instant, I was with don Juan and Genaro. They flanked me as we
walked lazily around the patio.

     While we were having  lunch the next day, don Juan said that Genaro had
pushed my assemblage point with his gait of power, and that he had been able
to do that because I had been in a state of inner silence. He explained that
the  articulation point  of everything seers do  is something he had  talked
about since the day we met: stopping the internal dialogue. He stressed over
and over that the internal dialogue is what keeps the assemblage point fixed
to its original position.
     "Once silence is attained, everything is possible," he said.
     I told him  I was very  conscious of the  fact  that in general  I  had
stopped talking to myself, but  did not  know how I had done it. If asked to
explain the procedure I would not know what to say.
     "The  explanation is  simplicity itself," he  said. "You willed it, and
thus you  set a  new  intent, a new  command. Then your  command became  the
Eagle's command.
     "This is one of the most extraordinary things that the new seers  found
out: that our command can become the Eagle's command. The internal  dialogue
stops in the same way it begins: by an act of will. After all, we are forced
to start talking to ourselves by those who teach us. As they teach us,  they
engage their will
     and  we engage ours, both without knowing  it. As we learn  to  talk to
ourselves, we learn to handle will.  We will ourselves to talk to ourselves.
The way to  stop talking to ourselves is to use exactly the  same method: we
must will it, we must inlend it."
     We were silent for a few  minutes. I asked him to whom he was referring
when he said that we had teachers who taught us to talk to ourselves.
     "I  was  talking  about  what  happens  to human  beings when they  are
infants," he  replied, "a  time when they are taught by everyone around them
to repeat  an  endless  dialogue  about  themselves.  The  dialogue  becomes
internalized, and that force alone keeps the assemblage point fixed.
     "The  new seers  say  that infants have hundreds of teachers who  teach
them exactly where to place their assemblage point."
     He said that  seers see that infants have no fixed assemblage  point at
first. Their encased emanations  are in a state of great  turmoil, and their
assemblage  points shift  everywhere in  the band of man, giving  children a
great  capacity  to  focus  on  emanations  that  l