The Art of Dreaming (12 page)

I held on
to that extraordinary view, afraid to let go, knowing that it was indeed a
dream and would disappear once I had run out of
dreaming
attention. But
the images lasted, even when I thought I should have run out of
dreaming
attention. A horrifying thought crossed my mind then: what if this was neither
a dream nor the daily world?

Frightened,
as an animal must experience fright, I recoiled into the clump of leaves I had
emerged from. The momentum of my backward motion kept me going through the tree
foliage and around the hard branches. It pulled me away from the tree, and in
one split second I was standing next to don Juan, at the door of his house, in
the desert in Sonora.

I instantly
realized I had entered again into a state in which I could think coherently,
but I could not talk. Don Juan told me not to worry. He said that our speech
faculty is extremely flimsy and attacks of muteness are common among sorcerers
who venture beyond the limits of normal perception.

My gut
feeling was that don Juan had taken pity on me and had decided to give me a pep
talk. But the voice of the
dreaming
emissary, which I clearly heard at
that instant, said that in a few hours and after some rest I was going to be
perfectly well.

Upon
awakening I gave don Juan, at his request, a complete description of what I had
seen and done. He warned me that it was not possible to rely on my rationality
to understand my experience, not because my rationality was in any way impaired
but because what had taken place was a phenomenon outside the parameters of
reason.

I,
naturally, argued that nothing can be outside the limits of reason; things can
be obscure, but sooner or later reason always finds a way to shed light on
anything. And I really believed this.

Don Juan,
with extreme patience, pointed out that reason is only a by-product of the
habitual position of the assemblage point; therefore, knowing what is going on,
being of sound mind, having our feet on the ground, sources of great pride to
us and assumed to be a natural consequence of our worth, are merely the result
of the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual place. The more rigid
and stationary it is, the greater our confidence in ourselves, the greater our
feeling of knowing the world, of being able to predict.

He added
that what
dreaming
does is give us the fluidity to enter into other
worlds by destroying our sense of knowing this world. He called
dreaming
a journey of unthinkable dimensions, a journey that, after making us perceive
everything we can humanly perceive, makes the assemblage point jump outside the
human domain and perceive the inconceivable.

"We
are back again, harping on the most important topic of the sorcerers'
world," he went on, "the position of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers'
curse, as well as mankind's thorn in the side."

"Why
do you say that, don Juan?"

"Because
both, mankind in general and the old sorcerers, fell prey to the position of
the assemblage point: mankind, because by not knowing that the assemblage point
exists we are obliged to take the by-product of its habitual position as
something final and indisputable. And the old sorcerers because, although they
knew all about the assemblage point, they fell for its facility to be
manipulated.

"You
must avoid falling into those traps," he continued. "It'd be really
disgusting if you sided with mankind, as if you didn't know about the existence
of the assemblage point. But it'd be even more insidious if you sided with the
old sorcerers and cynically manipulate the assemblage point for gain."

"I
still don't understand. What is the connection of all this with what I
experienced yesterday?"

"Yesterday,
you were in a different world. But if you ask me where that world is, and I
tell you that it is in the position of the assemblage point, my answer won't
make any sense to you."

Don Juan's
argument was that I had two choices. One was to follow mankind's rationales and
be faced with a predicament: my experience would tell me that other worlds
exist, but my reason would say that such worlds do not and cannot exist. The
other choice was to follow the old sorcerers' rationales, in which case I would
automatically accept the existence of other worlds, and my greed alone would
make my assemblage point hold on to the position that creates those worlds. The
result would be another kind of predicament: that of having to move physically
into visionlike realms, driven by expectations of power and gain.

I was too
numb to follow his argument, but then I realized I did not have to follow it
because I agreed with him completely, despite the fact that I did not have a
total picture of what I was agreeing about. Agreeing with him was rather a
feeling that came from far away, an ancient certainty I had lost, which was now
slowly finding its way back to me.

The return
to my
dreaming
practices eliminated these turmoils, but created new
ones. For example, after months of hearing it daily, I stopped finding the
dreaming
emissary's voice an annoyance or a wonder. It became a matter of course for me.
And I made so many mistakes influenced by what it said that I almost understood
don Juan's reluctance to take it seriously. A psychoanalyst would have had a
field day interpreting the emissary according to all the possible permutations
of my intrapersonal dynamics.

Don Juan
maintained a steadfast view on it: it is an impersonal but constant force from
the realm of inorganic beings; thus, every dreamer experiences it, in more or
less the same terms. And if we choose to take its words as advice, we are
incurable fools.

I was
definitely one of them. There was no way I could have remained impassive being
in direct contact with such an extraordinary event: a voice that clearly and
concisely told me in three languages hidden things about anything or anyone I
focused my attention on. Its only drawback, which was of no consequence to me,
was that we were not synchronized. The emissary used to tell me things about
people or events when I had honestly forgotten I had been interested in them.

I asked don
Juan about this oddity, and he said that it had to do with the rigidity of my
assemblage point. He explained that I had been reared by old adults and that
they had imbued me with old people's views; therefore, I was dangerously
righteous. His urge to give me potions of hallucinogenic plants was but an
effort, he said, to shake my assemblage point and allow it to have a minimal
margin of fluidity.

"If
you don't develop this margin," he went on, "either you'll become
more righteous or you'll become a hysterical sorcerer. My interest in telling
you about the old sorcerers is not to badmouth them but to pit them against
you. Sooner or later, your assemblage point will be more fluid, but not fluid
enough to offset your facility to be like them: righteous and hysterical."

"How can
I avoid all that, don Juan?"

"There
is only one way. Sorcerers call it sheer understanding. I call it a romance
with knowledge. It's the drive sorcerers use to know, to discover, to be
bewildered."

Don Juan
changed the subject and continued to explain the fixation of the assemblage
point. He said that seeing children's assemblage points constantly fluttering,
as if moved by tremors, changing their place with ease, the old sorcerers came
to the conclusion that the assemblage point's habitual location is not innate
but brought about by habituation. Seeing also that only in adults is it fixed
on one spot, they surmised that the specific location of the assemblage point
fetters a specific way of perceiving. Through usage, this specific way of
perceiving becomes a system of interpreting sensory data.

Don Juan
pointed out that, since we are drafted into that system by being born into it,
from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to adjust our perceiving to
conform to the demands of this system, a system that rules us for life.
Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly right in believing that the act
of countermanding it and perceiving energy directly is what transforms a person
into a sorcerer.

Don Juan
expressed wonder at what he called the greatest accomplishment of our human
upbringing: to lock our assemblage point on its habitual position. For, once it
is immobilized there, our perception can be coached and guided to interpret
what we perceive. In other words, we can then be guided to perceive more in
terms of our system than in terms of our senses. He assured me that human
perception is universally homogeneous, because the assemblage points of the
whole human race are fixed on the same spot.

He went on
to say that sorcerers prove all this to themselves when they
see
that at
the moment the assemblage point is displaced beyond a certain threshold, and
new universal filaments of energy begin to be perceived, there is no sense to
what we perceive. The immediate cause is that new sensory data has rendered our
system inoperative; it can no longer be used to interpret what we are
perceiving.

"Perceiving
without our system is, of course, chaotic," don Juan continued. "But
strangely enough, when we think we have truly lost our bearings, our old system
rallies; it comes to our rescue and transforms our new incomprehensible
perception into a thoroughly comprehensible new world. Just like what happened
to you when you gazed at the leaves of the mesquite tree."

"What
exactly happened to me, don Juan?"

"Your perception
was chaotic for a while; everything came to you at once, and your system for
interpreting the world didn't function. Then, the chaos cleared up, and there
you were in front of a new world."

"We
are again, don Juan, at the same place we were before. Does that world exist,
or is it merely my mind that concocted it?"

"We
certainly are back, and the answer is still the same. It exists in the precise
position your assemblage point was at that moment. In order to perceive it, you
needed cohesion, that is, you needed to maintain your assemblage point fixed on
that position, which you did. The result was that you totally perceived a new
world for a while."

"But
would others perceive that same world?"

"If
they had uniformity and cohesion, they would. Uniformity is to hold, in unison,
the same position of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers called the entire
act of acquiring uniformity and cohesion outside the normal world stalking
perception.

"The
art of stalking," he continued, "as I have already said, deals with
the fixation of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers discovered, through
practice, that important as it is to displace the assemblage point, it is even
more important to make it stay fixed on its new position, wherever that new
position might be."

He
explained that if the assemblage point does not become stationary, there is no
way that we can perceive coherently. We would experience then a kaleidoscope of
disassociated images. This is the reason the old sorcerers put as much emphasis
on
dreaming
as they did on stalking. One art cannot exist without the
other, especially for the kinds of activities in which the old sorcerers were
involved.

"What
were those activities, don Juan?"

"The
old sorcerers called them the intricacies of the second attention or the grand
adventure of the unknown."

Don Juan
said that these activities stem from the displacements of the assemblage point.
Not only had the old sorcerers learned to displace their assemblage points to
thousands of positions on the surface or on the inside of their energy masses
but they had also learned to fixate their assemblage points on those positions,
and thus retain their cohesiveness, indefinitely.

"What
was the benefit of that, don Juan?"

"We
can't talk about benefits. We can talk only about end results."

He
explained that the cohesiveness of the old sorcerers was such that it allowed
them to become perceptually and physically everything the specific position of
their assemblage points dictated. They could transform themselves into anything
for which they had a specific inventory. An inventory is, he said, all the
details of perception involved in becoming, for example, a jaguar, a bird, an
insect, et cetera, et cetera.

"It's
very hard for me to believe that this transformation can be possible," I
said.

"It is
possible," he assured me. "Not so much for you and me, but for them.
For them, it was nothing."

He said
that the old sorcerers had superb fluidity. All they needed was the slightest
shift of their assemblage points, the slightest perceptual cue from their
dreaming
,
and they would instantaneously stalk their perception, rearrange their
cohesiveness to fit their new state of awareness, and be an animal, another
person, a bird, or anything.

"But
isn't that what mentally ill people do? Make up their own reality as they go
along?" I said.

"No,
it isn't the same. Insane people imagine a reality of their own because they
don't have any preconceived purpose at all. Insane people bring chaos into the
chaos. Sorcerers, on the contrary, bring order to the chaos. Their
preconceived, transcendental purpose is to free their perception. Sorcerers
don't make lip the world they are perceiving; they perceive energy directly,
and then they discover that what they are perceiving is an unknown new world, which
can swallow them whole, because it is as real as anything we know to be
real."