The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda Page A

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