The Assemblage Point
The Assemblage Point is a challenging concept to assimilate and understand. The entire picture of the energetic structure of man needs to be accepted and experienced to some degree before this concept can be realized. This is not a subject for the language of debate or intellectual understanding; it is a vivid realization to be internalized and held at an experiential level.
Through different exercises in shifting awareness, Carlos was made to “see” energy and to understand “reality” – as we know it – to be a relatively arbitrary ‘branding’ and coagulation of perceptive trainings that are superimposed on our will, from the moment we are born. This is intended by all who surround us… who have been similarly formed to maintain “reality” in the same way: by their perceptive awareness being forcibly channelled and constrained, to “agree” with the perceived “reality” held by all those in the current cultural milieu.
By altering awareness to different vantage-points, an apprentice can be made to see that our version of “reality” is simply another dream – a dream that has been made solid by a lifetime of intent, conditioning and training, and it is no more real or valid than other worlds and other realities that practitioners are trained to access, simply by shifting the “valve of consciousness” that forces the interpretation of “reality”. This “valve of consciousness” is called “the assemblage point”.
On the energetic body of man, this assemblage point can be approximated to a location on the upper right back, near the shoulder-blade. Therefore Don Juan, in his role as nagual was able to shift his apprentices’ assemblage points by a physical blow to this area. This shift introduced a temporary change of consciousness, providing a state of lucidity that allowed certain teachings and understandings to be conveyed and permanently internalized.
Another example of a shift or movement of the assemblage point was dreaming. In the course of dreaming, the “valve of consciousness” that maintains our sensory interpretation of reality, is allowed to reconfigure itself and create a new total reality.
Have you ever felt such a shift in yourself? It happens when you walk into a room and it is no longer the room it always had been. The world is no longer the world it had been. Then suddenly with a shiver you shake off the old and come to the new. This isn’t just poetry. It happens all the time. And for godsakes, it doesn’t happen in the bloody shoulder blade.
If the assemblage point has a physical location, which it doesn’t, it would be the Default Mode Network in the left hemisphere for most people. But these are all abstractions, fairytales. Scientific fairytales. Esoteric fairytales. The truth is in the shiver and the sigh. And if you don’t know what I mean, you can be curious about where your next shift will take you.
As you’re ready, allow the world to be new again. This is what was on my mind just now for your entertainment.