The Nagualist Newsletter and Open Forum / Issue 4 Dec. 1994/Jan. 1995

Copyright 1995 by Nagualist Newsletter, all rights reserved. Individual submissions by readers and staff of the newsletter are also protected under copyright law. No portion may be reproduced without the written permission of the Nagualist Newsletter and of the individual who made the submission. Additional copies may be available at no charge.

One reader describes some mini-shifts of his assemblage point.

Editor: A reader sent in a very complex rendition of his understanding of the intricacies of holding minor shifts of the assemblage point. It was very good information, but difficult to follow. We wrote back and asked him to relate his experiences in story form. The results are displayed here. There is no technical explanation of what happened in these cases, but we believe that readers can figure this out for themselves. In general, we prefer story form for experiences because it minimizes personal interpretation.

[Story 1] One night, after recapitulating, I found my assemblage point to be particularly flexible. My hope was that this flexibility would result in dreaming that night, so I went to bed. As I lay there with my eyes closed, I noticed that my consciousness had a new dimension; depth. Instead of just blackness, I saw blackness with distance. I began to notice something very vague in the blackness. It wasn't anything particularly unusual, but that night I remembered Taisha's advice on exploring new positions of the assemblage point ("get adventuresome") and began to wonder if it could be made to apply to such a tiny shift.

I was seeing a slight trace of fog or smoke in the blackness. It wasn't enough to call a dream, but it was more than the blackness I normally see when my eyes are shut. I couldn't think of how to explore something so minor and vague, but I tried anyway. I moved my eyeballs inside my closed eyes so as to trace whatever I thought I was seeing in the blackness. As I examined the vague smoke with my eyes, it became ever so slightly more defined. After a minute or two I could actually see a smoke cloud. It was beginning to be as if I were having a dream, but I was quite awake. Something had begun to take over, and my tracing eye movements turned into a very real stroking that came naturally. I began to see the bank of smoke moving forwards and I was following it, looking through it into the darkness. Instinctively, I began to chant a little song, "Taka taka taka too," on and on. Frankly, I have no idea why I did that, I just found myself doing it at one point and it seemed to go along with the stroking eye movement, so I didn't stop. I saw a sidewalk form just ahead of the smoke bank, and then I saw movement in the smoke. The smoke was composed of tiny lines. As I watched, I realized that it wasn't smoke at all, but an extremely dense parade of tiny black spiders, walking over the ground towards the sidewalk. I suddenly found myself completely in dreaming, watching the spiders crawl up onto the sidewalk. I could see a park or garden down a ways on the path, and I got the idea to step over the spiders and walk into the park. Something clicked, I felt a small electric jolt, and the image disappeared. I woke up excited, realizing I'd gone into dreaming, directly from waking! For years I had been trying to learn to do that by shutting off my internal dialogue before sleep, without success. Now I'd done it in less than 10 minutes, with no effort, just by following Taisha's advice to explore and get adventuresome.

[Story 2] This was my first real attempt to hold onto a new position of the assemblage point that I'd recently discovered. I decided to do it sitting in a chair, in the dark. I sat there and shut my internal dialogue off until I got rid of my normal stuff. For me that consists of a petty, bitter voice that rehashes "wrongs" supposedly done by other people and decides what it ought to have said to them instead of what it did say. With that gone, I knew that the feeling I was after was near. I had only two more things to eliminate from my consciousness. The first was the expectation that something was going to happen. I guess you could call it the expectation of reward. For me, since I'm trying to make something happen through my own effort, there is an ever present expectation at the bottom of my internal dialogue. Having shut that off, confusion set in. The feeling I was looking for was just past the confusion. In order to get at it, I had one more thing to eliminate. There is a mechanism that keeps track of what I need to be doing next, sort of a counter part to the expectation of reward. I haven't learned to shut that off without blacking out, but it isn't necessary. I got the feeling I was looking for, just on the border of blacking out. My idea was to be able to stand up and move around while maintaining that feeling. Once the feeling came, my internal dialogue stayed off by itself. From that point, I tapped my hands on the chair, as if it were a drum. Instead of dispelling the feeling, the movement helped to stabilize it. I was eventually able to stand up while maintaining the feeling. I moved my hands rhythmically in the air until I felt I could open my eyes. From that perspective, I decided to try Clara's sorcery pass for opening up the lines in the world. I grabbed the air as if grabbing rope strands and "pulled" them apart. I saw a definite curtain pulling apart in the air. The excitement almost brought my internal dialogue back in, but I held onto the feeling I was using to hold the mini shift of my assemblage point.

I saw the curtain open wide enough to step into. Unfortunately, I forget the rest of Taisha's instructions. I stepped through the curtain into the "other side", but I couldn't remember what to do next. Since nothing happened, I stood there for a while. Finally, I turned on the light and tried to go off and run errands while holding that new position of my assemblage point. It faded away a few minutes later.

[Story 3] While sitting in my chair in my recapitulation crate, I noticed that there were two of me. I had stopped recapitulating and was just sitting there with my internal dialogue off. When I noticed that there were two of me, I tried to figure out where the second one was. I discovered that it was up, and to the right, and shifted to another place. I couldn't shift my attention fully to either one without coming out of that state of consciousness, so I opted to simply practice holding whatever position of the assemblage point I had stumbled onto. I found that the key to holding this new position was a state of confusion I was experiencing. That confusion was a result of having shut off my internal dialogue so much that I had actually shut off my memory of where I was and what I was doing. Holding that state was difficult, not because it was a difficult state to maintain, but because the confusion was very real and created a feeling of urgency. That feeling of urgency compelled me to figure out what was happening, and any type of figuring would have put an end to the state I was experiencing. All I could do was to hold onto the sense that there were two of me and sit there.

Eventually, I had to leave the crate. I felt as if nothing much had happened, but when I went to work the next day I found that I had difficulty talking. I was stuttering, my speech was slurred, and I was inverting and substituting words. Another result of this experience was a temporary ability to shut off my internal dialogue by remembering the direction and feeling of the separation of the two copies of myself I'd experienced.

Source: CA

Nagualist Newsletter and Open Forum/ Issue 4 Dec. 1994/Jan. 1995