Glimpses of Highland Spring

                                               
For those who don't like the one they've got......
                                     

Whose Story? A Trilogy (Part Three)

The theme of 'Whose Story?' is one that, to my knowledge, has not really featured in the multitude of strands going to make up Buddhism in the modern west.  This I find curious, though this is unfair of me, since in my twenty five-plus years as an ordained Buddhist I had no notion of the topic either.  The point, however, is this. Focal to Buddhism, as I have always understood it, is the notion of mind and consciousness.  The Dhammapada, a central text from what is generally regarded as early Buddhism, begins with the celebrated statement variously translated as 'Mind precedes all mental states', 'Phenomena are preceded by the heart', or 'What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday' (with such divergent translations, what chance do we have of really understanding.....?).  Different schools of Buddhism talk of 'Absolute Mind' and 'Mind Only doctrine'.  Yet the world 'out there' is as much a manifestation of mind and consciousness as is the world 'in here'.  Or, to take Buddhist philosophy to a more advanced level, the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' is illusory anyhow.  Shamanic traditions recognise this: for them, the outer world is unashamedly ensouled, alive, animate, conscious, and full of meaning. But Buddhism, in its more popular and exoteric forms at least, and as it has come down to us, seems overly personalistic, taking 'the individual' and his/her development too literally and seriously.  The idea of 'working on my mind' can be uplifting, yet is yuk-inducing in equal measure.

Buddhist analyses of the world tend to vex as much as inspire me nowadays.  The Buddhist Wheel of Life purports to depict the world and its workings.  In the centre of this wheel, the engine making the entire show go round, are a cock, a snake, and a pig going round in an endless circle, biting one another's tails.  The three animals are normally said to represent greed (lobha), hatred (dvesa), and delusion (moha), the driving forces of the samsaric (non-enlightened) world.  This is all very well, as far as it goes.  The problem, in my experience, is that it is so generalised and abstracted as to be totally inadequate as a tool for real analysis and understanding of the dynamics of worldly existence.  At worst, this branding of non-enlightened existence as 'all greed, hatred, and delusion' amounts to a dismissal, an escape from doing the hard work of truly understanding what consciousness is and how it works.  In order to do this, we need to be courageous enough to go into the heart of the beast - or to the entrails, more like.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist (whatever that is, apart from an ad hominem dismissal) to see that our modern world of politics, finance, media, legal institutions, and, sadly, much mainstream science and academia, along with many large 'charitable' and other non-elected organisations, comprise an interrelated and mutually supporting network of interest.  And one of their prime interests is to further a particular version of reality, to broadcast a certain type of consciousness as the one and only one; but a consciousness that is limited to say the least.

Within the aforementioned 'network of interest', many people now realise something of the nefarious nature of politics and global finance.  But it can be more difficult to see the essential part that media, academia, and non-elected organisations play as part of the same web. While the notion of the personal shadow is well recognised nowadays, there exists a corresponding and equally significant, yet curiously less celebrated, 'shadow of the world'. This is just as much a function of consciousness. And just like the personal dark side, this needs to be owned, worked on, and incorporated into our wider experience of consciousness and mind.  A similar point is being made in 'Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition' (readily available through youtube), a film I personally find rather uneven but well worth watching and taking seriously.  I submit that Buddhism needs to examine, in specifics and in some detail, how the world is put together as a construct of consciousness, and the kind of consciousness that is being continually created; how and why.  Only then can it truly claim to understand how 'mind precedes all mental states.'

And remember: Maya is not a democracy.....

            
      

Whose Story? - A Trilogy (Part Two)

                                           Ah yes, Truth 24/7!

James Lovelock it was who, in the 1970s, elucidated the self-regulating mechanism of the planetary Earth system, thereby formulating Gaia theory and becoming one of the founding fathers of modern ecology and environmentalism.  More recently, he was a major voice in promoting the theory of runaway global warming, principally through his book 'The Revenge of Gaia'.  As such, he is a darling and icon of modern environmentalism.  At least, he was until a couple of weeks ago.....

In an interview with msnbc, Lovelock dropped a bombshell.  He had made a mistake, he said.  This catastrophic global warming he had so direly predicted just wasn't happening - for now, at least. Planet Earth hasn't got any hotter over the last twelve years, he admitted.  We don't fully understand climate mechanics; 'the climate is doing its usual tricks.'

This, you would have thought, was momentous news indeed.  And fantastically good tidings, straight from the mouth of the guru.  We might not burn to a frazzle after all.  New York, London, and half of Bangla Desh might not disappear under the floodwaters.  Strangely, though, Lovelock's message of hope failed to make it onto the BBC.  Or into most of the apparently respectable newspapers, either.  It fell to a Daily Telegraph blogger to announce the news to the British public.  Shamefully, as a result of his honest admission, Lovelock himself became the target for nasty words from severely-miffed 'environmentalists': he's past it, etc etc. It was reminiscent of the tirade of viciousness unleashed upon former Greenpeace campaigner Peter Taylor when he questioned the orthodoxy on global warming.  Streams of truly nasty ad hominem attacks.

In similar vein, hardly a day passes without some further revelation on the great windfarm scam.  Three 'environmental' charities (World Wildlife Fund Scotland, Friends of the Earth Scotland, and RSPB Scotland)  were recently outed for accepting donations from windfarm builders (Pale Green Vortex had mentioned WWF funding a couple of years back).  But once again the BBC and those same 'liberal' and impartial newspapers, while expressing a tiresome obsession with integrity in the case of the Murdochs, seem to be oblivious to the same questions of integrity and objectivity when it comes to global warming scaremongering from these severely compromised, yet inordinately influential, organisations.  The last fortnight also saw fears for aeroplane radar interference from windfarms; global warming from windfarms (I jest not; at least the Guardian mentioned this one).  And probably much more that has escaped the eyes of the PGV staff, who actually devote little time to what's being presented in the mainstream media.

So, what we believe to be true is founded as much upon the sins of omission as what is actually being beamed into our living rooms on a daily basis.  I was recently discussing with a friend the subject of truth (or 'Truth'!).  While so doing, we stumbled upon a fantasy lodged in some cobweb-bedecked recess of the brain, that of the someone, somewhere, who really knows what truth is.  To discover that this omniscient being wasn't there, but was just a god fantasy, was a wee bit scary.  No cosmically impartial arbiter exists 'out there'; and the same is the case for 'the news'.  There is no infinitely wise greybeard sitting at the control desk of starship BBC, using a universal measure to evaluate what people should know about, how much, and why.  I suppose I find it strange when people cling onto every word issuing from the BBC, or any particular newspaper, while casting suspicion on everyone and everything else.  And here is where the situation begins to get a trifle vexing.....

When I started Pale Green Vortex, I was setting off on a journey of exploration, into some areas that were new to me, yet seemed extremely relevant to the overall theme of 'consciousness studies'.  It was an adventure but, like most adventures, it came with a certain degree of risk attached. In particular, I recognised that some of my new directions might appear a bit bizarre, and not especially edifying, to some of my old friends, colleagues, and assorted acquaintances.  As things have turned out, the area where a number of relationships have undergone a wobble has been in what I have written about aspects of the mainstream media.  More precisely, the BBC and various newspaper organs of the 'liberal left', all of which I have treated, not as superior arbiters of higher truths, but as just one part of the largely fake construct which is presented to us as 'normal' and 'reality'.

Today I shall go a step further, and in doing so risk more interpersonal alienation and wobbling. I shall venture to suggest that some of our 'green' friends, along with their media acolytes and buddies in the renewable energy business, are amongst the most dangerous people on the planet.  They are far more dangerous than the Anders Breiviks and Islamic fundamentalists of this world, who may be exceedingly nasty, but in the larger scheme of things are never going to win.  But the so-called greens I have periodically written about are in the process of actively shaping the world we inhabit. They are dangerous in part because they are based in ideology rather than pragmatic direct realities. Any ideology is dangerous, be it that of Hitler, Alex Salmond (a hardcore ideologue), or a Friends of the Earth stooge.  Ideology substitutes a ready-made, convenient, synthetic interpretation of reality for the real thing.  As such, it is rigid, alien from the mentality of learning from mistakes.  And this refusal to acknowledge error paves the way, as the Gnostics saw, for error to lurch out of control and morph into evil.

Furthermore, our green friends hold to their ideology in a manner fanatical enough to make even a Muslim extremist quake in his boots.  The evidence for this is abundant: the treatment of turncoats Lovelock and Peter Taylor; the refusal to countenance evidence that they might have got something a little wrong; the repeating of the same tired mantras in response to any questions or objections; their inflammatory language comparing global warming sceptics with holocaust deniers; this will do for now.  What's more, they are convinced they are right, and will implement their righteousness through control and regulation of the ignorant masses.  The climate change agenda - save the planet with carbon taxes and carbon trading; save the planet with windfarms that disfigure the landscape and work from time to time; and the rest - really has little to do with the environment, with Gaia-Sophia, but a lot to do with developing what is sometimes referred to as a kind of eco-socialism, a green 1984.  There are the naive, who still blindly believe in the guff put out by Greenpeace and the rest; and there are the control freaks, who see 'green' as a way of establishing a form of benevolent dictatorship. And the BBC, along with those 'respectable' newspapers, are very much part of this psycho-political complex.

The media play a pivotal role in creating what is generally considered 'normal' and 'reality'.  In the case of the mainstream, major ingredients of 'normal' include the generation of fear and insecurity, the depiction of 'reality' as routine killing with guns, bombs, and other explosive devices, lies, dishonesty, manipulative sex etc.  All this renders the shattered populace vulnerable to manipulation by those who will look after us and make the world safe and secure.  And as a palliative escape from this grim reality, we are offered mindnumbing entertainment, in which we can experience other people's mediocre celebrity in 'talent shows', thereby confirming our own status as half-dead passive consumers of the lives of others, those who are really living.

More profoundly, this all represents the constant generation of a particular form of consciousness, designed to keep us imprisoned in a small, fearful, 3-D world.  Politicians, parapoliticians, and others well up in the pyramid of control, know this full well: the media is one of their major tools in broadcasting a certain reality which they would like people to take as the only reality.  I'm not suggesting that Fiona Bruce and every Guardian journalist are evil - not at all, it doesn't work like that.  But unplugging to a large degree from the mainstream media, and taking it all in a spirit of sceptical discernment, is a very positive step in freeing our minds.


P.S. on Fiona Bruce, BBC newsreader!  She has been mentioned more than once on Pale Green Vortex.  Please don't think I have got anything against her.  On the contrary, we have something in common.  We attended the same college in Oxford University (me rather earlier than her...).  This college, it transpires, has quite a tradition of newreaders: Natasha Kaplinsky and Krishnan Guru-Murthy also attended.  Another college notable was one of my geography tutors (I was studying climate change in 1974, by the way....), one John Patten.  He went on to become a member of the Thatcher government, a minister for education, if I remember correctly.  He didn't do a lot to increase the popularity of that particular government, though, and was soon shunted off to the House of Lords as a life peer: Baron Patten.  A lot can be learnt from that.....

                  

Whose Story? A Trilogy (Part One)

Our prehistoric past......

One of the favourite books of my childhood was 'From Cavemen to Vikings' by one R.J.Unstead. In easily understood text and fully illustrated, it purported to tell the tale of our dim, distant, and often dark, human past. All I remember is a full-page illustration (it might have adorned the front cover, I have been unable to locate a copy of the edition in question) which left a deep impression on me. It showed a Viking, resplendent in horned helmet and with a mad glint in his eye, holding a dagger-like sword to the throat of a terrified Englishman (possibly a priest or monk). Nearby stood a terrified young English maiden, while behind the village burnt furiously. 'Rape, pillage, and plunder' is what those heathen Vikings were about as they raided the christianised coastlines of eastern England. To me, the message behind this scene of horror was clear: 'Things might not be perfect today, son, but we've come a long way. Don't forget, and be grateful to be alive in our wonderful modern day and age.'

The stories that we tell and are told profoundly influence our view of ourselves. We can go a step further and say that our world - our place in it, our attitudes and aspirations, our relationships with other human and non-human beings - is in fact largely created by these narratives. This is a notion that is widely acknowledged nowadays when dealing with the individual person. Modern psychotherapy, along with the host of related disciplines that has sprung up over the past fifty years, is based upon this premise. Its prime method is for the 'patient' to tell the various stories going to make up their life, see how these stories affect the person concerned, and then, if appropriate, create a new story or otherwise find a way to release the grip of a destructive narrative.

Less frequently recognised is the moulding influence of the stories we are told on a social or cultural level, and which go to create 'the world'. One reason is that it is often not even realised that we are being told stories in the first place. 'That's not a story: that's a fact' will be the common rejoinder. The world out there consists of solid facts and bits of information; such is the efficacy of the conditioning factor of the various narratives that shape our views, beliefs, perception even. Yet, I would contend, for the person seeking awakening and liberation, personal therapy (and 'self-knowledge' as commonly understood) is no more important than social, cultural and religious therapy: unravelling the stories we are told from birth that unconsciously go to create the world we inhabit, and in which we become de facto participants.

One most important area where the narrative is everything is that of our history. The story we are generally told of civilisation begins with the ancient Greeks. True, there had been the Egyptians beforehand, but with their huge impersonal eyes staring into infinity they are a bit too weird to be of much relevance. Before them existed various other folk, mainly notable for their bizarre propensity to stick enormous slabs of rock into circles, a clearly pointless exercise from our modern, enlightened perspective. Indeed, so the story goes, our ancestors seem to have been an autonomous collective of idiocy until the Greek philosophers, mathematicians and the rest appeared as beacons of light out of the mire of ignorance. Along with other luminaries across the globe such as Buddha, Confucius, and Zarathustra, they all came to embody around 2500 years ago what Karl Jaspers famously referred to as the 'Axial Age'. This was the period when outstanding figures (all of them males, strangely) appeared in order to bring culture, spirituality, and higher learning - in a word, civilisation - to a level hitherto undreamed of.

The story of Britain from here onwards is a familiar one: Romans, Christians, the Dark Ages, Saxons and Vikings, Medieval stuff, the separation of Church and State, Industrial Revolution, the age of science and rationality, and so on and so on. And underlying this grand story of western civilisation is the assumption of progress and evolution. Despite the blood that's spattered on every page, it's a case of onward and up. The fruits of this narrative of development are plain for all to see today. OK, there are still millions of folk going hungry across the globe, and huge numbers of young children needlessly suffering cheaply and easily treated diseases. Genocide is ongoing in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and over 100,000 people have been killed in Iraq since western powers intervened to bring peace. Cities are ravaged just south of the U.S. border in turf wars over drugs (don't worry, they're only Mexicans). But still the signs of our evolutionary history are clear. We have clean water and no longer need to poo in the street. We can watch Lady Gaga 24/7 on the latest mobile devices. We have Simon Cowell; we have wind farms.

The trouble is, scratch beneath the surface and the story begins to fall apart. Were our Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestors simply neo-agricultural barbarians with a stone circle fetish, thankfully superseded by the glorious civilising influence of those noble Greeks and Romans? Quite possibly not. One readable source with a different narrative is 'The Chalice and the Blade' by Riane Eisler. There are aspects of this book that I cannot go along with. She talks of evolution and progress too much, where it would be better to let the evidence speak for itself, rather than jamming it into a dubious telos. There appear to be gaps in her understanding of modern dominator system techniques: she takes groups like the Club of Rome seriously as world improvers. And she has been duped by the story of Jesus the compassionate, peace-loving revolutionary, whose message has been corrupted along the way. She did not have the benefit of John Lash's 'Not in His Image' to expose the fake love-and-peace ethic of the Nazarene carpenter. And the words of D.M.Murdock, aka Acharya S, run to several hundred pages in demonstrating that Mr. Christ is most likely nothing more than a made-up character for political power purposes.

Be all this as it may, Eisler's descriptions of the Neolithic partnership societies of the Near East, 'Old Europe' and Minoan Crete in the first eight chapters of the book are brilliant. She shows how these peoples, with their worship of the Goddess, were relatively life-loving, equalitarian, and peaceful, as well as bringing in many technological advances. It was only with the incursion of waves of more warlike peoples with their bloody male gods from the north and east that these civilisations began to break down between c4300 BCE and 2800 BCE. From then on the pattern of dominator cultures leading to our current situation began to emerge.

Scratch more deeply, and things get stranger still. What do we make of the already well-developed cave art of south-west Europe that goes back over 30,000 years? Were its creators really gormless primitives? And what do we make of Tony Wright's contention that human brain capacity seems to have increased rapidly until about 200,000 years ago, since when it has been pretty much stable. Get this: our ancestors of 200,000 years ago had the same kind of brain as us (actually, Tony suggests it might have been superior to our own). Do you really need all that cranial capacity simply to organise a trap for a woolly mammoth?

Of course - and this is a vital point to recognise vividly - the stories that we are told are not random, related as if by accident. The story of civilisation that has come down to us today is a reflection of a cluster of belief systems, and serves specific purposes. The notions of progress and evolution superimposed onto the passing of events confirm Darwinian principles, those by which the world is largely interpreted in our western world. Forget that this application of a distorted Darwinism to social changes in the human realm is a highly dubious project. The story of our history, achieved in large part by plunder and domination, is excused and justified by fitting it into this cheapened and dumbed-down version of Darwinism, summarised as 'the survival of the most brutally fit' and 'human nature, red in tooth and claw.' Slaughter, beheadings, betrayals, tyranny over the many by the few: all are an integral part of this inevitable march of progress, of evolution.

We, meanwhile, and it goes without saying, stand at the apex of this process, in spite of our little problems. This is our story, and it couldn't be any different. Needs must that our children are informed that they are the brightest and best, fortunate to be living at this pinnacle of human civilisation (one of the major functions of education in modern society, it appears, is to inculcate the main stories of our culture into the hearts and minds of our young ones). How could they be told otherwise? That times may have existed that were less warlike, more caring, and that somehow we messed up and got lost along the way. Not exactly the story to tell if you want children who are obedient to the status quo, 'good members of society', fearful and respectful of the imperatives of modern western civilisation.

Revisiting and revisioning the narratives of our history is an ongoing project that I have found extremely liberating. There is freedom in escaping the confines of the past 2500 years as the only past that is relevant to the question of who we are. Our story is broader, richer, and possibly far more noble. Maybe times have existed when human minds have been imbued with a deeper spiritual awareness. Maybe (in fact most likely) some of our ancestors possessed vast knowledge of the workings of the universe that has been lost or deliberately destroyed by those who superseded them. Maybe some were creators of marvellous technologies that we remain hopelessly ignorant of. Maybe, just maybe, the much-vaunted 'Axial Age' marks, not so much a flowering to new heights of human consciousness, as a wisdom once in the more general domain, now able to manifest only through the lives of a few individuals. Plato, Mr. Axial Age himself, referred to his times as 'a remembering of things forgotten.'

Reflecting on the undulating horizon of this much vaster panorama of human history also gives the lie to the notion that human nature is fixed: that the way things are is the inevitable consequence of our makeup, of a selfish gene and a nature red in tooth and claw. It becomes clear that the application of half-baked Darwinian principles to our story is a fabrication, a convenient narrative for those deeply invested in maintaining the social and perceptual status quo. To echo William Blake, the manacles we clamp upon our present and future are mind-made, nothing more.

As a postscript, there is a wealth of written and spoken information out there on revisiting our past. Be discerning, treat it as opening doorways rather than trying to nail down 'the truth'. Red Ice Radio has interviews with a multitude of researchers in these areas. For myself, I have been respectfully instructed by, among others, Riane Eisler as described above; Terence McKenna's rather speculative but visionary and poetic evocation in the first part of 'Food of the Gods'; Graham Hancock, especially 'Supernatural'; Marija Gimbutas; Lucy Wyatt; there are the energy-challenging but remarkably comprehensive tomes of Acharya S.; Michael Cremo. Michael Tsarion is another prominent figure in this world. Loads more. Dip in and follow your daimon!

And as a final postscript, even not pooing in the street is nothing for modern civilisation to be uniquely proud of: private loos with efficient sewage systems existed in the townships of the Indus Valley in 2,700 BCE!

Trouble at Mill

Belted Galloway Bull

Pale Green Vortex is not usually in the game of commenting on 'current affairs'. However, in a hastily-arranged meeting of PGV staff, it was decided to make an exception, and botch together a sentence or two after the Bradford West by-election last week.

For any reader unfamiliar with the geographical landscape of Britain, Bradford is a large settlement, part of the West Yorkshire conurbation in northern England, a child of the Industrial Revolution. It is the sort of place that, with its preponderance of working class and poor populations, only needs the Labour candidate to turn up to be elected to parliament with a handsome majority. Enter George Galloway, however, renegade and maverick politician, once a Labour man, now leader of the 'Respect' party. He is probably best known for his fierce and unfailing opposition to the Iraq war - and, less edifyingly, for his participation in a series of 'Big Brother' shows on television. He is looked upon by the 'main political parties' with loathing, scorn, and ridicule in equal measure. Nevertheless, in a way that no mainstream politician or commentator had an inkling of, he won the Bradford West by-election - not just scraping through, but with a huge majority, a swing of roughly three million per cent.

The pros and cons of Galloway's political policies are not the subject at issue in this piece. It is that here, in Britain, that most conservative and traditional (one might say 'dead') of nations politically, large numbers of people appear to have started to see what Pale Green Vortex has been intermittently banging on about for two years now. The mainstream political landscape is by and large irrelevant in terms of the welfare of the citizens of this planet. All players and parties are embedded in the same system/construct/matrix/call it what you will, that does not have the best interests of the majority of people in mind. Its agendas lie firmly elsewhere. Democrats - Republicans, Tories - Labour: all this means rather less than whether you support Chelsea or Arsenal. Similarly the bizarre sideshow of Scottish independence, a local moribund distraction from the important matters of the moment. Of course independence, as everybody knows, immediately confers enormous benefits on the mass of people; we only have to look at the majority of African nations, and how everyone has prospered in a fantastic atmosphere of benevolence and democracy since their rush for independence in the 1960s.

In the longer term, Bradford West might turn out to be insignificant. Yet, as a possible sign of a growing disenchantment with the entire rigged game, of some kind of awakening to what is really going on behind the facade of parliamentary democracy, we can watch with interest.

That clean green wind energy

There is a little-known aspect to industrial-scale wind farm development that should be read about here. With a current malfunctioning of one or two technical functions, I shall merely point the reader to putting 'neodymium pollution' in an internet search engine and reading the Daily Mail article that should come up. That it falls to the Daily Mail of all papers to bring this to public attention should, I suppose, be cause for reflection.

Just in case anybody still hasn't got it, this is my conclusion from six years of research on the subject: industrial-scale wind farms provide no discernible benefit to the majority of human beings whatsoever, and are destructive of the natural world within which we are embedded. They have no redeeming features. Please allow me my moment of absolutism. In this case, it is justified......

Assembling The World

A topic that features heavily in some of the later writings of Carlos Castaneda ('The Fire From Within' and 'The Art of Dreaming' for example) is that of the assemblage point. As is customary whenever C.C. is mentioned, in order to anticipate and deflate the cynics and scoffers, the detractors and debunkers, it is necessary to define the basis on which to proceed. We shall assume that the writings of C.C. are indeed fictional or semi-fictional in nature; and furthermore that the matter of the assemblage point can, if preferred, be taken metaphorically rather than literally. Enough said......

Don Juan Matus, the seer/sorcerer/shaman teacher of Carlos Castaneda, outlines at length and in several places the nature of the assemblage point. The universe, he states, is composed of energy, which manifests as millions of fibres of luminosity. The human being, too, consists of energy and luminous fibres, and can be perceived as something resembling a luminous egg or cocoon. Great numbers of the universe's fibres of energy pass through this luminous egg, most of them outside our conscious awareness. A few, however, channel through a particular node, called the assemblage point. It is these specific fibres that are 'assembled' to make up the world as we normally perceive it. '.... perception takes place because there is in each of us an agent called the assemblage point that selects internal and external emanations (of energy) for alignment. The particular alignment that we perceive as the world is the product of the specific spot where our assemblage point is located on our cocoon.' ('The Fire From Within', chapter seven). But, continues Don Juan, the precise location of this assemblage point is the result merely of habit and repetition; infants have no fixed assemblage point at first. Furthermore, sorcerers can train themselves to move the position of the assemblage point, thereby altering which fibres of the universe go to create the experienced world. In this way, they 'assemble' different realities, each in their own way as real and as 'valid' as the 'normal' reality of human consciousness.

According to Castaneda, 'the world' is something we assemble on a moment-to-moment basis. Many people take this world to be the only world, but this is erroneous. Other realities, sometimes operating to different laws, are equally real, yet most people are unaware of their existence, solely because their assemblage point is fixed in one spot.

Deep meditation and energy work, conscious dreaming, work with entheogens, shamanic journeying, sensory deprivation, trance dance and the rest: cultures throughout human history and prehistory have developed a range of techniques aimed at deliberately shifting the assemblage point. It is ordinarily located on the surface of the luminous egg behind the right shoulder blade, according to Don Juan. In fact, a quick internet search reveals that Castaneda is far from alone in acknowledging the existence of the assemblage point, but different healers and researchers may locate it in slightly different places. It seems that, while a large shift in its position may catapult the subject into unrecognisable worlds, a small shift can affect mood, and physical and emotional health - hence its value for healing.

And with the notion of the assemblage point, humankind is divided neatly into two different groups. Those who acknowledge the teaching of the assemblage point - that reality and the world are the constructs of perception, which in turn can be altered. And those who reject the idea, clinging to the belief that 'the world is the world', that experience is fixed and immutable, and that is that. It's a difference in perspective of enormous import. It lies at the bottom of, well, almost everything.

The sorcerers of old, says Don Juan, moved the assemblage point to all manner of places, thereby entering a host of outrageous magical worlds. Their aims were at times less than noble, however: manipulations for personal gain, for example, or to get one over on another human being. But for Don Juan and the modern seers, shifting the assemblage point is the key to freedom. To change the terms of discourse: experience of shifts in the assemblage point is a precondition for a more fluid, less fixed, sense of ego identity. Who I am, what the world is, become more relative. They are matters of personal perception, alterable and always altering, rather than absolutes; a truth that needs to be experienced directly, not just reflected on and thought about, to be effective. As the sense of fixed self and world dissolves, so comes freedom, liberation; the ability to fly everywhere and nowhere. The teaching on the assemblage point shows itself as a key to infinity, to freedom.