Where Reality Renders: Resetting The Assemblage Point
If we imagine all of our individual perspectives as filaments of consciousness, or light as Kabbalah describes it, we can theorize a place where all of those filaments meet. It is at this convergence point where reality is assembled and ultimately perceived. As described by Peruvian-born anthropologist and author Carlos Castaneda, who wrote a series of books based on the teachings of a Yaqui shaman named Don Juan Matus, this “assemblage point” is where individual consciousness merges into collective awareness to create reality. As we become aware of and intentional in how we program our filaments, we learn to reshape reality, which is the Great Work of Yaqui shamans, as well as alchemists and Hermeticists.
In the early 1960s Castaneda became an apprentice to Don Juan, who he claimed could manipulate time and space, and began exploring psychedelic plant medicine under his supervision. These experiences brought Castaneda into what he called “non-ordinary reality,” and from there he was able to explore consciousness beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception. From this vantage point, Don Juan was able to show Castaneda how much power our perception has to influence both our lives and the whole of humanity.
“Any movement of the assemblage point means a movement away from an excessive concern with the individual self,” Don Juan said. When we peer beyond the veil of ordinary reality and transcend our individuality, even just briefly, the filament of awareness radiating from us evolves as we return with a deep sense of connection to all of life. “To fixate the assemblage point on any new spot means to acquire cohesion,” he went on to say in reference to the process of unhooking from the socially imposed assemblage point and turning our attention towards creating interpersonal and environmental coherence. Such redirection of our focus moves the assemblage point towards peace on Earth.
Richard Rudd, author and channeler of The Gene Keys, describes this same phenomenon in a different way by bringing us back to the origin of our filament. “It’s about thought. Energy follows thought, that’s an ancient axiom. So when you change your thoughts you change your attractor field and you change your frequency. The Gene Keys represent the language of light, they elevate your mind up to the causal plane, the dimension beyond the mental plane.” By understanding the mechanism through which our thoughts are actually changing reality, we are invited to step into the role of co-creator - not just of our individual lives, but of this world.
The biggest challenge when it comes to managing our perspective is growing up in societies that indoctrinate us into limited thinking. Our assemblage point becomes habitual and fixed as we become increasingly disconnected from our true, infinite nature and imbued in human drama. In The Lineage of the Codes of Light, author Jessie Ayani clarifies this aspect of Don Juan’s teachings. “He also taught that these filaments are another name for intent. It is intent that moves the cogs of the universe, that shapes reality. If our filaments emanate out to the collective unconscious, our reality and limitations are gleaned from that resource and we are locked into collective behaviors that are not going to serve us now.”
In a previous essay called Reflections on the Creator, this process of getting stuck in a loop of destructive behaviors is described by author and scientist Itzhak Bentov as a “stress-producing event matrix” that can ultimately come to define a civilization’s history. Both Ayani and Don Juan believe we can escape that loop by cultivating our intent. “If we shift our perception, shift the assemblage point, and align our filaments with divine love, that becomes our new reality. It sounds simple, but it’s generally a lot of hard work shifting patterns and beliefs to accept a new reality,” Ayani wrote, noting that Don Juan used plant medicine taken in natural environments as his means of facilitating these jolts of perception. Her method for creating the conditions to produce such jolts is storytelling, while Richard Rudd’s is the art of contemplation.
Carlos Castaneda combined all three methods and ultimately wrote about his experiences under the tutelage of Don Juan. When his first book in the series The Teachings of Don Juan was published in 1968, it helped catalyze the consciousness revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s and mainstream interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness. This convergence of different meaning-making approaches illuminated our responsibility as co-creators, a sentiment that defined the revolutionary era these books were published in.
Fast-forward nearly 60 years to modernity, as mass media has grown to dominate most of our daily attention, we must ask ourselves - what are we collectively assembling with all this information? Every thought, story, and intention contributes another filament to the tapestry of human consciousness. So, if enough of us learn to align those filaments with coherence, curiosity, love, and certainty in the will of The Creator as Kabbalah says, we can shift the assemblage point. The Great Work, then, is not reserved for magicians and shamans. It belongs to anyone willing and able to become a conscious steward of their own awareness, because through that awareness that the future of life is continuously being assembled.