He guided me then into one of the display rooms of the museum [at the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City] and said that my question was apropos to what he had been planning to tell me.
"My intention was to explain to you that the position of the assemblage point is like a vault where sorcerers keep their records," he said. "I was tickled pink when your energy body felt my intent and you asked me about it. The energy body knows immensities. Let me show you how much it knows."
    He instructed me to enter into total silence. He reminded me that I was already in a special state of awareness, because my assemblage point had been made to shift by his presence. He assured me that entering into total silence was going to allow the sculptures in that room to make me see and hear inconceivable things. He added, apparently to increase my confusion, that some of the archaeological pieces in that room had the capacity to produce, by themselves, a shift of the assemblage point, and that if I reached a state of total silence I would be actually witnessing scenes pertaining to the lives of the people who made those pieces.
    He then began the strangest tour of a museum I have ever taken. He went around the room, describing and interpreting astounding details of every one of the large pieces. According to him, every archaeological piece in that room was a purposeful record left by the people of antiquity, a record that don Juan as a sorcerer was reading to me as one would read a book:
"Every piece here is designed to make the assemblage point shift," he went on. "Fix your gaze on any of them, silence your mind, and find out whether or not your assemblage point can be made to shift."
"How would I know that it has shifted?"
"Because you would see and feel things that are beyond your normal reach."
    I gazed at the sculptures and saw and heard things that I would be at a loss to explain. In the past, I had examined all those pieces with the bias of anthropology, always bearing in mind the descriptions of scholars in the field. Their descriptions of the functions of those pieces, rooted in modem man's cognition of the world, appeared to me, for the first time, to be utterly prejudiced if not asinine. What don Juan said about those pieces and what I heard and saw myself, gazing at them, was the farthest thing from what I had always read about them.

Carlos Castaneda: The Art of Dreaming