The Active Side of Infinity (19 page)

I tried doubly hard to approach Professor Lorca, but he was like an
impenetrable fortress.
When I talked to don Juan about my
difficulties, he explained that sorcerers viewed any kind of
activity
with people, no matter how minute or unimportant, as a battlefield. In that
battlefield,
sorcerers performed their best magic, their best effort.
He assured me that the trick to being at ease in such situations, a thing that
had never been my forte, was to face our opponents openly. He expressed his
abhorrence of timid souls who shy away from interaction to the point where
even
though they interact, they merely infer or deduce, in terms of their own
psychological states,
what is going on without actually
perceiving what is really going on. They interact without ever
being
part of the interaction.

"Always look at the man who is involved in a tug of war with
you," he continued. "Don't just
pull the rope;
look up and see his eyes. You'll know then that he is a man, just like you. No
matter
what he's saying, no matter what he's doing, he's shaking
in his boots, just like you. A look like
that renders
the opponent helpless, if only for an instant; deliver your blow then."

One day, luck was with me: I cornered Professor Lorca in the hall
outside his office.
"Professor Lorca," I said, "do you
have a free moment so I could talk to you?"

"Who in the hell are you?" he said with the most natural air,
as if I were his best friend and he
were merely asking me how I felt
that day.

Professor Lorca was as rude as anyone could be, but his words didn't
have the effect of rudeness on me. He grinned at me with tight lips, as if
encouraging me to leave or to say something meaningful.

"I am an anthropology student, Professor Lorca," I said.
"I am involved in a field situation
where I have
the opportunity to learn about the cognitive system of sorcerers."

Professor Lorca looked at me with suspicion and annoyance. His eyes
seemed to be two blue
points filled with spite. He combed his
hair backward with his hand, as if it had fallen on his face.

"I work with a real sorcerer in Mexico," I continued, trying
to encourage a response. "He's a
real sorcerer, mind you. It has
taken me over a year just to warm him up so he would consent to talk to
me."

Professor Lorca's face relaxed; he opened his mouth and, waving a most
delicate hand in front
of my eyes, as if he were twirling
pizza dough with it, he spoke to me. I couldn't help noticing his
enameled
gold cuff links, which matched his greenish blazer to perfection.

"And what do you want from me?" he said.

"I want you to hear me out for a moment," I said, "and
see if whatever I'm doing may interest
you."

He made a gesture of reluctance and resignation with his shoulders,
opened the door of his
office, and invited me to come in. I
knew that I had no time at all to waste and I gave him a very
direct
description of my field situation. I told him that I was being taught
procedures that had nothing to do with what I had found in the anthropological
literature about shamanism.

He moved his lips for a moment without saying a word. When he spoke, he
pointed out that
the flaw of anthropologists in general is that they
never allow themselves sufficient time to
become fully
cognizant of all the nuances of the particular cognitive
system
used by
the people
they are studying. He defined "cognition" as a
system of interpretation, which through usage
makes it
possible for individuals to utilize, with the utmost expertise, all the nuances
of meaning
that make up the particular social milieu under
consideration.

Professor Lorca's words illuminated the total scope of my field-work.
Without gaining
command of all the nuances of the cognitive
system
of the shamans of ancient Mexico, it would
have been
thoroughly superfluous for me to formulate any idea about that world. If
Professor
Lorca had not said another word to me, what he had just
voiced would have been more than
sufficient. What followed was a
marvelous discourse on cognition.

"Your problem," Professor Lorca said, "is that the
cognitive
system
of our everyday world
with which we are all familiar,
virtually from the day we are born, is not the same as the
cognitive
system
of the sorcerers' world."

This statement created a state of euphoria in me. I thanked Professor
Lorca profusely and
assured him that there was only one course of
action in my case: to follow his ideas through hell or high water.

"What I have told you, of course, is general knowledge," he
said as he ushered me out of his
office. "Anyone who reads is aware
of what I have been telling you."

We parted almost friends. My account to don Juan of my success in
approaching Professor
Lorca was met with a strange reaction.
Don Juan seemed, on the one hand, to be elated, and on
the other,
concerned.

"I have the feeling that your professor is not quite what he
claims to be," he said. "That's, of
course, from a
sorcerer's point of view. Perhaps it would be wise to quit now, before all this
becomes too involved and consuming. One of the high arts of sorcerers is to
know when to stop. It appears to me that you've gotten from your professor all
you can get from him."

I immediately reacted with a barrage of defenses on behalf of Professor
Lorca. Don Juan
calmed me down. He said that it wasn't his
intention to criticize or judge anybody, but that to his
knowledge,
very few people knew when to quit and even fewer knew how to actually utilize
their
knowledge.

In spite of don Juan's warnings, I didn't quit; instead, I became
Professor Lorca's faithful
student, follower, admirer. He seemed
to take a genuine interest in my work, although he felt
frustrated
no end with my reluctance and inability to formulate clear-cut concepts about
the
cognitive
system
of the sorcerers' world.

One day, Professor Lorca formulated for me the concept of the
scientist-visitor to
another
cognitive
world.
He conceded that he was willing to be open-minded, and
toy, as a social
scientist, with the possibility of a different
cognitive
system.
He envisioned an actual research in
which
protocols would be gathered and analyzed. Problems of cognition would be
devised and
given to the shamans I knew, to measure, for instance,
their capacity to focus their cognition on
two diverse
aspects of behavior.

He thought that the test would begin with a simple paradigm in which
they would try to
comprehend and retain written text that they read
while they played poker. The test would
escalate, to
measure, for instance, their capacity to focus their cognition on complex
things that were being said to them while they slept, and so on. Professor
Lorca wanted a linguistic analysis to be performed on the shamans' utterances.
He wanted an actual measurement of their responses
in terms of
their speed and accuracy, and other variables that would become prevalent as
the
project progressed.

Don Juan veritably laughed his head off when I told him about Professor
Lorca's proposed
measurements of the cognition of shamans.

"Now, I truly like your professor," he said. "But you
can't be serious about this idea of
measuring our cognition. What
could your professor get out of measuring our responses? He'll get the
conviction that we are a bunch of morons, because that's what we are. We cannot
possibly be
more intelligent, faster than the average man. It's not
his fault, though, to believe he can make measurements of cognition across
worlds. The fault is yours. You have failed to express to your
professor
that when sorcerers talk about the cognitive
world
of the shamans of
ancient Mexico
they are talking about things for which we have no
equivalent in the world of everyday life.

"For instance, perceiving energy directly as it flows in the
universe is a unit of cognition that
shamans live by. They
see
how
energy flows, and they follow its flow. If its flow is obstructed, they move
away to do something entirely different. Shamans
see
lines in the
universe. Their art,
or their job, is to choose the line
that will take them, perception-wise, to regions that have no
name.
You can say that shamans react immediately to the lines of the universe. They
see
human
beings as luminous balls, and they search in them for
their flow of energy. Naturally, they react
instantly to
this sight. It's part of their cognition."

I told don Juan that I couldn't possibly talk about all this to
Professor Lorca because I hadn't
done any of the things that he was
describing. My cognition remained the same.

"Ah!" he exclaimed. "It's simply that you haven't had the
time yet to embody the units of
cognition of the shamans' world."

I left don Juan's house more confused than ever. There was a voice
inside me that virtually
demanded that I end all endeavors with
Professor Lorca. I understood how right don Juan was
when he said to
me once that the practicalities that scientists were interested in were
conducive to
building more and more complex machines. They were not
the practicalities that changed an individual's life course from within. They
were not geared to reaching the vastness of the universe
as
a personal, experiential affair. The stupendous machines in existence, or those
in the making,
were cultural affairs, the attainment of which had
to be enjoyed vicariously, even by the creators
of those
machines themselves. The only reward for them was monetary.

In pointing out all of that to me, don Juan had succeeded in placing me
in a more inquisitive
frame of mind. I really began to
question the ideas of Professor Lorca, something I had never
done
before. Meanwhile, Professor Lorca kept spouting astounding truths about
cognition. Each
declaration was more severe than the preceding one
and, therefore, more incisive.

At the end of my second semester with Professor Lorca, I had reached an
impasse. There was
no way on earth for me to bridge the two lines of
thought: don Juan's and Professor Lorca's. They
were on
parallel tracks. I understood Professor Lorca's drive to qualify and quantify
the study of
cognition. Cybernetics was just around the comer at that
time, and the practical aspect of the
studies of cognition was a
reality. But so was don Juan's world, which could not be measured
with
the standard tools of cognition. I had been privileged to witness it, in don
Juan's actions, but I hadn't experienced it myself. I felt that that was the
drawback that made bridging those two
worlds impossible.

I told all this to don Juan on one of my visits to him. He said that
what I considered to be my
drawback, and therefore the factor
that made bridging these two worlds impossible, wasn't
accurate. In
his opinion, the flaw was something more encompassing than one man's individual
circumstances.

"Perhaps you can recall what I said to you about one of our biggest
flaws as average human beings," he said.

I couldn't recall anything in particular. He had pointed out so many
flaws that plagued us as
average human beings that my mind
reeled.

"You want something specific," I said, "and I can't think
of it."

"The big flaw I am talking about," he said, "is
something you ought to bear in mind every
second of your
existence. For me, it's the issue of issues, which I will repeat to you over
and over
until it comes out of your ears."

After a long moment, I gave up any further attempt to remember.

"We are beings on our way to dying," he said. "We are not
immortal, but we behave as if we
were. This is the flaw that brings us
down as individuals and will bring us down as a species
someday."

Don Juan stated that the sorcerers' advantage over their average fellow
men is that sorcerers
know that they are beings on their way
to dying and they don't let themselves deviate from that
knowledge.
He emphasized that an enormous effort must be employed in order to elicit and
maintain this knowledge as a total certainty.