The Active Side of Infinity (31 page)

"The energy from our first cousins is a drag!" don Juan went
on. "They are as fucked up as we
are. Let's say that the organic
and inorganic beings of our twin worlds are the children of two
sisters
who live next door to each other. They are exactly alike although they look
different. They
cannot help us, and we cannot help them. Perhaps we
could join together, and make a fabulous
family
business corporation, but that hasn't happened. Both branches of the family are
extremely
touchy and take offense over nothing, a typical
relationship between touchy first cousins. The crux of the matter, the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed, is that both human beings and
inorganic
beings from the twin worlds are profound egomaniacs."

According to don Juan, another classification that the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico made of the
inorganic beings was that of scouts, or
explorers, and by this they meant inorganic beings that
came
from the depths of the universe, and which were possessors of awareness
infinitely sharper
and faster than that of human beings. Don Juan
asserted that the old sorcerers had spent
generations
polishing their classification schemes, and their conclusions were that certain
types of
inorganic beings from the category of scouts or
explorers, because of their vivaciousness, were akin to man. They could make
liaisons and establish a symbiotic relation with men. The old
sorcerers
called these kinds of inorganic beings the allies.

Don Juan explained that the crucial mistake of those shamans with
reference to this type of
inorganic being was to attribute human
characteristics to that impersonal energy and to believe
that
they could harness it. They thought of those blocks of energy as their helpers,
and they relied
on them without comprehending that, being pure
energy, they didn't have the power to sustain
any effort.

"I've told you all there is to know about inorganic beings,"
don Juan said abruptly. "The only
way you can put
this to the test is by means of direct experience."

I didn't ask him what he wanted me to do. A deep fear made my body
rattle with nervous
spasms that burst like a volcanic eruption from my
solar plexus and extended down to the tips of
my toes and up
to my upper trunk.

"Today, we will go to look for some inorganic beings," he
announced.

Don Juan ordered me to sit on my bed and adopt again the Position that
fostered inner
silence,
I followed his
command with unusual ease. Normally, I would have been reluctant, perhaps not
overtly,
but I would have felt a twinge of reluctance nonetheless. 1 had a vague thought
that by
the time I sat down, I was already in a state of
inner
silence.
My thoughts were no longer clear. I
felt
an impenetrable darkness surrounding me, making me feel as if I were falling
asleep. My body was utterly motionless, either because I had no intention of
setting up any commands to
move or because I just couldn't
formulate them.

A moment later, I found myself with don Juan, walking in the Sonoran
desert. I recognized
the surroundings; I had been there with
him so many times that I had memorized every feature of
it.
It was the end of the day, and the light of the setting sun created in me a
mood of desperation. I
walked automatically, aware that I was
feeling in my body sensations that were not accompanied
by
thoughts. I was not describing to myself my state of being. I wanted to tell
this to don Juan,
but the desire to communicate my bodily sensations
to him vanished in an instant.

Don Juan said, very slowly, and in a low, grave voice, that the dry
riverbed on which we were
walking was a most appropriate place
for our business at hand, and that I should sit on a small
boulder,
alone, while he went and sat on another boulder about fifty feet away. I didn't
ask don
Juan, as I ordinarily would have, what I was supposed to
do. I knew what I had to do. I heard then
the rustling
steps of people walking through the bushes that were sparsely scattered around.
There
wasn't enough moisture in the area to allow the heavy
growth of underbrush. Some sturdy bushes
grew there,
with a space of perhaps ten or fifteen feet between them.

I saw then two men approaching. They seemed to be local men, perhaps
Yaqui Indians from
one of the Yaqui towns in the vicinity. They came
and stood by me. One of them nonchalantly
asked me how I
had been. I wanted to smile at him, laugh, but I couldn't. My face was
extremely rigid. Yet I was ebullient. I wanted to jump up and down, but I
couldn't. I told him that I had been
fine. Then I asked them who
they were. I said to them that I didn't know them, and yet I sensed an
extraordinary
familiarity with them-One of the men said, matter-of-factly, that they were my
allies.

I stared at them, trying to memorize their features, but their features
changed. They seemed to
mold themselves to the mood of my
stare. No thoughts were involved. Everything was a matter
guided
by visceral sensations. I stared at them long enough to erase their features
completely, and
finally, I was facing two shiny blobs of luminosity
that vibrated. The blobs of luminosity did not
have
boundaries. They seemed to sustain themselves cohesively from within. At times,
they
became flat, wide. Then they would take on a verticality
again, at the height of a man.

Suddenly, I felt don Juan's arm hooking my right arm and pulling me
from the boulder. He
said that it was time to go. The next
moment, I was in his house again, in central Mexico, more
bewildered
than ever.

"Today, you found
inorganic awareness,
and
then you
saw
it as it really is," he said.
"Energy
is the irreducible residue of everything. As far as we
are concerned, to
see
energy
directly is the
bottom line for a human being. Perhaps there are
other things beyond that, but they are not available to us."

Don Juan asserted all this over and over, and every time he said it,
his words seemed to
solidify me more and more, to help me return to my
normal state.

I told don Juan everything I had witnessed, everything I had heard. Don
Juan explained to me
that I had succeeded that day in
transforming the anthropomorphic shape of the inorganic beings
into
their essence: impersonal energy aware of itself.

"You must realize," he said, "that it is our cognition,
which is in essence an interpretation
system, that curtails our
resources. Our interpretation system is what tells us what the parameters
of
our possibilities are, and since we have been using that system of
interpretation all our lives,
we cannot possibly dare to go against
its dictums.

"The energy of those
inorganic beings
pushes us," don
Juan went on, "and we interpret that
push as we
may, depending on our mood. The most sober thing to do, for a sorcerer, is to
relegate
those entities to an abstract level. The fewer
interpretations sorcerers make, the better off they are.
"From
now on," he continued, "whenever you are confronted with the strange
sight of an
apparition, hold your ground and gaze at it with an
inflexible attitude. If it is an inorganic
being,
your
interpretation of it will fall off like dead leaves. If nothing happens, it is
just a chicken-shit
aberration of your mind, which is not your mind
anyway."

For the first time in my life, I found myself in a total quandary as to
how to behave in the
world. The world around me had not
changed. It definitely stemmed from a flaw in me. Don
Juan's
influence and all the activities stemming from his practices, into which he had
engaged me
so deeply, were taking their toll on me and were causing
in me a serious incapacity to deal with
my fellow men.
I examined my problem and concluded that my flaw was my compulsion to
measure
everyone using don Juan as a yardstick.

Don Juan was, in my estimate, a being who lived his life professionally,
in every aspect of the
term, meaning that every one of his
acts, no matter how insignificant, counted. I was surrounded by people who
believed that they were immortal beings, who contradicted themselves every step
of the way; they were beings whose acts could never be accounted for.
It was an unfair game; the
cards were stacked against the people I
encountered. I was accustomed to don Juan's unalterable
behavior,
to his total lack of self-importance, and to the unfathomable scope of his
intellect; very
few of the people I knew were even aware that there
existed another pattern of behavior that
fostered those
qualities. Most of them knew only the behavioral pattern of self-reflection,
which
renders men weak and contorted.

Consequently, I was having a very difficult time in my academic studies.
I was losing sight of
them. I tried desperately to find a
rationale that would justify my academic endeavors. The only
thing
that came to my aid and gave me a connection, however flimsy, to academia was
the
recommendation
that don Juan had made to me once that
warrior-travelers
should have a
romance with knowledge, in whatever form knowledge
was presented.

He had defined the concept of
warrior-travelers,
saying that it
referred to sorcerers who, by
being warriors, traveled in the
dark
sea of awareness.
He had added that human beings were
travelers
of the
dark sea of awareness,
and that this Earth was but a station on
their journey; for extraneous reasons, which he didn't care to divulge at the
time, the travelers had interrupted their
voyage. He said
that human beings were caught in a sort of eddy, a current that went in
circles,
giving them the impression of moving while they were, in
essence, stationary. He maintained that
sorcerers were
the only opponents of whatever force kept human beings prisoners, and that by
means
of their discipline sorcerers broke loose from its grip and continued
their
journey of
awareness.

What precipitated the final chaotic upheaval in my academic life was my
incapacity to focus
my interest on topics of anthropological concern
that didn't mean a hoot to me, not because of
their lack of
appeal but because they were mostly matters where words and concepts had to be
manipulated,
as in a legal document, to obtain a given result that would establish
precedents. It
was argued that human knowledge is built in such a
fashion, and that the effort of every
individual was a building block
in constructing a system of knowledge. The example that was put
to
me was that of the legal system by which we live, and which is or invaluable
importance to us.
However, my romantic notions at the time impeded
me from conceiving of myself as a barrister-
at-anthropology.
I had bought, lock, stock, and barrel, the concept that anthropology should be
the
matrix of all human endeavor, or the measure of man.

Don Juan, a consummate pragmatist, a true
warrior-traveler
of
the unknown, said that I was
full of prunes. He said that it didn't
matter that the anthropological topics proposed to me were
maneuvers
of words and concepts, that what was important was the exercise of discipline.

"It doesn't make any difference," he said to me one time,
"how good a reader you are, and
how many wonderful books you
can read. What's important is that you have the discipline to read what you
don't want to read. The crux of the sorcerers' exercise of going to school is
in what you refuse, not in what you accept."

I decided to take some time off from my studies and went to work in the
art department of a
company that made decals. My job engaged my efforts
and thoughts to their fullest extent. My
challenge was
to carry out the tasks assigned to me as perfectly and as rapidly as I could.
To set
up the vinyl sheets with the images to be processed by
silk-screening into decals was a standard
procedure that
wouldn't admit of any innovation, and the efficiency of the worker was measured
by exactness and speed. I became a workaholic and enjoyed myself tremendously.