The Active Side of Infinity (22 page)

"What are you going to do with the plants you are going to collect,
don Juan?" I asked him as
soon as we had started off.

"They are not for me," he said with a grin. "They are for
a friend of mine, a botanist and
pharmacist. He makes potions with
them."

"Is he a Yaqui, don Juan? Does he live here in Sonora?" I
asked.

"No, he isn't a Yaqui, and he doesn't live here in Sonora. You'll meet him someday." "Is he a sorcerer, don Juan?"

"Yes, he is," he replied dryly.

I asked him then if I could take some of the plants to be identified at
the Botanical Garden at
UCLA.

"Surely, surely!" he said.

I had found out in the past that whenever he said "surely,"
he didn't mean it. It was obvious
that he had no intention
whatsoever of giving me any specimens for identification. I became very curious
about his sorcerer friend, and asked him to tell me more about him, perhaps
describe him,
telling me where he lived and how he got to meet him.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!" don Juan said, as if I were a horse.
"Hold it, hold it! Who are
you? Professor Lorca? Do you want to
study his cognitive system?"

We went deep into the arid foothills. Don Juan walked steadily for
hours. I thought that the task of the day was going to be just to walk. He
finally stopped and sat down on the shaded side of the foothills.

"It is time that you start on one of the biggest projects of
sorcery," don Juan said.

"What is this project of sorcery that you're talking about, don
Juan?" I inquired.

"It's called the
recapitulation,"
he said. "The
old sorcerers used to call it
recounting the events
of
your life,
and for them, it started as a simple technique, a
device to aid them in remembering
what they were doing and saying
to their disciples. For their disciples, the technique had the same value: It
allowed them to remember what their teachers had said and done to them. It took
terrible
social upheavals, like being conquered and vanquished
several times, before the old sorcerers
realized that
their technique had far-reaching effects."

"Are you referring, don Juan, to the Spanish conquest?" I
asked.

"No," he said. "That was just the icing on the cake.
There were other upheavals before that, more devastating. When the Spaniards
got here, the old sorcerers didn't exist any longer. The
disciples
of those who had survived other upheavals were very cagey by then. They knew
how to
take care of themselves. It is that new crop of sorcerers
who renamed the old sorcerers' technique
recapitulation.

"There's an enormous premium on time," he continued. "For
sorcerers in general, time is of
the essence. The challenge I am faced
with is that in a very compact unit of time I must cram into
you
everything there is to know about sorcery as an abstract proposition, but in
order to do that I have to build the necessary space in you."

"What space? What are you talking about, don Juan?"

"The premise of sorcerers is that in order to bring something in,
there must be a space to put it
in," he said. "If you are
filled to the brim with the items of everyday life, there's no space for
anything
new. That space must be built. Do you see what I mean? The sorcerers of olden
times
believed that the
recapitulation
of your life made
that space. It does, and much more, of course.

"The way sorcerers perform the
recapitulation
is very
formal," he went on. "It consists of
writing a list
of all the people they have met, from the present to the very beginning of
their lives.
Once they have that list, they take the first person on
it and recollect everything they can about
that person.
And I mean everything, every detail. It's better to recapitulate from the
present to the past, because the memories of the present are fresh, and in this
manner, the recollection ability is
honed. What practitioners do is
to recollect and breathe. They inhale slowly and deliberately,
fanning
the head from right to left, in a barely noticeable swing, and exhale in the
same fashion."

He said that the inhalations and exhalations should be natural; if they
were too rapid, one
would enter into something that he called tiring
breaths:
breaths that required slower breathing
afterward in
order to calm down the muscles.

"And what do you want me to do, don Juan, with all this?" I
asked.

"You begin making your list today," he said. "Divide it
by years, by occupations, arrange it in
any order you
want to, but make it sequential, with the most recent person first, and end
with
Mommy and Daddy. And then, remember everything about
them. No more ado than that. As you
practice, you will realize what
you're doing."

On my next visit to his house, I told don Juan that I had been
meticulously going through the
events of my life, and that it was very
difficult for me to adhere to his strict format and follow my
list
of persons one by one. Ordinarily, my
recapitulation
took me every which
way. I let the
events decide the direction of my recollection.
What I did, which was volitional, was to adhere to a general unit of time. For
instance, I had begun with the people in the anthropology department,
but I let my recollection
pull me to anywhere in time, from the present to the day I started
attending school at UCLA.

I told don Juan that an odd thing I'd found out, which I had completely
forgotten, was that I
had no idea that UCLA existed until one
night when my girlfriend's roommate from college came
to Los Angeles
and we picked her up at the airport. She was going to study musicology at UCLA.
Her plane arrived in the early evening, and she asked me if I could take
her to the campus so she
could take a look at the place where
she was going to spend the next four years of her life. I knew
where
the campus was, for I had driven past its entrance on Sunset Boulevard endless
times on
my way to the beach. I had never been on the campus,
though.

It was during the semester break. The few people that we found directed
us to the music
department. The campus was deserted, but what I
witnessed subjectively was the most exquisite thing I have ever seen. It was a
delight to my eyes. The buildings seemed to be alive with some
energy
of their own. What was going to be a very cursory visit to the music department
turned out
to be a gigantic tour of the entire campus. I fell in
love with UCLA. I mentioned to don Juan that
the only thing
that marred my ecstasy was my girlfriend's annoyance at my insistence on
walking
through the huge campus.

"What the hell could there be in here?" she yelled at me in
protest. "It's as if you have never
seen a
university campus in your life! You've seen one, you've seen them all. I think
you're just trying to impress my friend with your sensitivity!"

I wasn't, and I vehemently told them that I was genuinely impressed by
the beauty of my
surroundings. I sensed so much hope in those
buildings, so much promise, and yet I couldn't
express my
subjective state.

"I have been in school nearly all my life," my girlfriend said
through clenched teeth, "and I'm
sick and tired of it! Nobody's
going to find shit in here! All you find is guff, and they don't even
prepare
you to meet your responsibilities in life."

When I mentioned that I would like to attend school here, she became
even more furious.

"Get a job!" she screamed. "Go and meet life from eight
to five, and cut the crap! That's what
life is: a job
from eight to five, forty hours a week! See what it does to you! Look at me-I'm
super-educated now, and I'm not fit for a job."

All I knew was that I had never seen a place so beautiful. I made a
promise then that I would go to school at UCLA, no matter what, come hell or
high water. My desire had everything to do
with me, and
yet it was not driven by the need for immediate gratification. It was more in
the
realm of awe.

I told don Juan that my girlfriend's annoyance had been so jarring to me
that it forced me to
look at her in a different light, and
that to my recollection, that was the first time ever that a
commentary
had aroused such a deep reaction in me. I saw facets of character in my
girlfriend that I hadn't seen before, facets that scared me stiff.

"I think I judged her terribly," I said to don Juan. "After
our visit to the campus, we drifted
apart. It was as if UCLA had
come between us like a wedge. I know that it's stupid to think this
way."

"It isn't stupid," don Juan said. "It was a perfectly
valid reaction. While you were walking on
the campus, I
am sure that you had a bout with
intent.
You
intended
being
there, and anything
that was opposed to it you had to let go.

"But don't overdo it," he went on. "The touch of
warrior-travelers
is very light, although it is
cultivated. The hand of a
warrior-traveler
begins as a heavy, gripping, iron hand but becomes
like the hand
of a ghost, a hand made of gossamer.
Warrior-travelers
leave no marks,
no tracks.
That's the challenge for
warrior-travelers.'"

Don Juan's comments made me sink into a deep, morose state of
recriminations against
myself, for I knew, from the little
bit of my recounting, that I was extremely heavy-handed,
obsessive,
and domineering. I told don Juan about my ruminations.

"The power of the
recapitulation,"
don Juan said,
"is that it stirs up all the garbage of our lives and brings it to the
surface."

Then don Juan delineated the intricacies of awareness and perception,
which were the basis of
the
recapitulation.
He began by
saying that he was going to present an arrangement of concepts
that
I should not take as sorcerers' theories under any conditions, because it was
an arrangement
formulated by the shamans of ancient Mexico as a
result of
seeing
energy directly as it flows in
the universe.
He warned me that he would present the units of this arrangement to me without
any
attempt at classifying them or ranking them by any
predetermined standard.

"I'm not interested in classifications," he went on.
"You have been classifying everything all
your life. Now
you are going to be forced to stay away from classifications. The other day,
when
I asked you if you knew anything about clouds, you gave
me the names of all the clouds and the
percentage of
moisture that one should expect from each one of them. You were a veritable
weatherman.
But when I asked you if you knew what you could do with the clouds personally,
you
had no idea what I was talking about.

"Classifications have a world of their own," he continued.
"After you begin to classify
anything, the classification
becomes alive, and it rules you. But since classifications never started as
energy-giving affairs, they always remain like dead logs. They are not trees;
they are merely
logs."

He explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw; that the universe
at large is composed
of energy fields in the form of
luminous filaments. They
saw
zillions of them, wherever they
turned
to
see.
They also
saw
that those energy fields arrange themselves
into currents of luminous
fibers, streams that are constant,
perennial forces in the universe, and that the current or stream of
filaments
that is related to the
recapitulation
was named by those sorcerers the
dark
sea of
awareness,
and also the Eagle.

He stated that those sorcerers also found out that every creature in the
universe is attached to
the
dark sea of awareness
at a
round point of luminosity that was apparent when those creatures
were
perceived as energy. On that point of luminosity, which the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico
called the
assemblage point,
don Juan said
that perception was assembled by a mysterious aspect of the
dark sea of
awareness.

Don Juan asserted that on the
assemblage point
of human beings,
zillions of energy fields
from the universe at large, in the form
of luminous filaments, converge and go through it. These
energy
fields are converted into sensory data, and the sensory data is then
interpreted and
perceived as the world we know. Don Juan further
explained that what turns the luminous fibers
into sensory
data is the
dark sea of awareness.
Sorcerers
see
this
transformation and call it the
glow of awareness,
a
sheen that extends like a halo around the
assemblage point.
He warned me
then that he was going to make a statement which, in the understanding
of sorcerers, was central to comprehending the scope of the
recapitulation.