The Active Side of Infinity (27 page)

"
Infinity
is claiming you," he continued.
"Whatever means it uses to point that out to you
cannot have any
other reason, any other cause, any other value than that. What you should do,
however,
is to be prepared for the onslaughts of infinity. You must be in a state of
continuously
bracing yourself for a blow of tremendous magnitude. That
is the sane, sober way in which sorcerers face infinity."

Don Juan's words left me with a bad taste in my mouth. 1 actually
sensed the assault coming
on me, and feared it. Since 1 had spent
my entire life hiding behind some superfluous activity, 1 immersed myself in
work. 1 gave lectures in classes taught by my friends in different schools in
southern California. I wrote copiously. I could say without exaggeration that 1
threw dozens of
manuscripts into the garbage can because they
didn't fulfill an indispensable requirement that don
Juan had
described to me as the mark of something that is acceptable by infinity.

He had said that everything I did had to be an act of sorcery. An act
free from encroaching
expectations, fears of failure, hopes
of success. Free from the cult of me; everything I did had to be impromptu, a
work of magic where I freely opened myself to the impulses of the infinite.

One night, I was sitting at my desk preparing myself for my daily
activity of writing. 1 felt a
moment of grogginess. 1 thought that 1
was feeling dizzy because 1 had gotten up too quickly from my mat where 1 had been
doing my exercises. My vision blurred. 1 saw yellow spots in front of my eyes.
I thought I was going to faint. The fainting spell got worse. There was an
enormous red spot in front of me. I began to breathe deeply, trying to quiet
whatever agitation was causing this visual distortion. 1 became extraordinarily
silent, to the point where 1 noticed
that 1 was surrounded by
impenetrable darkness. The thought crossed my mind that 1 had fainted.
However,
I could feel the chair, my desk; I could feel everything around me from inside
the
darkness that surrounded me.

Don Juan had said that the sorcerers of his lineage considered that one
of the most coveted
results of
inner silence
was a specific
interplay of energy, which is always heralded by a strong
emotion.
He felt that my recollections were the means to agitate me to the extreme,
where I
would experience this interplay. Such an interplay
manifested itself in terms of hues that were
projected on
any horizon in the world of everyday life, be it a mountain, the sky, a wall,
or simply
the palms of the hands. He had explained that this
interplay of hues begins with the appearance of
a tenuous
brushstroke of lavender on the horizon. In time, this lavender brushstroke
starts to
expand until it covers the visible horizon, like
advancing storm clouds.

He assured me that a dot of a peculiar, rich, pomegranate red shows up,
as if bursting from the
lavender clouds. He stated that as
sorcerers become more disciplined and experienced, the dot of
pomegranate
expands and finally explodes into thoughts or visions, or in the case of a
literate
man, into written words; sorcerers either see visions
engendered by energy, hear thoughts being voiced as words, or read written
words.

That night at my desk, I didn't see any lavender brushstrokes, nor did
I see any advancing
clouds. I was sure that I didn't have the
discipline that sorcerers require for such an interplay of
energy,
but I had an enormous dot of pomegranate red in front of me. This enormous dot,
without
any preliminaries, exploded into disassociated words that
I read as if they were on a sheet of
paper coming out of a
typewriter. The words moved at such tremendous speed in front of me that
it
was impossible to read anything. Then I heard a voice describing something to
me. Again, the
speed of the voice was wrong for my ears. The
words were garbled, making it impossible to hear
anything that
would make sense.

As if that weren't enough, I began to see liverish scenes like one sees
in dreams after a heavy
meal. They were baroque, dark, ominous.
I began to twirl, and I did so until I got sick to my
stomach. The
whole event ended there. I felt the effect of whatever had happened to me in
every
muscle of my body. 1 was exhausted. This violent
intervention had made me angry and
frustrated.

I rushed to don Juan's house to tell him about this happening. I sensed
that I needed his help
more than ever.

"There's nothing gentle about sorcerers or sorcery," don Juan
commented after he heard my
story. "This was the first time
that
infinity
descended on you in such a fashion. It was like a blitz.
It
was a total takeover of your faculties. Insofar as the speed of your visions is
concerned, you
yourself will have to learn to adjust it. For some
sorcerers, that's the job of a lifetime. But from now on, energy will appear to
you as if it were being projected onto a movie screen.

"Whether or not you understand the projection," he went on,
"is another matter. In order to
make an accurate interpretation,
you need experience. My recommendation is that you shouldn't
be
bashful, and you should begin now. Read energy on the wall! Your true mind is
emerging, and
it has nothing to do with the mind that is a
foreign
installation.
Let your true mind adjust the
speed. Be
silent, and don't fret, no matter what happens."

"But, don Juan, is all this possible? Can one actually read energy
as if it were a text?" I asked,
overwhelmed by the idea.

"Of course it's possible!" he retorted. "In your case,
it's not only possible, it's happening to
you."

"But why reading it, as if it were a text?" I insisted, but it
was a rhetorical insistence.

"It's an affectation on your part," he said. "If you read
the text, you could repeat it verbatim.
However, if
you tried to be a
viewer of infinity
instead of a
reader of infinity,
you would find that
you could not describe whatever you
were viewing, and you would end up babbling inanities,
incapable of
verbalizing what you witness. The same thing if you tried to hear it. This is,
of
course, specific to you. Anyway,
infinity
chooses.
The
warrior-traveler
simply acquiesces to the
choice.

"But above all," he added after a calculated pause,
"don't be overwhelmed by the event
because you
cannot describe it. It is an event beyond the syntax of our language."

"We can speak a little more clearly now about
inner silence
"
don Juan said.

His statement was such a non sequitur that it startled me. He had been
talking to me all afternoon about the vicissitudes that the Yaqui Indians had
suffered after the big Yaqui wars of
the twenties, when they were
deported by the Mexican government from their native homeland in
the
state of Sonora, in northern Mexico, to work in sugarcane plantations in
central and southern
Mexico
. The Mexican
government had had problems with endemic wars with the Yaqui Indians
for
years. Don Juan told me some astounding, poignant Yaqui stories of political
intrigue and betrayal, deprivation and human misery.

I had the feeling that don Juan was setting me up for something,
because he knew that those
stories were my cup of tea, so to
speak. I had at that time an exaggerated sense of social justice and fair play.

"Circumstances around you have made it possible for you to have
more energy," he went on.
"You have started the
recapitulation
of your life; you have looked at your friends for the first time as if they
were in a display window; you arrived at your breaking point, all by yourself,
driven
by your own needs; you canceled your business; and above all, you have accrued
enough
inner silence.
All of these
made it possible for you to make a journey through the
dark sea of
awareness.

"Meeting me in that town of our choice was that journey," he
continued. "I know that a crucial
question
almost reached the surface in you, and that for an instant, you wondered if I
really came
to your house. My coming to see you wasn't a dream for
you. I was real, wasn't I?"

"You were as real as anything could be," I said.

I had nearly forgotten about those events, but I remembered that it did
seem strange to me that
he had found my apartment. I had
discarded my astonishment by the simple process of assuming
that
he had asked someone for my new address, although, if I had been pressed, I
wouldn't have
been able to come up with the identity of anyone who would
have known where I lived.

"Let us clarify this point," he continued. "In my terms,
which are the terms of the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico,
I was as real as 1 could have been, and as such, I actually went to your place
from my
inner
silence to tell you about the requisite of
infinity,
and
to warn you that you were
about to run out of time. And you, in
turn, from your
inner silence,
veritably went to that town of our choice
to tell me that you had succeeded in fulfilling the requisite of infinity.

"In your terms, which are the terms of the average man, it was a
dream-fantasy in both
instances. You had a dream-fantasy
that I came to your place without knowing the address, and
then
you had a dream-fantasy that you went to see me. As far as I'm concerned, as a sorcerer,
what you consider your dream-fantasy of meeting me in that town was as
real as the two of us
talking here today."

I confessed to don Juan that there was no possibility of my framing
those events in a pattern
of thought proper to Western man. I said
that to think of them in terms of dream-fantasy was to
create a false
category that couldn't stand up under scrutiny, and that the only
quasi-explanation that was vaguely possible was another aspect of his
knowledge:
dreaming.

"No, it is not
dreaming,"
he said emphatically.
"This is something more direct, and more mysterious. By the way, I have a
new definition of
dreaming
for you today, more in accordance
with
your state of being.
Dreaming
is the act of changing the point of
attachment with the
dark
sea of awareness.
If
you view it in this fashion, it's a very simple concept, and a very simple
maneuver. It takes all you have to realize it, but it's not an impossibility,
nor is it something surrounded with mystical clouds.

"Dreaming
is a term that
has always bugged the hell out of me," he continued, "because it weakens
a very powerful act. It makes it sound arbitrary; it gives it a sense of being
a fantasy, and
this is the only thing it is not. I tried to
change the term myself, but it's too ingrained. Maybe someday you could change
it yourself, although, as with everything else in sorcery, I am afraid that by
the time you could actually do it, you won't give a damn about it because it
won't make
any difference what it is called anymore."

Don Juan had explained at great length, during the entire time that I
had known him, that
dreaming
was an art,
discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, by means of which ordinary
dreams
were transformed into bona-fide entrances to other worlds
of perception.
He
advocated, in
any way he could, the advent of something he called
dreaming
attention,
which was the capacity
to pay a special kind of
attention, or to place a special kind of awareness on the elements of an
ordinary
dream.

I had followed meticulously all his recommendations and had succeeded
in commanding my
awareness to remain fixed on the elements of a
dream. The idea that don Juan proposed was not
to set out
deliberately to have a desired dream, but to fix one's attention on the
component
elements of whatever dream presented itself.

Then don Juan had showed me energetically what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico considered
to be
the origin of
dreaming:
the displacement of the
assemblage point.
He
said that the
assemblage point
was displaced very naturally during sleep, but
that to
see
the displacement was
a bit difficult because it required an aggressive mood, and that such an
aggressive mood had been the predilection of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico. Those sorcerers, according to don Juan, had found all the premises of their sorcery
by means of this mood.