The Active Side of Infinity (29 page)

The next instant, I found myself in a Mexican town built around a
railroad station, a town located about a mile and a half east of where don Juan
lived. Don Juan and 1 were in the middle of the street by the government bank.
Immediately afterward, I saw one of the strangest sights I
had
ever been witness to in don Juan's world. I was
seeing
energy
as it flows in the universe, but I
wasn't seeing human beings as
spherical or oblong blobs of energy. The people around me were,
in
one instant, the normal beings of everyday life, and in the next instant, they
were strange
creatures. It was as if the ball of energy that we are
were transparent; it was like a halo around an
insectlike
core. That core did not have a primate's shape. There were no skeletal pieces,
so I
wasn't
seeing
people as if I
had X-ray vision that went to the bone core. At the core of people
there
were, rather, geometric shapes made of what seemed to be hard vibrations of
matter. That
core was like letters of the alphabet-a capital T seemed
to be the main structural support. An
inverted thick L was suspended
in front of the T; the Greek letter for delta, which went almost to
the
floor, was at the bottom of the vertical bar of the T, and seemed to be a
support for the whole
structure. On top of the letter T, I
saw a ropelike strand, perhaps an inch in diameter; it went
through
the top of the luminous sphere, as if what I was
seeing
were
indeed a gigantic bead
hanging from the top like a drooping
gem.

Once, don Juan had presented to me a metaphor to describe the energetic
union of strands of
human beings. He had said that the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico described those strands as a
curtain made
from beads strung on a string. I had taken this description literally, and
thought that
the string went through the conglomerate of energy
fields that we are from head to toe. The
attaching
string I was seeing made the round shape of the energy fields of human beings
look
more like a pendant. I didn't
see,
however, any other creature being strung by the same
string. Every single creature that I
saw
was
a geometrically patterned being that had a sort of string on
the upper part of its
spherical halo. The string reminded me immensely of the segmented
wormlike shapes that some of us see with the
eyelids half closed when we are in sunlight.

Don Juan and I walked in the town from one end to the other, and I saw
literally scores of
geometrically patterned creatures. My ability to
see
them
was unstable in the extreme. I would
see
them
for an instant, and then I would lose sight of them and I would be faced with
average
people. Soon, I became exhausted, and I could see only
normal people. Don Juan said that it was
time to go
back home, and again, something in me lost my usual sense of continuity. 1
found
myself
in don Juan's house without having the slightest notion as to how I had covered
the
distance from the town to the house. I
lay down in my bed and tried desperately to recollect, to
call back my memory, to probe the depths of my
very being for a clue as to how I had gone to the Yaqui town, and to the
railroad-station town. 1 didn't believe that they had been dream-fantasies,
because the scenes were too detailed to be
anything but real, and yet they couldn't possibly have
been real.

"You're wasting your time," don Juan said, laughing. "1
guarantee you that you will never
know how we got from the house
to the Yaqui town, and from the Yaqui town to the railroad
station,
and from the railroad station to the house. There was a break in the continuity
of time.
That is what inner
silence
does."

He patiently explained to me that the interruption of that flow of
continuity that makes the
world understandable to us is sorcery.
He remarked that I had journeyed that day through the
dark
sea of awareness,
and that I had
seen
people as they are, engaged in people's business. And then
I had
seen
the strand of energy that joins specific lines of human
beings.

Don Juan reiterated to me over and over that I had witnessed something
specific and inexplicable. I had understood what people were saying, without
knowing their language, and I had
seen
the strand of energy that
connected human beings to certain other beings, and I had
selected
those aspects through an act of intending it. He stressed the fact that this
intending I had done was not something conscious or volitional; the intending
had been done at a deep level, and
had been ruled by necessity. I
needed to become cognizant of some of the possibilities of
journeying
through the
dark sea of awareness,
and my
inner silence
had
guided intent-a perennial
force in the universe-to fulfill that
need.

At a given moment in my apprenticeship, don Juan revealed to me the
complexity of his life
situation. He had maintained, to my
chagrin and despondency, that he lived in the shack in the
state
of Sonora, Mexico, because that shack depicted my state of awareness. I didn't
quite believe
that he really meant that I was so meager, nor did I
believe that he had other places to live, as he
was claiming.

It turned out that he was right on both counts. My state of awareness
was very meager, and he did have other places where he could live, infinitely
more comfortable than the shack where I had
first found
him. Nor was he the solitary sorcerer that I had thought him to be, but the
leader of a
group of fifteen other
warrior-travelers:
ten
women and five men. My surprise was gigantic
when he took me
to his house in central Mexico, where he and his companion sorcerers lived.

"Did you live in Sonora just because of me, don Juan?" I asked
him, unable to stand the
responsibility, which filled me with
guilt and remorse and a sensation of worthlessness. ' "Well, 1
didn't
actually live there," he said, laughing
.
"I
just met you there."

"But-but-but you never knew when I was coming to see you, don
Juan," I said. "I had no
means to let you know!"

"Well, if you remember correctly," he said, "there were
many, many times when you didn't
find me. You had to sit patiently and
wait for me, for days sometimes."

"Did you fly from here to Guaymas, don Juan?" 1 asked him in
earnest. I thought that the
shortest way would have been to take
a plane.

"No, 1 didn't fly to Guaymas," he said with a big smile.
"I flew directly, to the shack where
you were
waiting."

I knew that
he was purposefully telling me something that my linear mind could not
understand or accept, something that was
confusing me no end. I was at the level of awareness, in
those days, when 1 asked myself incessantly a
fatal question: What if all that don Juan says is
true?

I didn't want to ask him any more questions, because 1 was hopelessly
lost, trying to bridge
our two tracks of thought and action.

In his new surroundings, don Juan began painstakingly to instruct me in
a more complex facet
of his knowledge, a facet that required
all my attention, a facet in which merely suspending
judgment was
not enough. This was the time when 1 had to plummet down into the depths of his
knowledge. I had to cease to be objective, and at the same time 1 had
to desist from being
subjective.

One day, 1 was helping don Juan clean some bamboo poles in the back of
his house. He asked
me to put on some working gloves, because, he said,
the splinters of bamboo were very sharp and
easily caused
infections. He directed me on how to use a knife to clean the bamboo. 1 became
immersed
in the work. When don Juan began to talk to me, 1 had to stop working in order
to pay
attention. He told me that 1 had worked long enough, and
that we should go into the house.

He asked me to sit down in a very comfortable armchair in his spacious,
almost empty living
room. He gave me some nuts, dried apricots, and
slices of cheese, neatly arranged on a plate. I
protested that
I wanted to finish cleaning the bamboo. I didn't want to eat. But he didn't pay
attention to me. He recommended that 1 nibble slowly and carefully, for
1 would need a steady
supply of food in order to be alert and
attentive to what he was going to
tell me.

"You already know," he began, "that there exists in the
universe a perennial force, which the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the dark
sea of awareness.
While they were at the maximum
of
their perceiving power, they saw something that made them shake in their
pantaloonies, if they
were wearing any. They
saw
that the
dark sea of awareness
is
responsible not only for the
awareness of organisms, but also for
the awareness of entities that don't have an organism."

"What is this, don Juan, beings without an organism that have
awareness?" I asked,
astonished, for he had never mentioned
such an idea before.

"The old shamans discovered that the entire universe is com' posed
of twin forces," he began,
"forces that are at the same time
opposed and complementary to each other. It is inescapable that
our
world is a twin world. Its opposite and complementary world is one populated by
beings that
have awareness, but not an organism. For this reason, the
old shamans called them inorganic
beings."

"And where is this world, don Juan?" I asked, munching
unconsciously on a piece of dried
apricot.

"Here, where you and I are sitting," he replied
matter-of-factly, but laughing outright at my
nervousness.
"I told you that it's our twin world, so it's intimately related to us.
The sorcerers of
ancient Mexico didn't think like you do in terms
of space and time. They thought exclusively in
terms of
awareness. Two types of awareness coexist without ever impinging on each other,

because each type is entirely different from the other. The old shamans
faced this problem of
coexistence without concerning
themselves
with time and space. They reasoned that the degree of awareness of organic
beings
and the degree of awareness of
inorganic
beings were so different that both could coexist
with
the most minimal interference."

"Can we perceive those inorganic
beings,
don
Juan?" I asked. "We certainly can," he replied.
"Sorcerers
do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize that they're doing
it because
they are not conscious of the existence of a twin world.
When they think of a twin world, they
enter into all kinds of mental
masturbation, but it has never occurred to them that their fantasies
have
their origin in a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not
alone."

1 was riveted by don Juan's words. Suddenly, I had become voraciously
hungry. There was an
emptiness in the pit of my stomach. All
I could do was to listen as carefully as I could, and eat.

"The difficulty with your facing things in terms of time and
space," he continued, "is that you
only notice if
something has landed in the space and time at your disposal, which is very
limited.
Sorcerers, on the other hand, have a vast field on which
they can notice if something extraneous
has landed.
Lots of entities from the universe at large, entities that possess awareness
but not an organism, land in the field of awareness of our world, or the field
of awareness of its twin world,
without an average human being ever
noticing them. The entities that land on our field of
awareness, or
the field of awareness of our twin world, belong to other worlds that exist
besides
our world and its twin. The universe at large is crammed
to the brim with worlds of awareness,
organic and inorganic."