The Active Side of Infinity (33 page)

"All I have are miserable complaints," I said. "I am
exactly like all the people I know. There's
no way to talk
to a single one of them without hearing an overt or a covert complaint."

I related to don Juan how in even the simplest dialogues my friends
managed to sneak in an
endless number of complaints, such as
in a dialogue like this one:

"How is everything, Jim?"

"Oh, fine, fine, Cal." A huge silence would follow.

I would be obliged to say, "Is there something wrong, Jim?"

"No! Everything's great. I have a bit of a problem with Mel, but
you know how Mel is-selfish and shitty. But you have to take your friends as
they come, true? He could, of course, have a little
more
consideration. But what the fuck. He's himself. He always puts the burden on
you-take me
or leave me. He's been doing that since we were twelve,
so it's really my fault. Why in the fuck do
I have to take
him?"

"Well, you're right, Jim, you know Mel is very hard, yes.
Yeah!"

"Well, speaking of shitty people, you're no better than Mel, Cal. I can never count on you,"
etc. Another classic dialogue was:

"How are you doing, Alex? How's your married life?"

"Oh, just great. For the first time, I'm eating on time,
home-cooked meals, but I'm getting fat.
There's
nothing for me to do except watch TV. I used to go out with you guys, but now I
can't.
Theresa doesn't let me. Of course, I could tell her to go
and fuck herself, but I don't want to hurt her. I feel content, but
miserable."

And Alex had been the most miserable guy before he got married. He was
the one whose
classic joke was to tell his friends, every time we ran
into him, "Hey, come to my car, I want to
introduce you
to my bitch."

He enjoyed himself pink with our crushed expectations when we would see
that what he had
in his car was a female dog. He introduced his
"bitch" to all his friends. We were shocked when
he
actually married Theresa, a long-distance runner. They met at a marathon when
Alex fainted.
They were in the mountains, and Theresa had to revive
him by any means, so she pissed on his
face. After
that, Alex was her prisoner. She had marked her territory. His friends used to
say,
"Her pissy prisoner." His friends thought she
was the true bitch who had turned weird Alex into a
fat dog.

Don Juan and I laughed for a while. Then he looked at me with a serious
expression.

"These are the ups and downs of daily living," don Juan said.
"You win, and you lose, and you
don't know when you win or when
you lose. This is the price one pays for living under the rule of
self-reflection.
There is nothing that I can say to you, and there's nothing that you can say to
yourself. I could only recommend that you not feel guilty because you're
an asshole, but that you strive to end the dominion of self-reflection. Go back
to school. Don't give up yet."

My interest in remaining in academia was waning considerably. I began
to live on automatic
pilot. I felt heavy, despondent.
However, I noticed that my mind was not involved. I didn't
calculate any thing, or
set up any goals or expectations of any sort. My thoughts were not
obsessive, but my feelings were. I tried to
conceptualize this dichotomy between a quiet mind and
turbulent feelings. It was in this frame of
mindlessness and overwhelmed feelings that I walked
one day from Haines Hall, where the anthropology
department was, to the cafeteria to eat my
lunch.

I was suddenly accosted by a strange tremor. I thought I was going to
faint, and I sat down on
some brick steps. I saw yellow spots
in front of my eyes. I had the sensation that I was spinning. I
was
sure that I was going to get sick to my stomach. My vision became blurry, and
finally I
couldn't see a thing. My physical discomfort was so
total and intense that it didn't leave room for
a single
thought. I had only bodily sensations of fear and anxiety mixed with elation,
and a
strange anticipation that I was at the threshold of a
gigantic event. They were sensations without
the
counterpart of thought. At a given moment, I no longer knew whether I was
sitting or
standing. I was surrounded by the most impenetrable
darkness one can imagine, and then, I
saw
energy
as it flowed in the universe.

I
saw
a succession of luminous spheres
walking toward me or away from me. I
saw
them
one
at a time, as don Juan had always told me one
sees
them. I knew they were different individuals
because
of their differences in size. I examined the details of their structures. Their
luminosity
and their roundness were made of fibers that seemed to be
stuck together. They were thin or thick fibers. Every one of those luminous
figures had a thick, shaggy covering. They looked like some
strange,
luminous, furry animals, or gigantic round insects covered with luminous hair.

What was the most shocking thing to me was the realization that I had
seen
those furry insects
all my life.
Every occasion on which don Juan had made me deliberately
see
them seemed to me
at that moment
to be like a detour that I had taken with him. I remembered every instance of
his help in making me
see
people as
luminous spheres, and all of those instances were set apart from
the
bulk of
seeing
to which I was having access now. I
knew then, as beyond the shadow of a
doubt, that I had perceived
energy as it flows in the universe all my life, on my own, without anybody's
help. Such a realization was overwhelming to me. I felt infinitely, vulnerable,
frail. I
needed to seek cover, to hide somewhere It was exactly
like the dream that most of us seem to have at one time or another in which we
find ourselves naked and don't know what to do. I felt
more than
naked; I felt unprotected, weak, and I dreaded returning to my normal state. In
a vague
way, I sensed that I was lying down. I braced myself for
my return to normality. I conceived of
the idea that I was going to find
myself lying on the brick walk, twitching convulsively,
surrounded by a whole circle of spectators.

The sensation that I was lying down became more and more accentuated. I
felt that I could
move my eyes. I could see light through my closed
eyelids, but 1 dreaded opening them. The odd part was that I didn't hear any of
those people that I imagined were around me. I heard no noise at
all.
At last, I ventured opening my eyes. I was on my bed, in my office apartment by
the corner of
Wilshire and Westwood boulevards.

I became quite hysterical upon finding myself in my bed. But for some
reason that was
beyond my grasp, I calmed down almost immediately.
My hysteria was replaced by a bodily
indifference, or by a state of
bodily satisfaction, something like what one feels after a good meal.
However,
I could not quiet my mind. It had been the most shocking thing imaginable for
me to
realize that I had perceived energy directly all my life.
How in the world could it have been
possible that I hadn't known?
What had been preventing me from gaining access to that facet of
my
being? Don Juan had said that every human being has the potential to
see
energy
directly.
What he hadn't said was that every human being already
sees
energy directly but doesn't know it.

I put that question to a psychiatrist friend. He couldn't shed any
light on my quandary. He
thought that my reaction was the result
fatigue and overstimulation. He gave me a prescription for Valium and told me
to rest.

hadn't dared mention to anyone that I had woken up in my bed without
being able to account
for how 1 had gotten there. Therefore,
my haste to see don Juan was more than justified. I flew to
Mexico
City
as soon as I could, rented a car, and drove to where he
lived.

"You've done all this before!" don Juan said, laughing, when
I narrated my mind-boggling
experience to him. "There are only
two things that are new. One is that now you have perceived energy all by
yourself. What you did was to stop the world, and then you realized that you
have
always seen energy as it flows in the universe, as every
human being does, but without knowing it
deliberately.
The other new thing is that you have traveled from your
inner
silence
all by
yourself.

"You know, without my having to tell you, that anything is
possible if one departs from
inner
silence. This time
your fear and vulnerability made it possible for you to end up in your bed,
which
is not really that far from the UCLA campus. If you would not indulge in your
surprise,
you would realize that what you did is nothing, nothing
extraordinary for a warrior-traveler.

"But the issue which is of the utmost importance isn't knowing that
you have always
perceived energy directly, or your journeying from
inner silence, but, rather, a twofold affair.
First, you
experienced something which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the clear
view,
or
losing the human form: the time when
human pettiness vanishes, as if it had been a patch of fog looming over us, a
fog that slowly clears up and dissipates. But under no circumstances must you
believe
that this is an accomplished fact. The sorcerers' world is not an immutable
world like the
world of everyday life, where they tell you that
once you reach a goal, you remain a winner
forever. In the
sorcerers' world, to arrive at a certain goal means that you have simply acquired
the most efficient tools to continue your fight, which, by the way, will never
end. "The second
part of this twofold matter is that
you experienced
the most maddening question for the hearts of
human beings. You expressed it yourself when you asked yourself the questions:
'How in the world could it have been possible that I didn't know
that
I had perceived energy directly all my life? What had been preventing me from
gaining
access to that facet of my being?'"

To sit in silence with don Juan was one of the most enjoyable
experiences I knew. We were
comfortably sitting on some stuffed
chairs in the back of his house in the mountains of central
Mexico
. It
was late afternoon. There was a pleasant breeze. The sun was behind the house,
at our
backs. Its fading light created exquisite shades of green
in the big trees in the backyard. There
were big trees
growing around his house, and beyond it, which obliterated the sight of the
city
where he lived. This always gave me the impression that I
was in the wilderness, a different wilderness than the barren Sonoran desert,
but wilderness nonetheless.

"Today, we're going to discuss a most serious topic in
sorcery," don Juan said abruptly, "and
we're going to
begin by talking about the
energy body."

He had described the
energy body
to me countless times, saying
that it was a conglomerate of
energy fields, the mirror image of the
conglomerate of energy fields that makes up the physical
body
when it is
seen
as energy that flows in the universe. He had said that
it was smaller, more
compact, and of heavier appearance than
the luminous sphere of the physical body.

Don Juan had explained that the body and the
energy body
were two
conglomerates of energy
fields compressed together by some
strange agglutinizing force. He had emphasized no end that
the
force that binds that group of energy fields together was, according to the
sorcerers of ancient
Mexico
, the most
mysterious force in the universe. His personal estimation was that it was the
pure
essence of the entire cosmos, the sum total of everything there is.

He had asserted that the physical body and the
energy body
were
the only counterbalanced
energy configurations in our realm as
human beings. He accepted, therefore, no other dualism
than the one
between these two. The dualism between body and mind, spirit and flesh, he
considered
to be a mere concatenation of the mind, emanating from it without any energetic
foundation. Don Juan had said that by means of discipline it is possible for
anyone to bring the
energy body
closer
to the physical body. Normally, the distance between the two is enormous.
Once
the
energy body
is within a certain range, which varies for each of us
individually, anyone,
through discipline, can forge it into
the exact replica of their physical body-that is to say, a three-
dimensional,
solid being. Hence the sorcerers' idea of the
other
or the
double.
By
the same token,
through the same processes of discipline, anyone
can forge their three-dimensional, solid physical
body to be a
perfect replica of their
energy body-
that is to say, an ethereal charge
of energy
invisible to the human eye, as all energy is.