The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 2 - Chapter 07. The Deep Concerns of Everyday Life.

I went to Sonora to see don Juan. I had to discuss with him the most serious event of that moment in my life. I needed his advice.

When I arrived at his house, I barely went through the formality of greeting him. I sat down and blurted out my turmoil.

"Calm down, calm down," don Juan said. "Nothing can be that bad!"

"What is happening to me, don Juan?" I asked. It was a rhetorical question on my part.

"It is the workings of infinity," he replied. "Something happened to your way of perceiving the day you met me. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal realization that your time is up.

"You are aware of it, but not deliberately conscious of it. You feel the absence of time, and that makes you impatient.

"I know this, for it happened to me and to all the sorcerers of my lineage. At a given time, a whole era in my life or their lives ended. Now it is your turn. You have simply run out of time."

He demanded then a total account of whatever had happened to me. He said that it had to be a full account, sparing no details. He was not after sketchy descriptions. He wanted me to air the full impact of what was troubling me.

"Let us have this talk, as they say in your world, by the book," he said. "Let us enter into the realm of formal talks."

Don Juan explained that the shamans of ancient Mexico had developed the idea of formal versus informal talks, and used both of them as devices for teaching and guiding their disciples. Formal talks were, for them, summations that they made from time to time of everything that they had taught or said to their disciples. Informal talks were daily elucidations in which things were explained without reference to anything but the phenomenon itself under scrutiny.

"Sorcerers keep nothing to themselves," he continued. "To empty themselves in this fashion is a sorcerers' maneuver. It leads them to abandon the fortress of the self."

I began my story, telling don Juan that the circumstances of my life had never permitted me to be introspective. As far back in my past as I could remember, my daily life had been filled to the brim with pragmatic problems that had clamored for immediate resolution.

I remembered that my favorite uncle had told me that he was appalled at having found out that I had never received a gift for Christmas or for my birthday. I had come to live in my father's family's home not too long before my uncle made that statement. He commiserated with me about the unfairness of my situation. He even apologized, although it had nothing to do with him.

"It is disgusting, my boy," he said, shaking with feeling. "I want you to know that I am behind you one hundred percent whenever the moment comes to redress wrongdoings."

He insisted over and over that I had to forgive the people who had wronged me. From what he said, I formed the impression that he wanted me to confront my father with his finding and accuse him of indolence and neglect, and then, of course, forgive him.

My uncle failed to see that I did not feel wronged at all. What he was asking me to do required an introspective nature that would make me respond to the barbs of psychological mistreatment once they were pointed out to me. I assured my uncle that I was going to think about it, but not at the moment; because, at that very instant my girlfriend was signaling me desperately to 'hurry up' from the living room where she was waiting for me.

I never had the opportunity to think about it, but my uncle must have talked to my father because I got a gift from him; a package neatly wrapped up with ribbon and all, and a little card that said "Sorry." I curiously and eagerly ripped the wrappings.

There was a cardboard box, and inside it there was a beautiful toy; a tiny boat with a winding key attached to the steam pipe. It could be used by children to play with while they took baths in the bathtub. My father had thoroughly forgotten that I was already fifteen years old, and was for all practical purposes a man.

Then, as I reached my adult years, I was still incapable of serious introspection. So it was quite a novelty when one day, years later, I found myself in the throes of a strange emotional agitation which seemed to increase as time went by. I discarded it, attributing it to natural processes of the mind or the body; processes that enter into action periodically for no reason at all, or are perhaps triggered by biochemical processes within the body itself. I thought nothing of it.

However, the agitation increased and its pressure forced me to believe that I had arrived at a moment in life when what I needed was a drastic change. There was something in me that demanded a rearrangement of my life. This urge to rearrange everything was familiar. I had felt it in the past, but it had been dormant for a long time.

I was committed to studying anthropology, and this commitment was so strong that not to study anthropology was never part of my proposed drastic change. It did not occur to me to drop out of school and do something else. The first thing that came to mind was that I needed to change schools, and go somewhere else far away from Los Angeles.

Before I undertook a change of that magnitude, I wanted to test the waters, so to speak. I enrolled in a full summer load of classes at a school in another city. The most important course, for me, was a class in anthropology taught by a foremost authority on the Indians of the Andean region. It was my belief that if I focused my studies on an area that was emotionally accessible to me, I would have a better opportunity to do anthropological field-work in a serious manner when the time came. I considered my knowledge of South America as giving me a better entree into any given Indian society there.

At the same time that I registered for school, I got a job as a research assistant to a psychiatrist who was the older brother of one of my friends. He wanted to do a content analysis of excerpts from some innocuous tapes of 'question and answer' sessions with young men and women about their problems arising from overwork in school, unfulfilled expectations, not being understood at home, frustrating love affairs, etc. The tapes were over five years old and were going to be destroyed, but before they were, random numbers were allotted to each reel, and following a table of random numbers, reels were picked by the psychiatrist and his research assistants, and were scanned for excerpts that could be analyzed.

On the first day of class in the new school, the anthropology professor talked about his academic bona fides and dazzled his students with the scope of his knowledge and his publications. He was a tall, slender man in his mid-forties, with shifty blue eyes. What struck me the most about his physical appearance was that his eyes were rendered enormous behind glasses for correcting far-sightedness, and each of his eyes gave the impression that it was rotating in an opposite direction from the other when he moved his head as he spoke. I knew that that could not be true. It was, however, a very disconcerting image. He was extremely well dressed for an anthropologist, who in my day were famous for their super-casual attire. Archaeologists, for example, were described by their students as creatures lost in carbon-14 dating who never took a bath.

However, for reasons unbeknownst to me, what really set him apart was not his physical appearance, or his erudition, but his speech pattern. He pronounced every word as clearly as anyone I had ever heard, and emphasized certain words by elongating them. He had a markedly foreign intonation, but I knew that it was an affectation. He pronounced certain phrases like an Englishman and others like a revivalist preacher.

He fascinated me from the start despite his enormous pomposity. His self-importance was so blatant that it ceased to be an issue after the first five minutes of his class; classes which were always bombastic displays of knowledge cushioned in wild assertions about himself. His command of the audience was sensational. None of the students I talked to felt anything but supreme admiration for this extraordinary man. I earnestly thought that everything was moving along nicely, and that this move to another school in another city was going to be easy and uneventful, but thoroughly positive. I liked my new surroundings.

At my job, I became completely engrossed in listening to the tapes to the point where I would sneak into the office, and listen not to excerpts, but to entire tapes. What fascinated me beyond measure, at first, was the fact that I heard myself speaking in every one of those tapes.

As the weeks went by and I heard more tapes, my fascination turned to sheer horror. Every line that was spoken, including the psychiatrist's questions, was mine. Those people were speaking from the depths of my own being.

The revulsion that I experienced was something unique for me. Never had I dreamed that I could be repeated endlessly in every man or woman I heard speaking on the tapes. My sense of individuality, which had been ingrained in me from birth, tumbled down hopelessly under the impact of this colossal discovery.

I began then an odious process of trying to restore myself. I unconsciously made a ludicrous attempt at introspection. I tried to wriggle out of my predicament by endlessly talking to myself. I rehashed in my mind all the possible rationales that would support my sense of uniqueness, and then I talked out loud to myself about them. I even experienced something quite revolutionary to me; waking myself up many times by my loud talking in my sleep, discoursing about my value and distinctiveness.

Then, one horrifying day, I suffered another deadly blow. In the wee hours of the night, I was woken up by an insistent knocking on my door. It was not a mild, timid knock, but what my friends called a 'Gestapo knock'. The door was about to come off its hinges. I jumped out of bed and opened the peephole. The person who was knocking on the door was my boss, the psychiatrist. My being his younger brother's friend seemed to have created an avenue of communication with him. He had befriended me without any hesitation, and there he was on my doorstep. I turned on the light and opened the door.

"Please come in," I said. "What happened?"

It was three o'clock in the morning, and by his livid expression, and his sunken eyes, I knew that he was deeply upset. He came in and sat down. His pride and joy, his black mane of longish hair, was falling all over his face. He did not make any effort to comb his hair back, the way he usually wore it. I liked him very much because he was an older version of my friend in Los Angeles, with black, heavy eyebrows, penetrating brown eyes, a square jaw, and thick lips. His upper lip seemed to have an extra fold inside, which at times, when he smiled in a certain way, gave the impression that he had a double upper lip. He always talked about the shape of his nose, which he described as an impertinent, pushy nose. I thought he was extremely sure of himself, and opinionated beyond belief. He claimed that in his profession those qualities were winning cards.

"What happened!" he repeated with a tone of mockery, his double upper lip trembling uncontrollably. "Anyone can tell that everything has happened to me tonight."

He sat down in a chair. He seemed dizzy, disoriented, looking for words. He got up and went to the couch, slumping down on it.

"It is not only that I have the responsibility of my patients," he went on, "but my research grant, my wife and kids, and now another fucking pressure has been added to it, and what burns me up is that it was my own fault, my own stupidity for putting my trust in a stupid cunt!

"I will tell you, Carlos," he continued, "there is nothing more appalling, disgusting, fucking nauseating than the insensitivity of women. I am not a woman hater, you know that! But at this moment it seems to me that every single cunt is just a cunt! Duplicitous and vile!"

I did not know what to say. Whatever he was telling me did not need affirmation or contradiction. I would not have dared to contradict him anyway. I did not have the ammunition for it. I was very tired. I wanted to go back to sleep, but he kept on talking as if his life depended on it.

"You know Theresa Manning, do you not?" he asked me in a forceful, accusatory manner.

For an instant, I believed that he was accusing me of having something to do with his young, beautiful, student secretary. Without giving me time to respond, he continued talking.

"Theresa Manning is an asshole. She is a schnook! A stupid, inconsiderate woman who has no incentive in life other than balling anyone with a bit of fame and notoriety. I thought she was intelligent and sensitive. I thought she had something, some understanding, some empathy, something that one would like to share, or hold as precious all to oneself. I do not know, but that is the picture that she painted for me, when in reality she is lewd and degenerate, and, I may add, incurably gross."

As he kept on talking, a strange picture began to emerge. Apparently, the psychiatrist had just had a bad experience involving his secretary.

"Since the day she came to work for me," he went on, "I knew that she was attracted to me sexually, but she never came around to saying it. It was all in the innuendos and the looks. Well, fuck it! This afternoon I got sick and tired of pussyfooting around, and I came right to the point. I went up to her desk and said, 'I know what you want, and you know what I want.'"

He went into a great, elaborate rendition of how forcefully he had told her that he expected her in his apartment across the street from school at 11:30 P.M., and that he did not alter his routines for anybody; that he read and worked and drank wine until one o'clock, at which time he retired to the bedroom. He kept an apartment in town as well as the house he and his wife and children lived in in the suburbs.

"I was so confident that the affair was going to pan out; turn into something memorable," he said and sighed. His voice acquired the mellow tone of someone confiding something intimate. "I even gave her the key to my apartment," he said, and his voice cracked.

"Very dutifully, she came at eleven-thirty," he went on. "She let herself in with her own key, and sneaked into the bedroom like a shadow. That excited me terribly. I knew that she was not going to be any trouble for me. She knew her role. She probably fell asleep on the bed. Or maybe she watched TV. I became engrossed in my work, and I did not care what the heck she did. I knew that I had her in the bag.

"But the moment I came into the bedroom," he continued, his voice tense and constricted, as if he were morally offended, "Theresa jumped on me like an animal and went for my dick. She did not even give me time to put down the bottle and the two glasses I was carrying. I had enough presence of mind to put my two Baccarat glasses on the floor without breaking them. The bottle flew across the room when she grabbed my balls as if they were made out of rocks. I wanted to hit her. I actually yelled in pain, but that did not faze her. She giggled insanely, because she thought I was being cute and sexy. She said so, as if to placate me."

Shaking his head with contained rage, he said that the woman was so friggin' eager and utterly selfish that she did not take into account that a man needs a moment's peace, he needs to feel at ease, at home, in friendly surroundings. Instead of showing consideration and understanding, as her role demanded, Theresa Manning pulled his sexual organs out of his pants with the expertise of someone who had done it hundreds of times.

"The result of all this shit," he said, "was that my sensuality retreated in horror. I was emotionally emasculated. My body abhorred that fucking woman, instantly. Yet my lust prevented me from throwing her out in the street."

He said that he decided then that instead of losing face by his impotence, miserably, the way he was bound to, he would have oral sex with her, and make her have an orgasm- put her at his mercy- but his body had rejected the woman so thoroughly that he could not do it.

"The woman was not even beautiful anymore," he said, "but plain. Whenever she is dressed up, the clothes that she wears hide the bulges of her hips. She actually looks okay. But when she is naked, she is a sack of bulging white flesh! The slenderness that she presents when she is clothed is fake. It does not exist."

Venom poured out of the psychiatrist in ways that I would never have imagined. He was shaking with rage. He wanted desperately to appear cool, and kept on smoking cigarette after cigarette.

He said that the oral sex was even more maddening and disgusting, and that he was just about to vomit when the friggin' woman actually kicked him in the belly, rolled him out of his own bed onto the floor, and called him an impotent faggot.

At this point in his narration, the psychiatrist's eyes were burning with hatred. His mouth was quivering. He was pale.

"I have to use your bathroom," he said. "I want to take a bath. I am reeking. Believe it or not, I have pussy breath."

He was actually weeping, and I would have given anything in the world not to be there. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or the mesmeric quality of his voice, or the inanity of the situation that created the illusion that I was listening not to the psychiatrist but to the voice of a male supplicant on one of his tapes complaining about minor problems turned into gigantic affairs by talking obsessively about them. My ordeal ended around nine o'clock in one morning. It was time for me to go to class and time for the psychiatrist to go and see his own shrink.

I went to class then, highly charged with a burning anxiety and a tremendous sensation of discomfort and uselessness. There, I received the final blow; the blow that caused my attempt at a drastic change to collapse. No volition of my own was involved in its collapse. It just happened; not only as if it had been scheduled, but as if its progression had been accelerated by some unknown hand.

The anthropology professor began his lecture about a group of Indians from the high plateaus of Bolivia and Peru, the Aymara. He called them the "ey-MEH-ra," elongating the name as if his pronunciation of it was the only accurate one in existence. He said that the making of chicha- which is pronounced "CHEE-cha," but which he pronounced "CHAHI-cha," an alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn- was in the realm of a sect of priestesses who were considered semi-divine by the Aymara. He said, in a tone of revelation, that those women were in charge of making the cooked corn into a mush ready for fermentation by chewing and spitting it, adding in this manner an enzyme found in human saliva. The whole class shrieked with contained horror at the mention of human saliva.

The professor seemed to be tickled pink. He laughed in little spurts. It was the chuckle of a nasty child. He went on to say that the women were expert chewers, and he called them the "chahi-cha chewers." He looked at the front row of the classroom, where most of the young women were sitting, and he delivered his punch line.

"I was p-r-r-rivileged," he said with a strange quasi-foreign intonation, "to be asked to sleep with one of the chahi-cha chewers. The art of chewing the chahi-cha mush makes them develop the muscles around their throat and cheeks to the point that they can do wonders with them."

He looked at his bewildered audience and paused for a long time, punctuating the pause with his giggles. "I am sure you get my drift," he said, and went into fits of hysterical laughter.

The class went wild with the professor's innuendo. The lecture was interrupted by at least five minutes of laughter and a barrage of questions that the professor declined to answer, emitting more silly giggles.

I felt so compressed by the pressure of the tapes, the psychiatrist's story, and the professor's "chahi-cha chewers" that in one instantaneous sweep I quit the job, quit school, and drove back to L.A.

"Whatever happened to me with the psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology," I said to don Juan, "has plunged me into an unknown emotional state. I can only call it introspection. I have been talking to myself without stop."

"Your malady is a very simple one," don Juan said, shaking with laughter.

Apparently my situation delighted him. It was a delight I could not share, because I failed to see the humor in it.

"Your world is coming to an end," he said. "It is the end of an era for you. Do you think that the world you have known all your life is going to leave you peacefully- without any fuss or muss? No! It will wriggle underneath you, and hit you with its tail."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 2 - Chapter 08. The View I Could Not Stand.

Los Angeles had always been home for me. My choice of Los Angeles had not been volitional. To me, staying in Los Angeles has always been the equivalent of having been born there, perhaps even more than that. My emotional attachment to it has always been total. My love for the city of Los Angeles has always been so intense, so much a part of me, that I have never had to voice it. I have never had to review it or renew it, ever.

I had, in Los Angeles, my family of friends. They were to me part of my immediate milieu, meaning that I had accepted them totally, the way I had accepted the city. One of my friends made the statement once, half in fun, that all of us hated each other cordially. Doubtless, they could afford feelings like that themselves, for they had other emotional arrangements at their disposal, like parents and wives and husbands. I had only my friends in Los Angeles.

For whatever reason, I was each one's confidant. Every one of them poured out to me their problems and vicissitudes. My friends were so close to me that I had never acknowledged their problems or tribulations as anything but normal. I could talk for hours to them about the very same things that had horrified me in the psychiatrist and his tapes.

Furthermore, I had never realized that every one of my friends was astoundingly similar to the psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology. I had never noticed how tense my friends were. All of them smoked compulsively, like the psychiatrist, but it had never been obvious to me because I smoked just as much myself and was just as tense.

Their affectation in speech was another thing that had never been apparent to me, although it was there. They always affected a twang of the western United States, but they were very aware of what they were doing.

Nor had I ever noticed their blatant innuendos about a sensuality that they were incapable of feeling, except intellectually.

The real confrontation with myself began when I was faced with the dilemma of my friend Pete. He came to see me, all battered. He had a swollen mouth, and a red and swollen left eye that had obviously been hit and was turning blue already. Before I had time to ask him what had happened to him, he blurted out that his wife, Patricia, had gone to a real estate brokers' convention over the weekend, in relation to her job, and that something terrible had happened to her. The way Pete looked, I thought that perhaps Patricia had been injured, or even killed, in an accident.

"Is she all right?" I asked, genuinely concerned.

"Of course she is all right," he barked. "She is a bitch and a whore, and nothing happens to bitch whores except that they get frigged, and they like it!"

Pete was rabid. He was shaking, nearly convulsing. His bushy, curly hair was sticking out every which way. Usually, he combed it carefully and slicked his natural curls into place. Now, he looked as wild as a Tasmanian devil.

"Everything was normal until today," my friend continued. "Then, this morning, after I came out of the shower, she snapped a towel at my naked butt, and that is what made me aware of her shit! I knew instantly that she had been frigging someone else."

I was puzzled by his line of reasoning. I questioned him further. I asked him how snapping a towel could reveal anything of this sort to anybody.

"It would not reveal anything to assholes!" he said with pure venom in his voice. "But I know Patricia, and on Thursday, before she went to the brokers' convention, she could not snap a towel! In fact, she has never been able to snap a towel in all the time we have been married. Somebody must have taught her to do it, while they were naked! So I grabbed her by the throat, and choked the truth out of her! Yes! She has been frigging her boss!"

Pete said that he went to Patricia's office to have it out with her boss, but the man was heavily protected by bodyguards. They threw him out into the parking lot. He wanted to smash the windows of the office, throw rocks at them, but the bodyguards said that if he did that, he would land in jail, or even worse, he would get a bullet in his head.

"Are they the ones who beat you up, Pete?" I asked him.

"No," he said, dejected. "I walked down the street and went into the sales office of a used car lot. I punched the first salesman who came to talk to me. The man was shocked, but he did not get angry. He said, 'Calm down, sir, calm down! There is room for negotiation.' When I punched him again in the mouth, he got pissed off. He was a big guy, and he hit me in the mouth and the eye, and knocked me out.

"When I came to my senses," Pete continued, "I was lying on the couch in their office. I heard an ambulance approaching. I knew they were coming for me, so I got up and ran out. Then I came to see you."

He began to weep uncontrollably. He got sick to his stomach. He was a mess. I called his wife, and in less than ten minutes she was in the apartment. She knelt in front of Pete, and swore that she loved only him; that everything else she did was pure imbecility and that theirs was a love that was a matter of life or death. The others were nothing. She did not even remember them.

Both of them wept to their hearts' content, and of course they forgave each other. Patricia was wearing sunglasses to hide the hematoma by her right eye where Pete had apparently hit her: Pete was left-handed. Both of them were oblivious to my presence, and when they left, they did not seem to know I was there. They just walked out, leaving the door open, hugging each other.

Life seemed to continue for me as it always had. My friends acted with me as they always did. We were, as usual, involved in going to parties, or the movies, or just simply 'chewing the fat', or looking for restaurants where they offered 'all you can eat' for the price of one meal.

However, despite this pseudo-normality, a strange new factor seemed to have entered my life. As the subject who was experiencing it, it appeared to me that, all of a sudden, I had become extremely narrow-minded. I had begun to judge my friends in the same way I had judged the psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology. Who was I, anyway, to set myself up in judgment of anyone else?

I felt an immense sense of guilt. To judge my friends created a mood previously unknown to me. But what I considered to be even worse was that not only was I judging them, I was finding their problems and tribulations astoundingly banal.

I was the same man. They were my same friends. I had heard their complaints and renditions of their situations hundreds of times, and I had not ever felt anything except a deep identification with whatever I had been listening to. My horror at discovering this new mood in myself was staggering.

The aphorism that 'when it rains it pours' could not have been more true for me at that moment in my life.

The total disintegration of my way of life came when my friend Rodrigo Cummings asked me to take him to the Burbank airport. From there he was going to fly to New York. It was a very dramatic and desperate maneuver on his part. He considered it his damnation to be caught in Los Angeles.

For the rest of his friends, it was a big joke, and a fact, that he had tried to drive across country to New York various times; and every time he had tried to do it, his car had broken down. Once, he had gone as far as Salt Lake City before his car collapsed. It needed a new motor and he had to junk it there. Most of the time, his cars petered out in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

"What happens to your cars, Rodrigo?" I asked him once, driven by truthful curiosity.

"I do not know," he replied with a veiled sense of guilt. And then, in a voice worthy of the professor of anthropology in his role of revivalist preacher, he said, "Perhaps it is because when I hit the road, I accelerate because I feel free. I usually open all my windows. I want the wind to blow on my face. I feel that I am a kid in search of something new."

It was obvious to me that his cars, which were always jalopies, were no longer capable of speeding, and he just simply burned their motors out.

From Salt Lake City, Rodrigo had returned to Los Angeles, hitchhiking. Of course, he could have hitchhiked to New York, but it had never occurred to him. Rodrigo seemed to be afflicted by the same condition that afflicted me: an unconscious passion for Los Angeles which he wanted to refuse at any cost.

Another time, his car was in excellent mechanical condition. It could have made the whole trip with ease, but Rodrigo was apparently not in any condition to leave Los Angeles. He drove as far as San Bernadino, where he went to see a movie- The Ten Commandments. This movie, for reasons known only to Rodrigo, created in him an unbeatable nostalgia for L.A. He came back, and wept, telling me how the shagging city of Los Angeles had built a fence around him that did not let him go through. His wife was delighted that he had not gone.

His girlfriend, Melissa, was even more delighted, although also chagrined because she had to give back the dictionaries that he had given her.

His last desperate attempt to reach New York by plane was rendered even more dramatic because he borrowed money from his friends to pay for the ticket. He said that in this fashion, since he did not intend to repay them, he was making sure that he would not come back.

I put his suitcases in the trunk of my car and headed with him for the Burbank airport. He remarked that the plane did not leave until seven o'clock. It was early afternoon, and we had plenty of time to go and see a movie. Besides, he wanted to take one last look at Hollywood Boulevard; the center of our lives and activities.

We went to see an epic in Technicolor and Cinerama. It was a long, excruciating movie that seemed to rivet Rodrigo's attention. When we got out of the movie, it was already getting dark. I rushed to Burbank in the midst of heavy traffic. He demanded that we go on surface streets rather than the freeway, which was jammed at that hour. The plane was just leaving when we reached the airport. That was the final straw. Meek and defeated, Rodrigo went to a cashier and presented his ticket to get his money back. The cashier wrote down his name and gave him a receipt and said that his money would be sent within six to twelve weeks from Tennessee, where the accounting offices of the airline were located.

We drove back to the apartment building where we both lived. Since he had not said good-bye to anybody this time, for fear of losing face, nobody had ever noticed that he had tried to leave one more time. The only drawback was that he had sold his car. He asked me to drive him to his parents' house, because his dad was going to give him the money he had spent on the ticket.

His father had always been, as far back as I could remember, the man who had bailed Rodrigo out of every problematic situation that he had ever gotten into. The father's slogan was 'Have no fear, Rodrigo Senior is here!' After he heard Rodrigo's request for a loan to pay his other loan, the father looked at my friend with the saddest expression that I had ever seen. He was having terrible financial difficulties himself.

Putting his arm around his son's shoulders, he said, "I can not help you this time, my boy. Now you should have fear, because Rodrigo Senior is no longer here."

I wanted desperately to identify with my friend, to feel his drama the way I always had, but I could not. I only focused on the father's statement. It sounded to me so final that it galvanized me.

I sought don Juan's company avidly. I left everything pending in Los Angeles and made a trip to Sonora. I told him about the strange mood that I had entered into with my friends. Sobbing with remorse, I said to him that I had begun to judge them.

"Do not get so worked up over nothing," don Juan said calmly. "You already know that a whole era in your life is coming to an end, but an era does not really come to an end until the king dies."

"What do you mean by that, don Juan?"

"You are the king, and you are just like your friends. That is the truth that makes you shake in your boots. One thing you can do is to accept it at face value, which, of course, you can not do. The other thing you can do is to say, 'I am not like that, I am not like that,' and repeat to yourself that you are not like that. I promise you, however, that a moment will come when you will realize that you are like that."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 2 - Chapter 09. The Unavoidable Appointment.

There was something that kept nagging at me in the back of my mind. I had to answer a most important letter I had received, and I had to do it at any cost. My anthropologist friend who was responsible for my meeting don Juan Matus had written me a letter a couple of months earlier. He wanted to know how I was doing in my studies of anthropology, and urged me to pay him a visit.

What had prevented me from doing it was a mixture of indolence and a deep desire to please. I composed three long letters. On rereading each of them, I found them so trite and obsequious that I tore them up.

I could not express in them the depth of my gratitude; the depth of my feelings for him. I rationalized my delay in answering with a genuine resolve to go to see him, and tell him personally what I was doing with don Juan Matus; but I kept postponing my imminent trip because I was not sure what it was that I was doing with don Juan. I wanted someday to show my friend real results. As it was, I had only vague sketches of possibilities, which, in his demanding eyes, would not have been anthropological fieldwork anyway.

One day I found out that he had died. His death brought to me one of those dangerous silent depressions. I had no way to express what I felt because what I was feeling was not fully formulated in my mind. It was a mixture of dejection, despondency, and abhorrence at myself for not having answered his letter; for not having gone to see him.

I paid a visit to don Juan Matus soon after that. On arriving at his house, I sat down on one of the crates under his ramada and tried to search for words that would not sound banal to express my sense of dejection over the death of my friend. For reasons incomprehensible to me, don Juan knew the origin of my turmoil, and the overt reason for my visit to him.

"Yes," don Juan said dryly. "I know that your friend, the anthropologist who guided you to meet me, has died. For whatever reasons, I knew exactly the moment he died. I saw it."

His statements jolted me to my foundations.

"I saw it coming a long time ago. I even told you about it, but you disregarded what I said. I am sure that you do not even remember it."

I remembered every word he had said, but it had no meaning for me at the time he had said it.

Don Juan had stated that a detail deeply related to our meeting, but not part of it, was the fact that he had seen my anthropologist friend as a dying man.

"I saw death as an outside force already opening your friend," he had said to me. "Every one of us has an energetic fissure, an energetic crack below the navel. That crack, which sorcerers call the gap, is closed when a man is in his prime."

He had said that, normally, all that is discernible to the sorcerer's eye is a tenuous discoloration in the otherwise whitish glow of the luminous sphere. But when a man is close to dying, that gap becomes quite apparent. He had assured me that my friend's gap was wide open.

"What is the significance of all this, don Juan?" I had asked perfunctorily.

"The significance is a terminal one," he had replied. "The spirit was signaling to me that something was coming to an end. I thought it was my life that was coming to an end, and I accepted it as gracefully as I could.

It dawned on me much, much later that it was not my life that was coming to an end, but my entire lineage."

I did not know what he was talking about. But how could I have taken all that seriously? As far as I was concerned, it was, at the time he said it, like everything else in my life; just talk.

"Your friend himself told you, though not in so many words, that he was dying," don Juan said. "You acknowledged what he was saying just as you acknowledged what I said; but in both cases, you chose to bypass it."

I had no comments to make. I was overwhelmed by what he was saying. I wanted to sink into the crate I was sitting on; to disappear, swallowed up by the earth.

"It is not your fault that you bypass things like this," he went on. "It is youth. You have so many things to do, so many people around you. You are not alert. You never learned to be alert, anyway."

In the vein of defending the last bastion of myself- my idea that I was watchful- I pointed out to don Juan that I had been in life and death situations that required my quick wit and vigilance. It was not that I lacked the capacity to be alert, but that I lacked the orientation for setting an appropriate list of priorities. Therefore, everything was either important or unimportant to me.

"To be alert does not mean to be watchful," don Juan said. "For sorcerers, to be alert means to be aware of the true underlying fabric of the everyday world that seems extraneous to the interaction of the moment.

"On the trip that you took with your friend before you met me, you noticed only the details that were obvious. You did not notice how his death was absorbing him, and yet something in you knew it."

I began to protest, to tell him that what he was saying was not true.

"Do not hide yourself behind banalities," he said in an accusing tone. "Stand up, if only for the moment you are with me. Assume responsibility for what you know.

"Do not get lost in the extraneous threads of the world around you; or in unimportant distractions from what is really going on in the fabric around you.

If you had not been so concerned with yourself and your problems, you would have known that that was his last trip. You would have noticed that he was closing his accounts; seeing the people who helped him; saying good-bye to them.

"Your anthropologist friend had talked to me once," don Juan went on. "I remembered him so clearly that I was not surprised at all when he brought you to me at that bus depot.

"I could not help him when he had talked to me. He was not the man I was looking for, but I wished him well from my sorcerer's emptiness, from my sorcerer's silence.

"For this reason, I know that on his last trip, he was saying thank you to the people who counted in his life."

I admitted to don Juan that he was so very right, that there had been so many details that I had been aware of, but that they had not meant a thing to me at the time; such as, for instance, my friend's ecstasy in watching the scenery around us. He would stop the car just to watch, for hours on end, the mountains in the distance, or the riverbed, or the desert.

I discarded this as the idiotic sentimentality of a middle-aged man. I even made vague hints to him that perhaps he was drinking too much. He told me that in dire cases a drink would allow a man a moment of peace and detachment, a moment long enough to savor something unrepeatable.

"That was, for a fact, the trip for his eyes only," don Juan said. "Sorcerers take such a trip, and, in it, nothing counts except what their eyes can absorb. Your friend was unburdening himself of everything superfluous."

I confessed to don Juan that I had disregarded what he had said to me about my dying friend because, at an unknown level, I had known that it was true.

"Sorcerers never say things idly," he said. "I am most careful about what I say to you or to anybody else. The difference between you and me is that I do not have any time at all, and I act accordingly. You, on the other hand, believe that you have all the time in the world, and you act accordingly. The end result of our individual behaviors is that I measure everything I do and say, and you do not."

I conceded that he was right, but I assured him that whatever he was saying did not alleviate my turmoil, or my sadness. I blurted out then, uncontrollably, every nuance of my confused feelings. I told him that I was not in search of advice. I wanted him to prescribe a sorcerer's way to end my anguish. I believed I was really interested in getting from him some natural relaxant, an organic Valium, and I said so to him. Don Juan shook his head in bewilderment.

"You are too much," he said. "Next you are going to ask for a sorcerer's medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part- just the effort of swallowing whatever is given. The more awful the taste, the better the results. That is your Western man's motto. You want results- one potion and you are cured.

"Sorcerers face things in a different way," don Juan continued. "Since they do not have any time to spare, they give themselves fully to what is in front of them.

"Your turmoil is the result of your lack of sobriety. You did not have the sobriety to thank your friend properly. That happens to every one of us. We never express what we feel, and when we want to, it is too late, because we have run out of time.

"It is not only your friend who ran out of time. You, too, ran out of it.

"You should have thanked him profusely in Arizona. He took the trouble to take you around, and whether you understand it or not, in the bus depot he gave you his best shot. But the moment when you should have thanked him, you were angry with him- you were judging him: He was nasty to you, or whatever.

"And then you postponed seeing him. In reality, what you did was to postpone thanking him. Now you are stuck with a ghost on your tail. You will never be able to pay what you owe him."

I understood the immensity of what he was saying. Never had I faced my actions in such a light. In fact, I had never thanked anyone, ever.

Don Juan pushed his barb even deeper. "Your friend knew that he was dying," he said. "He wrote you one final letter to find out about your doings. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, or to you, you were his last thought."

The weight of don Juan's words was too much for my shoulders. I collapsed. I felt that I had to lie down. My head was spinning. Maybe it was the setting. I had made the terrible mistake of arriving at don Juan's house in the late afternoon. The setting sun seemed astoundingly golden, and the reflections on the bare mountains to the east of don Juan's house were gold and purple. The sky did not have a speck of a cloud. Nothing seemed to move. It was as if the whole world were hiding, but its presence was overpowering. The quietness of the Sonoran desert was like a dagger. It went to the marrow of my bones. I wanted to leave, to get in my car and drive away. I wanted to be in the city; to get lost in its noise.

"You are having a taste of infinity," don Juan said with grave finality. "I know it, because I have been in your shoes. You want to run away, to plunge into something human, warm, contradictory, stupid, who cares? You want to forget the death of your friend.

"But infinity will not let you." His voice mellowed. "It has gripped you in its merciless clutches."

"What can I do now, don Juan?" I asked.

"The only thing you can do," don Juan said, "is to keep the memory of your friend fresh; to keep it alive for the rest of your life and perhaps even beyond. Sorcerers express, in this fashion, the thanks that they can no longer voice. You may think it is a silly way, but that is the best sorcerers can do."

It was my own sadness, doubtless, which made me believe that the typically ebullient don Juan was as sad as I was. I discarded the thought immediately. That could not be possible.

"Sadness, for sorcerers, is not personal," don Juan said, again erupting into my thoughts. "It is not quite sadness. It is a wave of energy that comes from the depths of the cosmos, and hits sorcerers when they are receptive; when they are like radios capable of catching radio waves.

"The sorcerers of olden times, who gave us the entire format of sorcery, believed that there is sadness in the universe, as a force, or a condition; like light; like intent. And that this perennial force acts especially on sorcerers- particularly because they no longer have any defensive shields. They cannot hide behind their friends or their studies. They cannot hide behind love, or hatred, or happiness, or misery. They can not hide behind anything.

"The condition of sorcerers," don Juan went on, "is that sadness, for them, is abstract. It does not come from coveting or lacking something, or from self-importance. It does not come from me. It comes from infinity. The sadness you feel for not thanking your friend is already leaning in that direction.

"My teacher, the nagual Julian," he went on, "was a fabulous actor. He actually worked professionally in the theater. He had a favorite story that he used to tell in his theater sessions. He used to push me into terrible outbursts of anguish with it. He said that it was a story for warriors who had everything and yet felt the sting of the universal sadness. I always thought he was telling it for me, personally."

Don Juan then paraphrased his teacher, telling me that the story referred to a man suffering from profound melancholy.

The man went to see the best doctors of his day and every one of those doctors failed to help him. He finally came to the office of a leading doctor, a healer of the soul.

The doctor suggested to his patient that perhaps he could find solace, and the end of his melancholy, in love. The man responded that love was no problem for him, that he was loved perhaps like no one else in the world.

The doctor's next suggestion was that maybe the patient should undertake a voyage and see other parts of the world. The man responded that, without exaggeration, he had been in every corner of the world.

The doctor recommended hobbies like the arts, sports, etc. The man responded to every one of his recommendations in the same terms: He had done that and had had no relief.

The doctor suspected that the man was possibly an incurable liar. He could not have done all those things, as he claimed. But being a good healer, the doctor had a final insight.

"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed. "I have the perfect solution for you, sir. You must attend a performance of the greatest comedian of our day. He will delight you to the point where you will forget every twist of your melancholy. You must attend a performance of the Great Garrick!"

Don Juan said that the man looked at the doctor with the saddest look you can imagine, and said, "Doctor, if that is your recommendation, I am a lost man, and have no cure. I am Garrick."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 2 - Chapter 10. The Breaking Point.

Inner silence is a state of profound quietude.

Don Juan defined inner silence as a state of being in which thoughts were canceled out, and I could function from a level other than that of daily awareness. He stressed that inner silence meant the suspension of the perennial companion of thoughts; the suspension of my internal dialogue.

"The old sorcerers," don Juan said, "called this state inner silence because it is a state in which perception does not depend on using the senses as we are accustomed to. What is at work during inner silence is another faculty that man has; the faculty that makes him a magical being; the very faculty that has been curtailed- not by man himself, but by some extraneous influence."

"What is this extraneous influence that curtails the magical faculty of man?" I asked.

"That," don Juan replied, "is the topic for a future explanation, and is not a subject of our present discussion, even though it is indeed a most serious aspect of the sorcery of the shamans of ancient Mexico.

"Inner silence," he continued, "is the stand from which everything stems in sorcery. In other words, everything we do leads to that stand, which, like everything else in the world of sorcerers, does not reveal itself unless something gigantic shakes us."

Don Juan said that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico devised endless ways to shake themselves, or other sorcery practitioners at their foundations in order to reach that coveted state of inner silence. They considered the most farfetched acts, which may seem totally unrelated to the pursuit of inner silence- such as jumping into waterfalls or spending nights hanging upside down from the top branch of a tree- to be key methods that brought inner silence into being.

Following the rationale of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, don Juan stated categorically that inner silence is accrued; accumulated.

In my case, he struggled to guide me to construct a core of inner silence in myself, and then add to it, second by second on every occasion I practiced it. He explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico discovered that each individual had a different threshold of inner silence in terms of time; meaning that inner silence must be kept by each one of us for the length of time of our specific threshold before it can work.

"What did those sorcerers consider the sign that inner silence is working, don Juan?" I asked.

"Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it," he replied. "What the old sorcerers were after was the final, dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence. Some very talented practitioners need only a few minutes of silence to reach that coveted goal. Others, less talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of complete quietude, before they reach the desired result. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called stopping the world; the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it has always been.

"This is the moment when sorcerers return to the true nature of man," don Juan went on. "The old sorcerers also called it total freedom. It is the moment when 'man the slave' becomes 'man the free being' capable of feats of perception that defy our linear imagination."

Don Juan assured me that inner silence is the avenue that leads to a true suspension of judgment- to a moment when sensory data emanating from the universe at large ceases to be interpreted by the senses; a moment when cognition ceases to be the force which, through usage and repetition, decides the nature of the world.

"Sorcerers need a breaking point for the workings of inner silence to set in," don Juan said. "The breaking point is like the mortar that a mason puts between bricks. It is only when the mortar hardens that the loose bricks become a structure."

From the beginning of our association, don Juan had drilled into me the value and the necessity of inner silence. I did my best to follow his suggestions by accumulating inner silence second by second. I had no means to measure the effect of this accumulation, nor did I have any means to judge whether or not I had reached any threshold. I simply aimed doggedly at accruing it, not just to please don Juan, but because the act of accumulating it had become a challenge in itself.

One day, don Juan and I were taking a leisurely stroll in the main plaza of Hermosillo. It was the early afternoon of a cloudy day. The heat was dry, and actually very pleasant. There were lots of people walking around. There were stores around the plaza. I had been to Hermosillo many times, and yet I had never noticed the stores. I knew that they were there, but their presence was not something I had been consciously aware of. I could not have made a map of that plaza if my life depended on it. That day, as I walked with don Juan, I was trying to locate and identify the stores. I searched for something to use as a mnemonic device that would stir my recollection for later use.

"As I have told you before, many times," don Juan said, jolting me out of my concentration, "every sorcerer I know, male or female, sooner or later arrives at a breaking point in their lives."

"Do you mean that they have a mental breakdown or something like that?" I asked

"No, no," he said, laughing. "Mental breakdowns are for persons who indulge in themselves. Sorcerers are not persons. What I mean is that at a given moment, the continuity of their lives has to break in order for inner silence to set in and become an active part of their structures.

"It is very, very important," don Juan went on, "that you yourself deliberately arrive at that breaking point, or that you create it artificially, and intelligently."

"What do you mean by that, don Juan?" I asked, caught in his intriguing reasoning.

"Your breaking point" he said, "is to discontinue your life as you know it. You have done everything I told you, dutifully and accurately. If you are talented, you never show it. That seems to be your style. You are not slow, but you act as if you were. You are very sure of yourself, but you act as if you were insecure. You are not timid, and yet you act as if you were afraid of people. Everything you do points at one single spot; your need to break all that, ruthlessly."

"But in what way, don Juan? What do you have in mind?" I asked, genuinely frantic.

"I think everything boils down to one act," he said. "You must leave your friends. You must say good-bye to them, for good. It is not possible for you to continue on the warriors' path carrying your personal history with you, and unless you discontinue your way of life, I will not be able to go ahead with my instruction."

"Now, now, now, don Juan," I said, "I have to put my foot down. You are asking too much of me. To be frank with you, I do not think I can do it. My friends are my family; my points of reference."

"Precisely, precisely," he remarked. "They are your points of reference. Therefore, they have to go. Sorcerers have only one point of reference: infinity."

"But how do you want me to proceed, don Juan?" I asked in a plaintive voice. His request was driving me up the wall.

"You must simply leave," he said matter-of-factly. "Leave any way you can."

"But where would I go?" I asked.

"My recommendation is that you rent a room in one of those chintzy hotels you know," he said. "The uglier the place, the better. If the room has drab green carpet, and drab green drapes, and drab green walls, so much the better- a place comparable to that hotel I showed you once in Los Angeles."

I laughed nervously at my recollection of a time when I was driving with don Juan through the industrial side of Los Angeles, where there were only warehouses and dilapidated hotels for transients. One hotel in particular attracted don Juan's attention because of its bombastic name: Edward the Seventh. We stopped across the street from it for a moment to look at it.

"That hotel over there," don Juan said, pointing at it, "is to me the true representation of life on Earth for the average person. If you are lucky, or ruthless, you will get a room with a view of the street, where you will see this endless parade of human misery. If you are not that lucky, or that ruthless, you will get a room on the inside, with windows to the wall of the next building. Think of spending a lifetime torn between those two views, envying the view of the street if you are inside, and envying the view of the wall if you are on the outside, tired of looking out."

Don Juan's metaphor bothered me no end, for I had taken it all in.

Now, faced with the possibility of having to rent a room in a hotel comparable to the Edward the Seventh, I did not know what to say or which way to go.

"What do you want me to do there, don Juan?" I asked.

"A sorcerer uses a place like that to die," he said, looking at me with an unblinking stare. "You have never been alone in your life. This is the time to do it. You will stay in that room until you die."

His request scared me, but at the same time, it made me laugh.

"Not that I am going to do it, don Juan," I said, "but what would be the criteria to know that I am dead?- unless you want me to actually die physically."

"No," he said, "I do not want your body to die physically. I want your person to die. The two are very different affairs. In essence, your person has very little to do with your body. Your person is your mind, and believe you me, your mind is not yours."

"What is this nonsense, don Juan, that my mind is not mine?" I heard myself asking with a nervous twang in my voice.

"I will tell you about that subject someday," he said, "but not while you are cushioned by your friends.

"The criteria that indicates that a sorcerer is dead," he went on, "is when it makes no difference to him whether he has company or whether he is alone. The day you do not covet the company of your friends, whom you use as shields, that is the day that your person dies. What do you say? Are you game?"

"I can not do it, don Juan," I said. "It is useless that I try to lie to you. I can not leave my friends."

"It is perfectly all right," he said, unperturbed. My statement did not seem to affect him in the least. "I will not be able to talk to you anymore, but let us say that during our time together you have learned a great deal. You have learned things that will make you very strong, regardless of whether you come back or you stray away."

He patted me on the back and said good-bye to me. He turned around and simply disappeared among the people in the plaza, as if he had merged with them. For an instant, I had the strange sensation that the people in the plaza were like a curtain that he had opened and then disappeared behind. The end had come, as did everything else in don Juan's world: swiftly and unpredictably. Suddenly, the end of don Juan's world was upon me. I was in the throes of it, and I did not even know how I had gotten into it.

I should have been crushed. Yet I was not. I did not know why, but I was elated. I marveled at the facility with which everything had ended. Don Juan was indeed an elegant being. There were no recriminations or anger or anything of that sort at all. I got in my car and drove, happy as a lark. I was ebullient. How extraordinary that everything had ended so swiftly, I thought, so painlessly.

My trip home was uneventful. In Los Angeles, being in my familiar surroundings, I noticed that I had derived an enormous amount of energy from my last exchange with don Juan. I was actually very happy, very relaxed, and I resumed what I considered to be my normal life with renewed zest. All my tribulations with my friends, and my realizations about them, everything that I had said to don Juan in reference to this, were thoroughly forgotten. It was as if something had erased all that from my mind. I marveled a couple of times at the facility I had in forgetting something that had been so meaningful; and in forgetting it so thoroughly.

Everything was as expected. There was one single inconsistency in the otherwise neat paradigm of my new old life: I distinctly remembered don Juan saying to me that my departing from the sorcerers' world was purely academic, and that I would be back.

I remembered writing down every word of our exchange. According to my normal linear reasoning and memory, don Juan had never made those statements. How could I remember things that had never taken place? I pondered uselessly. My pseudo-recollection was strange enough to make a case for it, but then I decided that there was no point in reflecting on it. As far as I was concerned, I was out of don Juan's milieu.

Following don Juan's suggestions in reference to my behavior with those who had favored me in any way, I had come to a earthshaking decision for myself: I resolved to honor and to thank my friends before it was too late.

One incident involving my friend Rodrigo, however, toppled my new paradigm and sent it tumbling down to its total destruction.

My attitude toward Rodrigo changed radically when I vanquished my competitiveness with him. I found out that it was the easiest thing in the world for me to project 100 percent into whatever Rodrigo did. In fact, I was exactly like him, but I did not know it until I stopped competing with him. Then the truth emerged for me with maddening vividness.

One of Rodrigo's foremost wishes was to finish college. Every semester, he registered for school and took as many courses as was permitted. Then, as the semester progressed, he dropped them one by one. Sometimes he would withdraw from school altogether. At other times he would keep one three-unit course all the way through to the bitter end.

During the most recent semester, he had kept a course in sociology because he liked it. The final exam was approaching. He told me that he had three weeks to study; to read the textbook for the course. He thought that that was an exorbitant amount of time to read merely six hundred pages. He considered himself something of a speed reader, with a high level of retention; in his opinion, he had a nearly 100 percent photographic memory.

He thought he had a great deal of time before the exam, so he asked me if I would help him recondition his car for his paper route. He wanted to take the right door off in order to throw the paper through that opening with his right hand instead of over the roof with his left.

I pointed out to him that he was left-handed, to which he retorted that among his many abilities, which none of his friends noticed, was that of being ambidextrous. He was right about that: I had never noticed it myself.

After I helped him to take the door off, he decided to rip out the roof lining, which was badly torn. He said that his car was in optimum mechanical condition, and so he was going to take it to Tijuana, Mexico- which, as a good Angeleno of the day, he called 'TJ'- to have it relined for a few bucks.

"We could use a trip," he said with glee. He even selected the friends he would like to take. "In TJ, I am sure that you will go to look for used books, because you are an asshole. The rest of us will go to a bordello. I know quite a few."

It took us a week to rip out all the lining and sand the metal surface to prepare it for its new lining. Rodrigo had two weeks left to study then, and he still considered that to be too much time.

He engaged me then in helping him paint his apartment and redo the floors. It took us over a week to paint it and sand the hardwood floors. He did not want to paint over the wallpaper in one room. We had to rent a machine that removed wallpaper by applying steam to it.

Naturally, neither Rodrigo nor I knew how to use the machine properly, and we botched the job horrendously. We ended up having to use Topping; a very fine mixture of plaster of paris and other substances that gives a wall a smooth surface.

After all these endeavors, Rodrigo ended up having only two days left to cram six hundred pages into his head. He went frantically into an all-day and all-night reading marathon, with the help of amphetamine.

Rodrigo did go to school the day of the exam, and did sit down at his desk, and did get the multiple-choice exam sheet.

What he did not do was stay awake to take the exam. His body slumped forward, and his head hit the desk with a terrifying thud.

The exam had to be suspended for a while. The sociology teacher became hysterical, and so did the students sitting around Rodrigo. His body was stiff and icy cold. The whole class suspected the worst: They thought he had died of a heart attack. Paramedics were summoned to remove him. After a cursory examination, they pronounced Rodrigo profoundly asleep and took him to a hospital to sleep the effect of the amphetamines off.

My projection into Rodrigo Cummings was so total that it frightened me. I was exactly like him. The similarity became untenable to me. In an act of what I considered to be total, suicidal nihilism, I rented a room in a dilapidated hotel in Hollywood.

The carpets were green and had terrible cigarette burns that had obviously been snuffed out before they turned into full-fledged fires. It had green drapes and drab green walls. The blinking sign of the hotel shone all night through the window.

I ended up doing exactly what don Juan had requested, but in a roundabout way. I did not do it to fulfill any of don Juan's requirements or with the intention of patching up our differences. I did stay in that hotel room for months on end, until my person, like don Juan had proposed, died; or at least until it truthfully made no difference to me whether I had company or I was alone.

After leaving the hotel, I went to live alone, closer to school. I continued my studies of anthropology, which had never been interrupted, and I started a very profitable business with a lady partner.

Everything seemed perfectly in order until one day when the realization hit me like a kick in the head that I was going to spend the rest of my life worrying about my business, or worrying about the phantom choice between being an academic or a businessman, or worrying about my partner's foibles and shenanigans.

True desperation pierced the depths of my being. For the first time in my life, despite all the things that I had done and seen, I had no way out. I was completely lost. I seriously began to toy with the idea of the most pragmatic and painless way to end my days.

One morning, a loud and insistent knocking woke me up. I thought it was the landlady, and I was sure that if I did not answer, she would enter with her passkey.

I opened the door, and there was don Juan! I was so surprised that I was numb. I stammered and stuttered, incapable of saying a word. I wanted to kiss his hand, to kneel in front of him. Don Juan came in and sat down with great ease on the edge of my bed.

"I made the trip to Los Angeles," he said, "just to see you."

I wanted to take him to breakfast, but he said that he had other things to attend to, and that he had only a moment to talk to me. I hurriedly told him about my experience in the hotel. His presence had created such havoc that not for a second did it occur to me to ask him how he had found out where I lived. I told don Juan how intensely I regretted having said what I had in Hermosillo.

"You do not have to apologize," he assured me. "Every one of us does the same thing. Once, I ran away from the sorcerers' world myself, and I had to nearly die to realize my stupidity.

"The important issue is to arrive at a breaking point in whatever way, and that is exactly what you have done. Inner silence is becoming real for you. This is the reason I am here in front of you, talking to you. Do you see what I mean?"

I thought I understood what he meant. I thought that he had intuited or read, the way he read things in the air, that I was at my wits' end and that he had come to bail me out.

"You have no time to lose," he said. "You must dissolve your business enterprise within an hour, because one hour is all I can afford to wait- not because I do not want to wait, but because infinity is pressing me mercilessly. Let us say that infinity is giving you one hour to cancel yourself out.

"For infinity, the only worthwhile enterprise of a warrior is freedom. Any other enterprise is fraudulent. Can you dissolve everything in one hour?"

I did not have to assure him that I could. I knew that I had to do it. Don Juan told me then that once I had succeeded in dissolving everything, he was going to wait for me at the marketplace in a town in Mexico. In my effort to think about the dissolution of my business, I overlooked what he was saying. He repeated it and, of course, I thought he was joking.

"How can I reach that town, don Juan? Do you want me to drive, to take a plane?" I asked.

"Dissolve your business first," he commanded. "Then the solution will come. But remember, I will be waiting for you only for an hour."

He left the apartment, and I feverishly endeavored to dissolve everything I had. Naturally, it took me more than an hour, but I did not stop to consider this because once I had set the dissolution of the business in motion, its momentum carried me.

It was only when I was through that the real dilemma faced me. I knew then that I had failed hopelessly. I was left with no business, and no possibilities of ever reaching don Juan.

I went to my bed and sought the only solace I could think of: quietude; silence. In order to facilitate the advent of inner silence, don Juan had taught me a way to sit down on my bed, with the knees bent and the soles of the feet touching, the hands pushing the feet together by holding the ankles. He had given me a thick dowel that I always kept at hand wherever I went. It was cut to a fourteen-inch length to support the weight of my head if I leaned over and put the dowel on the floor between my feet, and then placed the other end, which was cushioned, on the spot in the middle of my forehead. Every time I adopted this position, I fell sound asleep in a matter of seconds.

I must have fallen asleep with my usual facility because I dreamed that I was in the Mexican town where don Juan had said he was going to meet me. I had always been intrigued by this town. The marketplace was open one day a week, and the farmers who lived in the area brought their products there to be sold.

What fascinated me the most about that town was the paved road that led to it. At the very entrance to the town, it went over a steep hill. I had sat many times on a bench by a stand that sold cheese, and had looked at that hill. I would see people who were coming into town with their donkeys and their loads, but I would see their heads first; as they kept approaching I would see more of their bodies, until the moment they were on the very top of the hill, when I would see their entire bodies. It seemed to me always that they were emerging from the earth, either slowly or very fast, depending on their speed.

In my dream, don Juan was waiting for me by the cheese stand. I approached him.

"You made it from your inner silence," he said, patting me on the back. "You did reach your breaking point. For a moment, I had begun to lose hope. But I stuck around, knowing that you would make it."

In that dream, we went for a stroll. I was happier than I had ever been. The dream was so vivid, so terrifyingly real, that it left me no doubts that I had resolved the problem, even if my resolving it was only a dream-fantasy.

Don Juan laughed, shaking his head. He had definitely read my thoughts. "You are not in a mere dream," he said, "but who am I to tell you that? You will know it yourself someday- that there are no dreams from inner silence- because you will choose to know it."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 2 - Chapter 11. The Measurements of Cognition.

'The end of an era' was, for don Juan, an accurate description of a process that shamans go through in dismantling the structure of the world they know in order to replace it with another way of understanding the world around them. Don Juan Matus, as a teacher, endeavored from the very instant we met to introduce me to the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico.

The term 'cognition' was, for me at that time, a bone of tremendous contention. I understood it as the process by which we recognize the world around us. Certain things fall within the realm of that process and are easily recognized by us all. Other things do not, and remain, therefore, as oddities, things for which we nave no adequate comprehension.

Don Juan maintained, from the start of our association, that the world of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico was different from ours; not in a shallow way, but different in the way in which the process of cognition was arranged.

He maintained that in our world, our cognition requires the interpretation of sensory data.

He said that the universe is composed of an infinite number of energy fields that exist in the universe at large as luminous filaments. Those luminous filaments act on man as an organism. The response of the organism is to turn those energy fields into sensory data. Sensory data is then interpreted, and that interpretation becomes our cognitive system.

My understanding of cognition forced me to believe that all humans respond to pressure from the world at large using a universal process; similar to language being a universal process.

I reasoned that, just as there is a different syntax for every language, naturally there must simply be a slightly different arrangement for every system of cognitive interpretation in the world.

What I desperately wanted don Juan to say was that their different cognitive system was the equivalent of having a different language but that it was a language nonetheless.

Don Juan's assertion that the shamans of ancient Mexico had a different cognitive system, however, was for me equivalent to saying that they had a different way of communicating that had nothing to do with language.

'The end of an era' meant to don Juan that the units of a foreign cognition were beginning to take hold. The units of my normal cognition, no matter how pleasant and rewarding I felt they had been for me, were beginning to fade. A grave moment in the life of a thinking man!

Perhaps my most cherished unit was my academic life. Unenlightened as I was, anything that threatened my academia I felt as a threat to the very core of my being; especially if the attack was veiled or unnoticed.

And so it happened with a professor in whom I had put all my trust, Professor Lorca.

I had enrolled in Professor Lorca's course on cognition because he was recommended to me as one of the most brilliant academics in existence.

Professor Lorca was rather handsome, with blond hair neatly combed to the side. His forehead was smooth, wrinkle-free, giving the appearance of someone who had never worried in his life. His clothes were extremely well tailored. He did not wear a tie; a feature that gave him a boyish look. He would put on a tie only to face important people.

On my memorable first class with Professor Lorca, I was bewildered and nervous at seeing how he paced back and forth for minutes that stretched themselves into an eternity for me. Professor Lorca kept on moving his thin, clenched lips up and down, adding immensities to the tension he was generating in that closed-window, stuffy room. Suddenly, he stopped walking. He stood in the center of the room, a few feet from where I was sitting, and, banging a carefully rolled newspaper on the podium, he began to talk.

"It will never be known..." he began.

Everyone in the room at once started anxiously taking notes.

"It will never be known," he repeated, "what a toad is feeling while he sits at the bottom of a pond and interprets the toad world around him." His voice carried a tremendous force and finality. "So, what do you think this thing is?" He waved the newspaper over his head.

He went on to read to the class an article in the newspaper in which the work of a biologist was reported. The scientist was quoted as describing what frogs felt when insects swam above their heads.

"This article shows the carelessness of the reporter, who has obviously misquoted the scientist," Professor Lorca asserted with the authority of a full professor.

"A scientist, no matter how shoddy his work might be, would never allow himself to anthropomorphize the results of his research, unless, of course, he is a nincompoop."

With this as an introduction, he delivered a most brilliant lecture on the insular quality of our cognitive system; or the cognitive system of any organism, for that matter.

He brought to me, in his initial lecture, a barrage of new ideas and made them extremely simple, ready for use.

The most novel idea to me was that every individual of every species on this earth interprets the world around it, using data reported by its specialized senses. He asserted that human beings cannot even imagine what it must be like, for example, to be in a world ruled by echolocation, as in the world of bats, where any inferred point of reference could not even be conceived of by the human mind.

He made it quite clear that, from that point of view, no two cognitive systems could be alike among species.

As I left the auditorium at the end of the hour and a half lecture, I felt that I had been bowled over by the brilliance of Professor Lorca's mind. From then on, I was his confirmed admirer. I found his lectures more than stimulating and thought provoking. His were the only lectures I had ever looked forward to attending. All his eccentricities meant nothing to me in comparison with his excellence as a teacher and as an innovative thinker in the realm of psychology.

When I first attended the class of Professor Lorca, I had been working with don Juan Matus for almost two years. It was a well established pattern of behavior with me, accustomed as I was to routines, to tell don Juan everything that happened to me in my everyday world.

On the first opportunity I had, I related to him what was taking place with Professor Lorca. I praised Professor Lorca to the skies and told don Juan unabashedly that Professor Lorca was my role model. Don Juan seemed very impressed with my display of genuine admiration, yet he gave me a strange warning.

"Do not admire people from afar," he said. "That is the surest way to create mythological beings. Get close to your professor, talk to him, see what he is like as a man. Test him. If your professor's behavior is the result of his conviction that he is a being who is going to die, then everything he does, no matter how strange, must be premeditated and final. If what he says turns out to be just words, he is not worth a hoot."

I was insulted no end by what I considered to be don Juan's callousness. I thought he was a little bit jealous of my feelings for Professor Lorca. Once that thought was formulated in my mind I felt relieved. I understood everything.

"Tell me, don Juan," I said to end the conversation on a different note, "what is a being that is going to die, really? I have heard you talk about it so many times, but you have not actually defined it for me."

"Human beings are beings that are going to die," he said.

"Sorcerers firmly maintain that the only way to have a grip on our world, and on what we do in it, is by fully accepting that we are beings on the way to dying. Without this basic acceptance, our lives, our doings, and the world in which we live are unmanageable affairs."

"But is the mere acceptance of this so far-reaching?" I asked in a tone of quasi-protest.

"You bet your life!" don Juan said, smiling. "However, it is not the mere acceptance that does the trick. We have to embody that acceptance and live it all the way through. Sorcerers throughout the ages have said that the view of our death is the most sobering view that exists.

What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we were never going to die- an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it: the sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our minds."

A most deadly juxtaposition of ideas had me mercilessly in its grip between don Juan's wisdom and Professor Lorca's knowledge. Both were difficult, obscure, all-encompassing, and most appealing. There was nothing for me to do except follow the course of events and go with them wherever they might take me.

I followed to the letter don Juan's suggestion about approaching Professor Lorca. I tried for the whole semester to get close to him; to talk to him. I went religiously to his office during his office hours, but he never seemed to have any time for me. But even though I could not speak to him, I admired him unbiasedly. I even accepted that he would never talk to me. It did not matter to me. What mattered were the ideas that I gathered from his magnificent classes.

I reported to don Juan all my intellectual findings. I had done extensive reading on cognition. Don Juan Matus urged me, more than ever, to establish direct contact with the source of my intellectual revolution.

"It is imperative that you speak to him," he said with a note of urgency in his voice. "Sorcerers do not admire people in a vacuum. They talk to them. They get to know them. They establish points of reference. They compare.

"What you are doing is a little bit infantile. You are admiring from a distance. It is very much like what happens to a man who is afraid of women. Finally, his gonads overrule his fear and compel him to worship the first woman who says 'hello' to him."

I tried doubly hard to approach Professor Lorca, but he was like an impenetrable fortress. When I talked to don Juan about my difficulties, he explained that sorcerers viewed any kind of activity with people, no matter how minute or unimportant, as a battlefield. In that battlefield, sorcerers performed their best magic; their best effort.

He assured me that the trick to being at ease in such situations, a thing that had never been my forte, was to face our opponents openly.

He expressed his abhorrence of timid souls who shy away from interaction to the point where even though they interact, they merely infer or deduce, in terms of their own psychological states, what is going on without actually perceiving what is really going on. They interact without ever being part of the interaction.

"Always look at the man who is involved in a tug of war with you," he continued. "Do not just pull the rope. Look up and see his eyes. You will know then that he is a man, just like you. No matter what he is saying, no matter what he is doing, he is shaking in his boots, just like you. A look like that renders the opponent helpless, if only for an instant. Deliver your blow then."

One day, luck was with me: I cornered Professor Lorca in the hall outside his office.

"Professor Lorca," I said, "do you have a free moment so I could talk to you?"

"Who in the hell are you?" he said with the most natural air, as if I were his best friend and he were merely asking me how I felt that day.

Professor Lorca was as rude as anyone could be, but his words did not have the effect of rudeness on me. He grinned at me with tight lips, as if encouraging me to leave or to say something meaningful.

"I am an anthropology student, Professor Lorca," I said. "I am involved in a field situation where I have the opportunity to learn about the cognitive system of sorcerers."

Professor Lorca looked at me with suspicion and annoyance. His eyes seemed to be two blue points filled with spite. He combed his hair backward with his hand, as if it had fallen on his face.

"I work with a real sorcerer in Mexico," I continued, trying to encourage a response. "He is a real sorcerer, mind you. It has taken me over a year just to warm him up so he would consent to talk to me."

Professor Lorca's face relaxed. He opened his mouth and, waving a most delicate hand in front of my eyes, as if he were twirling pizza dough with it, he spoke to me. I could not help noticing his enameled gold cuff links, which matched his greenish blazer to perfection.

"And what do you want from me?" he said.

"I want you to hear me out for a moment," I said, "and see if whatever I am doing may interest you."

He made a gesture of reluctance and resignation with his shoulders, opened the door of his office, and invited me to come in. I knew that I had no time at all to waste and I gave him a very direct description of my field situation. I told him that I was being taught procedures that had nothing to do with what I had found in the anthropological literature about shamanism.

He moved his lips for a moment without saying a word. When he spoke, he pointed out that the flaw of anthropologists in general had been that they never allow themselves sufficient time to become fully cognizant of all the nuances of the particular cognitive system used by the people they are studying.

He defined 'cognition' as a system of interpretation, which through usage makes it possible for individuals to utilize, with the utmost expertise, all the nuances of meaning that make up the particular social milieu under consideration.

Professor Lorca's words illuminated the total scope of my field-work. Without gaining command of all the nuances of the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico, it would have been thoroughly superfluous for me to formulate any idea about that world. If Professor Lorca had not said another word to me, what he had just voiced would have been more than sufficient. What followed was a marvelous discourse on cognition.

"Your problem," Professor Lorca said, "is that the cognitive system of our everyday world with which we are all familiar, virtually from the day we are born, is not the same as the cognitive system of the sorcerers' world."

This statement created a state of euphoria in me. I thanked Professor Lorca profusely, and assured him that there was only one course of action in my case: to follow his ideas through hell or high water.

"What I have told you, of course, is general knowledge," he said as he ushered me out of his office. "Anyone who reads is aware of what I have been telling you."

We parted almost friends. My account to don Juan of my success in approaching Professor Lorca was met with a strange reaction. Don Juan seemed, on the one hand, to be elated, and on the other, concerned.

"I have the feeling that your professor is not quite what he claims to be," he said. "That is, of course, from a sorcerer's point of view. Perhaps it would be wise to quit now, before all this becomes too involved and consuming. One of the high arts of sorcerers is to know when to stop. It appears to me that you have gotten from your professor all you can get from him."

I immediately reacted with a barrage of defenses on behalf of Professor Lorca. Don Juan calmed me down. He said that it was not his intention to criticize or judge anybody, but that to his knowledge, very few people knew when to quit, and even fewer knew how to actually utilize their knowledge.

In spite of don Juan's warnings, I did not quit. Instead, I became Professor Lorca's faithful student, follower, and admirer. He seemed to take a genuine interest in my work, although he felt frustrated no end with my reluctance and inability to formulate clear-cut concepts about the cognitive system of the sorcerers' world.

One day, Professor Lorca formulated for me the concept of the scientist-visitor to another cognitive world. He conceded that he was willing to be open-minded, and as a social scientist toy with the possibility of a different cognitive system.

He envisioned an actual research in which protocols would be gathered and analyzed. Problems of cognition would be devised and given to the shamans I knew to measure, for instance, their capacity to focus their cognition on two diverse aspects of behavior. He thought that the test would begin with a simple paradigm in which they would try to comprehend and retain written text that they read while they played poker. The test would escalate, to measure, for instance, their capacity to focus their cognition on complex things that were being said to them while they slept, and so on. Professor Lorca wanted a linguistic analysis to be performed on the shamans' utterances. He wanted an actual measurement of their responses in terms of their speed and accuracy, and other variables that would become prevalent as the project progressed.

Don Juan veritably laughed his head off when I told him about Professor Lorca's proposed measurements of the cognition of shamans.

"Now, I truly like your professor," he said. "But you can not be serious about this idea of measuring our cognition. What could your professor get out of measuring our responses? He will get the conviction that we are a bunch of morons, because that is what we are. We cannot possibly be more intelligent, faster than the average man.

"It is not his fault, though, to believe he can make measurements of cognition across worlds. The fault is yours. You have failed to express to your professor that when sorcerers talk about the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico they are talking about things for which we have no equivalent in the world of everyday life.

"For instance, perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe is a unit of cognition that shamans live by. They see how energy flows, and they follow its flow.

"If its flow is obstructed, they move away to do something entirely different. Shamans see lines in the universe. Their art, or their job, is to choose the line that will take them perception-wise to regions that have no name. You can say that shamans react immediately to the lines of the universe. They see human beings as luminous balls, and they search in them for their flow of energy. Naturally, they react instantly to this sight. It is part of their cognition."

I told don Juan that I could not possibly talk about all this to Professor Lorca because I had not done any of the things that he was describing. My cognition had remained the same.

"Ah!" he exclaimed. "It is simply that you have not had the time yet to embody the units of cognition of the shamans' world."

I left don Juan's house more confused than ever. There was a voice inside me that virtually demanded that I end all endeavors with Professor Lorca.

I understood how right don Juan was when he said to me once that the practicalities that scientists were interested in were conducive to building more and more complex machines.

They were not the practicalities that changed an individual's life course from within. They were not geared to reaching the vastness of the universe as a personal, experiential affair.

The stupendous machines in existence, or those in the making, were cultural affairs, the attainment of which had to be enjoyed vicariously, even by the creators of those machines themselves. The only reward for them was monetary.

In pointing out all of that to me, don Juan had succeeded in placing me in a more inquisitive frame of mind. I really began to question the ideas of Professor Lorca, something I had never done before. Meanwhile, Professor Lorca kept spouting astounding truths about cognition. Each declaration was more severe than the preceding one and, therefore, more incisive.

At the end of my second semester with Professor Lorca, I had reached an impasse. Don Juan's and Professor Lorca's ideas were on parallel tracks, and there was no way on earth for me to bridge the two lines of thought.

I understood Professor Lorca's drive to qualify and quantify the study of cognition. Cybernetics was just around the corner at that time, and that practical aspect of the studies of cognition was a reality.

But don Juan's world was also a reality, though it was one which could not be measured with the standard tools of cognition. I had been privileged to witness it, in don Juan's actions, but I had not experienced it myself. I felt that that was the drawback that made bridging those two worlds impossible.

I told all this to don Juan on one of my visits to him. He said that what I considered to be my drawback, and therefore the factor that made bridging these two worlds impossible, was not accurate. In his opinion, the flaw was something more encompassing than one man's individual circumstances.

"Perhaps you can recall what I said to you about one of our biggest flaws as average human beings," he said.

I could not recall anything in particular. He had pointed out so many flaws that plagued us as average human beings that my mind reeled.

"You want something specific," I said, "and I can not think of it."

"The big flaw I am talking about," he said, "is something you ought to bear in mind every second of your existence. For me, it is the issue of issues, which I will repeat to you over and over until it comes out of your ears."

After a long moment, I gave up any further attempt to remember.

"We are beings on our way to dying," he said. "We are not immortal, but we behave as if we were. This is the flaw that brings us down as individuals and will bring us down as a species someday."

Don Juan stated that the sorcerers' advantage over their average fellow men is that sorcerers know that they are beings on their way to dying and they do not let themselves deviate from that knowledge. He emphasized that an enormous effort must be employed in order to elicit and maintain this knowledge as a total certainty.

"Why is it so hard for us to admit something that is so truthful?" I asked, bewildered by the magnitude of our internal contradiction.

"It is really not man's fault," he said in a conciliatory tone. "Someday, I will tell you more about the forces that drive a man to act like an ass."

There was not anything else to say. The silence that followed was ominous. I did not even want to know what the forces were that don Juan was referring to.

"It is no great feat for me to assess your professor at a distance," don Juan went on. "He is an immortal scientist. He is never going to die. And when it comes to any concerns about dying, I am sure that he has taken care of them already. He has a plot to be buried in, and a hefty life insurance policy that will take care of his family. Having fulfilled those two mandates, he does not think about death anymore. He thinks only about his work.

"Professor Lorca makes sense when he talks," don Juan continued, "because he is prepared to use words accurately. But he is not prepared to take himself seriously as a man who is going to die. Being immortal, he would not know how to do that.

"It makes no difference what complex machines scientists can build. The machines can in no way help anyone face the unavoidable appointment: the appointment with infinity.

"The nagual Julian used to tell me," he went on, "about the conquering generals of ancient Rome. When they would return home victorious, gigantic parades were staged to honor them.

"Displaying the treasures that they had won, and the defeated people that they had turned into slaves, the conquerors paraded; riding in their war chariots. Riding with them was always a slave whose job was to whisper in their ear that all fame and glory is but transitory.

"If we are victorious in any way," don Juan went on, "we do not have anyone to whisper in our ear that our victories are fleeting.

"Sorcerers, however, do have the upper hand. As beings on their way to dying, they have someone whispering in their ear that everything is ephemeral. The whisperer is death; the infallible adviser; the only one who will not ever tell you a lie."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 2 - Chapter 12. Saying Thank You.

"Warrior travelers do not leave any debts unpaid," don Juan said.

"What are you talking about, don Juan?" I asked.

"It is time that you square certain indebtedness you have incurred in the course of your life," he said. "Not that you will ever pay in full, mind you, but you must make a gesture. You must make a token payment in order to atone; in order to appease infinity.

"You told me about your two friends who meant so much to you, Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan. It is time for you to go and find them, and to make to each of them one gift in which you spend everything you have. You have to make two gifts that will leave you penniless. That is the gesture."

"I do not know where they are, don Juan," I said, almost in a mood of protest.

"To find them is your challenge. In your search for them, you will not leave any stone unturned.

"What you intend to do is something very simple, and yet nearly impossible. You want to cross over the threshold of personal indebtedness and in one sweep be free in order to proceed. If you cannot cross that threshold, there will not be any point in trying to continue with me."

"But where did you get the idea of this task for me?" I asked. "Did you invent it yourself because you think it is appropriate?"

"I do not invent anything," he said matter-of-factly. "I got this task from infinity itself. It is not easy for me to say all this to you. If you think that I am enjoying myself pink with your tribulations, you are wrong.

"The success of your mission means more to me than it does to you. If you fail, you have very little to lose. What? Your visits to me. Big deal. But I would lose you, and that means to me losing either the continuity of my lineage or the possibility of your closing it with a golden key."

Don Juan stopped talking. He always knew when my mind became feverish with thoughts.

"I have told you over and over that warrior travelers are pragmatists," he went on. "They are not involved in sentimentalism, or nostalgia, or melancholy. For warrior travelers, there is only struggle, and it is a struggle with no end.

"If you think that you have come here to find peace, or that this is a lull in your life, you are wrong. This task of paying your debts is not guided by any feelings that you know about. It is guided by the purest sentiment; the sentiment of a warrior traveler who is about to dive into infinity. And just before he does, he turns around to say thank you to those who favored him.

"You must face this task with all the gravity it deserves," he continued. "It is your last stop before infinity swallows you. In fact, unless a warrior traveler is in a sublime state of being, infinity will not touch him with a ten foot pole. So, do not spare yourself. Do not spare any effort. Push it mercilessly, but elegantly, all the way through."

I had met the two people don Juan had referred to as 'my two friends who meant so much to me' while going to junior college. I used to live in the garage apartment of the house belonging to Patricia Turner's parents.

In exchange for room and board, I took care of vacuuming the pool, raking the leaves, putting the trash out, and making breakfast for Patricia and myself. I was also the handyman in the house as well as the family chauffeur. I drove Mrs. Turner to do her shopping, and I bought liquor for Mr. Turner, which I had to sneak into the house and then into his studio.

He was an insurance executive who was a solitary drinker. He had promised his family that he was not going to touch the bottle ever again after some serious family altercations due to his excessive drinking.

He confessed to me that he had tapered off enormously, but that he needed a swig from time to time. His studio was, of course, off limits to everybody except me. I was supposed to go in to clean it, but what I really did was hide his bottles inside a beam that appeared to support an arch in the ceiling in the studio, but that was actually hollow. I had to sneak the bottles in, and sneak the empties out and dump them at the market.

Patricia was a drama and music major in college and a fabulous singer. Her goal was to sing in musicals on Broadway. It goes without saying that I fell head over heels in love with Patricia Turner. She was very slim and athletic, a brunette with angular features, and was about a head taller than I am; my ultimate requisite for going bananas over any woman.

I seemed to fulfill a deep need in her; the need to nurture someone, especially after she realized that her daddy trusted me implicitly. She became my little mommy. I could not even open my mouth without her consent. She watched me like a hawk. She even wrote term papers for me, read textbooks, and gave me synopses of them.

And I liked it, but not because I wanted to be nurtured. I do not think that that need was ever part of my cognition. I relished the fact that she did it. I relished her company.

She used to take me to the movies daily. She had passes to all the big movie theaters in Los Angeles that had been given to her father courtesy of some movie moguls. Mr. Turner never used them himself. He felt that it was beneath his dignity to flash movie passes.

The movie clerks always made the recipients of such passes sign a receipt. Patricia had no qualms about signing anything, but sometimes the nasty clerks wanted Mr. Turner to sign. When I went to do that, they were not satisfied with only the signature of Mr. Turner. They demanded a driver's license.

One of them, a sassy young guy, made a remark that cracked him up, and me, too, but which sent Patricia into a fit of fury.

"I think you are Mr. Turd," he said with the nastiest smile you could imagine, "not Mr. Turner."

I could have sloughed off the remark, but then he subjected us to the profound humiliation of refusing us entrance to see Hercules starring Steve Reeves.

Usually, we went everywhere with Patricia's best friend, Sandra Flanagan, who lived next door with her parents. Sandra was quite the opposite of Patricia. She was just as tall, but her face was round, with rosy cheeks and a sensuous mouth. She was healthier than a raccoon.

She had no interest in singing. She was only interested in the sensual pleasures of the body. She could eat and drink anything and digest it; and the feature that finished me off about her was that after she had polished off her own plate, she managed to do the same with mine; a thing that, being a picky eater, I had never been able to do in all my life.

She was also extremely athletic, but in a rough, wholesome way. She could punch like a man and kick like a mule.

As a courtesy to Patricia, I used to do the same chores for Sandra's parents that I did for hers: vacuuming their pool, raking the leaves from their lawn, taking the trash out on trash day, and incinerating papers and flammable trash. That was the time in Los Angeles when the air pollution was increased by the use of backyard incinerators.

Perhaps it was because of the proximity, or the ease of those young women that I ended up madly in love with both of them.

I went to seek advice from a very strange young man who was my friend; Nicholas van Hooten. He had two girlfriends, and he lived with both of them; apparently in a state of bliss. He began by giving me, he said, the simplest advice: how to behave in a movie theater if you had two girlfriends.

He said that whenever he went to a movie with his two girlfriends, all his attention was always centered on whoever sat to his left. After a while, the two girls would go to the bathroom and, on their return, he would have them change the seating arrangement. Anna would sit where Betty had been sitting, and nobody around them was the wiser.

He assured me that this was the first step in a long process of breaking the girls into a matter-of-fact acceptance of the trio situation; Nicholas was rather corny, and he used the trite French expression 'menage a trois'.

I followed his advice and went to a theater that showed silent movies on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles with Patricia and Sandy. I sat Patricia to my left and poured all my attention on her. They went to the bathroom, and when they returned I told them to switch places. I started then to do what Nicholas van Hooten had advised, but Patricia would not put up with any nonsense like that. She stood up and left the theater, offended, humiliated, and raving mad. I wanted to run after her and apologize, but Sandra stopped me.

"Let her go," she said with a poisonous smile. "She is a big girl. She has enough money to get a taxi and go home."

I fell for it and remained in the theater kissing Sandra, rather nervously, and filled with guilt. I was in the middle of a passionate kiss when I felt someone pulling me backward by the hair. It was Patricia. The row of seats was loose and tilted backward. Athletic Patricia jumped out of the way before the seats where we were sitting crashed on the row of seats behind. I heard the frightened screams of two movie watchers who were sitting at the end of the row, by the aisle.

Nicholas van Hooten's tip was miserable advice. Patricia, Sandra, and I returned home in absolute silence. We patched up our differences, in the midst of very weird promises, tears- the works.

The outcome of our three sided relationship was that, in the end, we nearly destroyed ourselves. We were not prepared for such an endeavor. We did not know how to resolve the problems of affection, morality, duty, and social mores.

I could not leave one of them for the other, and they could not leave me. One day, at the climax of a tremendous upheaval, and out of sheer desperation, all three of us fled in different directions, never to see one another again.

I felt devastated. Nothing of what I did could erase their impact on my life. I left Los Angeles and got busy with endless things in an effort to placate my longing.

Without exaggerating in the least, I can sincerely say that I fell into the depths of hell- I believed- never to emerge again.

If it had not been for the influence that don Juan had on my life and my person, I would never have survived my private demons. I told don Juan that I knew that whatever I had done was wrong; that I had no business engaging such wonderful people in such sordid, stupid shenanigans that I had no preparation to face.

"What was wrong," don Juan said, "was that the three of you were lost egomaniacs. Your self-importance nearly destroyed you. If you do not have self-importance, you have only feelings.

"Humor me," he went on, "and do the following simple and direct exercise that could mean the world to you: Remove from your memory of those two girls any statements that you make to yourself such as 'She said this or that to me, and she yelled, and the other one yelled, at me!' and remain at the level of your feelings. If you had not been so self-important, what would you have had as the irreducible residue?"

"My unbiased love for them," I said, nearly choking.

"And is it less today than it was then?" don Juan asked.

"No, it is not, don Juan," I said in truthfulness, and I felt the same pang of anguish that had chased me for years.

"This time, embrace them from your silence," he said. "Do not be a meager asshole. Embrace them totally for the last time. But intend that this is the last time on Earth. Intend it from your darkness. If you are worth your salt," he went on, "when you make your gift to them, you will sum up your entire life twice. Acts of this nature make warriors airborne, almost vaporous."

Following don Juan's commands, I took the task to heart. I realized that if I did not emerge victorious, don Juan was not the only one who was going to lose out. I would also lose something, and whatever I was going to lose was as important to me as what don Juan had described as being important to him. I was going to lose my chance to face infinity and be conscious of it.

The memory of Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan put me in a terrible frame of mind. The devastating sense of irreparable loss that had chased me all these years was as vivid as ever. When don Juan exacerbated that feeling, I knew for a fact that there are certain things that can remain with us, in don Juan's terms, for life and perhaps beyond. I had to find Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan.

Don Juan's final recommendation was that if I did find them, I could not stay with them. I could have time only to atone; to envelop each of them with all the affection I felt; without the angry voices of recrimination, self-pity, or egomania.

I embarked on the colossal task of finding out what had become of them, where they were. I began by asking questions of the people who knew their parents. Their parents had moved out of Los Angeles, and nobody could give me a lead as to where to find them. There was no one to talk to. I thought of putting a personal ad in the paper. But then I thought that perhaps they had moved out of California. I finally had to hire a private investigator. Through his connections with official offices of records and whatnot, he located them within a couple of weeks.

They lived in New York, a short distance from one other, and their friendship was as close as it had ever been. I went to New York and tackled Patricia Turner first. She had not made it to stardom on Broadway the way she had wanted to, but she was part of a production. I did not want to know whether it was in the capacity of a performer or as management.

I visited her in her office. She did not tell me what she did. She was shocked to see me. What we did was just sit together and hold hands and weep. I did not tell her what I did either. I said that I had come to see her because I wanted to give her a gift that would express my gratitude, and that I was embarking on a journey from which I did not intend to come back.

"Why such ominous words?" she asked, apparently genuinely alarmed. "What are you planning to do? Are you ill? You do not look ill."

"It was a metaphorical statement," I assured her. "I am going back to South America, and I intend to seek my fortune there. The competition is ferocious, and the circumstances are very harsh, that is all. If I want to succeed, I will have to give all I have to it."

She seemed relieved, and hugged me. She looked the same, except much bigger, much more powerful, more mature, very elegant. I kissed her hands and the most overwhelming affection enveloped me. Don Juan was right. Deprived of recriminations, all I had were feelings.

"I want to make you a gift, Patricia Turner," I said. "Ask me anything you want, and if it is within my means, I will get it for you."

"Did you strike it rich?" she said and laughed. "What is great about you is that you never had anything, and you never will. Sandra and I talk about you nearly every day. We imagine you parking cars, living off women, et cetera, et cetera. I am sorry, we can not help ourselves, but we still love you."

I insisted that she tell me what she wanted. She began to weep and laugh at the same time.

"Are you going to buy me a mink coat?" she asked me between sobs.

I ruffled her hair and said that I would.

"If you do not like it, you take it back to the store and get the money back," I said.

She laughed and punched me the way she used to. She had to go back to work, and we parted after I promised her that I would come back again to see her, but that if I did not, I wanted her to understand that the force of my life was pulling me every which way, yet I would keep the memory of her in me for the rest of my life and perhaps beyond.

I did return, but only to see from a distance how they delivered the mink coat to her. I heard her screams of delight.

That part of my task was finished. I left, but I was not vaporous, the way don Juan had said I was going to be. I had opened up an old wound and it had started to bleed.

It was not quite raining outside: It was a fine mist that seemed to penetrate all the way to the marrow of my bones.

Next, I went to see Sandra Flanagan. She lived in one of the suburbs of New York that is reached by train. I knocked on her door. Sandra opened it and looked at me as if I were a ghost. All the color drained out of her face. She was more beautiful than ever, perhaps because she had filled out and looked as big as a house.

"Why, you, you, you!" she stammered, not quite capable of articulating my name.

She sobbed, and she seemed indignant and reproachful for a moment. I did not give her the chance to continue. My silence was total. In the end, it affected her. She let me in and we sat down in her living room.

"What are you doing here?" she said, quite a bit calmer. "You can not stay! I am a married woman! I have three children! And I am very happy in my marriage."

Shooting her words out rapidly, like a machine gun, she told me that her husband was very dependable, not too imaginative but a good man, that he was not sensual, that she had to be very careful because he tired very easily when they made love, that he got sick easily and sometimes could not go to work, but that he had managed to produce three beautiful children, and that after her third child, her husband, whose name seemed to be Herbert, had just simply quit. He did not have it anymore, but it did not matter to her.

I tried to calm her down by assuring her over and over that I had come to visit her only for a moment, that it was not my intention to alter her life or to bother her in any way. I described to her how hard it had been to find her.

"I have come here to say good-bye to you," I said, "and to tell you that you are the love of my life. I want to make you a token gift, a symbol of my gratitude and my undying affection."

She seemed to be deeply affected. She smiled openly the way she used to. The separation between her teeth made her look childlike. I commented to her that she was more beautiful than ever, which was the truth to me.

She laughed and said that she was going on a strict diet, and if she had known that I was coming to see her, she would have started her diet a long time ago. But she would start now, and I would find her the next time as lean as she had always been.

She reiterated the horror of our life together and how profoundly affected she had been. She had even thought, in spite of being a devout Catholic, of committing suicide, but she had found in her children the solace that she needed. Whatever we had done were quirks of youth that would never be vacuumed away, but had to be swept under the rug.

When I asked if there was some gift that I could make to her as a token of my gratitude and affection for her, she laughed and said exactly what Patricia Turner had said: that I did not have a pot to piss in, nor would I ever have one, because that is the way I was made. I insisted that she name something.

"Can you buy me a station wagon where all my children could fit?" she said, laughing. "I want a Pontiac, or an Oldsmobile, with all the trimmings."

She said that knowing in her heart of hearts that I could not possibly make her such a gift. But I did.

I drove the dealer's car, following him as he delivered the station wagon to her the next day, and from the parked car where I was hiding, I heard her surprise.

But congruous with her sensual being, her surprise was not an expression of delight. It was a bodily reaction, a sob of anguish, of bewilderment. She cried, but I knew that she was not crying because she had received the gift. She was expressing a longing that had echoes in me. I crumpled in the seat of the car.

On my train ride to New York, and my flight to Los Angeles, the feeling that persisted was that my life was running out: It was running out of me like clutched sand. I did not feel in any way liberated or changed by saying thank you and good-bye.

Quite the contrary, I felt the burden of that weird affection more deeply than ever. I felt like weeping. What ran through my mind over and over were the titles that my friend Rodrigo Cummings had invented for books that were never to be written. He specialized in writing titles.

His favorite was "We will All Die in Hollywood". Another was "We will Never Change". And my favorite, the one that I bought for ten dollars, was "From the Life and Sins of Rodrigo Cummings." All those titles played in my mind. I was Rodrigo Cummings, and I was stuck in time and space, and I did love two women more than my life, and that would never change. And like the rest of my friends, I would die in Hollywood.

I told don Juan all of this in my report of what I considered to be my pseudo-success. He discarded it shamelessly. He said that what I felt was merely the result of indulging and self-pity, and that in order to say good-bye and thank you, and really mean it and sustain it, sorcerers had to remake themselves.

"Vanquish your self-pity right now," he demanded. "Vanquish the idea that you are hurt and what do you have as the irreducible residue?"

What I had as the irreducible residue was the feeling that I had made my ultimate gift to both of them. Not in the spirit of renewing anything, or harming anyone, including myself, but in the true spirit that don Juan had tried to point out to me- in the spirit of a warrior traveler whose only virtue, as he had said, is to keep alive the memory of whatever has affected him; whose only way to say thank you and good-bye was by this act of magic: of storing in his silence whatever he has loved.