The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 3 - Chapter 13. The Usher.

I was in don Juan's house in Sonora, sound asleep in my bed, when he woke me up. I had stayed up practically all night, mulling over concepts that he had explained to me.

"You have rested enough," he said firmly, almost gruffly, as he shook me by the shoulders. "Do not indulge in being fatigued. Your fatigue is more than fatigue. Its a desire not to be bothered. Something in you resents being bothered. But it is most important that you exacerbate that part of you until it breaks down. Let us go for a hike."

Don Juan was right. There was some part of me that resented immensely being bothered. I wanted to sleep for days and not think about don Juan's sorcery concepts anymore. Thoroughly against my will, I got up and followed him. Don Juan had prepared a meal, which I devoured as if I had not eaten for days, and then we walked out of the house and headed east, toward the mountains. I had been so dazed that I had not noticed that it was early morning until I saw the sun, which was right above the eastern range of mountains. I wanted to comment to don Juan that I had slept all night without moving, but he hushed me. He said that we were going to go on an expedition to the mountains to search for specific plants.

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

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

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

"No, he is not a Yaqui, and he does not live here in Sonora. You will meet him someday."

"Is he a sorcerer, don Juan?"

"Yes, he is," he replied dryly.

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

"Surely, surely!" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On my next visit to his house, I told don Juan that I had been meticulously going through the events of my life, and that it was very difficult for me to adhere to his strict format and follow my list of persons one by one. Ordinarily, my recapitulation took me every which way. I let the events decide the direction of my recollection.

What I did, which was volitional, was to adhere to a general unit of time. For instance, I had begun with the people in the anthropology department, but I let my recollection pull me to anywhere in time, from the present to the day I started attending school at UCLA.

I told don Juan that an odd thing I found out, which I had completely forgotten, was that I had no idea that UCLA existed until one night when my girlfriend's roommate from college came to Los Angeles and we picked her up at the airport. She was going to study musicology at UCLA.

Her plane arrived in the early evening, and she asked me if I could take her to the campus so she could take a look at the place where she was going to spend the next four years of her life. I knew where the campus was, for I had driven past its entrance on Sunset Boulevard endless times on my way to the beach. I had never been on the campus, though.

It was during the semester break. The few people that we found directed us to the music department. The campus was deserted, but what I witnessed subjectively was the most exquisite thing I have ever seen. It was a delight to my eyes. The buildings seemed to be alive with some energy of their own.

What was going to be a very cursory visit to the music department turned out to be a gigantic tour of the entire campus. I fell in love with UCLA. I mentioned to don Juan that the only thing that marred my ecstasy was my girlfriend's annoyance at my insistence on walking through the huge campus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then don Juan delineated the intricacies of awareness and perception, which were the basis of the recapitulation. He began by saying that he was going to present an arrangement of concepts that I should not take as sorcerers' 'theories' under any conditions, because it was an arrangement formulated by the shamans of ancient Mexico as a result of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe.

He warned me that he would present the units of this arrangement to me without any attempt at classifying them or ranking them by any predetermined standard.

"I am not interested in classifications," he went on. "You have been classifying everything all your life. Now you are going to be forced to stay away from classifications.

"The other day, when I asked you if you knew anything about clouds, you gave me the names of all the clouds and the percentage of moisture that one should expect from each one of them. You were a veritable weatherman. But when I asked you if you knew what you could do with the clouds personally, you had no idea what I was talking about.

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

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

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

Don Juan asserted that on the assemblage point of human beings, zillions of energy fields from the universe at large, in the form of luminous filaments, converge and go through it. These energy fields are converted into sensory data, and the sensory data is then interpreted and perceived as the world we know.

Don Juan further explained that what turns the luminous fibers into sensory data is the dark sea of awareness. Sorcerers see this transformation and call it the glow of awareness; a sheen that extends like a halo around the assemblage point. He warned me then that he was going to make a statement which, in the understanding of sorcerers, was central to comprehending the scope of the recapitulation.

Putting an enormous emphasis on his words, he said that what we call the senses in organisms is nothing but degrees of awareness. He maintained that if we accept that the senses are the dark sea of awareness, we have to admit that the interpretation that the senses make of sensory data is also the dark sea of awareness.

He explained at length that to face the world around us in the terms that we do is the result of the interpretation system of mankind with which every human being is equipped. He also said that every organism in existence has to have an interpretation system that permits it to function in its surroundings.

"The sorcerers who came after the apocalyptic upheavals I told you about," he continued, "saw that at the moment of death, the dark sea of awareness sucked in, so to speak, through the assemblage point, the awareness of living creatures. They also saw that the dark sea of awareness had a moment's, let us say, hesitation when it was faced with sorcerers who had done a recounting of their lives. Unbeknownst to them, some had done it so thoroughly that the dark sea of awareness took their awareness in the form of their life experiences, but did not touch their life force.

Sorcerers had found out a gigantic truth about the forces of the universe: The dark sea of awareness wants only our life experiences, not our life force."

The premises of don Juan's elucidation were incomprehensible to me. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I was vaguely and yet deeply cognizant of how functional the premises of his explanation were.

"Sorcerers believe," don Juan went on, "that as we recapitulate our lives, all the debris, as I told you, comes to the surface. We realize our inconsistencies, our repetitions, but something in us puts up a tremendous resistance to recapitulating. Sorcerers say that the road is free only after a gigantic upheaval, after the appearance on our screen of the memory of an event that shakes our foundations with its terrifying clarity of detail. It is the event that drags us to the actual moment that we lived it. Sorcerers call that event the usher, because from then on every event we touch on is relived, not merely remembered.

"Walking is always something that precipitates memories," don Juan went on. "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed that everything we live we store as a sensation on the backs of the legs. They considered the backs of the legs to be the warehouse of man's personal history. So, let us go for a walk in the hills now." We walked until it was almost dark.

"I think I have made you walk long enough," don Juan said when we were back at his house, "to have you ready to begin this sorcerers' maneuver of finding an usher: an event in your life that you will remember with such clarity that it will serve as a spotlight to illuminate everything else in your recapitulation with the same, or comparable, clarity.

"Do what sorcerers call recapitulating pieces of a puzzle. Something will lead you to remember the event that will serve as your usher."

He left me alone, giving me one last warning. "Give it your best shot," he said. "Do your best."

I was extremely silent for a moment, perhaps due to the silence around me. I experienced, then, a vibration, a sort of jolt in my chest. I had difficulty breathing, but suddenly something opened up in my chest that allowed me to take a deep breath, and a total view of a forgotten event of my childhood burst into my memory, as if it had been held captive and was suddenly released.

I was at my grandfather's studio, where he had a billiard table, and I was playing billiards with him. I was almost nine years old then. My grandfather was quite a skillful player, and compulsively he had taught me every play he knew until I was good enough to have a serious match with him. We spent endless hours playing billiards. I became so proficient at it that one day I defeated him. From that day on, he was incapable of winning. Many a time I deliberately threw the game, just to be nice to him, but he knew it and would become furious with me. Once, he got so upset that he hit me on the top of the head with the cue.

To my grandfather's chagrin and delight, by the time I was nine years old, I could make carom after carom without stopping. He became so frustrated and impatient in a game with me once that he threw down his cue and told me to play by myself. My compulsive nature made it possible for me to compete with myself and work the same play on and on until I got it perfectly.

One day, a man notorious in town for his gambling connections, the owner of a billiards house, came to visit my grandfather. They were talking and playing billiards as I happened to enter the room. I instantly tried to retreat, but my grandfather grabbed me and pulled me in.

"This is my grandson," he said to the man.

"Very pleased to meet you," the man said. He looked at me sternly, and then extended his hand, which was the size of the head of a normal person.

I was horrified. His enormous burst of laughter told me that he was cognizant of my discomfort. He told me that his name was Falelo Quiroga, and I mumbled my name.

He was very tall, and extremely well dressed. He was wearing a double-breasted blue pinstriped suit with beautifully tapered trousers. He must have been in his early fifties then, but he was trim and fit except for a slight bulge in his midsection. He was not fat; he seemed to cultivate the look of a man who is well fed and is not in need of anything. Most of the people in my hometown were gaunt. They were people who labored hard to earn a living and had no time for niceties. Falelo Quiroga appeared to be the opposite. His whole demeanor was that of a man who had time only for niceties.

He was pleasant-looking. He had a bland, well-shaven face with kind blue eyes. He had the air and the confidence of a doctor. People in my town used to say that he was capable of putting anyone at ease, and that he should have been a priest, a lawyer, or a doctor instead of a gambler. They also used to say that he made more money gambling than all the doctors and lawyers in town put together made by working.

His hair was black, and carefully combed. It was obviously thinning considerably. He tried to hide his receding hairline by combing his hair over his forehead. He had a square jaw and an absolutely winning smile. He had big, white teeth, which were well cared for; the ultimate novelty in an area where tooth decay was monumental. Two other remarkable features of Falelo Quiroga, for me, were his enormous feet and his handmade, black patent-leather shoes. I was fascinated by the fact that his shoes did not squeak at all as he walked back and forth in the room. I was accustomed to hearing my grandfather's approach by the squeak of the soles of his shoes.

"My grandson plays billiards very well," my grandfather said nonchalantly to Falelo Quiroga. "Why do I not give him my cue and let him play with you while I watch?""

"This child plays billiards?" the big man asked my grandfather with a laugh.

"Oh, he does," my grandfather assured him. "Of course, not as well as you do, Falelo. Why do you not try him? And to make it interesting for you, so you will not be patronizing my grandson, let us bet a little money. What do you say if we bet this much?"

He put a thick wad of crumpled-up bills on the table and smiled at Falelo Quiroga, shaking his head from side to side as if daring the big man to take his bet.

"My oh my, that much, eh?" Falelo Quiroga said, looking at me questioningly. He opened his wallet then and pulled out some neatly folded bills. This, for me, was another surprising detail. My grandfather's habit was to carry his money in every one of his pockets, all crumpled up. When he needed to pay for something, he had to straighten out the bills in order to count them.

Falelo Quiroga did not say it, but I knew that he felt like a highway robber. He smiled at my grandfather and, obviously out of respect for him, he put his money on the table. My grandfather, acting as the arbiter, set the game at a certain number of caroms and flipped a coin to see who would start first. Falelo Quiroga won.

"You better give it all you have, without holding back," my grandfather urged him. "Do not have any qualms about demolishing this twerp and winning my money!"

Falelo Quiroga, following my grandfather's advice, played as hard as he was able, but at one point he missed one carom by a hair. I took the cue. I thought I was going to faint, but seeing my grandfather's glee- he was jumping up and down- calmed me, and besides, it irked me to see Falelo Quiroga about to split his sides laughing when he saw the way I held the cue. I could not lean over the table, as billiards is normally played, because of my height. But my grandfather, with painstaking patience and determination, had taught me an alternative way of playing. By extending my arm all the way back, I held the cue nearly above my shoulders, to the side.

"What does he do when he has to reach the middle of the table?" Falelo Quiroga asked, laughing.

"He hangs on the edge of the table," my grandfather said matter-of-factly. "It is permissible, you know."

My grandfather came to me and whispered through clenched teeth that if I tried to be polite and lose he was going to break all the cues on my head. I knew he did not mean it. This was just his way of expressing his confidence in me.

I won easily. My grandfather was delighted beyond description, but strangely enough, so was Falelo Quiroga. He laughed as he went around the pool table, slapping its edges. My grandfather praised me to the skies. He revealed to Quiroga my best score, and joked that I had excelled because he had found the way to lure me to practice: coffee with Danish pastries.

"You do not say, you do not say!" Quiroga kept repeating. He said good-bye; my grandfather picked up the bet money, and the incident was forgotten. My grandfather promised to take me to a restaurant and buy me the best meal in town, but he never did. He was very stingy. He was known to be a lavish spender only with women.

Two days later, two enormous men affiliated with Falelo Quiroga came to me at the time that I got out from school and was leaving.

"Falelo Quiroga wants to see you," one of them said in a guttural tone. "He wants you to go to his place and have some coffee and Danish pastries with him."

If he had not said coffee and Danish pastries, I probably would have run away from them. I remembered then that my grandfather had told Falelo Quiroga that I would sell my soul for coffee and Danish pastries. I gladly went with them. However, I could not walk as fast as they did, so one of them, the one whose name was Guillermo Falcon, picked me up and cradled me in his huge arms. He laughed through crooked teeth.

"You better enjoy the ride, kid," he said. His breath was terrible. "Have you ever been carried by anyone? Judging by the way you wriggle, never!" He giggled grotesquely.

Fortunately, Falelo Quiroga's place was not too far from the school. Mr. Falcon deposited me on a couch in an office. Falelo Quiroga was there, sitting behind a huge desk. He stood up and shook hands with me. He immediately had some coffee and delicious pastries brought to me, and the two of us sat there chatting amiably about my grandfather's chicken farm. He asked me if I would like to have more pastries, and I said that I would not mind if I did. He laughed, and he himself brought me a whole tray of unbelievably delicious pastries from the next room.

After I had veritably gorged myself, he politely asked me if I would consider coming to his billiards place in the wee hours of the night to play a couple of friendly games with some people of his choice. He casually mentioned that a considerable amount of money was going to be involved.

He openly expressed his trust in my skill, and added that he was going to pay me, for my time and my effort, a percentage of the winning money. He further stated that he knew the mentality of my family. They would have found it improper that he give me money, even though it was pay. So he promised to put the money in the bank in a special account for me, or more practical yet, he would cover any purchase that I made in any of the stores in town, or the food I consumed in any restaurant in town.

I did not believe a word of what he was saying. I knew that Falelo Quiroga was a crook, a racketeer. I liked, however, the idea of playing billiards with people I did not know, and I struck a bargain with him.

"Will you give me some coffee and Danish pastries like the ones you gave me today?" I said.

"Of course, my boy," he replied. "If you come to play for me, I will buy you the bakery! I will have the baker bake them just for you. Take my word."

I warned Falelo Quiroga that the only drawback was my incapacity to get out of my house. I had too many aunts who watched me like hawks, and besides, my bedroom was on the second floor.

"That is no problem," Falelo Quiroga assured me. "You are quite small. Mr. Falcon will catch you if you jump from your window into his arms. He is as big as a house! I recommend that you go to bed early tonight. Mr. Falcon will wake you up by whistling and throwing rocks at your window. You have to watch out, though! He is an impatient man."

I went home in the midst of the most astounding excitation. I could not go to sleep. I was quite awake when I heard Mr. Falcon whistling and throwing small pebbles against the glass panes of the window. I opened the window. Mr. Falcon was right below me, on the street.

"Jump into my arms, kid," he said to me in a constricted voice, which he tried to modulate into a loud whisper. "If you do not aim at my arms, I will drop you and you will die. Remember that. Do not make me run around. Just aim at my arms. Jump! Jump!"

I did, and he caught me with the ease of someone catching a bag of cotton. He put me down and told me to run. He said that I was a child awakened from a deep sleep, and that he had to make me run so I would be fully awake by the time I got to the billiards house.

I played that night with two men, and I won both games. I had the most delicious coffee and pastries that one could imagine. Personally, I was in heaven. It was around seven in the morning when I returned home. Nobody had noticed my absence. It was time to go to school. For all practical purposes, everything was normal except for the fact that I was so tired that I could not keep my eyes open all day.

From that day on, Falelo Quiroga sent Mr. Falcon to pick me up two or three times a week, and I won every game that he made me play. And faithful to his promise, he paid for anything that I bought, including meals at my favorite Chinese restaurant, where I used to go daily. Sometimes, I even invited my friends, whom I mortified no end by running out of the restaurant screaming when the waiter brought the bill. They were amazed at the fact that they were never taken to the police for consuming food and not paying for it.

What was an ordeal for me was that I had never conceived of the fact that I would have to contend with the hopes and expectations of all the people who bet on me. The ordeal of ordeals, however, took place when a crack player from a nearby city challenged Falelo Quiroga and backed his challenge with a giant bet. The night of the game was an inauspicious night. My grandfather became ill and could not fall asleep. The entire family was in an uproar. It appeared that nobody went to bed. I doubted that I had any possibility of sneaking out of my bedroom, but Mr. Falcon's whistling and the pebbles hitting the glass of my window were so insistent that I took a chance and jumped from my window into Mr. Falcon's arms.

It seemed that every male in town had congregated at the billiards place. Anguished faces silently begged me not to lose. Some of the men boldly assured me that they had bet their houses and all their belongings.

One man, in a half-joking tone, said that he had bet his wife; if I did not win, he would be a cuckold that night, or a murderer. He did not specify whether he meant he would kill his wife in order not to be a cuckold, or me, for losing the game.

Falelo Quiroga paced back and forth. He had hired a masseur to massage me. He wanted me relaxed. The masseur put hot towels on my arms and wrists and cold towels on my forehead. He put on my feet the most comfortable, soft shoes that I had ever worn. They had hard, military heels and arch supports. Falelo Quiroga even outfitted me with a beret to keep my hair from falling in my face, as well as a pair of loose overalls with a belt.

Half of the people around the billiard table were strangers from another town. They glared at me. They gave me the feeling that they wanted me dead.

Falelo Quiroga flipped a coin to decide who would go first. My opponent was a Brazilian of Chinese descent, young, round-faced, very spiffy and confident. He started first, and he made a staggering amount of caroms. I knew by the color of his face that Falelo Quiroga was about to have a heart attack, and so were the other people who had bet everything they had on me.

I played very well that night, and as I approached the number of caroms that the other man had made, the nervousness of the ones who had bet on me reached its peak. Falelo Quiroga was the most hysterical of them all. He yelled at everybody and demanded that someone open the windows because the cigarette smoke made the air unbreathable for me. He wanted the masseur to relax my arms and shoulders. Finally, I had to stop everyone, and in a real hurry, I made the eight caroms that I needed to win. The euphoria of those who had bet on me was indescribable. I was oblivious to all that, for it was already morning and they had to take me home in a hurry.

My exhaustion that day knew no limits. Very obligingly, Falelo Quiroga did not send for me for a whole week. However, one afternoon, Mr. Falcon picked me up from school and took me to the billiards house. Falelo Quiroga was extremely serious. He did not even offer me coffee or Danish pastries. He sent everybody out of his office and got directly to the point. He pulled his chair close to me.

"I have put a lot of money in the bank for you," he said very solemnly. "I am true to what I promised you. I give you my word that I will always look after you. You know that! Now, if you do what I am going to tell you to do, you will make so much money that you will not have to work a day in your life. I want you to lose your next game by one carom. I know that you can do it. But I want you to miss by only a hair. The more dramatic, the better."

I was dumbfounded. All of this was incomprehensible to me. Falelo Quiroga repeated his request and further explained that he was going to bet anonymously all he had against me, and that that was the nature of our new deal.

"Mr. Falcon has been guarding you for months," he said. "All I need to tell you is that Mr. Falcon uses all his force to protect you, but he could do the opposite with the same strength."

Falelo Quiroga's threat could not have been more obvious. He must have seen in my face the horror that I felt, for he relaxed and laughed.

"Oh, but do not worry about things like that," he said reassuringly, "because we are brothers."

This was the first time in my life that I had been placed in an untenable position. I wanted with all my might to run away from Falelo Quiroga, from the fear that he had evoked in me. But at the same time, and with equal force, I wanted to stay. I wanted the ease of being able to buy anything I wanted from any store, and above all, the ease of being able to eat at any restaurant of my choice, without paying. I was never confronted, however, with having to choose one or the other.

Unexpectedly, at least for me, my grandfather moved to another area, quite distant. It was as if he knew what was going on, and he sent me ahead of everyone else. I doubted that he actually knew what was taking place. It seemed that sending me away was one of his usual intuitive actions.

Don Juan's return brought me out of my recollection. I had lost track of time. I should have been famished but I was not hungry at all. I was filled with nervous energy. Don Juan lit a kerosene lantern and hung it from a nail on the wall. Its dim light cast strange, dancing shadows in the room. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the semidarkness.

I entered then into a state of profound sadness. It was a strangely detached feeling, a far-reaching longing that came from that semidarkness, or perhaps from the sensation of being trapped. I was so tired that I wanted to leave, but at the same time, and with the same force, I wanted to stay.

Don Juan's voice brought me a measure of control. He appeared to know the reason for and the depth of my turmoil, and modulated his voice to fit the occasion. The severity of his tone helped me to gain control over something that could easily have turned into a hysterical reaction to fatigue and mental stimulation.

"To recount events is magical for sorcerers," he said. "It is not just telling stories. It is seeing the underlying fabric of events. This is the reason recounting is so important and vast."

At his request, I told don Juan the event I had recollected.

"How appropriate," he said, and chuckled with delight. "The only commentary I can make is that warrior travelers roll with the punches. They go wherever the impulse may take them. The power of warrior travelers is to be alert, to get maximum effect from minimal impulse. And above all, their power lies in not interfering.

Events have a force, a gravity of their own, and travelers are just travelers. Everything around them is for their eyes alone. In this fashion, travelers construct the meaning of every situation without ever asking how it happened this way or that way.

"Today, you remembered an event that sums up your total life," he continued. "You are always faced with a situation that is the same as the one that you never resolved. You never really had to choose whether to accept or reject Falelo Quiroga's crooked deal.

"Infinity always puts us in this terrible position of having to choose," he went on. "We want infinity, but at the same time, we want to run away from it. You want to tell me to go and jump in a lake, but at the same time you are compelled to stay. It would be infinitely easier for you to just be compelled to stay."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 3 - Chapter 14. The Interplay of Energy on the Horizon.

The clarity the usher brought a new impetus to my recapitulation. A new mood replaced the old one. From then on, I began to recollect events in my life with maddening clarity. It was exactly as if a barrier had been built inside me that had kept me holding rigidly on to meager and unclear memories, and the usher had smashed it.

My memory faculty had been for me, prior to that event, a vague way of referring to things that had happened, but which I wanted most of the time to forget. Basically, I had no interest whatsoever in remembering anything of my life. Therefore, I honestly saw absolutely no point in this futile exercise of recapitulating, which don Juan had practically imposed on me. For me, it was a chore that tired me instantly and did nothing but point out my incapacity for concentrating.

I had dutifully made, nevertheless, lists of people, and I had engaged in a haphazard effort of quasi-remembering my interactions with them. My lack of clarity in bringing those people into focus did not dissuade me. I fulfilled what I considered to be my duty, regardless of the way I really felt.

With practice, the clarity of my recollection improved, I thought remarkably. I was able to descend, so to speak, on certain choice events with a fair amount of keenness that was at once scary and rewarding. After don Juan presented me with the idea of the usher, however, the power of my recollection became something for which I had no name.

Following my list of people made the recapitulation extremely formal and exigent, the way don Juan wanted it. But from time to time, something in me got loose; something that forced me to focus on events unrelated to my list; events whose clarity was so maddening that I was caught and submerged in them, perhaps even more intensely than I had been when I had lived the experiences themselves. Every time I recapitulated in such a fashion, I had a degree of detachment which allowed me to see things I had disregarded when I had really been in the throes of them.

The first time in which the recollection of an event shook me to my foundations happened after I had given a lecture at a college in Oregon. The students in charge of organizing the lecture took me and another anthropology friend of mine to a house to spend the night.

I was going to go to a motel, but they insisted, for our comfort, on taking us to this house. They said that it was in the country, and there were no noises, the quietest place in the world, with no telephones, no interference from the outside world. I, like the fool that I was, agreed to go with them. Don Juan had not only warned me to always be a solitary bird, he had demanded that I observe his recommendation, something that I did most of the time, but there were occasions when the gregarious creature in me took the upper hand.

The committee took us to the house, quite a distance from Portland, of a professor who was on sabbatical. Very swiftly, they turned on the lights inside and outside of the house, which was located on a hill with spotlights all around it. With the spotlights on, the house must have been visible from five miles away. After that, the committee took off as fast as they could, some-thing that surprised me because I thought they were going to stay and talk. The house was a wooden A-frame, small, but very well constructed. It had an enormous living room and a mezzanine above it where the bedroom was. Right above, at the apex of the A-frame, there was a life-size crucifix hanging from a strange rotating hinge, which was drilled into the head of the figure. The spotlights on the wall were focused on the crucifix. It was quite an impressive sight, especially when it rotated, squeaking as if the hinge needed oil.

The bathroom of the house was another sight. It had mirrored tiles on the ceiling, the walls, and the floor, and it was illuminated with a reddish light. There was no way to go to the bathroom without seeing yourself from every conceivable angle. I enjoyed all those features of the house, which seemed to me stupendous.

When the time came for me to go to sleep, however, I encountered a serious problem because there was only one narrow, hard, quite monastic bed and my anthropologist friend was close to having pneumonia, wheezing and retching phlegm every time he coughed. He went straight for the bed and passed out. I looked for a place to sleep. I could not find one. That house was barren of comforts. Besides, it was cold. The committee had turned on the lights, but not the heater. I looked for the heater. My search was fruitless, as was my search for the switch to the spotlights or to any of the lights in the house, for that matter. The switches were there on the walls, but they seemed to be overruled by the effect of some main switch. The lights were on, and I had no way to turn them off.

The only place I could find to sleep was on a thin throw rug, and the only thing I found with which I could cover myself was the tanned hide of a giant French poodle. Obviously, it had been the pet of the house and had been preserved; it had shiny black-marble eyes and an open mouth with the tongue hanging out. I put the head of the poodle skin toward my knees. I still had to cover myself with the tanned rear end, which was on my neck. Its preserved head was like a hard object between my knees, quite unsettling! If it had been dark, it would not have been as bad. I gathered a bundle of washcloths and used them as a pillow. I used as many as possible to cover the hide of the French poodle the best way I could. I could not sleep all night.

It was then, as I lay there cursing myself silently for being so stupid and not following don Juan's recommendation, that I had the first maddeningly clear recollection of my entire life. I had recollected the event that don Juan had called the usher with equal clarity, but my tendency had always been to half disregard what happened to me when I was with don Juan, on the basis that in his presence anything was possible. This time, however, I was alone.

Years before I met don Juan, I had worked painting signs on buildings. My boss's name was Luigi Palma. One day Luigi got a contract to paint a sign, advertising the sale and rental of bridal gowns and tuxedos, on the back wall of an old building. The owner of the store in the building wanted to catch the eye of possible customers with a large display. Luigi was going to paint a bride and groom, and I was going to do the lettering. We went to the flat roof of the building and set up a scaffold.

I was quite apprehensive although I had no overt reason to be so. I had painted dozens of signs on high buildings. Luigi thought that I was beginning to be afraid of heights, but that my fear was going to pass. When the time came to start working, he lowered the scaffold a few feet from the roof and jumped onto its flat boards. He went to one side, while I stood on the other in order to be totally out of his way. He was the artist.

Luigi began to show off. His painting movements were so erratic and agitated that the scaffold moved back and forth. I became dizzy. I wanted to go back to the flat roof, using the pretext that I needed more paint and other painters' paraphernalia. I grabbed the edge of the wall that fringed the flat roof and tried to hoist myself up, but the tips of my feet got stuck in the boards of the scaffold.

I tried to pull my feet and the scaffold toward the wall; the harder I pulled, the farther away I pushed the scaffold from the wall. Instead of helping me untangle my feet, Luigi sat down and braced himself with the cords that attached the scaffold to the flat roof. He crossed himself and looked at me in horror. From his sitting position, he knelt, weeping quietly as he recited the Lord's Prayer.

I held on to the edge of the wall for dear life. What gave me the desperate strength to endure was the certainty that if I was in control, I could keep the scaffold from moving farther and farther away. I was not going to lose my grip and fall thirteen floors to my death.

Luigi, being a compulsive taskmaster to the bitter end, yelled to me, in the midst of tears, that I should pray. He swore that both of us were going to fall to our deaths, and that the least we could do was to pray for the salvation of our souls. For a moment, I deliberated about whether it was functional to pray. I opted to yell for help. People in the building must have heard my yelling and sent for the firemen. I sincerely thought that it had taken only two or three seconds after I began to yell for the firemen to come onto the roof and grab Luigi and me and secure the scaffold.

In reality, I had hung on to the side of the building for at least twenty minutes. When the firemen finally pulled me onto the roof, I had lost any vestige of control. I vomited on the hard floor of the roof, sick to my stomach from fear and the odious smell of melted tar. It was a very hot day; the tar on the cracks of the scratchy roofing sheets was melting in the heat.

The ordeal had been so frightening and embarrassing that I did not want to remember it, and I ended up hallucinating that the firemen had pulled me into a warm, yellow room. They had then put me in a supremely comfortable bed, and I had fallen peacefully asleep, safe, wearing my pajamas, delivered from danger.

My second recollection was another blast of incommensurable force. I was talking amiably to a group of friends when, for no apparent reason I could account for, I suddenly lost my breath under the impact of a thought; a memory which was vague for an instant, and then became an engrossing experience. Its force was so intense that I had to excuse myself and retreat for a moment to a corner.

My friends seemed to understand my reaction. They disbanded without any comments.

What I was remembering was an incident that had taken place in my last year of high school.

My best friend and I used to walk to school, passing a big mansion with a black wrought iron fence at least seven feet high and ending in pointed spikes. Behind the fence was an extensive, well-kept green lawn, and a huge, ferocious German shepherd dog.

Every day, we used to tease the dog and let him charge at us. He stopped physically at the wrought iron fence, but his rage seemed to cross over to us. My friend delighted in engaging the dog every day in a contest of mind over matter. He used to stand a few inches from the dog's snout which protruded between the iron bars at least six inches into the street, and my friend would bare his teeth, just like the dog did.

"Yield, yield!" my friend shouted every time. "Obey! Obey! I am more powerful than you!"

His daily displays of mental power, which lasted at least five minutes, never affected the dog, outside of leaving him more furious than ever. My friend assured me daily, as part of his ritual, that the dog was either going to obey him or die in front of us of heart failure brought about by rage. His conviction was so intense that I believed that the dog was going to drop dead any day.

One morning, when we came around, the dog was not there. We waited for a moment, but he did not show up. Then we saw him, at the end of the extensive lawn. He seemed to be busy there, so we slowly began to walk away. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that the dog was running at full speed, toward us. When he was perhaps six or seven feet from the fence, he took a gigantic leap over it. I was sure that he was going to rip his belly on the spikes. He barely cleared them and fell onto the street like a sack of potatoes.

I thought for a moment that he was dead, but he was only stunned. Suddenly, he got up, and instead of chasing after the one who had brought about his rage, he ran after me. I jumped onto the roof of a car, but the car was nothing for the dog. He took a leap and was nearly on top of me. I scrambled down and climbed the first tree that was within reach, a flimsy little tree that could barely support my weight. I was sure that it would snap in the middle, sending me right into the dog's jaws to be mauled to death.

In the tree, I was nearly out of his reach. But the dog jumped again, and snapped his teeth, catching me by the seat of my pants and ripping them. His teeth actually nicked my buttocks. The moment I was safe at the top of the tree, the dog left. He just ran up the street, perhaps looking for my friend.

At the infirmary in school, the nurse told me that I had to ask the owner of the dog for a certificate of rabies vaccination.

"You must look into this," she said severely. "You may have rabies already. If the owner refuses to show you the vaccination certificate, you are within your rights to call the police."

I talked to the caretaker of the mansion where the dog lived. He accused me of luring the owner's most valuable dog, a pedigreed animal, out into the street.

"You better watch out, boy!" he said in an angry tone. "The dog got lost. The owner will send you to jail if you keep on bothering us."

"But I may have rabies," I said in a sincerely terrified tone.

"I do not give a shit if you have the bubonic plague," the man snapped. "Scram!"

"I will call the police," I said.

"Call whoever you like," he retorted. "You call the police, and we will turn them against you. In this house, we have enough clout to do that!"

I believed him, so I lied to the nurse and said that the dog could not be found, and that it had no owner.

"Oh my god!" the woman exclaimed. "Then brace yourself for the worst. I may have to send you to the doctor." She gave me a long list of symptoms that I should look for or wait for until they manifested themselves. She said that the injections for rabies were extremely painful, and that they had to be administered subcutaneously on the area of the abdomen.

"I would not wish that treatment on my worst enemy," she said, plunging me into a horrid nightmare.

What followed was my first real depression. I just lay in my bed feeling every one of the symptoms enumerated by the nurse. I ended up going to the school infirmary, and begging the woman to give me the treatment for rabies, no matter how painful. I made a huge scene. I became hysterical. I did not have rabies, but I had totally lost my control.

I related to don Juan my two recollections in all their detail, sparing nothing. He did not make any comments. He nodded a few times.

"In both recollections, don Juan," I said, feeling myself the urgency of my voice, "I was as hysterical as anyone could be. My body was trembling. I was sick to my stomach.

"I do not want to say it was as if I were in the experiences, because that is not the truth. I was in the experiences themselves both times. And when I could not take them anymore, I jumped into my life now. For me, that was a jump into the future. I had the power of going over time. My jump into the past was not abrupt. The event developed slowly, as memories do. It was at the end that I did jump abruptly into the future: my life now."

"Something in you has begun to collapse for sure," he finally said. "It has been collapsing all along, but it repaired itself very quickly every time its supports failed. My feeling is that it is now collapsing totally."

After another long silence, don Juan explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed that, as he had told me already, we had two minds, and only one of them was truly ours. I had always understood don Juan as saying that there were two parts to our minds, and one of them was always silent because expression was denied to it by the force of the other part. Whatever don Juan had said, I had taken as a metaphorical way to explain, perhaps, the apparent dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain over the right, or something of the like.

"There is a secret option to the recapitulation," don Juan said.

"Just like I told you that there is a secret option to dying, an option that only sorcerers take. In the case of dying, the secret option is that human beings could retain their life force and relinquish only their awareness, the product of their lives.

"In the case of the recapitulation, the secret option that only sorcerers take is to choose to enhance their true minds.

"The haunting memory of your recollections," he went on, "could come only from your true mind, whereas, the other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model; economy strength; one size fits all.

"But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake now is the advent of a disintegrating force. But not a force that is disintegrating you- I do not mean it that way.

"It is disintegrating what the sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in every other human being. The natural result of the force that is descending on you and is disintegrating your foreign installation is that it pulls a sorcerer out of their syntax."

I had listened carefully to don Juan, but I could not say that I had understood what he had said. For some strange reason, which was to me as unknown as the cause of my vivid recollections, I could not ask him any questions.

"I know how difficult it is for you," don Juan said all of a sudden, "to deal with this facet of your life. Every sorcerer that I know has gone through it. The males going through it suffer infinitely more damage than the females. I suppose it is the condition of women to be more durable.

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico, acting as a group, tried their best to buttress the impact of this disintegrating force. In our day, we have no means of acting as a group, so we must brace ourselves to face in solitude a force that will sweep us away from language because there is no way to describe adequately what is going on."

Don Juan was right in that I was at a loss for explanations or ways of describing the effect that those recollections had had on me. Don Juan had told me that sorcerers face the unknown in the most common incidents one can imagine.

When they are confronted with the unknown, and cannot interpret what they are perceiving, they have to rely on an outside source for direction. Don Juan had called that source infinity, or the voice of the spirit, and had said that if sorcerers do not try to be rational about what can not be rationalized, the spirit unerringly tells them 'what is what'.

Don Juan had guided me to accept the idea that infinity was a force that had a voice, which in a sense is true, but not altogether accurate; and he had guided me to accept that infinity was conscious of itself, which for all practical purposes is accurate.

Consequently, he had prepared me to be ready to listen to that voice and always act efficiently, but without antecedents, using as little as possible the railings of the a priori.

I waited impatiently for the voice of the spirit to tell me the meaning of my recollections, but nothing happened.

Then one day, I was in a bookstore when a girl recognized me and came over to talk to me. She was tall and slim, and had an insecure, little girl's voice. I was trying to make her feel at ease when I was suddenly accosted by an instantaneous energetic change.

It was as if an alarm had been triggered in me, and as it had happened in the past, without any volition on my part whatsoever, I recollected another completely forgotten event in my life.

The memory of my grandparents' house flooded me. It was a veritable avalanche so intense that it was devastating, and once more, I had to retreat to a corner. My body shook, as if I had taken a chill.

I must have been eight years old. My grandfather was talking to me. He had begun by telling me that it was his utmost duty to set me straight. I had two cousins who were my age: Alfredo and Luis. My grandfather demanded mercilessly that I admit that my cousin Alfredo was really beautiful. In my vision, I heard my grandfather's raspy, constricted voice.

"Alfredo does not need any introductions," he had said to me on that occasion. "He needs only to be present and the doors will fly open for him because everybody practices the cult of beauty. Everybody likes beautiful people. They envy them, but they certainly seek their company. Take it from me. I am handsome, would you not say?"

I sincerely agreed with my grandfather. He was certainly a very handsome man, small-boned, with laughing blue eyes and an exquisitely chiseled face with beautiful cheekbones. Everything seemed to be perfectly balanced in his face-his nose, his mouth, his eyes, his pointed jaw. He had blond hair growing on his ears, a feature that gave him an elf-like appearance. He knew everything about himself, and he exploited his attributes to the maximum. Women adored him; first, according to him, for his beauty, and second, because he posed no threat to them. He, of course, took full advantage of all this.

"Your cousin Alfredo is a winner," my grandfather went on. "He will never have to crash a party because he will be the first one on the list of guests. Have you ever noticed how people stop in the street to look at him, and how they want to touch him?

"He is so beautiful that I am afraid he is going to turn out to be an asshole, but that is a different story. Let us say that he will be the most welcome asshole you have ever met."

My grandfather compared my cousin Luis with Alfredo. He said that Luis was homely, and a little bit stupid, but that he had a heart of gold. And then he brought me into the picture.

"If we are going to proceed with our explanation," he continued, "you have to admit in sincerity that Alfredo is beautiful and Luis is good. Now, let us take you. You are neither handsome nor good. You are a veritable son of a bitch.

Nobody's going to invite you to a party. You will have to get used to the idea that if you want to be at a party, you will have to crash it. Doors will never be open for you the way they will be open for Alfredo for being beautiful, and for Luis for being good, so you will have to get in through the window."

His analysis of his three grandsons was so accurate that he made me weep with the finality of what he had said. The more I wept, the happier he became. He finished his case with a most deleterious admonition.

"There is no need to feel bad," he said, "because there is nothing more exciting than getting in through the window. To do that, you have to be clever and on your toes. You have to watch everything, and be prepared for endless humiliations.

"If you have to go in through the window," he went on, "it is because you are definitely not on the list of guests; therefore, your presence is not welcome at all, so you have to work your butt off to stay. The only way I know is by possessing everybody. Scream! Demand! Advise! Make them feel that you are in charge! How could they throw you out if you are in charge?"

Remembering this scene caused a profound upheaval in me. I had buried this incident so deeply that I had forgotten all about it. What I had remembered all along, however, was his admonition to be in charge, which he must have repeated to me over and over throughout the years.

I did not have a chance to examine this event, or ponder it, because another forgotten memory surfaced with the same force. In it, I was with the girl I had been engaged to. At that time, both of us were saving money to be married and have a house of our own. I heard myself demanding that we have a joint checking account; I would not have it any other way. I felt an imperative need to lecture her on frugality. I heard myself telling her where to buy her clothes, and what the top affordable price should be.

Then I saw myself giving driving lessons to her younger sister and going veritably berserk when she said that she was planning to move out of her parents' house. Forcefully, I threatened her with canceling my lessons. She wept, confessing that she was having an affair with her boss. I jumped out of the car and began kicking the door.

However, that was not all. I heard myself telling my fiancee's father not to move to Oregon, where he planned to go. I shouted at the top of my voice that it was a stupid move. I really believed that my reasonings against it were unbeatable.

I presented him with budget figures in which I had meticulously calculated his losses. When he did not pay any attention to me, I slammed the door and left, shaking with rage. I found my fiancee in the living room, playing her guitar. I pulled it out of her hands and yelled at her that she embraced the guitar instead of playing it, as if it were more than an object.

My desire to impose my will extended all across the board. I made no distinctions. Whoever was close to me was there for me to possess and mold, following my whims.

I no longer had to ponder the significance of my vivid visions because an unquestionable certainty invaded me as if coming from outside me.

It told me that my weak point was the idea that I had to be the man in the director's chair at all times. It had been a deeply ingrained concept with me that I not only had to be in charge, but I had to be in control of any situation.

The way in which I had been brought up had reinforced this drive, which must have been arbitrary at its onset, but had turned, in my adulthood, into a deep necessity.

I was aware, beyond any doubt, that what was at stake was infinity. Don Juan had portrayed it as a conscious force that deliberately intervenes in the lives of sorcerers. And now it was intervening in mine. I knew that infinity was pointing out to me, through the vivid recollection of those forgotten experiences, the intensity and the depth of my drive for control, and thus preparing me for something transcendental to myself.

I knew with frightening certainty that something was going to bar any possibility of my being in control, and that I needed, more than anything else, sobriety, fluidity, and abandon in order to face the things that I felt were coming to me.

Naturally, I told all this to don Juan, elaborating to my heart's content on my speculations and inspirational insights about the possible significance of my recollections.

Don Juan laughed good-humoredly. "All this is psychological exaggeration on your part, wishful thinking," he said. "You are, as usual, seeking explanations with linear cause and effect.

"Each of your recollections becomes more and more vivid, more and more maddening to you, because as I told you already, you have entered an irreversible process. Your true mind is emerging, waking up from a state of lifelong lethargy.

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

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

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

One night, I was sitting at my desk preparing myself for my daily activity of writing. I felt a moment of grogginess. I thought that I was feeling dizzy because I had gotten up too quickly from my mat where I had been doing my exercises.

My vision blurred. I saw yellow spots in front of my eyes. I thought I was going to faint. The fainting spell got worse. There was an enormous red spot in front of me. I began to breathe deeply, trying to quiet whatever agitation was causing this visual distortion.

I became extraordinarily silent, to the point where I noticed that I was surrounded by impenetrable darkness. The thought crossed my mind that I had fainted. However, I could feel the chair, my desk. I could feel everything around me from inside the darkness that surrounded me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 3 - Chapter 15. Journeys Through the Dark Sea of Awareness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, it is not dreaming," he said emphatically. "This is something more direct, and more mysterious. By the way, I have a new definition of dreaming for you today, more in accordance with your state of being.

"Dreaming is the act of changing the point of attachment with the dark sea of awareness. If you view it in this fashion, it is a very simple concept, and a very simple maneuver. It takes all you have to realize it, but it is not an impossibility, nor is it something surrounded with mystical clouds.

"Dreaming is a term that has always bugged the hell out of me," he continued, "because it weakens a very powerful act. It makes the act sound arbitrary. It gives it a sense of being a fantasy, and this is the only thing it is not. I tried to change the term myself, but it is too ingrained.

"Maybe someday you could change it yourself, although, as with everything else in sorcery, I am afraid that by the time you could actually do it, you will not give a damn about it because it will not make any difference what it is called anymore."

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

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

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

"It is a very predatory mood," don Juan went on. "It is not difficult at all to enter into it, because man is a predator by nature. You could see, aggressively, anybody in this little village, or perhaps someone far away, while they are asleep; anyone would do for the purpose at hand. What is important is that you arrive at a complete sense of indifference. You are in search of something, and you are out to get it. You are going to go out looking for a person, searching like a feline, like an animal of prey, for someone to descend on."

Don Juan had told me, laughing at my apparent chagrin, that the difficulty with this technique was the mood, and that I could not be passive in the act of seeing, for the sight was not something to watch but to act upon.

It might have been the power of his suggestion, but that day, when he had told me all this, I felt astoundingly aggressive. Every muscle of my body was filled to the brim with energy, and in my dreaming practice I did go after someone. I was not interested in who that someone might have been. I needed someone who was asleep, and some force I was aware of, without being fully conscious of it, had guided me to find that someone.

I never knew who the person was, but while I was seeing that person, I felt don Juan's presence. It was a strange sensation of knowing that someone was with me by an undetermined sensation of proximity that was happening at a level of awareness that was not part of anything that I had ever experienced. I could only focus my attention on the individual at rest. I knew that he was a male, but I do not know how I knew that. I knew that he was asleep because the ball of energy that human beings ordinarily are was a little bit flat. It was expanded laterally.

And then I saw the assemblage point at a position different from the habitual one, which is right behind the shoulder blades. In this instance, it had been displaced to the right of where it should have been, and a bit lower. I calculated that in this case it had moved to the side of the ribs. Another thing that I noticed was that there was no stability to it. It fluctuated erratically and then abruptly went back to its normal position. I had the clear sensation that, obviously, my presence, and don Juan's, had awakened the individual. I had experienced a profusion of blurred images right after that, and then I woke up back in the place where I had started.

Don Juan had also told me all along that sorcerers were divided into two groups: one group was dreamers; the other was stalkers. The dreamers were those who had a great facility for displacing the assemblage point. The stalkers were those who had a great facility for maintaining the assemblage point fixed on that new position. Dreamers and stalkers complemented each other, and worked in pairs, affecting one another with their given proclivities.

Don Juan had assured me that the displacement and the fixation of the assemblage point could be realized at will by means of the sorcerers' iron-handed discipline. He said that the sorcerers of his lineage believed that there were at least six hundred points within the luminous sphere that we are, that when reached at will by the assemblage point, can each give us a totally inclusive world; meaning that, if our assemblage point is displaced to any of those points and remains fixed on it, we will perceive a world as inclusive and total as the world of everyday life, but a different world nevertheless.

Don Juan had further explained that the art of sorcery is to manipulate the assemblage point and make it change positions at will on the luminous spheres that human beings are. The result of this manipulation is a shift in the point of contact with the dark sea of awareness, which brings as its concomitant a different bundle of zillions of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments that converge on the assemblage point.

The consequence of new energy fields converging on the assemblage point is that awareness of a different sort than that which is necessary for perceiving the world of everyday life enters into action, turning the new energy fields into sensory data, sensory data that is interpreted and perceived as a different world because the energy fields that engender it are different from the habitual ones.

Don Juan had asserted that an accurate definition of sorcery as a practice would be to say that sorcery is the manipulation of the assemblage point for purposes of changing its focal point of contact with the dark sea of awareness, thus making it possible to perceive other worlds.

Don Juan had said that the art of the stalkers enters into play after the assemblage point has been displaced. Maintaining the assemblage point fixed in its new position assures sorcerers that they will perceive whatever new world they enter in its absolute completeness, exactly as we do in the world of ordinary affairs. For the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage, the world of everyday life was but one fold of a total world consisting of at least six hundred folds.

Don Juan went back again to the topic under discussion: my journeys through the dark sea of awareness. He said that what I had done from my inner silence was very similar to what is done in dreaming when one is asleep. However, when journeying through the dark sea of awareness, there was no interruption of any sort caused by going to sleep, nor was there any attempt whatsoever at controlling one's attention while having a dream. The journey through the dark sea of awareness entailed an immediate response. There was an overpowering sensation of the here and now. Don Juan lamented the fact that some idiotic sorcerers had given the name dreaming-awake to this act of reaching the dark sea of awareness directly, making the term dreaming even more ridiculous.

"When you thought that you had the dream-fantasy of going to that town of our choice," he continued, "you had actually placed your assemblage point directly on a specific position on the dark sea of awareness that allows the journey. Then the dark sea of awareness supplied you with whatever was necessary to carry on that journey. There is no way whatsoever to choose that place at will. Sorcerers say that inner silence selects it unerringly. Simple, is it not?"

He explained to me then the intricacies of choice. He said that choice, for warrior-travelers, was not really the act of choosing, but rather the act of acquiescing elegantly to the solicitations of infinity.

"Infinity chooses," he said. "The art of the warrior-traveler is to have the ability to move with the slightest insinuation; the art of acquiescing to every command of infinity. For this, a warrior-traveler needs prowess, strength, and above everything else, sobriety. All those three put together give, as a result, elegance!"

After a moment's pause, I went back to the subject that intrigued me the most.

"But it is unbelievable that I actually went to that town, don Juan, in body and soul," I said.

"It is unbelievable, but it is not unlivable," he said. "The universe has no limits, and the possibilities at play in the universe at large are indeed incommensurable. So do not fall prey to the axiom, 'I believe only what I see,' because it is the dumbest stand one can possibly take."

Don Juan's elucidation had been crystal clear. It made sense, but I did not know where it made sense; certainly not in my daily world of usual affairs. Don Juan assured me then, unleashing a great trepidation in me, that there was only one way in which sorcerers could handle all this information: to taste it through experience, because the mind was incapable of taking in all that stimulation.

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

"You must deliberately journey through the dark sea of awareness," he replied, "but you will never know how this is done. Let us say that inner silence does it, following inexplicable ways; ways that cannot be understood, but only practiced."

Don Juan had me sit down on my bed and adopt the position that fostered inner silence. I usually fell asleep instantly whenever I adopted this position. However, when I was with don Juan, his presence always made it impossible for me to fall asleep; instead, I entered into a veritable state of complete quietude. This time, after an instant of silence, I found myself walking. Don Juan was guiding me by holding my arm as we walked.

We were no longer in his house. We were walking in a Yaqui town I had never been in before. I knew of the town's existence; I had been close to it many times, but I had been made to turn around by the sheer hostility of the people who lived around it. It was a town where it was nearly impossible for a stranger to enter. The only non-Yaquis who had free access to that town were the supervisors from the federal bank because of the fact that the bank bought the crops from the Yaqui farmers. The endless negotiations of the Yaqui farmers revolved around getting cash advances from the bank on the basis of a near-speculation process about future crops.

I instantly recognized the town from the descriptions of people who had been there. As if to increase my astonishment, don Juan whispered in my ear that we were in the Yaqui town in question. I wanted to ask him how we had gotten there, but I could not articulate my words. There were a large number of Indians talking in argumentative tones. Tempers seemed to flare. I did not understand a word of what they were saying, but the moment I conceived of the thought that I could not understand, something cleared up. It was very much as if more light went into the scene. Things became very defined and neat, and I understood what the people were saying although I did not know how. I did not speak their language. The words were definitely understandable to me, not singularly, but in clusters, as if my mind could pick up whole patterns of thought.

I could say in earnest that I got the shock of a lifetime, not so much because I understood what they were saying but because of the content of what they were saying. Those people were indeed warlike. They were not Western men at all. Their propositions were propositions of strife, warfare, strategy. They were measuring their strength, their striking resources, and lamenting the fact that they had no power to deliver their blows. I registered in my body the anguish of their impotence. All they had were sticks and stones to fight high-technology weapons. They mourned the fact that they had no leaders. They coveted, more than anything else one could imagine, the rise of some charismatic fighter who could galvanize them.

I heard then the voice of cynicism; one of them expressed a thought that seemed to devastate everyone equally, including me, for I seemed to be an indivisible part of them. He said that they were defeated beyond salvation, because if at a given moment one of them had the charisma to rise up and rally them, he would be betrayed because of envy and jealousy and hurt feelings.

I wanted to comment to don Juan on what was happening to me, but I could not voice a single word. Only don Juan could talk.

"The Yaquis are not unique in their pettiness," he said in my ear. "It is a condition in which human beings are trapped, a condition that is not even human, but imposed from the outside."

I felt my mouth opening and closing involuntarily as I tried desperately to ask a question that I could not even conceive of. My mind was blank, void of thoughts. Don Juan and I were in the middle of a circle of people, but none of them seemed to have noticed us. I did not record any movement, reaction, or furtive glance that may have indicated that they were aware of us.

The next instant, I found myself in a Mexican town built around a railroad station, a town located about a mile and a half east of where don Juan lived. Don Juan and I were in the middle of the street by the government bank.

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

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

Don Juan and I walked in the town from one end to the other, and I saw literally scores of geometrically patterned creatures. My ability to see them was unstable in the extreme. I would see them for an instant, and then I would lose sight of them and I would be faced with average people.

Soon, I became exhausted, and I could see only normal people. Don Juan said that it was time to go back home, and again, something in me lost my usual sense of continuity. I found myself in don Juan's house without having the slightest notion as to how I had covered the distance from the town to the house.

I lay down in my bed and tried desperately to recollect, to call back my memory, to probe the depths of my very being for a clue as to how I had gone to the Yaqui town, and to the railroad-station town. I did not believe that they had been dream-fantasies, because the scenes were too detailed to be anything but real, and yet they could not possibly have been real.

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

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

Don Juan reiterated to me over and over that I had witnessed something specific and inexplicable. I had understood what people were saying, without knowing their language, and I had seen the strand of energy that connected human beings to certain other beings, and I had selected those aspects through an act of intending it.

He stressed the fact that this intending I had done was not something conscious or volitional. The intending had been done at a deep level, and had been ruled by necessity. I had needed to become cognizant of some of the possibilities of journeying through the dark sea of awareness, and my inner silence had guided intent- a perennial force in the universe- to fulfill that need.

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 3 - Chapter 16. Inorganic Awareness.

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

It turned out that he was right on both counts. My state of awareness was very meager, and he did have other places where he could live, infinitely more comfortable than the shack where I had first found him. Nor was he the solitary sorcerer that I had thought him to be. He was leader of a group of fifteen other warrior travelers: ten women and five men.

My surprise was gigantic when he took me to his house in central Mexico, where he and his companion sorcerers lived.

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

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

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

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

"No, I did not fly to Guaymas," he said with a big smile. "I flew directly, to the shack where you were waiting."

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

I did not want to ask him any more questions, because I was hopelessly lost, trying to bridge our two tracks of thought and action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, where you and I are sitting," he replied matter-of-factly, but laughing outright at my nervousness. "I told you that it is our twin world, so it is intimately related to us. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico did not think like you do in terms of space and time. They thought exclusively in terms of awareness. Two types of awareness coexist without ever impinging on each other, because each type is entirely different from the other. The old shamans faced this problem of coexistence without concerning themselves with time and space. They reasoned that the degree of awareness of organic beings and the degree of awareness of inorganic beings were so different that both could coexist with the most minimal interference."

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

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

"The difficulty with your facing things in terms of time and space," he continued, "is that you only notice if something has landed in the space and time at your disposal, which is very limited.

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

Don Juan continued talking and said that those sorcerers knew when inorganic awareness from other worlds besides our twin world had landed in their field of awareness. He said that as every human being on this earth would do, those shamans made endless classifications of different types of this energy that has awareness. They knew them by the general term inorganic beings.

"Do those inorganic beings have life like we have life?" I asked.

"If you think that life is to be aware, then they do have life," he said. "I suppose it would be accurate to say that if life can be measured by the intensity, the sharpness, the duration of that awareness, I can sincerely say that they are more alive than you and I."

"Do those inorganic beings die, don Juan?" I asked.

Don Juan chuckled for a moment before he answered. "If you call death the termination of awareness, yes, they die. Their awareness ends. Their death is rather like the death of a human being, and at the same time, it is not, because the death of human beings has a hidden option. It is something like a clause in a legal document, a clause that is written in tiny letters that you can barely see. You have to use a magnifying glass to read it, and yet it is the most important clause of the document."

"What is the hidden option, don Juan?"

"Death's hidden option is exclusively for sorcerers. They are the only ones who have, to my knowledge, read the fine print. For them, the option is pertinent and functional. For average human beings, death means the termination of their awareness, the end of their organisms.

"For the inorganic beings, death means the same: the end of their awareness. In both cases, the impact of death is the act of being sucked into the dark sea of awareness, Their individual awareness, loaded with their life experiences, breaks its boundaries, and awareness as energy spills out into the dark sea of awareness."

"But what is death's hidden option that is picked up only by sorcerers, don Juan?" I asked.

"For a sorcerer, death is a unifying factor. Instead of disintegrating the organism, as is ordinarily the case, death unifies it."

"How can death unify anything?" I protested.

"Death for a sorcerer," he said, "terminates the reign of individual moods in the body. The old sorcerers believed it was the dominion of the different parts of the body that ruled the moods and the actions of the total body; parts that become dysfunctional drag the rest of the body to chaos, such as, for instance, when you yourself get sick from eating junk. In that case, the mood of your stomach affects everything else. Death eradicates the dominion of those individual parts. It unifies their awareness into one single unit."

"Do you mean that after they die, sorcerers are still aware?" I asked.

"For sorcerers, death is an act of unification that employs every bit of their energy. You are thinking of death as a corpse in front of you, a body on which decay has settled. For sorcerers, when the act of unification takes place, there is no corpse. There is no decay.

"Their bodies in their entirety have been turned into energy, energy possessing awareness that is not fragmented. The boundaries that are set up by the organism, boundaries which are broken down by death, are still functioning in the case of sorcerers, although they are no longer visible to the naked eye.

"I know that you are dying to ask me," he continued with a broad smile, "if whatever I am describing is the soul that goes to hell or heaven. No, it is not the soul. What happens to sorcerers, when they pick up that hidden option of death, is that they turn into inorganic beings, very specialized, high-speed inorganic beings, beings capable of stupendous maneuvers of perception. Sorcerers enter then into what the shamans of ancient Mexico called their definitive journey. Infinity becomes their realm of action."

"Do you mean by this, don Juan, that they become eternal?"

"My sobriety as a sorcerer tells me," he said, "that their awareness will terminate, the way inorganic beings' awareness terminates, but I have not seen this happen. I have no firsthand knowledge of it. The old sorcerers believed that the awareness of this type of inorganic being would last as long as the earth is alive. The earth is their matrix. As long as it prevails, their awareness continues. To me, this is a most reasonable statement."

The continuity and order of don Juan's explanation had been, for me, superb. I had no way whatsoever in which to contribute. He left me with a sensation of mystery and unvoiced expectations to be fulfilled.

On my next visit to don Juan, I began my conversation by asking him eagerly a question that was foremost in my mind.

"Is there a possibility, don Juan, that ghosts and apparitions really exist?"

"Whatever you may call a ghost or an apparition," he said, "when it is scrutinized by a sorcerer, boils down to one issue- it is possible that any of those ghostlike apparitions may be a conglomeration of energy fields that have awareness, and which we turn into things we know. If that is the case, then the apparitions have energy. Sorcerers call them energy generating configurations. Or, no energy emanates from them, in which case they are phantasmagorical creations, usually of a very strong person- strong in terms of awareness.

"One story that intrigued me immensely," don Juan continued, "was the story you told me once about your aunt. Do you remember it?"

I had told don Juan that when I was fourteen years old I had gone to live in my father's sister's house. She lived in a gigantic house that had three patios with living accommodations in between each of them- bedrooms, living rooms, etc.

The first patio was very austere, cobble-stoned. They told me that it was a colonial house and this first patio was where horse-drawn carriages had gone in.

The second patio was a beautiful orchard zigzagged by brick lanes of Moorish design and filled with fruit trees.

The third patio was covered with flowerpots hanging from the eaves of the roof, birds in cages, and a colonial-style fountain in the middle of it with running water, as well as a large area fenced with chicken wire, set aside for my aunt's prized fighting cocks, her predilection in life.

My aunt made available to me a whole apartment right in front of the fruit orchard. I thought I was going to have the time of my life there. I could eat all the fruit that I wanted. No one else in the household touched the fruit of any of those trees, for reasons that were never revealed to me.

The household was composed of my aunt, a tall, round-faced chubby lady in her fifties, very jovial, a great raconteur, and full of eccentricities that she hid behind a formal facade and the appearance of devout Catholicism. There was a butler, a tall, imposing man in his early forties who had been a sergeant-major in the army and had been lured out of the service to occupy the better-paid position of butler, bodyguard, and all-around man in my aunt's house. His wife, a beautiful young woman, was my aunt's companion, cook, and confidante. The couple also had a daughter, a chubby little girl who looked exactly like my aunt. The likeness was so strong that my aunt had adopted her legally.

Those four were the quietest people I had ever met. They lived a very sedate life, punctuated only by the eccentricities of my aunt, who, on the spur of the moment, would decide to take trips, or buy promising new fighting cocks, train them, and actually have serious contests in which enormous sums of money were involved. She tended her fighting cocks with loving care, sometimes all day long. She wore thick leather gloves and stiff leather leggings to keep the fighting cocks from spurring her.

I spent two stupendous months living in my aunt's house. She taught me music in the afternoons, and told me endless stories about my family's ancestors. My living situation was ideal for me because I used to go out with my friends and did not have to report the time I came back to anybody. Sometimes I used to spend hours without falling asleep, lying on my bed. I used to keep my window open to let the smell of orange blossoms fill my room. Whenever I was lying there awake, I would hear someone walking down a long corridor that ran the length of the whole property on the north side, joining all the patios of the house. This corridor had beautiful arches and a tiled floor. There were four light bulbs of minimal voltage that dimly illuminated the corridor, lights that were turned on at six o'clock every evening and turned off at six in the morning.

I asked my aunt if anyone walked at night and stopped at my window, because whoever was walking always stopped by my window, turned around, and walked back again toward the main entrance of the house.

"Do not trouble yourself with nonsense, dear," my aunt said, smiling. "It is probably my butler, making his rounds. Big deal! Were you frightened?"

"No, I was not frightened," I said, "I just got curious, because your butler walks up to my room every night. Sometimes his steps wake me up."

She discarded my inquiry in a matter-of-fact fashion, saying that the butler had been a military man and was habituated to making his rounds, as a sentry would. I accepted her explanation.

One day, I mentioned to the butler that his steps were just too loud, and asked if he would make his rounds by my window with a little more care so as to let me sleep.

"I do not know what you are talking about!" he said in a gruff voice.

"My aunt told me that you make your rounds at night," I said.

"I never do such a thing!" he said, his eyes flaring with disgust.

"But who walks by my window then?"

"Nobody walks by your window. You are imagining things. Just go back to sleep. Do not go around stirring things up. I am telling you this for your own good."

Nothing could have been worse for me in those years than someone telling me that they were doing something for my own good. That night, as soon as I began to hear the footsteps, I got out of my bed and stood behind the wall that led to the entrance of my apartment. When I calculated that whoever was walking was by the second bulb, I just stuck my head out to look down the corridor. The steps stopped abruptly, and there was no one in sight. The dimly illuminated corridor was deserted. If somebody had been walking there, they would not have had time to hide because there was no place to hide. There were only bare walls.

My fright was so immense that I woke up the whole household screaming my head off. My aunt and her butler tried to calm me down by telling me that I was imagining all that, but my agitation was so intense that both of them sheepishly confessed, in the end that something which was unknown to them walked in that house every night.

Don Juan had said that it was almost surely my aunt who walked at night. That is to say, some aspect of her awareness over which she had no volitional control. He believed that this phenomenon obeyed a sense of playfulness or mystery that she cultivated. Don Juan was sure that it was not a far-fetched idea that my aunt, at a subliminal level, was not only making all those noises happen, but that she was capable of much more complex manipulations of awareness. Don Juan had also said that to be completely fair, he had to admit the possibility that the steps were the product of inorganic awareness.

Don Juan said that the inorganic beings who populated our twin world were considered, by the sorcerers of his lineage, to be our relatives. Those shamans believed that it was futile to make friends with our inorganic family members because the demands levied on us for such friendships were always exorbitant. He said that that type of inorganic being, who are our first cousins, communicate with us incessantly, but that their communication with us is not at the level of conscious awareness. In other words, we know all about them in a subliminal way, while they know all about us in a deliberate, conscious manner.

"The energy from our first cousins is a drag!" don Juan went on. "They are as fucked up as we are. Let us say that the organic and inorganic beings of our twin worlds are the children of two sisters who live next door to each other. They are exactly alike although they look different. They cannot help us, and we cannot help them. Perhaps we could join together, and make a fabulous family business corporation, but that has not happened. Both branches of the family are extremely touchy and take offense over nothing, a typical relationship between touchy first cousins. The crux of the matter, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed, is that both human beings and inorganic beings from the twin worlds are profound egomaniacs."

According to don Juan, another classification that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico made of the inorganic beings was that of scouts, or explorers, and by this they meant inorganic beings that came from the depths of the universe, and which were possessors of awareness infinitely sharper and faster than that of human beings.

Don Juan asserted that the old sorcerers had spent generations polishing their classification schemes, and their conclusions were that certain types of inorganic beings from the category of scouts or explorers, because of their vivaciousness, were akin to man. They could make liaisons and establish a symbiotic relation with men. The old sorcerers called these kinds of inorganic beings the allies.

Don Juan explained that the crucial mistake of those shamans with reference to this type of inorganic being was to attribute human characteristics to that impersonal energy and to believe that they could harness it. They thought of those blocks of energy as their helpers, and they relied on them without comprehending that, being pure energy, they did not have the power to sustain any effort.

"I have told you all there is to know about inorganic beings," don Juan said abruptly. "The only way you can put this to the test is by means of direct experience."

I did not ask him what he wanted me to do. A deep fear made my body rattle with nervous spasms that burst like a volcanic eruption from my solar plexus and extended down to the tips of my toes and up to my upper trunk.

"Today, we will go to look for some inorganic beings," he announced.

Don Juan ordered me to sit on my bed and adopt again the position that fostered inner silence, I followed his command with unusual ease. Normally, I would have been reluctant, perhaps not overtly, but I would have felt a twinge of reluctance nonetheless.

I had a vague thought that by the time I sat down, I was already in a state of inner silence. My thoughts were no longer clear. I felt an impenetrable darkness surrounding me, making me feel as if I were falling asleep. My body was utterly motionless, either because I had no intention of setting up any commands to move or because I just could not formulate them.

A moment later, I found myself with don Juan, walking in the Sonoran desert. I recognized the surroundings. I had been there with him so many times that I had memorized every feature of it. It was the end of the day, and the light of the setting sun created in me a mood of desperation. I walked automatically, aware that I was feeling in my body sensations that were not accompanied by thoughts. I was not describing to myself my state of being. I wanted to tell this to don Juan, but the desire to communicate my bodily sensations to him vanished in an instant.

Don Juan said, very slowly, and in a low, grave voice, that the dry riverbed on which we were walking was a most appropriate place for our business at hand, and that I should sit on a small boulder, alone, while he went and sat on another boulder about fifty feet away. I did not ask don Juan, as I ordinarily would have, what I was supposed to do. I knew what I had to do. I heard then the rustling steps of people walking through the bushes that were sparsely scattered around. There was not enough moisture in the area to allow the heavy growth of underbrush. Some sturdy bushes grew there, with a space of perhaps ten or fifteen feet between them.

I saw then two men approaching. They seemed to be local men, perhaps Yaqui Indians from one of the Yaqui towns in the vicinity. They came and stood by me. One of them nonchalantly asked me how I had been. I wanted to smile at him, laugh, but I could not. My face was extremely rigid. Yet I was ebullient. I wanted to jump up and down, but I could not. I told him that I had been fine. Then I asked them who they were. I said to them that I did not know them, and yet I sensed an extraordinary familiarity with them- One of the men said, matter-of-factly, that they were my allies.

I stared at them, trying to memorize their features, but their features changed. They seemed to mold themselves to the mood of my stare. No thoughts were involved. Everything was a matter guided by visceral sensations. I stared at them long enough to erase their features completely, and finally, I was facing two shiny blobs of luminosity that vibrated. The blobs of luminosity did not have boundaries. They seemed to sustain themselves cohesively from within. At times, they became flat, wide. Then they would take on a verticality again, at the height of a man.

Suddenly, I felt don Juan's arm hooking my right arm and pulling me from the boulder. He said that it was time to go. The next moment, I was in his house again, in central Mexico, more bewildered than ever.

"Today, you found inorganic awareness, and then you saw it as it really is," he said. "Energy is the irreducible residue of everything. As far as we are concerned, to see energy directly is the bottom line for a human being. Perhaps there are other things beyond that, but they are not available to us."

Don Juan asserted all this over and over, and every time he said it, his words seemed to solidify me more and more, to help me return to my normal state.

I told don Juan everything I had witnessed; everything I had heard. Don Juan explained to me that I had succeeded that day in transforming the anthropomorphic shape of the inorganic beings into their essence: impersonal energy aware of itself.

"You are now in the position of having embodied the realization," he said, "that it is our cognition, which is in essence an interpretation system, that curtails our resources. Our cognitive interpretation system is what tells us what the parameters of our possibilities are. And since we have been using that system of interpretation all our lives, we cannot possibly dare to go against its dictums.

"The energy of those inorganic beings pushes us," don Juan went on, "and we interpret that push as we may, depending on our mood. The most sober thing to do, for a sorcerer, is to relegate those entities to an abstract level: The fewer interpretations sorcerers make, the better off they are.

"From now on," he continued, "whenever you are confronted with the strange sight of an apparition, hold your ground and gaze at it with an inflexible attitude. If it is an inorganic being, your interpretation of it will fall off like dead leaves. If nothing happens, it is just a chicken-shit aberration of your mind, which is not your mind anyway."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 3 - Chapter 17. The Clear View.

For the first time in my life, I had found myself in a total quandary as to how to behave in the world. The world around me had not changed. It definitely stemmed from a flaw in me.

Don Juan's personal influence upon me, and my deep engagement in all the activities stemming from his practices were taking their toll on me; causing in me a serious incapacity to deal with my fellow men.

I had examined my problem and concluded that my flaw was my compulsion to measure everyone using don Juan as a yardstick.

Don Juan was, in my estimate, a being who lived his life profes­sionally in every aspect of the term. Every one of his acts, no matter how insignificant, counted.

I, on the other hand, was surrounded by people who believed that they were immortal beings; people who contradicted themselves every step of the way. They were beings whose acts could never be accounted for.

It was an unfair game. The cards were stacked against the people I encountered. I had become accustomed to don Juan's unalterable behavior; to his total lack of self-importance; and to the unfathomable scope of his intellect.

Very few of the people I knew were even aware that there existed another pattern of behavior that fostered those qualities. Most of them knew only the behavioral pattern of self-reflection, which renders men weak and contorted.

Consequently, I was having a very difficult time in my aca­demic studies. I was losing sight of them. I tried desperately to find a rationale that would justify my academic endeavors.

The only thing that came to my aid and gave me a connection, however flimsy, to academia was the recommendation that don Juan had made to me once that warrior travelers should have a romance with knowledge, in whatever form knowledge was presented.

Don Juan had defined the concept of warrior travelers by saying that it referred to sorcerer seers who traveled in the dark sea of awareness as total freedom warriors.

He had added that all human beings were travelers of the dark sea of awareness whether they were aware of it or not; and that this Earth can be considered as a station on their journey.

And for extraneous reasons, which don Juan did not care to divulge at the time, the bulk of the travelers have interrupted their voyage.

He said that human beings were caught in a sort of eddy; a cur­rent that went in circles, giving them the impression of moving while they were, in essence, stationary.

He maintained that sor­cerers were the only opponents of whatever force kept human beings prisoners, and that by means of their discipline sorcerers broke loose from its grip and continued their journey of awareness.

What precipitated the final chaotic upheaval in my academic life was my incapacity to focus my interest on topics of anthropo­logical concern that did not mean a hoot to me, not because of their lack of appeal but because they were mostly matters where words and concepts had to be manipulated, as in a legal docu­ment, to obtain a given result that would establish precedents. It was argued that human knowledge is built in such a fashion, and that the effort of every individual was a building block in con­structing a system of knowledge.

The example that was put to me was that of the legal system by which we live, and which is of invaluable importance to us. However, my romantic notions at the time impeded me from conceiving of myself as a 'barrister at anthropology'.

I had bought, lock, stock, and barrel, the concept that anthropology should be the matrix of all human endeavor, or the measure of man.

Don Juan, a consummate pragmatist, a true 'warrior traveler' of the unknown, said that I was full of prunes. He said that it did not matter that the anthropological topics proposed to me were maneuvers of words and concepts, that what was important was the exercise of discipline.

"It does not make any difference," he said to me one time, "how good a reader you are, and how many wonderful books you can read. What is important is that you have the discipline to read what you do not want to read. The crux of the sorcerers' exercise of going to school is in what you refuse, not in what you accept."

I decided to take some time off from my studies and went to work in the art department of a company that made decals. My job engaged my efforts and thoughts to their fullest extent. My challenge was to carry out the tasks assigned to me as perfectly and as rapidly as I could. To set up the vinyl sheets with the images to be processed by silk-screening into decals was a standard procedure that would not admit of any innovation, and the efficiency of the worker was measured by exactness and speed.

I became a workaholic and enjoyed myself tremendously.

The director of the art department and I became fast friends. He practically took me under his wing. His name was Ernest Lipton. I admired and respected him immensely. He was a fine artist and a magnificent craftsman.

His flaw was his softness, his incredible consideration for others, which bordered on passivity.

For example, one day we were driving out of the parking lot of a restaurant where we had eaten lunch. Very politely, he waited for another car to pull out of the parking space in front of him. The driver obviously did not see us, and began to back out at a con­siderable speed.

Ernest Lipton could easily have blown his horn to attract the man's attention to watch where he was going. Instead, he sat, grinning like an idiot as the guy crashed into his car. Then he turned and apologized to me. "Gee, I could have blown my horn," he said, "but it is so frigging loud, it embarrasses me."

The guy who had backed up into Ernest's car was furious and had to be placated.

"Do not worry," Ernest said. "There is no damage to your car. Besides, you only smashed my headlights; I was going to replace them anyway."

Another day, in the same restaurant, some Japanese people, clients of the decal company and Ernest Lipton's guests for lunch, were talk­ing animatedly to us, asking questions. The waiter came with the food and cleared the table of some of the salad plates, making room, the best way he could on the narrow table, for the huge hot plates of the entree.

One of the Japanese clients needed more space. He pushed his plate forward. The push set Ernest's plate in motion and it began to slide off the table. Again, Ernest could have warned the man, but he did not. He sat there grinning until the plate fell in his lap.

On another occasion, I went to his house to help him put up some rafters over his patio, where he was going to let a grape vine grow for partial shade and fruit. We prearranged the rafters into a huge frame and then lifted one side and bolted it to some beams. Ernest was a tall, very strong man, and using a length of two-by-four as a hoisting device, he lifted the other end for me to fit the bolts into holes that were already drilled into the supporting beams. But before I had a chance to put in the bolts there was an insistent knock on the door and Ernest asked me to see who it was while he held the frame of rafters.

His wife was at the door with her grocery packages. She engaged me in a lengthy conversation and I forgot about Ernest. I even helped her to put her groceries away. In the middle of arranging her celery bundles, I remembered that my friend was still holding the frame of rafters, and knowing him, I knew that he would still be at the job, expecting everybody else to have the consideration that he himself had.

I rushed desperately to the backyard, and there he was on the ground. He had collapsed from the exhaustion of holding the heavy wooden frame. He looked like a rag doll. We had to call his friends to lend a hand and hoist up the frame of rafters- he could not do it anymore. He had to go to bed. He thought for sure that he had a hernia.

The classic story about Ernest Lipton was that one day he went hiking for the weekend in the San Bernardino Mountains with some friends. They camped in the mountains for the night.

While everybody was sleeping, Ernest Lipton went to the bushes, and being such a considerate man, he walked some distance from the camp so as not to bother anybody. He slipped in the darkness and rolled down the side of the mountain. He told his friends afterward that he knew for a fact that he was falling to his death at the bottom of the valley.

He was lucky in that he grabbed on to a ledge with the tips of his fingers. He held on to it for hours, searching in the dark with his feet for any support, because his arms were about to give in- he was going to hold on until his death.

By extending his legs as wide as he could, he found tiny protuberances in the rock that helped him to hold on. He stayed stuck to the rock, like the decals that he made, until there was enough light for him to realize that he was only a foot from the ground.

"Ernest, you could have yelled for help!" his friends com­plained.

"Gee, I did not think there was any use," he replied. "Who could have heard me? I thought I had rolled down at least a mile into the valley. Besides, everyone was asleep."

The final blow came for me when Ernest Lipton, who spent two hours daily commuting back and forth from his house to the shop, decided to buy an economy car, a Volkswagen Beetle, and began measuring how many miles he got per gallon of gasoline.

I was extremely surprised when he announced one morning that he had reached 125 miles per gallon. Being a very exact man, he qualified his statement, saying that most of his driving was not done in the city, but on the freeway, although at the peak hour of traffic, he had to slow down and accelerate quite often. A week later, he said that he had reached the 250 miles per gallon mark.

This marvelous event escalated until he reached an unbeliev­able figure: 645 miles to a gallon. His friends told him that he should enter this figure into the logs of the Volkswagen company. Ernest Lipton was as pleased as punch, and gloated, saying that he would not know what to do if he reached the thousand-mile mark. His friends told him that he should claim a miracle.

This extraordinary situation went on until one morning when he caught one of his friends, who for months had been playing the oldest gag in the book on him, adding gasoline to his tank. Every morning he had been adding three or four cups so that Ernest's gas gauge was never on empty.

Ernest Lipton was nearly angry. His harshest comment was, "Gee! Is this supposed to be funny?"

I had known for weeks that his friends were playing that gag on him, but I was unable to intervene. I felt that it was none of my business. The people who were playing the gag on Ernest Lipton were his lifelong friends. I was a newcomer. When I saw his look of disappointment and hurt, and his incapacity to get angry, I felt a wave of guilt and anxiety. I was facing again an old enemy of mine. I despised Ernest Lipton, and at the same time, I liked him immensely. He was helpless.

The real truth of the matter was that Ernest Lipton looked like my father. His thick glasses and his receding hairline, as well as the stubble of graying beard that he could never quite shave com­pletely, brought my father's features to mind. He had the same straight, pointed nose and pointed chin. But seeing Ernest Lipton's inability to get angry and punch the jokers in the nose was what really clinched his likeness to my father for me and pushed it beyond the threshold of safety.

I remembered how my father had been madly in love with the sister of his best friend. I spotted her one day in a resort town, holding hands with a young man. Her mother was with her as a chaperone. The girl seemed so happy. The two young people looked at each other, enraptured. As far as I could see, it was young love at its best.

When I saw my father, I told him, relishing every instant of my recounting with all the malice of my ten years, that his girlfriend had a real boyfriend. He was taken aback. He did not believe me.

"But have you said anything at all to the girl?" I asked him dar­ingly- "Does she know that you are in love with her?"

"Do not be stupid, you little creep!" he snapped at me. "I do not have to tell any woman any shit of that sort!" Like a spoiled child, he looked at me petulantly, his lips trembling with rage.

"She is mine! She should know that she is my woman without my having to tell her anything!"

He declared all this with the certainty of a child who has had everything in life given to him without having to fight for it.

At the apex of my form, I delivered my punch line. "Well," I said, "I think she expected someone to tell her that, and someone has just beaten you to it."

I was prepared to jump out of his reach and run because I thought he would slash at me with all the fury in the world, but instead, he crumpled down and began to weep. He asked me, sob­bing uncontrollably, that since I was capable of anything, would I please spy on the girl for him and tell him what was going on?

I despised my father beyond anything I could say, and at the same time I loved him with a sadness that was unmatched. I cursed myself for precipitating that shame on him.

Ernest Lipton reminded me of my father so much that I quit my job, alleging that I had to go back to school. I did not want to increase the burden that I already carried on my shoulders. I had never forgiven myself for causing my father that anguish, and I had never forgiven him for being so cowardly.

I went back to school and began the gigantic task of reintegrating myself into my studies of anthropology. What made this reintegration very difficult was the fact that if there was someone I could have worked with with ease and delight because of his admirable touch, his daring curiosity, and his willingness to expand his knowledge without getting flustered or defending. indefensible points, it was someone outside my department, an archaeologist. It was because of his influence that I had become interested in fieldwork in the first place. Perhaps because of the fact that he actually went into the field, literally to dig out infor­mation, his practicality was an oasis of sobriety for me. He was the only one who had encouraged me to go ahead and do field-work because I had nothing to lose.

"Lose it all, and you will gain it all," he told me once, the sound­est advice that I ever got in academia. If I followed don Juan's advice, and worked toward correcting my obsession with self-reflection, I veritably had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But this possibility had not been in the cards for me at that time.

When I told don Juan about the difficulty I encountered in find­ing a professor to work with, I thought that his reaction to what I said was vicious. He called me a petty fart, and worse. He told me what I already knew: that if I were not so tense, I could have worked successfully with anybody in academia, or in business.

"'Warrior travelers' do not complain," don Juan went on. "They take everything that infinity hands them as a challenge. A chal­lenge is a challenge. It is not personal. It cannot be taken as a curse or a blessing. A warrior-traveler either wins the challenge or the challenge demolishes him. It is more exciting to win, so win!"

I told him that it was easy for him or anyone else to say that, but to carry it out was another matter, and that my tribulations were insoluble because they originated in the incapacity of my fellow men to be consistent.

"It is not the people around you who are at fault," he said. "They can not help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone."

"You are absolutely wrong this time, don Juan," I said. "Believe me, I have no interest whatsoever in judging them, or entangling myself with them in any way."

"You do understand what I am talking about," he insisted doggedly. "If you are not conscious of your desire to judge them," he continued, "you are in even worse shape than I thought. This is the flaw of warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand."

I admitted to don Juan that my complaints were petty in the extreme. I knew that much. I said to him that I was confronted with daily events, events that had the nefarious quality of wear­ing down all my resolve, and that I was embarrassed to relate to don Juan the incidents that weighed heavily on my mind.

"Come on," he urged me. "Out with it! Do not have any secrets from me. I am an empty tube. Whatever you say to me will be pro­jected out into infinity."

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

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

"How is everything, Jim?"

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

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

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

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

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

"How are you doing, Alex? How is your married life?"

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

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

He enjoyed himself pink with our crushed expectations when we would see that what he had in his car was a female dog. He introduced his 'bitch' to all his friends. We were shocked when he actually married Theresa, a long-distance runner. They met at a marathon when Alex fainted. They were in the mountains, and Theresa had to revive him by any means.

So she pissed on his face. After that, Alex was her prisoner. She had marked her terri­tory. His friends used to say, "Her pissy prisoner." His friends thought she was the true bitch who had turned weird Alex into a fat dog.

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

"These are the ups and downs of daily living," don Juan said. "You win, and you lose, and you do not know when you win or when you lose. This is the price one pays for living under the rule of self-reflection. There is nothing that I can say to you, and there is nothing that you can say to yourself.

I could only recom­mend that you not feel guilty because you are an asshole, but that you strive to end the dominion of self-reflection. Go back to school. Do not give up yet."

My interest in remaining in academia was waning considerably. I began to live on automatic pilot. I felt heavy, despondent.

However, I noticed that my mind was not involved. I did not calculate anything, or set up any goals or expectations of any sort. My thoughts were not obsessive, but my feelings were. I tried to conceptualize this dichotomy dichotomy between a quiet mind and turbulent turbulent feelings. It was in this frame of mindlessness and overwhelmed feelings that I walked one day from Haines Hall, where the anthropology depart­ment was, to the cafeteria to eat my lunch.

I was suddenly accosted by a strange tremor. I thought I was going to faint, and I sat down on some brick steps. I saw yellow spots in front of my eyes. I had the sensation that I was spinning. I was sure that I was going to get sick to my stomach. My vision became blurry, and finally I could not see a thing. My physical dis­comfort was so total and intense that it did not leave room for a single thought.

I had only bodily sensations of fear and anxiety mixed with elation, and a strange anticipation that I was at the threshold of a gigantic event. They were sensations without the counterpart of thought. At a given moment, I no longer knew whether I was sitting or standing. I was surrounded by the most impenetrable darkness one can imagine, and then, I saw energy as it flowed in the universe.

I saw a succession of luminous spheres walking toward me or away from me. I saw them one at a time, as don Juan had always told me one sees them. I knew they were different individuals because of their differences in size.

I examined the details of their structures. Their luminosity and their roundness were made of fibers that seemed to be stuck together. They were thin or thick fibers. Every one of those luminous figures had a thick, shaggy covering. They looked like some strange, luminous, furry animals, or gigantic round insects covered with luminous hair.

What was the most shocking thing to me was the realization that I had seen those furry insects all my life. Every occasion on which don Juan had made me deliberately see them seemed to me at that moment to be like a detour that I had taken with him. I remembered every instance of his help in making me see people as luminous spheres, and all of those instances were set apart from the bulk of seeing to which I was having access now.

I knew then, as beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I had perceived energy as it flows in the universe all my life, on my own, without anybody's help. Such a realization was overwhelming to me. I felt infinitely, vulnerable, frail. I needed to seek cover; to hide somewhere.

It was exactly like the dream that most of us seem to have at one time or another in which we find ourselves naked and do not know what to do. I felt more than naked; I felt unprotected, weak, and I dreaded returning to my normal state. In a vague way, I sensed that I was lying down. I braced myself for my return to normality. I conceived of the idea that I was going to find myself lying on the brick walk, twitching convulsively, surrounded by a whole circle of spectators.

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

I became quite hysterical upon finding myself in my bed. But for some reason that was beyond my grasp, I calmed down almost immediately. My hysteria was replaced by a bodily indifference, or by a state of bodily satisfaction, something like what one feels after a good meal.

However, I could not quiet my mind. It had been the most shocking thing imaginable for me to realize that I had perceived energy directly all my life. How in the world could it have been possible that I had not known? What had been pre­venting me from gaining access to that facet of my being? Don Juan had said that every human being has the potential to see energy directly. What he had not said was that every human being already sees energy directly but does not know it.

I put that question to a psychiatrist friend. He could not shed any light on my quandary. He thought that my reaction was the result of fatigue and over-stimulation. He gave me a prescription for Valium and told me to rest.

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

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

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

"But the issue which is of the utmost importance is not knowing that you have always perceived energy directly, or your journey­ing from inner silence, but, rather, a twofold affair.

"First, you expe­rienced something which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the clear view, or losing the human form; the time when human pettiness vanishes, as if it had been a patch of fog looming over us, a fog that slowly clears up and dissipates.

"But under no circumstances must you consider this accomplishment as an end.

"The sorcerers' world is not an immutable immutable world like the world of everyday life, where they tell you that once you reach a goal, you remain a winner forever.

"In the sorcerers' world, to arrive at a cer­tain goal means that you have simply acquired the most efficient tools to continue your fight, which, by the way, will never end.

"The second part of this twofold matter is that you experienced the most maddening question for the hearts of human beings. You expressed it yourself when you asked yourself the questions: 'How in the world could it have been possible that I did not know that I had perceived energy directly all my life? What had been pre­venting me from gaining access to that facet of my being?'"

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 3 - Chapter 18. Mud Shadows.

To sit in silence with don Juan was one of the most enjoyable experiences I knew.

We were comfortably sitting on some stuffed chairs in the back of his house in the mountains of central Mexico. It was late afternoon. There was a pleasant breeze. The sun was behind the house, at our backs. Its fading light created exquisite shades of green in the big trees in the backyard.

There were big trees growing around his house, and beyond it, which obliterated the sight of the city where he lived. This always gave me the impression that I was in the wilderness; a different wilderness than the barren Sonoran desert, but wilderness nonetheless.

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

Sitting at the back of his house in central Mexico that day, don Juan said that the energy body was of key importance in whatever was taking place in my life.

He saw that it was an energetic fact that my energy body, instead of moving away from me as normally happens, was approaching me with great speed.

"What does it mean that it is approaching me?" I asked.

Smiling, don Juan said, "It means that something is going to knock the daylights out of you. A tremendous degree of control is going to come into your life, but not your control; the energy body's control."

I asked, "Do you mean that some outside force will control me?"

"There are scores of outside forces controlling you at this moment," don Juan replied. "The control that I am referring to is something outside the domain of language.

"It is your control and at the same time it is not. It cannot be classified, but it can certainly be experienced. And above all, it can certainly be manipulated.

"Remember this: This control can be manipulated to your total advantage, of course, which is not your advantage, but the energy body's advantage.

"However, the energy body is you. So we could go on forever like dogs biting their own tails trying to describe this. Language is inadequate. All these experiences are beyond syntax."

Darkness had descended very quickly. The foliage of the trees that had been glowing green a little while before was now very dark and heavy.

Don Juan said that if I paid close attention to the darkness of the foliage without focusing my eyes, and if I sort of looked at it from the corner of my eye, I would see a fleeting shadow crossing my field of vision.

He said, "This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do. It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Do not stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow."

I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage of the trees. It was either one shadow going back and forth, or there were various fleeting shadows moving from left to right, right to left and straight up in the air.

They looked like fat black fish to me; enormous fish. It was as if gigantic swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight.

Then, finally, it scared me. Although, it became too dark to see the foliage, I could still see the fleeting black shadows.

"What is it, don Juan?" I asked. "I see fleeting black shadows all over the place."

"Ah," he said, "that is the universe at large; incommensurable, nonlinear, and outside the realm of syntax.

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so the sorcerers followed them around. They saw them as you are seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe.

"And those sorcerers discovered something transcendental."

He stopped talking and looked at me. His pause was perfectly placed. He stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.

I asked, "What did they discover, don Juan?"

"They discovered that we have a companion for life," he said, as clearly as he could. "We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos, and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master.

"It has rendered us docile; helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we do not do so."

It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite inhibited.

"It is pitch black around us," don Juan said, "but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you."

He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything.

Don Juan said, "You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics.

"I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico."

"Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you are describing, don Juan?" I asked. "There must be a logical explanation."

"There is an explanation," don Juan replied, "which is the simplest explanation in the world.

"They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance.

"Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them."

I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.

I heard myself saying, "No, no, no, no. This is absurd, don Juan. What you are saying is something monstrous. It simply can not be true, for sorcerers, or for average men, or for anyone."

"Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you?"

"Yes, it infuriates me," I retorted. "Those claims are monstrous!"

"Well," he said, "you have not heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel.

"I am going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I am going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts; and you cannot get up and leave because you are caught. Not because I am holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!"

There was something in me which I felt was a 'glutton for punishment'. He was right. I would not have left the house for the world; and yet I did not like one bit the inanities he was spouting.

Don Juan said, "I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer, and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs; or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior.

"Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs; our ideas of good and evil; our social mores. The predators are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations, and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal."

"But how can they do this, don Juan?" I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. "Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?"

"No, they do not do it that way. That is idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that.

"In order to keep us obedient, meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver- stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist; a horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it.

"They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, and filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.

"I know that even though you have never suffered hunger," he went on, "you have food anxiety which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered, and its food is going to be denied.

"Through the mind, which after all is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. The predators ensure in this manner a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear."

"It is not that I can not accept all this at face value, don Juan," I said. "I could, but there is something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand.

"If it is true that they eat us, how do they do it?"

Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch.

He explained that sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy.

He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely.

As if I were in a dream, I heard don Juan explaining that, to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order; such as the heavy awareness of the predator.

He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection where man was irremediably caught.

By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion.

They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudo-concerns.

There must have been something in what don Juan was saying which was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach.

After a moment's pause long enough for me to recover, I asked don Juan, "But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see the predators, do not do anything about it?"

"There is nothing that you and I can do about it," don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. "All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us.

"How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They will laugh and make fun of you; and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you- and not so much because they do not believe it.

"Down in the depths of every human being, there is an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence."

My analytical mind swung back and forth like a yo-yo. It left me and came back, and left me and came back again. Whatever don Juan was proposing was preposterous, incredible.

At the same time, it was a most reasonable thing; so simple. It explained every kind of human contradiction I could think of.

But how could one have taken all this seriously? Don Juan was pushing me into the path of an avalanche that would take me down forever.

I felt another wave of a threatening sensation. The wave did not stem from me, yet it was attached to me. Don Juan was doing something to me, mysteriously positive and terribly negative at the same time. I sensed it as an attempt to cut a thin film that seemed to be glued to me.

His eyes were fixed on mine in an unblinking stare. He moved his eyes away, and began to talk without looking at me anymore.

"Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point," he said, "do something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see."

He got up to turn off the lights. I stopped him.

"No, no, don Juan," I said, "do not turn off the lights. I am doing okay."

What I felt then was a most unusual, for me, fear of the darkness. The mere thought of it made me pant. I definitely knew something viscerally, but I would not dare touch it, or bring it to the surface, not in a million years!

"You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees," don Juan said, sitting back against his chair. "That is pretty good. I would like you to see them inside this room. You are not seeing anything. You are just merely catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that."

I feared that don Juan would get up anyway and turn off the lights, which he did. Two seconds later, I was screaming my head off. Not only did I catch a glimpse of those fleeting images, I heard them buzzing by my ears.

Don Juan doubled up with laughter as he turned on the lights.

"What a temperamental fellow!" he said. "A total disbeliever, on the one hand; and a total pragmatist on the other.

"You must arrange this internal fight, otherwise you are going to swell up like a big toad and burst."

Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico," he said, "saw the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground.

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights and feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man."

I wanted to get angry and call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being was not there.

Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time and with equal force, I felt that all that he was saying was absurdity itself.

"What are you saying, don Juan?" I asked feebly. My throat was constricted. I could hardly breathe.

"What I am saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He is an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic."

Don Juan's words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed involuntarily.

Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The maneuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.

"This predator," don Juan said, "which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us as other inorganic beings are. I think as children we do see it, but we decide it is so horrific that we do not want to think about it.

"Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.

Continuing, he said, "The only alternative left for mankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent.

"But by discipline I do not mean harsh routines. I do not mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you are blue.

"Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For sorcerers, discipline is an art; the art of facing infinity without flinching; not because they are strong and tough, but because they are filled with awe."

"In what way would the sorcerers' discipline be a deterrent to the flyers?" I asked.

Don Juan scrutinized my face as if to discover any signs of my disbelief. He said, "Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer.

"The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they do not have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.

He continued, saying, "If the predators do not eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while, it will keep on growing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size.

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.

"The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times," don Juan continued, "was to burden the flyers' mind with discipline.

"Sorcerers found out that if they taxed the flyers' mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, and give any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind's foreign origin.

"The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong; and a process begins in which the fleeing of the flyers' mind becomes routine until one day it flees permanently.

"That is the day when you have to rely on your own devices which are nearly zero. A sad day indeed! There is no one to tell you what to do. There is no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you are accustomed to.

"My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples," don Juan continued, "that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer's life for the real mind that belongs to us.

"The sum total of our experience after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty.

"Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation."

I became genuinely agitated. I wanted to know more, and yet a strange feeling in me clamored for me to stop. It alluded to dark results and punishment, something like the wrath of God descending on me for tampering with something veiled by God himself. I made a supreme effort to allow my curiosity to win.

I heard myself say, "What-what-what do you mean, by taxing the flyers' mind?"

"Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end," he replied. "So, through their discipline, sorcerers vanquish the foreign installation."

I was overwhelmed by his statements. I believed that don Juan was either certifiably insane or that he was telling me something so awesome that it froze everything in me.

I noticed, however how quickly I rallied my energy to deny everything he had said. After an instant of panic, I began to laugh, as if don Juan had told me a joke. I even heard myself saying, "Don Juan, don Juan, you are incorrigible!"

Don Juan seemed to understand everything I was experiencing. He shook his head from side to side, and raised his eyes to the heavens in a gesture of mock despair.

He said, "I am so incorrigible, that I am going to give the flyers' mind which you carry inside you one more jolt. I am going to reveal to you one of the most extraordinary secrets of sorcery. I am going to describe to you a finding that took sorcerers thousands of years to verify and consolidate."

He looked at me, smiled maliciously, and said, "The flyers' mind flees forever when a sorcerer succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together as a conglomerate of energy fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers' mind flees in defeat. And that is exactly what you are going to do; hold on to the energy that binds you together."

I had the most inexplicable reaction I could have imagined. Something in me actually shook, as if it had received a jolt. I entered into a state of unwarranted fear, which I immediately associated with my religious background.

Don Juan looked at me from head to toe.

"You are fearing the wrath of God, are you not?" he said. "Rest assured, that is not your fear. It is the flyers' fear, because it knows that you will do exactly as I am telling you."

His words did not calm me at all. I felt worse. I was actually convulsing involuntarily, and I had no means to stop it.

"Do not worry," don Juan said calmly. "I know for a fact that those attacks wear off very quickly. The flyer's mind has no concentration whatsoever."

After a moment, everything stopped as don Juan had predicted. To say again that I was bewildered is a euphemism.

This was the first time in my life ever, with don Juan or alone, that I did not know whether I was coming or going.

I wanted to get out of the chair and walk around, but I was deathly afraid. I was filled with rational assertions, and at the same time I was filled with an infantile fear.

I began to breathe deeply as a cold perspiration covered my entire body. I had somehow unleashed on myself a most godawful sight: black, fleeting shadows jumping all around me wherever I turned.

I closed my eyes and rested my head on the arm of the stuffed chair. "I do not know which way to turn, don Juan," I said. "Tonight, you have really succeeded in getting me lost."

Don Juan said, "You are being torn by an internal struggle.

"Down in the depths of you, you know that you are incapable of refusing the agreement that an indispensable part of you, your glowing coat of awareness, is going to serve as an incomprehensible source of nourishment to, naturally, incomprehensible entities.

"And another part of you will stand against this situation with all its might.

"The sorcerers' revolution," he continued, "is that they refuse to honor agreements in which they did not participate.

"Nobody ever asked me if I would consent to being eaten by beings of a different kind of awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like themselves, and that is the end of the story."

Don Juan stood up from his chair and stretched his arms and legs. "We have been sitting here for hours. It is time to go into the house. I am going to eat. Do you want to eat with me?"

I declined. My stomach was in an uproar.

"I think you had better go to sleep," he said. "The blitz has devastated you."

I did not need any further coaxing. I collapsed onto my bed, and fell asleep like the dead.

At home, as time went by, the idea of the flyers became one of the main fixations of my life. I got to the point where I felt that don Juan was absolutely right about them. No matter how hard I tried, I could not discard his logic.

The more I thought about it, and the more I talked to and observed myself, and my fellow men, the more intense the conviction that something was rendering us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that did not have the self as its focal point.

My concern, as well as the concern of everyone I knew or talked to, was the self.

Since I could not find any explanation for such universal homogeneity, I believed that don Juan's line of thought was the most appropriate way of elucidating the phenomenon.

I went as deeply as I could into readings about myths and legends. In reading, I experienced something I had never felt before: Each of the books I read was an interpretation of myths and legends. In each one of those books, a homogeneous mind was palpable.

The styles differed, but the drive behind the words was homogeneously the same: Even though the theme was something as abstract as myths and legends, the authors always managed to insert statements about themselves. The homogeneous drive behind every one of those books was not the stated theme of the book. Instead, it was self-service. I had never felt this before.

I attributed my reaction to don Juan's influence. The unavoidable question that I posed to myself was: Is he influencing me to see this, or is there really a foreign mind dictating everything we do?

I lapsed, perforce, into denial again, and I went insanely from denial to acceptance to denial. Something in me knew that whatever don Juan was driving at was an energetic fact; but something equally important in me knew that all of that was guff.

The end result of my internal struggle was a sense of foreboding; the sense of something imminently dangerous coming at me.

I made extensive anthropological inquiries into the subject of the flyers in other cultures, but I could not find any references to them anywhere. Don Juan seemed to be the only source of information about this matter.

The next time I saw him, I instantly jumped to talk about the flyers.

I said, "I have tried my best to be rational about this subject matter, but I can not. There are moments when I fully agree with you about the predators."

"Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see," don Juan said with a smile.

I told don Juan that those fleeting shadows were going to be the end of my rational life. I saw them everywhere.

Since I had left his house, I was incapable of going to sleep in the dark. To sleep with the lights on did not bother me at all. The moment I turned the lights off, however, everything around me began to jump. I never saw complete figures or shapes. All I saw were fleeting black shadows.

"The flyers' mind has not left you," don Juan said. "It has been seriously injured. It is trying its best to rearrange its relationship with you. But something in you is severed forever. The flyer knows that. The real danger is that the flyers' mind may win by getting you tired and forcing you to quit by playing the contradiction between what it says and what I say.

"You see, the flyers' mind has no competitors," don Juan continued. "When it proposes something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you have done something of worth.

"The flyers' mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is pure nonsense, and then the same mind will agree with its own proposition, 'Yes, of course, it is nonsense,' you will say. That is the way they overcome us.

"The flyers are an essential part of the universe," he went on, "and they must be taken as what they really are- awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us.

"We are energetic probes created by the universe," he continued as if he were oblivious to my presence, "and it is because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself.

"The flyers are the implacable challengers. They cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe allows us to continue."

I wanted don Juan to say more. But he said only, "The blitz ended the last time you were here. There is only so much to be said about the flyers. It is time for another kind of maneuver."

I could not sleep that night. I fell into a light sleep in the early hours of the morning until don Juan dragged me out of my bed and took me for a hike in the mountains.

Where he lived, the configuration of the land was very different from that of the Sonoran desert, but he told me not to indulge in comparison; that after walking for a quarter of a mile, every place in the world was just the same.

He said, "Sightseeing is for people in cars. They go at great speed without any effort on their part. Sightseeing is not for walkers.

"For instance, when you are riding in a car, you may see a gigantic mountain whose sight overwhelms you with its beauty. The sight of the same mountain will not overwhelm you in the same manner if you look at it while you are going on foot. It will overwhelm you in a different way, especially if you have to climb it or go around it."

It was very hot that morning. We walked on a dry riverbed. One thing that this valley and the Sonoran desert had in common was their millions of insects. The gnats and flies all around me were like dive-bombers that aimed at my nostrils, eyes, and ears. Don Juan told me not to pay attention to their buzzing.

"Do not try to disperse them with your hand," he uttered in a firm tone. "Intend them away. Set up an energy barrier around you. Be silent, and from your silence the barrier will be constructed. Nobody knows how this is done. It is one of those things that the old sorcerers called energetic facts. Shut off your internal dialogue. That is all it takes.

"I want to propose a weird idea to you," don Juan went on as he kept walking ahead of me.

I had to accelerate my steps to be closer to him so as not to miss anything he said.

"I have to stress," he said, "that this is a weird idea that will find endless resistance in you. I will tell you beforehand that you will not accept it easily. But the fact that it is weird should not be a deterrent. You are a social scientist. Therefore, your mind is always open to inquiry, is that not so?"

Don Juan was shamelessly making fun of me. I knew it, but it did not bother me. Perhaps due to the fact that he was walking so fast and I had to make a tremendous effort to keep up with him, his sarcasm just sloughed off me, and instead of making me feisty, it made me laugh.

My undivided attention was focused on what he was saying, and the insects either stopped bothering me because I had intended a barrier of energy around me, or because I was so busy listening to don Juan that I did not care about their buzzing around me anymore.

"The weird idea," he said slowly, measuring the effect of his words, "is that every human being on this earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the same feelings. They seem to respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those reactions seem to be sort of fogged up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are exactly the same reactions that besiege every human being on Earth.

"I would like you to become curious about this, as a social scientist, of course, and see if you could formally account for such homogeneity."

Don Juan collected a series of plants. Some of them could hardly be seen. They seemed to be more in the realm of algae, moss. I held his bag open, and we did not speak anymore. When he had enough plants, he headed back for his house, walking as fast as he could. He said that he wanted to clean and separate those plants, and put them in a proper order before they dried up too much.

I was deeply involved in thinking about the task he had delineated for me. I began by trying to review in my mind if I knew of any articles or papers written on this subject. I thought that I would have to research it, and I decided to begin my research by reading all the works available on 'national character'. I got enthusiastic about the topic, in a haphazard way, and I really wanted to start for home right away because I wanted to take his task to heart; but before we reached his house, don Juan sat down on a high ledge overlooking the valley. He did not say anything for a while. He was not out of breath. I could not conceive of why he had stopped to sit down.

"The task of the day for you," he said abruptly, in a foreboding tone, "is one of the most mysterious things of sorcery, something that goes beyond language; beyond explanations.

"We went for a hike today, and we talked because the mystery of sorcery must be cushioned in the mundane. It must stem from nothing, and go back again to nothing. That is the art of warrior travelers; to go through the eye of a needle unnoticed.

"So, brace yourself by propping your back against this rock wall, as far as possible from the edge. I will be by you, in case you faint or fall down."

"What are you planning to do, don Juan?" I asked, and my alarm was so patent that I noticed it, and lowered my voice.

"I want you to cross your legs, and enter into inner silence," he said. "Let us say that you want to find out what articles you could look for to discredit or substantiate what I have asked you to do in your academic milieu. Enter into inner silence, but do not fall asleep. This is not a journey through the dark sea of awareness. This is seeing from inner silence."

It was rather difficult for me to enter into inner silence without falling asleep. I fought a nearly invincible desire to fall asleep.

I succeeded, and found myself looking at the bottom of the valley from an impenetrable darkness around me. And then, I saw something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I saw a gigantic shadow, perhaps fifteen feet across, leaping in the air and then landing with a silent thud. I felt the thud in my bones, but I did not hear it.

"They are really heavy," don Juan said in my ear. He was holding me by the left arm, as hard as he could.

I saw something that looked like a mud shadow wiggle on the ground, and then take another gigantic leap, perhaps fifty feet long, and land again, with the same ominous silent thud.

I fought not to lose my concentration. I was frightened beyond anything I could rationally use as a description. I kept my eyes fixed on the jumping shadow on the bottom of the valley.

Then I heard a most peculiar buzzing, a mixture of the sound of flapping wings and the buzzing of a radio whose dial has not quite picked up the frequency of a radio station, and the thud that followed was something unforgettable. It shook don Juan and me to the core- a gigantic black mud shadow had just landed by our feet.

"Do not be frightened," don Juan said imperiously. "Keep your inner silence and it will move away."

I was shivering from head to toe. I had the clear knowledge that if I did not keep my inner silence alive, the mud shadow would cover me up like a blanket and suffocate me.

Without losing the darkness around me, I screamed at the top of my voice. Never had I been so angry, so utterly frustrated. The mud shadow took another leap, clearly to the bottom of the valley. I kept on screaming, shaking my legs. I wanted to shake off whatever might come to eat me. My state of nervousness was so intense that I lost track of time. Perhaps I fainted.

When I came to my senses, I was lying in my bed in don Juan's house. There was a towel, soaked in icy-cold water, wrapped around my forehead. I was burning with fever. One of don Juan's female cohorts rubbed my back, chest, and forehead with rubbing alcohol, but this did not relieve me. The heat I was experiencing came from within myself. It was wrath and impotence that generated it.

Don Juan laughed as if what was happening to me was the funniest thing in the world. Peals of laughter came out of him in an endless barrage.

"I would never have thought that you would take seeing a flyer so much to heart," he said.

He took me by the hand, and led me to the back of his house where he dunked me in a huge tub of water, fully clothed- shoes, watch, everything.

"My watch, my watch!" I screamed.

Don Juan twisted with laughter. "You should not wear a watch when you come to see me," he said. "Now you have fouled up your watch!"

I took off my watch, and put it by the side of the tub. I remembered that it was waterproof and that nothing would happen to it.

Being dunked in the tub helped me enormously. When don Juan pulled me out of the freezing water, I had gained a degree of control.

"That sight is preposterous!" I kept on repeating, unable to say anything else.

The predator don Juan had described was not something benevolent. It was enormously heavy, gross, indifferent. I felt its disregard for us. Doubtless, it had crushed us ages ago, making us, as don Juan had said, weak, vulnerable, and docile.

I took off my wet clothes, covered myself with a poncho, sat in my bed, and veritably wept my head off; but not for myself. I had my wrath, and my unbending intent not to let them eat me.

I wept for my fellow men, especially for my father. I never knew until that instant that I loved him so much.

"He never had a chance," I heard myself repeating, over and over, as if the words were not really mine. My poor father, the most considerate being I knew, so tender, so gentle, so helpless.