The Active Side of Infinity (12 page)

Don Juan went on explaining that the moment one crosses a peculiar
threshold in
infinity,
either deliberately or, as in my case,
unwittingly, everything that happens to one from then on is no longer
exclusively in one's own domain, but enters into the realm of
infinity.

"When we met in Arizona, both of us crossed a peculiar
threshold," he continued. "And this
threshold was
not decided by either one of us, but by infinity itself. Infinity is everything
that surrounds us." He said this and made a broad gesture with his arms.
"The sorcerers of my lineage
call it
infinity,
the
spirit, the
dark sea of awareness,
and say that it is something that
exists out
there and rules our lives."

I was truly capable of comprehending everything he was saying, and yet 1
didn't know what
the hell he was talking about. I asked if crossing
the threshold had been an accidental event, born
of
unpredictable circumstances ruled by chance. He answered that his steps and
mine were guided
by infinity, and that circumstances that seemed to
be ruled by chance were in essence ruled by the
active side, of infinity.
He
called it
intent.

"What put you and me together," he went on, "was the
intent
of infinity.
It is impossible to
determine what this intent
of
infinity
is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and 1 are. Sorcerers say
that
it is a tremor in
the air.
The advantage of sorcerers is to know that
the
tremor in the air
exists, and to acquiesce to it without any further
ado. For sorcerers, there's no pondering,
wondering, or
speculating. They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with
the
intent
of infinity,
and they just do it."

Nothing could have been clearer to me than those statements. As far as
I was concerned, the truth of what he was telling me was so self-evident that
it didn't permit me to ponder how such
absurd
assertions could have sounded so rational. 1 knew that everything that don Juan
was
saying was not only a truism, but 1 could corroborate it
by referring to my own being. I knew
about everything that he was
saying. I had the sensation that I had lived every twist of his
description.

Our interchange ended then. Something seemed to deflate inside me. It
was at that instant that
the thought crossed my mind that I was
losing my marbles. I had been blinded by weird
statements and
had lost every conceivable sense of objectivity. Accordingly, I left don Juan's
house in a real hurry, feeling threatened to the core by an unseen
enemy. Don Juan walked me to my car, fully cognizant of what was going on
inside me.

"Don't worry," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
You're not going crazy. What you
felt was a gentle tap of
infinity."

As time went by, I was able to corroborate what don Juan had said about
his two teachers. Don Juan Matus was exactly as he had described those two men
to be. I would go as far as saying that he was an extraordinary blend of both
of them: on the one hand, extremely quiet and
introspective;
on the other, extremely open and funny. The most accurate statement about what
a
nagual is,
which he voiced the day I found him, was that a nagual is empty, and that that
emptiness doesn't reflect the world, but reflects
infinity.

Nothing could have been more true than this in reference to don Juan
Matus. His emptiness
reflected
infinity.
There was
no boisterousness on his part, or assertions about the self. There was
not
a speck of a need to have either grievances or remorse. His was the emptiness
of a
warrior-
traveler,
seasoned to
the point where he doesn't take anything for granted. A warrior-
traveler
who
doesn't underestimate or overestimate anything. A quiet, disciplined
fighter whose elegance is so extreme that no one, no matter how hard they try
to look, will ever find the seam where all that
complexity has
come together.

I went to Sonora to see don Juan. I had to discuss with him the most
serious event of that
moment in my life. I needed his
advice. When I arrived at his house, I barely went through the
formality
of greeting him. I sat down and blurted out my turmoil.

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

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

"It is the workings of
infinity,"
he replied.
"Something happened to your way of perceiving the
day you met
me. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal realization that
your time
is up. You are aware of it, but not deliberately
conscious of it. You feel the absence of time, and
that makes you
impatient. I know this, for it happened to me and to all the sorcerers of my
lineage.
At a given time, a whole era in my life, or their lives, ended. Now it's your
turn. You
have simply run out of time." He demanded then a
total account of whatever had happened to me.
He said that it
had to be a full account, sparing no details. He wasn't after sketchy
descriptions.
He wanted me to air the full impact of what was troubling
me.

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

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

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

I began my story, telling don Juan that the circumstances of my life
have never permitted me
to be introspective. As far back in my
past as I can remember, my daily life has been filled to the
brim
with pragmatic problems that have clamored for immediate resolution. I remember
my
favorite uncle telling me that he was appalled at having
found out that I had never received a gift
for Christmas
or for my birthday. I had come to live in my father's family's home not too
long
before he made that statement. He commiserated with me
about the unfairness of my situation.
He even apologized, although it
had nothing to do with him.

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

He insisted over and over that I had to forgive the people who had
wronged me. From what he said, I formed the impression that he wanted me to
confront my father with his finding and accuse him of indolence and neglect,
and then, of course, forgive him. He failed to see that I didn't feel
wronged
at all. What he was asking me to do required an introspective nature that would
make
me
respond to the barbs of psychological mistreatment once they were pointed out
to me. I
assured my uncle that I was going
to think about it, but not at the moment, because at that very
instant, my girlfriend, from the living room where
she was waiting for me, was signaling me desperately to hurry up.

1 never had the opportunity to think about it, but my uncle must have
talked to my father, because I got a gift from him, a package neatly wrapped
up, with ribbon and all, and a little card
that said
"Sorry." I curiously and eagerly ripped the wrappings. There was a
cardboard box, and
inside it there was a beautiful toy, a tiny boat
with a winding key attached to the steam pipe. It could be used by children to
play with while they took baths in the bathtub. My father had thoroughly
forgotten that I was already fifteen years old and, for all practical purposes,
a man.

Since I had reached my adult years still incapable of serious
introspection, it was quite a novelty when one day years later I found myself
in the throes of a strange emotional agitation,
which seemed
to increase as time went by. I discarded it, attributing it to natural
processes of the
mind or the body that enter into action
periodically, for no reason at all, or are perhaps triggered
by
biochemical processes within the body itself. I thought nothing of it. However,
the agitation
increased and its pressure forced me to believe that I
had arrived at a moment in life when what I
needed was a
drastic change. There was something in me that demanded a rearrangement of my
life.
This urge to rearrange everything was familiar. I had felt it in the past, but
it had been
dormant for a long time.

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

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

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

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

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

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