The active side of infin.., p.27
The Active Side of Infinity, page 27
"It was sheer beauty, Antoine," my grandmother said, sighing. "It expressed everything that you wanted to say. Everything that I wanted to hear." She paused for an instant. Then her lips broke into an exquisite smile.
"Plagiarized, Antoine?" she asked.
Antoine's smile in response to his mother was equally beaming. "Of course, Mother," he said. "Of course."
They embraced, weeping. The horn of the taxi sounded more impatient yet. Antoine looked at me where I was hiding under the stairway. He nodded his head slightly, as if to say, "Good-bye. Take care."
Then he turned around, and without looking at his mother again, he ran toward the door. He was thirty-seven years old, but he looked like he was sixty, he seemed to carry such a gigantic weight on his shoulders. He stopped before he reached the door, when he heard his mother's voice admonishing him for the last time.
"Don't turn around to look, Antoine," she said. "Don't turn around to look, ever. Be happy, and do. Do! There is the trick. Do!"
The scene filled me with a strange sadness that lasts to this day; a most inexplicable melancholy that don Juan explained as my first-time knowledge that we do run out of time.
The next day my grandmother left with her 'counselor/ manservant/ valet' on a journey to a mythical place called Rondonia, where her sorcerer-helper was going to elicit her cure. My grandmother was terminally ill, although I didn't know it.
She never returned, and don Juan explained the selling of her holdings and giving them to Antoine as a supreme sorcerers' maneuver executed by her counselor to detach her from the care of her family. They were so angry with Mother for her deed that they didn't care whether or not she returned. I had the feeling that they didn't even realize that she had left.
On the top of that flat mountain, I recollected those three events as if they had happened only an instant before. When I expressed my thanks to those three persons, I succeeded in bringing them back to that mountaintop. At the end of my shouting, my loneliness was something inexpressible. I was weeping uncontrollably.
Don Juan very patiently explained to me that loneliness is inadmissible in a warrior. He said that warrior travelers can count on one being on which they can focus all their love; all their care: this marvelous Earth, the mother, the matrix, the epicenter of everything we are and everything we do; the very being to which all of us return; the very being that allows warrior travelers to leave on their definitive journey.
Don Genaro proceeded to perform then an act of magical intent for my benefit. Lying on his stomach, he executed a series of dazzling movements. He became a blob of luminosity that seemed to be swimming as if the ground were a pool.
Don Juan said that it was Genaro's way of hugging the immense earth, and that in spite of the difference in size, the earth acknowledged Genaro's gesture. The sight of Genaro's movements, and the explanation of them replaced my loneliness with sublime joy.
"I can't stand the idea that you are leaving, don Juan," I heard myself saying. The sound of my voice and what I had said made me feel embarrassed. When I began to sob, involuntarily, driven by self-pity, I felt even more chagrined. "What is the matter with me, don Juan?" I muttered. "I'm not ordinarily like this."
"What's happening to you is that your awareness is on your toes again," he replied, laughing.
Then I lost any vestige of control and gave myself fully to my feelings of dejection and despair.
"I'm going to be left alone," I said in a shrieking voice. "What's going to happen to me? What's going to become of me?"
"Let's put it this way," don Juan said calmly. "In order for me to leave this world and face the unknown, I need all my strength, all my forbearance, all my luck; but above all, I need every bit of a warrior traveler's guts of steel. To remain behind and fare like a warrior traveler, you need everything of what I myself need. To venture out there, the way we are going to, is no joking matter; but neither is it to stay behind."
I had an emotional outburst, and kissed his hand.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he said. "Next thing you're going to make a shrine for my guaraches!"
The anguish that gripped me turned from self-pity to a feeling of unequaled loss. "You are leaving!" I muttered. "My god! Leaving forever!"
At that moment don Juan did something to me that he had done repeatedly since the first day I had met him. His face puffed up as if the deep breath he was taking inflated him. He tapped my back forcefully with the palm of his left hand and said, "Get up from your toes! Lift yourself up!"
In the next instant, I was once again coherent, complete, in control. I knew what was expected of me. There was no longer any hesitation on my part, or any concern about myself. I didn't care what was going to happen to me when don Juan left. I knew that his departure was imminent. He looked at me, and in that look his eyes said it all.
"We will never be together again," he said softly. "You don't need my help anymore; and I don't want to offer it to you because if you are worth your salt as a warrior traveler, you'll spit in my eye for offering it to you.
"Beyond a certain point, the only joy of a warrior traveler is his aloneness. I wouldn't like you to try to help me either. Once I leave, I am gone. Don't think about me, for I won't think about you. If you are a worthy warrior traveler, be impeccable! Take care of your world. Honor it: Guard it with your life!"
He moved away from me. The moment was beyond self-pity or tears or happiness. He shook his head as if to say good-bye, or as if he were acknowledging what I felt.
"Forget the self and you will fear nothing in whatever level of awareness you find yourself to be," he said.
He had an outburst of levity. He teased me for the last time on this Earth.
"I hope you find love!" he said.
He raised his palm toward me and stretched his fingers like a child, then contracted them against the palm.
"Ciao," he said
I knew that it was futile to feel sorry or to regret anything; and that it was as difficult for me to stay behind as it was for don Juan to leave. Both of us were caught in an irreversible energetic maneuver that neither of us could stop.
Nevertheless, I wanted to join don Juan, follow him wherever he went. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps if I died, he would take me with him.
I saw then how don Juan Matus, the nagual, led the fifteen other seers who were his companions- his wards, his delight- one by one to disappear in the haze of that mesa toward the north.
I saw how every one of them turned into a blob of luminosity, and together they ascended and floated above the mountaintop like phantom lights in the sky. They circled above the mountain once, as don Juan had said they would do: their last survey; the one for their eyes only; their last look at this marvelous Earth. And then they vanished.
I knew what I had to do. I had run out of time. I took off at my top speed toward the precipice and leaped into the abyss. I felt the wind on my face for a moment, and then the most merciful blackness swallowed me like a peaceful subterranean river.
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The Return Trip
I was vaguely aware of the loud noise of a motor that seemed to be racing in a stationary position. I thought that the attendants were fixing a car in the parking lot at the back of the building where I had my office/apartment. The noise became so intense that it finally caused me to wake up.
I silently cursed the boys who ran the parking lot for fixing their car right under my bedroom window. I was hot, sweaty, and tired. I sat up on the edge of my bed, then had the most painful cramps in my calves. I rubbed them for a moment. They seemed to have contracted so tightly that I was afraid that I would have horrendous bruises.
I automatically headed for the bathroom to look for some liniment. I couldn't walk. I was dizzy. I fell down; something that had never happened to me before. When I had regained a minimum of control, I noticed that I wasn't worried at all about the cramps in my calves. I had always been a near hypochondriac. An unusual pain in my calves such as the one I was having now would ordinarily have thrown me into a chaotic state of anxiety.
I went then to the window to close it, although I couldn't hear the noise anymore. I realized that the window was locked and that it was dark outside. It was night! The room was stuffy.
I opened the windows. I couldn't understand why I had closed them. The night air was cool and fresh. The parking lot was empty. It occurred to me that the noise must have been made by a car accelerating in the alley between the parking lot and my building. I thought nothing of it anymore, and went to my bed to go back to sleep, I lay across it with my feet on the floor. I wanted to sleep in this fashion to help the circulation in my calves, which were very sore, but I wasn't sure whether it would have been better to keep them down, or perhaps lift them up on a pillow.
As I was beginning to rest comfortably and fall asleep again, a thought came to my mind with such ferocious force that it made me stand up in one single reflex. I had jumped into an abyss in Mexico! The next thought that I had was a quasi-logical deduction: Since I had jumped into the abyss deliberately in order to die, I must now be a ghost.
How strange, I thought, that I should return, in ghostlike form, to my office/apartment on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire in Los Angeles after I had died. No wonder my feelings were not the same. But if I were a ghost, I reasoned, why would I have felt the blast of fresh air on my face, or the pain in my calves?
I touched the sheets of my bed: They felt real to me. So did its metal frame. I went to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror.
By the looks of me, I could easily have been a ghost. I looked like hell. My eyes were sunken, with huge black circles under them. I was dehydrated, or dead. In an automatic reaction, I drank water straight from the tap. I could actually swallow it. I drank gulp after gulp, as if I hadn't drunk water for days.
I felt my deep inhalations. I was alive! By god, I was alive! I knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I wasn't elated, as I should have been.
A most unusual thought crossed my mind then: I had died and revived before. I was accustomed to it: It meant nothing to me. The vividness of the thought, however, made it into a quasi-memory. It was a quasi-memory that didn't stem from situations in which my life had been endangered. It was something quite different from that.
It was, rather, a vague knowledge of something that could never have happened, and had no reason whatsoever to be in my thoughts.
And yet, there was no doubt in my mind that I had jumped into an abyss in Mexico. I was now in my apartment in Los Angeles, over three thousand miles from where I had jumped, with no recollection whatsoever of having made the return trip.
In an automatic fashion, I ran the water in the tub and sat in it. I didn't feel the warmth of the water: I was chilled to the bone. Don Juan had taught me that at moments of crisis, such as this one, one must use running water as a cleansing factor. I remembered this and got under the shower. I let the warm water run over my body for perhaps over an hour.
I wanted to think calmly and rationally about what was happening to me but I couldn't. Thoughts seemed to have been erased from my mind. I was thoughtless yet I was filled to capacity with sensations that came to my whole body in barrages that I was incapable of examining. All I was able to do was to feel their onslaughts and let them go through me.
The only conscious choice I made was to get dressed and leave. I went to eat breakfast; something I always did at any time of the day or night, at Ship's Restaurant on Wilshire, a block away from my office/apartment.
I had walked from my office to Ship's so many times that I knew every step of the way. The same walk this time was a novelty for me. I didn't feel my steps. It was as if I had a cushion under my feet, or as if the sidewalk were carpeted. I practically glided.
I was suddenly at the door of the restaurant after what I thought might have been only two or three steps. I knew that I could swallow food because I had drunk water in my apartment. I also knew that I could talk because I had cleared my throat and cursed while the water ran on me. I walked into the restaurant as I had always done. I sat at the counter and a waitress who knew me came to me.
"You don't look too good today, dear," she said. "Do you have the flu?"
"No," I replied, trying to sound cheerful. "I've been working too hard. I've been up for twenty-four hours straight writing a paper for a class. By the way, what day is today?"
She looked at her watch and gave me the date, explaining that she had a special watch that was a calendar, too, a gift from her daughter. She also gave me the time: 3:15 A.M.
I ordered steak and eggs, hash browned potatoes, and buttered white toast. When she went away to fill my order, another wave of horror flooded my mind: Had it been only an illusion that I had jumped into that abyss in Mexico, at twilight the previous day? But even if the jump had been only an illusion, how could I have returned to L.A. from such a remote place only ten hours later? Had I slept for ten hours? Or was it that it had taken ten hours for me to fly, slide, float, or whatever to Los Angeles? To have traveled by conventional means to Los Angeles from the place where I had jumped into the abyss was out of the question, since it would have taken two days just to travel to Mexico City from the place where I had jumped.
Another strange thought emerged in my mind. It had the same clarity of my quasi-memory of having died and revived before; and the same quality of being totally foreign to me: My continuity was now broken beyond repair.
I had really died, one way or another, at the bottom of that gully. It was impossible to comprehend my being alive; having breakfast at Ship's. It was impossible for me to look back into my past and see the uninterrupted line of continuous events that all of us see when we look into the past.
The only explanation available to me was that I had followed don Juan's directives; I had moved my assemblage point to a position that prevented my death, and from my inner silence I had made the return journey to L.A. There was no other rationale for me to hold on to.
For the first time ever, this line of thought was thoroughly acceptable to me, and thoroughly satisfactory. It didn't really explain anything, but it certainly pointed out a pragmatic procedure that I had tested before in a mild form when I met don Juan in that town of our choice; and this thought seemed to put all my being at ease.
Vivid thoughts began to emerge in my mind. They had the unique quality of clarifying issues. The first one that erupted had to do with something that had plagued me all along. Don Juan had described it as a common occurrence among male sorcerers: my incapacity to remember events that had transpired while I was in states of heightened awareness.
Don Juan had explained heightened awareness as a minute displacement of my assemblage point, which he achieved, every time I saw him, by actually pushing forcefully on my back. He helped me, with such displacements, to engage energy fields that were ordinarily peripheral to my awareness.
In other words, the energy fields that were usually on the edge of my assemblage point became central to it during that displacement. A displacement of this nature had two consequences for me: an extraordinary keenness of thought and perception; and the incapacity to remember, once I was back in my normal state of awareness, what had transpired while I had been in that other state.
My relationship with my cohorts had been an example of both of these consequences. I had cohorts; don Juan's other apprentices; companions for my definitive journey. I interacted with them only in heightened awareness. The clarity and scope of our interaction was supreme.
The drawback for me was that in my daily life they were only poignant quasi-memories that drove me to desperation with anxiety and expectations. I could say that I lived my normal life on the perennial lookout for somebody who was going to appear all of a sudden in front of me; perhaps emerging from an office building; perhaps turning a corner and bumping into me. Wherever I went, my eyes darted everywhere, ceaselessly and involuntarily, looking for people who didn't exist and yet existed like no one else.
While I sat at Ship's that morning, everything that had happened to me in heightened awareness, to the most minute detail, in all the years with don Juan became again a continuous memory without interruption.
Don Juan had lamented that a male sorcerer, who is the nagual, perforce had to be fragmented because of the bulk of his energetic mass. He said that in each fragment lived a specific range of a total scope of activity; and the events that the male sorcerer had experienced in each fragment had to be joined someday to give a complete, conscious picture of everything that had taken place in his total life.
Looking into my eyes, he had told me that that unification takes years to accomplish, and that he had been told of cases of naguals who never reached the total scope of their activities in a conscious manner, and lived fragmented.
What I experienced that morning at Ship's was beyond anything I could have imagined in my wildest fantasies. Don Juan had said to me time after time that the world of sorcerers was not an immutable world, where the word is final, and unchanging; but that it's a world of eternal fluctuation where nothing should be taken for granted.
The jump into the abyss had modified my cognition so drastically that it allowed now the entrance of possibilities both portentous and indescribable.
But anything that I could have said about the unification of my cognitive fragments would have paled in comparison to the reality of it. That fateful morning at Ship's, I experienced something infinitely more potent than I did the day that I saw energy as it flows in the universe for the first time- the day that after having been on the campus of UCLA, I ended up in the bed of my office/apartment without actually going home in the fashion my cognitive system demanded in order for the whole event to be real.
In Ship's, I integrated all the fragments of my being. I had acted in each one of them with perfect certainty and consistency, and yet I had had no idea that I had done that. I was, in essence, a gigantic puzzle, and to fit each piece of that puzzle into place produced an effect that had no name.
