The Active Side of Infinity (35 page)

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 wouldn't 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's pretty good. I'd
like you to see them inside this room. You're not
seeing
anything.
You're
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're 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, 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, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the
righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn't
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, 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'm 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's 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. 1 think as children we do see it and
decide it's so horrific that we don't 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.

"The only alternative left for mankind," he continued,
"is
discipline.
Discipline is the only
deterrent. But
by discipline I don't mean harsh routines. I don't mean waking up every morning
at
five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until
you're blue. Sorcerers understand discipline
as the capacity
to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them,
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?"
I asked.

"Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat
of
awareness
unpalatable to the
flyer,"
don Juan said,
scrutinizing my face as if to discover any signs of disbelief. "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 don't have any recourse other than refraining
from
continuing their nefarious task.

"If the predators don't eat our glowing coat
of awareness
for
a while," he went on, "it'll 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. They found out that if they taxed the
flyers' mind
with
inner
silence,
the foreign installation would flee, giving to 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. A
sad day indeed! That's the day when you have to rely on your own devices, which
are nearly zero. There's no one to tell you what to do.
There's
no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you're 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,
1 would say
that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely
preparation."

I became genuinely agitated. 1 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. 1 made a supreme
effort
to allow my curiosity to win.

"What-what-what do you mean," I heard myself say, "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're
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.

"I am so incorrigible," he said, "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 and smiled maliciously. "The
flyers' mind
flees
forever," he said, "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's 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, aren't you?" he said.
"Rest assured, that's not your fear. It's
the
flyers'
fear,
because it knows that you will do exactly as I'm 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.

"Don't 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
ever, with don Juan or alone, in my life that I
didn't 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 don't know which way
to turn, don Juan," I said.
"Tonight, you have really succeeded in getting me lost."

"You're being torn by an internal struggle," don Juan said.
"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 be eaten by beings of a
different
kind of awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like
themselves,
and that's 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's time to go into the
house. I'm gonna eat. Do you want to eat with me?"

I declined. My stomach was in an uproar.

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

I didn't 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 couldn't 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 didn't 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 couldn't 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.