The Active Side of Infinity (42 page)

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
each
fragment lived a specific range of a total scope of
activity, and the events that he 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, 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 1 experienced
something
infinitely more potent than I did the day that 1
saw
energy as it flows
in the universe,
for the first time-the day that 1 ended up in the
bed of my office/apartment after having been on
the campus of
UCLA 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 1 had had no idea that 1
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.

I sat at the counter at Ship's, perspiring profusely, pondering
uselessly, and obsessively asking
questions that couldn't be answered:
How could all this be possible? How could I have been fragmented in such a
fashion?
Who are we really? Certainly not the people all of us have been led to believe
we are. I
had memories of events that had never happened, as far as
some core of myself was concerned. I
couldn't even weep.

"A sorcerer weeps when he is fragmented," don Juan had said to
me once. "When he's
complete, he's taken by a shiver that
has the potential, because it is so intense, of ending his life."

I was experiencing such a shiver! I doubted that I would ever meet my
cohorts again. It
appeared to me that all of them had left with don
Juan. I was alone. I wanted to think about it, to
mourn my loss,
to plunge into a satisfying sadness the way I had always done. I couldn't.
There
was nothing to mourn, nothing to feel sad about. Nothing
mattered. All of us were warrior-
travelers, and all of us had been
swallowed by
infinity.

All along,
I had listened to don Juan talk about the
warrior-traveler.
I had liked
the
description immensely, and I had
identified with it on a purely emotional basis. Yet I had never
felt what he really meant by that, regardless of
how many times he had explained his meaning to
me. That night, at the counter of Ship's, I knew what don Juan had been
talking about. I was a
warrior-traveler.
Only
energetic facts
were
meaningful for me. All the rest were trimmings that had no importance at all.

That night, while I sat waiting for my food, another vivid thought
erupted in my mind. I felt a
wave of empathy, a wave of
identification with don Juan's premises. I had finally reached the
goal
of his teachings: I was one with him as I had never been before. It had never
been the case
that I was just fighting don Juan or his concepts, which
were revolutionary for me because they
didn't fulfill
the linearity of my thoughts as a Western man. Rather, it was that don Juan's
precision
in presenting his concepts had always scared me half to death. His efficiency
had appeared to be dogmatism. It was that appearance that had forced me to seek
elucidations, and
had made me act, all along, as if I had been a
reluctant believer.

Yes, I had jumped into an abyss, I said to myself, and I didn't die
because before I reached the
bottom of that gully I let the
dark
sea of awareness
swallow me. I surrendered to it, without fears or regrets.
And that
dark sea
had supplied me with whatever was necessary for me not
to die, but
to end up in my bed in L.A. This explanation would have
explained nothing to me two days
before. At three in the morning, in
Ship's, it meant everything to me.

I banged my hand on the table as if I were alone in the room. People
looked at me and smiled
knowingly. I didn't care. My mind was
focused on an insoluble dilemma: I was alive despite the
fact
that I had jumped into an abyss in order to die ten hours before. I knew that
such a dilemma
could never be resolved. My normal cognition
required a linear explanation in order to be
satisfied, and
linear explanations were not possible. That was the crux of the interruption of
continuity. Don Juan had said that that interruption was sorcery. I knew this
now, as clearly as I
was capable of. How right don Juan had
been when he had said that in order for me to stay
behind, I
needed all my strength, all my forbearance, and above all, a
warrior-traveler's
guts of
steel.

I wanted to think about don Juan, but I couldn't. Besides, I didn't care
about don Juan. There
seemed to be a giant barrier between
us. I truly believed at that moment that the foreign thought that had been
insinuating itself to me since I had woken up was true: I was someone else. An
exchange
had taken place at the moment of my jump. Otherwise, I would have relished the
thought
of don Juan; 1 would have longed for him. I would have even felt a twinge of
resentment
because he hadn't taken me with him. That would have
been my normal self. 1 truthfully wasn't the same. This thought gained momentum
until it invaded all my being. Any residue of my old
self that I may
have retained vanished then.

A new mood took over. I was alone! Don Juan had left me inside a dream
as his agent
provocateur. I felt my body begin to lose its rigidity;
it became flexible, by degrees, until I could
breathe deeply
and freely. I laughed out loud. I didn't care that people were staring at me
and
weren't smiling this time. I was alone, and there was
nothing I could have done about it!

I had the physical sensation of actually entering into a passageway, a
passageway that had a
force of its own. It pulled me in. It
was a silent passageway. Don Juan was that passageway, quiet
and
immense. This was the first time ever that 1 felt that don Juan was void of
physicality. There
was no room for sentimentality or longing. I
couldn't possibly have missed him because he was
there as a
depersonalized emotion that lured me in.

The passageway challenged me. I had a sensation of ebullience, ease.
Yes, I could travel that
passageway, alone or in company,
perhaps forever. And to do this was not an imposition for me,
nor
was it a pleasure. It was more than the beginning of the
definitive journey,
the unavoidable
fate of a warrior-traveler, it was the beginning of
a new era. I should have been weeping with the
realization
that 1 had found that passageway, but I wasn't. I was facing
infinity
at Ship's! How
extraordinary! I felt a chill on
my back. I heard don Juan's voice saying that the universe was
indeed
unfathomable.

At that moment, the back door of the restaurant, the one that led to
the parking lot, opened and
a strange character entered: a man
perhaps in his early forties, disheveled and emaciated, but with
rather
handsome features. I had seen him for years roaming around UCLA, mingling with
the students. Someone had told me that he was an outpatient of the nearby
Veterans' Hospital. He
seemed to be mentally unbalanced. I had
seen him time after time at Ship's, huddled over a cup of
coffee,
always at the same end of the counter. I had also seen how he waited outside,
looking
through the window, watching for his favorite stool to
become vacant if someone was sitting
there.

When he entered the restaurant, he sat at his usual place, and then he
looked at me. Our eyes
met. The next thing I knew, he had let
out a formidable scream that chilled me, and everyone present, to the bone.
Everyone looked at me, wide-eyed, some of them with unchewed food in
their
mouths. Obviously, they thought I had screamed. I had set up the precedents by
banging the
counter and then laughing out loud. The man jumped off
his stool and ran out of the restaurant,
turning back to
stare at me while, with his hands, he made agitated gestures over his head.

I succumbed to an impulsive urge and ran after the man. 1 wanted him to
tell me what he had seen in me that had made him scream. 1 overtook him in the
parking lot and asked him to tell me
why he had screamed. He covered
his eyes and screamed again, even louder. He was like a child,
frightened
by a nightmare, screaming at the top of his lungs. 1 left him and went back to
the restaurant.

"What happened to you, dear?" the waitress asked with a
concerned look. "I thought you ran
out on
me."

"I just went to see a friend," I said.

The waitress looked at me and made a gesture of mock annoyance and
surprise.
"Is that guy your friend?" she asked.

"The only friend I have in the world," I said, and that was
the truth, if I could define "friend"
as someone who
sees through the veneer that covers you and knows where you really come from.