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.
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 had been 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, and 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: I 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. I 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 I 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 I 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. I wanted him to tell me what he had seen in me that had made him scream. I 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. I 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.
### "The Active Side of Infinity" - Copyright 1998 by Carlos Castaneda - The End ###