The Active Side of Infinity (18 page)

I went to my bed and sought the only solace I could think of: quietude,
silence. In order to
facilitate the advent of inner
silence,
don Juan had taught me a way to sit down on my bed, with
the
knees bent and the soles of the feet touching, the hands pushing the feet
together by holding
the ankles. He had given me a thick dowel that I
always kept at hand wherever I went. It was cut to a fourteen-inch length to
support the weight of my head if I leaned over and put the dowel on
the
floor between my feet, and then placed the other end, which was cushioned, on
the spot in the
middle of my forehead. Every time I adopted this
position, I fell sound asleep in a matter of
seconds.

I must have fallen asleep with my usual facility, for I dreamed that I
was in the Mexican town
where don Juan had said he was going to
meet me. I had always been intrigued by this town. The
marketplace
was open one day a week, and the farmers who lived in the area brought their
products
there to be sold. What fascinated me the most about that town was the paved
road that
led to it. At the very entrance to the town, it went
over a steep hill. I had sat many times on a bench by a stand that sold cheese,
and had looked at that hill. I would see people who were
coming
into town with their donkeys and their loads, but I would see their heads
first; as they
kept approaching I would see more of their bodies,
until the moment they were on the very top of
the hill, when
I would see their entire bodies. It seemed to me always that they were emerging
from the earth, either slowly or very fast, depending on their speed.
In my dream, don Juan was
waiting for me by the cheese stand. I
approached him.

"You made it from your
inner silence,"
he said,
patting me on the back. "You did reach your
breaking
point.
For a moment, I had begun to lose hope. But I stuck
around, knowing that you
would make it."

In that dream, we went for a stroll. I was happier than I had ever been.
The dream was so
vivid, so terrifyingly real, that it left me no
doubts that I had resolved the problem, even if my
resolving it
was only a dream-fantasy.

Don Juan laughed, shaking his head. He had definitely read my thoughts.
"You're not in a
mere dream," he said, "but
who am I to tell you that? You'll know it yourself someday-that there
are
no dreams from
inner silence-
because you'll choose to know it."

"The end of an era" was, for don Juan, an accurate
description of a process that shamans go
through in dismantling
the structure of the world they know in order to replace it with another
way
of understanding the world around them. Don Juan Matus as a teacher endeavored,
from the
very instant we met, to introduce me to the cognitive
world
of the shamans of ancient Mexico.
The term "cognition"
was, for me at that time, a bone of tremendous contention. I understood it as
the
process by which we recognize the world around us. Certain things fall within
the realm of
that
process and are easily recognized by us. Other things don't, and remain,
therefore, as
oddities, things for which we
nave no adequate comprehension.

Don Juan maintained, from the start of our association, that the world
of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico was different from ours, not in a shallow
way, but different in the way in which
the Process of
cognition was arranged. He maintained that in our world our cognition requires
the
interpretation of sensory data. He said that the universe
is composed of an infinite number of
energy fields that exist in the
universe at large as luminous filaments. Those luminous filaments
act
on man as an organism. The response of the organism is to turn those energy
fields into
sensory data. Sensory data is then interpreted, and that
interpretation becomes our cognitive
system.
My understanding of
cognition forced me to believe that it is a universal process, as
language
is a universal process. There is a different syntax for every language, as
there must be a
slightly different arrangement for every system of
interpretation in the world.

Don Juan's assertion, however, that the shamans of ancient Mexico had a different cognitive
system,
was, for me,
equivalent to saying that they had a different way of communicating that had
nothing
to do with language. What 1 desperately wanted him to say was that their
different
cognitive
system
was the equivalent of having a
different language but that it was a language nonetheless. "The end of an
era" meant, to don Juan, that the units of a foreign cognition were
beginning
to take hold. The units of my normal cognition, no matter how pleasant and
rewarding
they were for me, were beginning to fade. A grave moment
in the life of a man!

Perhaps my most cherished unit was my academic life. Anything that
threatened it was a threat to the very core of my being, especially if the
attack was veiled, unnoticed. It happened
with a
professor in whom I had put all my trust, Professor Lorca.

I had enrolled in Professor Lorca's course on cognition because he was
recommended to me as
one of the most brilliant academics in
existence. Professor Lorca was rather handsome, with
blond hair
neatly combed to the side. His forehead was smooth, wrinkle-free, giving the
appearance of someone who
had never worried in his life. His clothes were extremely well
tailored. He didn't wear a tie, a feature that
gave him a boyish look. He would put on a tie only to face important people.

On my memorable first class with Professor Lorca, I was bewildered and
nervous at seeing
how he paced back and forth for minutes that stretched
themselves into an eternity for me.
Professor Lorca kept on moving
his thin, clenched lips up and down, adding immensities to the
tension
he was generating in that closed-window, stuffy room. Suddenly, he stopped
walking. He
stood in the center of the room, a few feet from where I
was sitting, and, banging a carefully
rolled newspaper on the podium,
he began to talk.

"It'll never be known .. ." he began.

Everyone in the room at once started anxiously taking notes.

"It'll never be known," he repeated, "what a toad is
feeling while he sits at the bottom of a
pond and
interprets the toad world around him." His voice carried a tremendous
force and finality. "So, what do you think this thing is?" He waved
the newspaper over his head.

He went on to read to the class an article in the newspaper in which
the work of a biologist
was reported. The scientist was quoted
as describing what frogs felt when insects swam above their heads.

"This article shows the carelessness of the reporter, who has
obviously misquoted the
scientist," Professor Lorca
asserted with the authority of a full professor. "A scientist, no matter
how
shoddy his work might be, would never allow himself to anthropomorphize the
results of his
research, unless, of course, he's a
nincompoop."

With this as an introduction, he delivered a most brilliant lecture on
the insular quality of our
cognitive
system,
or the
cognitive system of any organism, for that matter. He brought to me, in his
initial lecture, a barrage of new ideas and made them extremely simple, ready
for use. The
most novel idea to me was that every individual of every
species on this earth interprets the world
around it,
using data reported by its specialized senses. He asserted that human beings
cannot
even imagine what it must be like, for example, to be in
a world ruled by echolocation, as in the
world of bats,
where any inferred point of reference could not even be conceived of by the
human
mind. He made it quite clear that, from that point of
view, no two
cognitive systems
could be alike
among species.

As I left the auditorium at the end of the hour-and-a-half lecture, I
felt that I had been bowled
over by the brilliance of Professor
Lorca's mind. From then on, I was his confirmed admirer. I
found
his lectures more than stimulating and thought provoking. His were the only
lectures I had
ever looked forward to attending. All his
eccentricities meant nothing to me in comparison with
his excellence
as a teacher and as an innovative thinker in the realm of psychology.

When I first attended the class of Professor Lorca, I had been working
with don Juan Matus
for almost two years. It was a well-established
pattern of behavior with me, accustomed as I was
to routines, to
tell don Juan everything that happened to me in my everyday world. On the first
opportunity
I had, I related to him what was taking place with Professor Lorca. I praised
Professor Lorca to the skies and told don Juan
unabashedly that Professor Lorca was my role model. Don Juan seemed very
impressed with my display of genuine admiration, yet he gave me
a strange warning.

"Don't admire people from afar," he said. "That is the
surest way to create mythological
beings. Get close to your
professor, talk to him, see what he's like as a man. Test him. If your
professor's
behavior is the result of his conviction that he is a being who is going to
die, then everything he does, no matter how strange, must be premeditated and
final. If what he says turns out to be just words, he's not worth a hoot."

I was insulted no end by what I considered to be don Juan's callousness.
I thought he was a
little bit jealous of my feelings for Professor
Lorca. Once that thought was formulated in my mind
I felt
relieved; I understood everything.

"Tell me, don Juan," I said to end the conversation on a different
note, "what is a being that is
going to die, really? I have
heard you talk about it so many times, but you haven't actually
defined
it for me."

"Human beings are beings that are going to die," he said.

"Sorcerers firmly maintain that the only way to have a grip on our
world, and on what we do in it, is by fully accepting that we are beings on the
way to dying. Without this basic acceptance,
our lives, our
doings, and the world in which we live are unmanageable affairs."

"But is the mere acceptance of this so far-reaching?" 1 asked
in a tone of quasi-protest.

"You bet your life!" don Juan said, smiling. "However,
it's not the mere acceptance that does
the trick. We
have to embody that acceptance and live it all the way through. Sorcerers
throughout
the ages have said that the view of our death is the most sobering view that
exists.
What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong
since time immemorial, is that without
ever stating it
in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We
behave
as if we were never going to die-an infantile arrogance. But even more
injurious than this
sense of immortality is what comes with it: the
sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our minds."

A most deadly juxtaposition of ideas had me mercilessly in its grip: don
Juan's wisdom and
Professor Lorca's knowledge. Both were difficult,
obscure, all-encompassing, and most
appealing. There was nothing for
me to do except follow the course of events and go with them
wherever
they might take me.

I followed to the letter don Juan's suggestion about approaching
Professor Lorca. I tried, for
the whole semester, to get close to
him, to talk to him. 1 went religiously to his office during his
office
hours, but he never seemed to have any time for me. But even though I couldn't
speak to
him, I admired him unbiasedly. I even accepted that he
would never talk to me. It didn't matter to
me; what
mattered were the ideas that I gathered from his magnificent classes.

I reported to don Juan all my intellectual findings. I had done
extensive reading on cognition.
Don Juan Matus urged me, more than
ever, to establish direct contact with the source of my
intellectual
revolution. "It is imperative that you speak to him," he said with a
note of urgency in
his voice. "Sorcerers don't admire people in
a vacuum. They talk to them; they get to know them.
They establish
points of reference. They compare. What you are doing is a little bit
infantile. You
are admiring from a distance. It is very much like
what happens to a man who is afraid of women.
Finally, his
gonads overrule his fear and compel him to worship the first woman who says
'hello'
to
him."