The Active Side of Infinity (30 page)

Don Juan continued talking and said that those sorcerers knew when
inorganic
awareness
from other worlds besides our
twin world had landed in their field of awareness. He said that as
every
human being on this earth would do, those shamans made endless classifications
of
different types of this energy that has awareness. They
knew them by the general term inorganic
beings.

"Do those inorganic
beings
have
life like we have life?" I asked. "If you think that life is to be
aware,
then they do have life," he said. "I suppose it would be accurate to
say that if life can be
measured by the intensity, the
sharpness, the duration of that awareness, I can sincerely say that
they
are more alive than you and I." "Do those inorganic
beings
die, don Juan?" I asked. Don
Juan
chuckled for a moment before he answered. "If you call death the
termination of awareness,
yes, they die. Their awareness ends.
Their death is rather like the death of a human being, and at
the
same time, it isn't, because the death of human beings has a hidden option. It
is something like
a clause in a legal document, a clause that is
written in tiny letters that you can barely see. You
have to use a
magnifying glass to read it, and yet it's the most important clause of the
document."
"What's the hidden option, don Juan?"

"Death's hidden option is exclusively for sorcerers. They are the
only ones who have, to my
knowledge, read the fine print. For
them, the option is pertinent and functional. For average
human
beings, death means the termination of their awareness, the end of their
organisms. For the
inorganic
beings,
death means the same: the
end of their awareness. In both cases, the impact of
death is the
act of being sucked into the dark
sea of awareness,
Their individual
awareness,

loaded with their life experiences, breaks its boundaries, and awareness
as energy spills out into
the
dark sea of awareness."

"But what is death's hidden option that is picked up only by
sorcerers, don Juan?" I asked.

"For a sorcerer, death is a unifying factor. Instead of
disintegrating the organism, as is
ordinarily the case, death
unifies it." "How can death unify anything?" I protested.
"Death for a
sorcerer," he said, "terminates the reign
of individual moods in the body. The old sorcerers believed it was the dominion
of the different parts of the body that ruled the moods and the
actions
of the total body; parts that become dysfunctional drag the rest of the body to
chaos, such
as, for instance, when you yourself get sick from eating
junk. In that case, the mood of your
stomach affects everything
else. Death eradicates the dominion of those individual parts. It
unifies
their awareness into one single unit."

"Do you mean that after they die, sorcerers are still aware?"
I asked.

"For sorcerers, death is an act of unification that employs every
bit of their energy. You are
thinking of death as a corpse in front
of you, a body on which decay has settled. For sorcerers,
when
the act of unification takes place, there is no corpse. There is no decay.
Their bodies in their entirety have been turned into energy, energy possessing
awareness that is not fragmented. The
boundaries that are set up by
the organism, boundaries which are broken down by death, are still
functioning
in the case of sorcerers, although they are no longer visible to the naked eye.

"I know that you are dying to ask me," he continued with a
broad smile, "if whatever I'm
describing is the soul that
goes to hell or heaven. No, it is not the soul. What happens to sorcerers,
when
they pick up that hidden option of death, is that they turn into
inorganic
beings,
very
specialized, high-speed
inorganic beings,
beings
capable of stupendous maneuvers of perception.
Sorcerers enter
then into what the shamans of ancient Mexico called their
definitive
journey.
Infinity
becomes their
realm of action."

"Do you mean by this, don Juan, that they become eternal?"

"My sobriety as a sorcerer tells me," he said, "that
their awareness will terminate, the way
inorganic
beings' awareness terminates, but I haven't
seen
this happen. I have no
firsthand
knowledge of it. The old sorcerers believed that the
awareness of this type of inorganic
being
would last as long as the
earth is alive. The earth is their matrix. As long as it prevails, their
awareness
continues. To me, this is a most reasonable statement."

The continuity and order of don Juan's explanation had been, for me,
superb. I had no way
whatsoever in which to contribute. He
left me with a sensation of mystery and unvoiced
expectations
to be fulfilled.

On my next visit to don Juan, I began my conversation by asking him
eagerly a question that
was foremost in my mind.

"Is there a possibility, don Juan, that ghosts and apparitions
really exist?"

"Whatever
you may call a ghost or an apparition," he said, "when it is
scrutinized by a
sorcerer, boils down to
one issue-it is possible that any of those ghostlike apparitions may be a
conglomeratation of energy fields that have awareness, and which we turn into
things we know. If
that's the case,
then the apparitions have energy. Sorcerers call them
energy-generating
configurations.
Or, no energy emanates from them, in which case they are
phantasmagorical creations, usually of a very strong person-strong in terms of
awareness.

"One story that intrigued me immensely," don Juan continued,
"was the story you told me
once about your aunt. Do you remember
it?"

I had told don Juan that when I was fourteen years old I had gone to
live in my father's sister's
house. She lived in a gigantic house
that had three patios with living accommodations in between
each
of them-bedrooms, living rooms, etc. The first patio was very austere,
cobblestoned. They
told me that it was a colonial house and this first
patio was where horse-drawn carriages had gone
in. The second
patio was a beautiful orchard zigzagged by brick lanes of Moorish design and
filled
with fruit trees. The third patio was covered with flowerpots hanging from the
eaves of the roof, birds in cages, and a colonial-style fountain in the middle
of it with running water, as well as
a large area fenced with chicken
wire, set aside for my aunt's prized fighting cocks, her
predilection
in life.

My aunt made available to me a whole apartment right in front of the
fruit orchard. I thought I
was going to have the time of my life
there. I could eat all the fruit that I wanted. No one else in
the
household touched the fruit of any of those trees, for reasons that were never
revealed to me.
The household was composed of my aunt, a tall,
round-faced chubby lady in her fifties, very
jovial, a great
raconteur, and full of eccentricities that she hid behind a formal facade and
the
appearance of devout Catholicism. There was a butler, a
tall, imposing man in his early forties
who had been a
sergeant-major in the army and had been lured out of the service to occupy the
better-paid position of butler, bodyguard, and all-around man in my aunt's
house. His wife, a
beautiful young woman, was my aunt's companion,
cook, and confidante. The couple also had a
daughter, a
chubby little girl who looked exactly like my aunt. The likeness was so strong
that my
aunt had adopted her legally.

Those four were the quietest people I had ever met. They lived a very
sedate life, punctuated only by the eccentricities of my aunt, who, on the spur
of the moment, would decide to take trips, or buy promising new fighting cocks,
train them, and actually have serious contests in which
enormous
sums of money were involved. She tended her fighting cocks with loving care,
sometimes all day long. She wore thick leather gloves and stiff leather
leggings to keep the
fighting cocks from spurring her.

I spent two stupendous months living in my aunt's house. She taught me
music in the
afternoons, and told me endless stories about my family's
ancestors. My living situation was ideal
for me because
I used to go out with my friends and didn't have to report the time I came back
to
anybody. Sometimes I used to spend hours without falling
asleep, lying on my bed. 1 used to
keep my window open to let the
smell of orange blossoms fill my room. Whenever I was lying
there
awake, I would hear someone walking down a long corridor that ran the length of
the whole
property on the north side, joining all the patios of
the house. This corridor had beautiful arches
and a tiled
floor. There were four light bulbs of minimal voltage that dimly illuminated
the corridor, lights that were turned on at six o'clock every evening and
turned off at six in the
morning.

I asked my aunt if anyone walked at night and stopped at my
window,
because whoever was walking always stopped by my window, turned around, and
walked
back again toward the main entrance of the house.

"Don't trouble yourself with nonsense, dear," my aunt said,
smiling. "It's probably my butler,
making his
rounds. Big deal! Were you frightened?"

"No, I was not frightened," I said, "I just got curious,
because your butler walks up to my
room every night. Sometimes his
steps wake me up."

She discarded my inquiry in a matter-of-fact fashion, saying that the
butler had been a military
man and was habituated to making his
rounds, as a sentry would. I accepted her explanation.

One day, I mentioned to the butler that his steps were just too loud,
and asked if he would make his rounds by my window with a little more care so
as to let me sleep.

"I don't know what you're talking about!" he said in a gruff
voice.

"My aunt told me that you make your rounds at night," I said.

"I never do such a thing!" he said, his eyes flaring with
disgust.

"But who walks by my window then?"

"Nobody walks by your window. You're imagining things. Just go
back to sleep. Don't go
around stirring things up. I'm telling
you this for your own good."

Nothing could have been worse for me in those years than someone telling
me that they were
doing something for my own good. That night, as
soon as I began to hear the footsteps, I got out
of my bed and
stood behind the wall that led to the entrance of my apartment. When I
calculated
that whoever was walking was by the second bulb, I just
stuck my head out to look down the
corridor. The steps stopped
abruptly, but there was no one in sight. The dimly illuminated
corridor
was deserted. If somebody had been walking there, they wouldn't have had time
to hide
because there was no place to hide. There were only bare
walls.

My fright was so immense that I woke up the whole household screaming my
head off. My aunt and her butler tried to calm me down by telling me that 1 was
imagining all that, but my
agitation was so intense that both of
them sheepishly confessed, in the end that something which
was
unknown to them walked in that house every night.

Don Juan had said that it was almost surely my aunt who walked at night;
that is to say, some
aspect of her awareness over which she
had no volitional control. He believed that this
phenomenon
obeyed a sense of playfulness or mystery that she cultivated. Don Juan was sure
that
it was not a far-fetched idea that my aunt, at a
subliminal level, was not only making all those
noises happen,
but that she was capable of much more complex manipulations of awareness. Don
Juan
had also said that to be completely fair, he had to admit the possibility that
the steps were
the product of inorganic awareness.

Don Juan said that the inorganic beings who populated our twin world
were considered, by
the sorcerers of his lineage, to be our relatives.
Those shamans believed that it was futile to make
friends with
our family members because the demands levied on us for such friendships were
always
exorbitant. He said that that type of inorganic being, who are our first
cousins,
communicate with us incessantly, but that their
communication with us is not at the level of conscious awareness. In other
words, we know all about them in a subliminal way, while they
know
all about us in a deliberate, conscious manner.