Version 2006.05.21

## "The Active Side of Infinity" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda
The End of an Era

### The Deep Concerns of Everyday Life

I went to Sonora to see don Juan. I had to discuss with him the most serious event of that moment in my life. I needed his advice.

When I arrived at his house, I barely went through the formality of greeting him. I sat down and blurted out my turmoil.

"Calm down, calm down," don Juan said. "Nothing can be that bad!"

"What's happening to me, don Juan?" I asked. It was a rhetorical question on my part.

"It is the workings of infinity," he replied. "Something happened to your way of perceiving the day you met me. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal realization that your time is up.

"You are aware of it, but not deliberately conscious of it. You feel the absence of time, and that makes you impatient.

"I know this, for it happened to me and to all the sorcerers of my lineage. At a given time, a whole era in my life or their lives ended. Now it's your turn. You have simply run out of time."

He demanded then a total account of whatever had happened to me. He said that it had to be a full account, sparing no details. He wasn't after sketchy descriptions. He wanted me to air the full impact of what was troubling me.

"Let's have this talk, as they say in your world, by the book," he said. "Let us enter into the realm of formal talks."

Don Juan explained that the shamans of ancient Mexico had developed the idea of formal versus informal talks, and used both of them as devices for teaching and guiding their disciples. Formal talks were, for them, summations that they made from time to time of everything that they had taught or said to their disciples. Informal talks were daily elucidations in which things were explained without reference to anything but the phenomenon itself under scrutiny.

"Sorcerers keep nothing to themselves," he continued. "To empty themselves in this fashion is a sorcerers' maneuver. It leads them to abandon the fortress of the self."

I began my story, telling don Juan that the circumstances of my life had never permitted me to be introspective. As far back in my past as I ccould remember, my daily life had been filled to the brim with pragmatic problems that had clamored for immediate resolution.

I remembered that my favorite uncle had told me that he was appalled at having found out that I had never received a gift for Christmas or for my birthday. I had come to live in my father's family's home not too long before my uncle made that statement. He commiserated with me about the unfairness of my situation. He even apologized, although it had nothing to do with him.

"It is disgusting, my boy," he said, shaking with feeling. "I want you to know that I am behind you one hundred percent whenever the moment comes to redress wrongdoings."

He insisted over and over that I had to forgive the people who had wronged me. From what he said, I formed the impression that he wanted me to confront my father with his finding and accuse him of indolence and neglect, and then, of course, forgive him.

My uncle failed to see that I didn't feel wronged at all. What he was asking me to do required an introspective nature that would make me respond to the barbs of psychological mistreatment once they were pointed out to me. I assured my uncle that I was going to think about it, but not at the moment; because, at that very instant my girlfriend was signaling me desperately to 'hurry up' from the living room where she was waiting for me.

I never had the opportunity to think about it, but my uncle must have talked to my father because I got a gift from him; a package neatly wrapped up with ribbon and all, and a little card that said "Sorry." I curiously and eagerly ripped the wrappings.

There was a cardboard box, and inside it there was a beautiful toy; a tiny boat with a winding key attached to the steam pipe. It could be used by children to play with while they took baths in the bathtub. My father had thoroughly forgotten that I was already fifteen years old, and was for all practical purposes a man.

Then, as I reached my adult years, I was still incapable of serious introspection. So it was quite a novelty when one day, years later, I found myself in the throes of a strange emotional agitation which seemed to increase as time went by. I discarded it, attributing it to natural processes of the mind or the body; processes that enter into action periodically for no reason at all, or are perhaps triggered by biochemical processes within the body itself. I thought nothing of it.

However, the agitation increased and its pressure forced me to believe that I had arrived at a moment in life when what I needed was a drastic change. There was something in me that demanded a rearrangement of my life. This urge to rearrange everything was familiar. I had felt it in the past, but it had been dormant for a long time.

I was committed to studying anthropology, and this commitment was so strong that not to study anthropology was never part of my proposed drastic change. It didn't occur to me to drop out of school and do something else. The first thing that came to mind was that I needed to change schools, and go somewhere else far away from Los Angeles.

Before I undertook a change of that magnitude, I wanted to test the waters, so to speak. I enrolled in a full summer load of classes at a school in another city. The most important course, for me, was a class in anthropology taught by a foremost authority on the Indians of the Andean region. It was my belief that if I focused my studies on an area that was emotionally accessible to me, I would have a better opportunity to do anthropological field-work in a serious manner when the time came. I considered my knowledge of South America as giving me a better entree into any given Indian society there.

At the same time that I registered for school, I got a job as a research assistant to a psychiatrist who was the older brother of one of my friends. He wanted to do a content analysis of excerpts from some innocuous [* innocuous- unlikely to harm or disturb anyone] tapes of 'question and answer' sessions with young men and women about their problems arising from overwork in school, unfulfilled expectations, not being understood at home, frustrating love affairs, etc. The tapes were over five years old and were going to be destroyed, but before they were, random numbers were allotted to each reel, and following a table of random numbers, reels were picked by the psychiatrist and his research assistants, and were scanned for excerpts that could be analyzed.

On the first day of class in the new school, the anthropology professor talked about his academic bona fides and dazzled his students with the scope of his knowledge and his publications. He was a tall, slender man in his mid-forties, with shifty blue eyes. What struck me the most about his physical appearance was that his eyes were rendered enormous behind glasses for correcting far-sightedness, and each of his eyes gave the impression that it was rotating in an opposite direction from the other when he moved his head as he spoke. I knew that that couldn't be true: It was, however, a very disconcerting image. He was extremely well dressed for an anthropologist, who in my day were famous for their super-casual attire. Archaeologists, for example, were described by their students as creatures lost in carbon-14 dating who never took a bath.

However, for reasons unbeknownst to me, what really set him apart wasn't his physical appearance, or his erudition, but his speech pattern. He pronounced every word as clearly as anyone I had ever heard, and emphasized certain words by elongating them. He had a markedly foreign intonation, but I knew that it was an affectation. [* affectation- a deliberate pretence or exaggerated display] He pronounced certain phrases like an Englishman and others like a revivalist preacher.

He fascinated me from the start despite his enormous pomposity. [* pomposity- ack of elegance as a consequence of being puffed up with vanity] [* - ] His self-importance was so blatant that it ceased to be an issue after the first five minutes of his class; classes which were always bombastic displays of knowledge cushioned in wild assertions about himself. His command of the audience was sensational. None of the students I talked to felt anything but supreme admiration for this extraordinary man. I earnestly thought that everything was moving along nicely, and that this move to another school in another city was going to be easy and uneventful, but thoroughly positive. I liked my new surroundings.

At my job, I became completely engrossed in listening to the tapes to the point where I would sneak into the office, and listen not to excerpts, but to entire tapes. What fascinated me beyond measure, at first, was the fact that I heard myself speaking in every one of those tapes.

As the weeks went by and I heard more tapes, my fascination turned to sheer horror. Every line that was spoken, including the psychiatrist's questions, was mine. Those people were speaking from the depths of my own being.

The revulsion that I experienced was something unique for me. Never had I dreamed that I could be repeated endlessly in every man or woman I heard speaking on the tapes. My sense of individuality, which had been ingrained in me from birth, tumbled down hopelessly under the impact of this colossal discovery.

I began then an odious process of trying to restore myself. I unconsciously made a ludicrous attempt at introspection. I tried to wriggle out of my predicament by endlessly talking to myself. I rehashed in my mind all the possible rationales that would support my sense of uniqueness, and then I talked out loud to myself about them. I even experienced something quite revolutionary to me; waking myself up many times by my loud talking in my sleep, discoursing about my value and distinctiveness.

Then, one horrifying day, I suffered another deadly blow. In the wee hours of the night, I was woken up by an insistent knocking on my door. It wasn't a mild, timid knock, but what my friends called a 'Gestapo knock'. The door was about to come off its hinges. I jumped out of bed and opened the peephole. The person who was knocking on the door was my boss, the psychiatrist. My being his younger brother's friend seemed to have created an avenue of communication with him. He had befriended me without any hesitation, and there he was on my doorstep. I turned on the light and opened the door.

"Please come in," I said. "What happened?"

It was three o'clock in the morning, and by his livid expression, and his sunken eyes, I knew that he was deeply upset. He came in and sat down. His pride and joy, his black mane of longish hair, was falling all over his face. He didn't make any effort to comb his hair back, the way he usually wore it. I liked him very much because he was an older version of my friend in Los Angeles, with black, heavy eyebrows, penetrating brown eyes, a square jaw, and thick lips. His upper lip seemed to have an extra fold inside, which at times, when he smiled in a certain way, gave the impression that he had a double upper lip. He always talked about the shape of his nose, which he described as an impertinent, pushy nose. I thought he was extremely sure of himself, and opinionated beyond belief. He claimed that in his profession those qualities were winning cards.

"What happened!" he repeated with a tone of mockery, his double upper lip trembling uncontrollably. "Anyone can tell that everything has happened to me tonight."

He sat down in a chair. He seemed dizzy, disoriented, looking for words. He got up and went to the couch, slumping down on it.

"It's not only that I have the responsibility of my patients," he went on, "but my research grant, my wife and kids, and now another fucking pressure has been added to it, and what burns me up is that it was my own fault, my own stupidity for putting my trust in a stupid cunt!

"I'll tell you, Carlos," he continued, "there's nothing more appalling, disgusting, fucking nauseating than the insensitivity of women. I'm not a woman hater, you know that! But at this moment it seems to me that every single cunt is just a cunt! Duplicitous [* duplicitous- arked by deliberate deceptiveness especially by pretending one set of feelings and acting under the influence of another] and vile!"

I didn't know what to say. Whatever he was telling me didn't need affirmation or contradiction. I wouldn't have dared to contradict him anyway. I didn't have the ammunition for it. I was very tired. I wanted to go back to sleep, but he kept on talking as if his life depended on it.

"You know Theresa Manning, don't you?" he asked me in a forceful, accusatory manner.

For an instant, I believed that he was accusing me of having something to do with his young, beautiful, student secretary. Without giving me time to respond, he continued talking.

"Theresa Manning is an asshole. She's a schnook! A stupid, inconsiderate woman who has no incentive in life other than balling anyone with a bit of fame and notoriety. I thought she was intelligent and sensitive. I thought she had something, some understanding, some empathy, something that one would like to share, or hold as precious all to oneself. I don't know, but that's the picture that she painted for me, when in reality she's lewd and degenerate, and, I may add, incurably gross."

As he kept on talking, a strange picture began to emerge. Apparently, the psychiatrist had just had a bad experience involving his secretary.

"Since the day she came to work for me," he went on, "I knew that she was attracted to me sexually, but she never came around to saying it. It was all in the innuendos and the looks. Well, fuck it! This afternoon I got sick and tired of pussyfooting around, and I came right to the point. I went up to her desk and said, 'I know what you want, and you know what I want.'"

He went into a great, elaborate rendition of how forcefully he had told her that he expected her in his apartment across the street from school at 11:30 P.M., and that he did not alter his routines for anybody; that he read and worked and drank wine until one o'clock, at which time he retired to the bedroom. He kept an apartment in town as well as the house he and his wife and children lived in in the suburbs.

"I was so confident that the affair was going to pan out; turn into something memorable," he said and sighed. His voice acquired the mellow tone of someone confiding something intimate. "I even gave her the key to my apartment," he said, and his voice cracked.

"Very dutifully, she came at eleven-thirty," he went on. "She let herself in with her own key, and sneaked into the bedroom like a shadow. That excited me terribly. I knew that she wasn't going to be any trouble for me. She knew her role. She probably fell asleep on the bed. Or maybe she watched TV. I became engrossed in my work, and I didn't care what the fuck she did. I knew that I had her in the bag.

"But the moment I came into the bedroom," he continued, his voice tense and constricted, as if he were morally offended, "Theresa jumped on me like an animal and went for my dick. She didn't even give me time to put down the bottle and the two glasses I was carrying. I had enough presence of mind to put my two Baccarat glasses on the floor without breaking them. The bottle flew across the room when she grabbed my balls as if they were made out of rocks. I wanted to hit her. I actually yelled in pain, but that didn't faze her. She giggled insanely, because she thought I was being cute and sexy. She said so, as if to placate me."

Shaking his head with contained rage, he said that the woman was so friggin' eager and utterly selfish that she didn't take into account that a man needs a moment's peace, he needs to feel at ease, at home, in friendly surroundings. Instead of showing consideration and understanding, as her role demanded, Theresa Manning pulled his sexual organs out of his pants with the expertise of someone who had done it hundreds of times.

"The result of all this shit," he said, "was that my sensuality retreated in horror. I was emotionally emasculated. My body abhorred that fucking woman, instantly. Yet my lust prevented me from throwing her out in the street."

He said that he decided then that instead of losing face by his impotence, miserably, the way he was bound to, he would have oral sex with her, and make her have an orgasm- put her at his mercy- but his body had rejected the woman so thoroughly that he couldn't do it.

"The woman was not even beautiful anymore," he said, "but plain. Whenever she's dressed up, the clothes that she wears hide the bulges of her hips. She actually looks okay. But when she's naked, she's a sack of bulging white flesh! The slenderness that she presents when she's clothed is fake. It doesn't exist."

Venom poured out of the psychiatrist in ways that I would never have imagined. He was shaking with rage. He wanted desperately to appear cool, and kept on smoking cigarette after cigarette.

He said that the oral sex was even more maddening and disgusting, and that he was just about to vomit when the friggin' woman actually kicked him in the belly, rolled him out of his own bed onto the floor, and called him an impotent faggot.

At this point in his narration, the psychiatrist's eyes were burning with hatred. His mouth was quivering. He was pale.

"I have to use your bathroom," he said. "I want to take a bath. I am reeking. Believe it or not, I have pussy breath."

He was actually weeping, and I would have given anything in the world not to be there. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or the mesmeric quality of his voice, or the inanity of the situation that created the illusion that I was listening not to the psychiatrist but to the voice of a male supplicant [* supplicant- one praying humbly for something] on one of his tapes complaining about minor problems turned into gigantic affairs by talking obsessively about them. My ordeal ended around nine o'clock in one morning. It was time for me to go to class and time for the psychiatrist to go and see his own shrink.

I went to class then, highly charged with a burning anxiety and a tremendous sensation of discomfort and uselessness. There, I received the final blow; the blow that caused my attempt at a drastic change to collapse. No volition of my own was involved in its collapse. It just happened; not only as if it had been scheduled, but as if its progression had been accelerated by some unknown hand.

The anthropology professor began his lecture about a group of Indians from the high plateaus of Bolivia and Peru, the Aymara. He called them the "ey-MEH-ra," elongating the name as if his pronunciation of it was the only accurate one in existence. He said that the making of chicha- which is pronounced "CHEE-cha," but which he pronounced "CHAHI-cha," an alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn- was in the realm of a sect of priestesses who were considered semidivine by the Aymara. He said, in a tone of revelation, that those women were in charge of making the cooked corn into a mush ready for fermentation by chewing and spitting it, adding in this manner an enzyme found in human saliva. The whole class shrieked with contained horror at the mention of human saliva.

The professor seemed to be tickled pink. He laughed in little spurts. It was the chuckle of a nasty child. He went on to say that the women were expert chewers, and he called them the "chahi-cha chewers." He looked at the front row of the classroom, where most of the young women were sitting, and he delivered his punch line.

"I was p-r-r-rivileged," he said with a strange quasi-foreign intonation, "to be asked to sleep with one of the chahi-cha chewers. The art of chewing the chahi-cha mush makes them develop the muscles around their throat and cheeks to the point that they can do wonders with them."

He looked at his bewildered audience and paused for a long time, punctuating the pause with his giggles. "I'm sure you get my drift," he said, and went into fits of hysterical laughter.

The class went wild with the professor's innuendo. The lecture was interrupted by at least five minutes of laughter and a barrage of questions that the professor declined to answer, emitting more silly giggles.

I felt so compressed by the pressure of the tapes, the psychiatrist's story, and the professor's "chahi-cha chewers" that in one instantaneous sweep I quit the job, quit school, and drove back to L.A.

"Whatever happened to me with the psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology," I said to don Juan, "has plunged me into an unknown emotional state. I can only call it introspection. I've been talking to myself without stop."

"Your malady is a very simple one," don Juan said, shaking with laughter.

Apparently my situation delighted him. It was a delight I could not share, because I failed to see the humor in it.

"Your world is coming to an end," he said. "It is the end of an era for you. Do you think that the world you have known all your life is going to leave you peacefully- without any fuss or muss? No! It will wriggle underneath you, and hit you with its tail."