Version 2006.05.21

## "The Active Side of Infinity" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda
A Tremor in the Air

### Who Was Don Juan Matus, Really

The part of my account of meeting don Juan that he didn't want to hear about was my feelings and impressions on that fateful day when I walked into his house: the contradictory clash between my expectations and the reality of the situation, and the effect that was caused in me by a cluster of the most extravagant ideas I had ever heard.

"That is more in the line of confession than in the line of events," he had said to me once when I tried to tell him about all this.

"You couldn't be more wrong, don Juan," I began, but I stopped. Something in the way he looked at me made me realize that he was right. Whatever I was going to say could have sounded only like lip service, flattery. What had taken place on our first real meeting, however, was of transcendental importance to me, an event of ultimate consequence.

During my first encounter with don Juan, in the bus depot in Nogales, Arizona, something of an unusual nature had happened to me, but it had come to me cushioned in my concerns with the presentation of the self. I had wanted to impress don Juan, and in attempting to do so I had focused all my attention on the act of selling my wares, so to speak. It was only months later that a strange residue of forgotten events began to appear.

One day, out of nowhere, and with no coaxing or coaching on my part, I recollected with extraordinary clarity something that had completely bypassed me during my actual encounter with don Juan. When he had stopped me from telling him my name, he had peered into my eyes and had numbed me with his look. There was infinitely more that I could have said to him about myself. I could have expounded on my knowledge and worth for hours if his look hadn't completely cut me off.

In light of this new realization, I reconsidered everything that had happened to me on that occasion. My unavoidable conclusion was that I had experienced the interruption of some mysterious flow that kept me going; a flow that had never been interrupted before, at least not in the manner in which don Juan had done it.

When I tried to describe to any of my friends what I had physically experienced, a strange perspiration began to cover my entire body; the same perspiration that I had experienced when don Juan had given me that look. I had been, at that moment, not only incapable of voicing a single word, but incapable of having a single thought.

For some time after, I dwelled on the physical sensation of this interruption for which I found no rational explanation. I argued for a while that don Juan must have hypnotized me, but then my memory told me that he hadn't given any hypnotic commands, nor had he made any movements that could have trapped my attention.

In fact, he had merely glanced at me. It was the intensity of that glance that had made it appear as if he had stared at me for a long time. It had obsessed me, and had rendered me discombobulated at a deep physical level.

When I finally had don Juan in front of me again, the first thing I noticed about him was that he didn't look at all as I had imagined him during all the time I had tried to find him. I had fabricated an image of the man I had met at the bus depot, which I perfected every day by allegedly remembering more details.

In my mind, he was an old man, still very strong and nimble, yet almost frail. The man facing me was muscular and decisive. He moved with agility, but not nimbleness. His steps were firm, and, at the same time, light. He exuded vitality and purpose.

My composite memory was not at all in harmony with the real thing. I thought he had short, white hair and an extremely dark complexion. His hair was longer, and not as white as I had imagined. His complexion was not that dark either. I could have sworn that his features were birdlike, because of his age. But that was not so either. His face was full, almost round. In one glance, the most outstanding feature of the man looking at me was his dark eyes, which shone with a peculiar, dancing glow.

Something that had bypassed me completely in my prior assessment of him was the fact that his total countenance was that of an athlete. His shoulders were broad, his stomach flat. He seemed to be planted firmly on the ground. There was no feebleness to his knees, no tremor in his upper limbs. I had imagined detecting a slight tremor in his head and arms, as if he were nervous and unsteady. I had also imagined him to be about five feet six inches tall, three inches shorter than his actual height.

Don Juan had not seemed surprised to see me. I wanted to tell him how difficult it had been for me to find him. I would have liked to be congratulated by him on my titanic efforts, but he just laughed at me, teasingly.

"Your efforts are not important," he said. "What's important is that you found my place. Sit down, sit down," he said, enticing me, pointing to one of the freight boxes under his ramada, and patting me on my back; but it wasn't a friendly pat.

It felt like he had slapped me on the back although he never actually touched me. His quasi-slap created a strange, unstable sensation, which appeared abruptly and disappeared before I had time to grasp what it was.

What was left in me as a result was a strange peace. I felt at ease. My mind was crystal clear. I had no expectations; no desires. My usual nervousness and sweaty hands- the marks of my existence- were suddenly gone.

"Now you will understand everything I am going to say to you," don Juan said to me, looking into my eyes as he had done in the bus depot.

Ordinarily, I would have found his statement perfunctory, perhaps rhetorical, but when he said it, I could only assure him repeatedly and sincerely that I would understand anything he said to me. He looked me in the eyes again with a ferocious intensity.

"I am Juan Matus," he said, sitting down on another freight box, a few feet away, facing me. "This is my name, and I voice it because, with it, I am making a bridge for you to cross over to where I am."

He stared at me for an instant before he started talking again.

"I am a sorcerer," he went on. "I belong to a lineage of sorcerers that has lasted for twenty-seven generations. I am the 'nagual' of my generation."

He explained to me that the leader of a party of sorcerers like himself was called the nagual, and that this was a generic term applied to a sorcerer in each generation who had some specific energetic configuration that set him apart from the others- not in terms of superiority or inferiority, or anything of the like, but in terms of the capacity to be responsible.

"Only the nagual," he said, "has the energetic capacity to be responsible for the fate of his cohorts. Every one of his cohorts knows this, and they accede. [* accede- agree; submit; yield] The nagual can be a man or a woman. In the time of the sorcerers who were the founders of my lineage, women were, by rule, the naguals. Their natural pragmatism- the product of their femaleness- led my lineage into pits of practicalities from which they could barely emerge. Then, the males took over, and led my lineage into pits of imbecility from which we are barely emerging now.

"Since the time of the nagual Lujan, who lived about two hundred years ago," he went on, "there has been a joint nexus of effort, shared by a man and a woman. The nagual man brings sobriety; the nagual woman brings innovation."

I wanted to ask him at this point if there was a woman in his life who was the nagual, but the depth of my concentration didn't allow me to formulate the question. Instead, he himself formulated it for me.

"Is there a nagual woman in my life?" he asked. "No, there isn't any. I am a solitary sorcerer. I have my cohorts, though. At the moment, they are not around."

A thought came with uncontainable vigor into my mind. At that instant, I remembered what some people in Yuma had told me about don Juan running with a party of Mexican men who seemed to be very versed in sorcery maneuvers.

"To be a sorcerer," don Juan continued, "doesn't mean to practice witchcraft, or to work to affect people, or to be possessed by demons. To be a sorcerer means to reach a level of awareness that makes inconceivable things available.

The term 'sorcery' is inadequate to express what sorcerers do, and so is the term 'shamanism.' The actions of sorcerers are exclusively in the realm of the abstract; the impersonal. Sorcerers struggle to reach a goal that has nothing to do with the quests of an average man. Sorcerers' aspirations are to reach infinity, and to be conscious of it."

Don Juan continued, saying that the task of sorcerers was to face infinity, and that they plunged into it daily, as a fisherman plunges into the sea. It was such an overwhelming task that sorcerers had to state their names before venturing into it. He reminded me that, in Nogales, he had stated his name before any interaction had taken place between us. He had, in this manner, asserted his individuality in front of the infinite.

I understood with unequaled clarity what he was explaining. I didn't have to ask him for clarifications. My keenness of thought should have surprised me, but it didn't at all.

I knew at that moment that I had always been crystal clear, merely playing dumb for someone else's benefit.

"Without you knowing anything about it," he continued, "I started you on a traditional quest. You are the man I was looking for. My quest ended when I found you, and yours when you found me now."

Don Juan explained to me that, as the nagual of his generation, he was in search of an individual who had a specific energetic configuration, adequate to ensure the continuity of his lineage. He said that at a given moment, the nagual of each generation for twenty-seven successive generations had entered into the most nerve-racking experience of their lives: the search for succession.

Looking me straight in the eyes, he stated that what made human beings into sorcerers was their capacity to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe, and that when sorcerers perceive a human being in this fashion, they see a luminous ball, or a luminous egg-shaped figure.

His contention was that human beings are not only capable of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe, but that they actually do see it, although they are not deliberately conscious of seeing it.

He made right then the most crucial distinction for sorcerers; the distinction between the general state of being aware, and the particular state of being deliberately conscious of something.

He categorized all human beings as possessing awareness, in a general sense, which permits them to see energy directly, and he categorized sorcerers as the only human beings who were deliberately conscious of seeing energy directly.

He then defined awareness as 'energy', and energy as constant flux; a luminous vibration that was never stationary, but always moving of its own accord.

He asserted that when a human being was seen, he was perceived as a conglomerate of energy fields held together by the most mysterious force in the universe: a binding, agglutinating, vibratory force that holds energy fields together in a cohesive unit.

He further explained that the nagual was a specific sorcerer in each generation whom the other sorcerers were able to see, not as a single luminous ball but as a set of two spheres of luminosity fused, one over the other.

"This feature of doubleness," he continued, "permits the nagual to perform maneuvers that are rather difficult for an average sorcerer. For example, the nagual is a connoisseur of the force that holds us together as a cohesive unit. The nagual could place his full attention, for a fraction of a second, on that force, and numb the other person.

"I did that to you at the bus depot because I wanted to stop your barrage of me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I wanted you to find me, and cut the crap.

"The sorcerers of my lineage maintained," don Juan went on, "that the presence of a double being-a nagual- is sufficient to clarify things for us. What's odd about it, is that the presence of the nagual clarifies things in a veiled fashion. It happened to me when I met the nagual Julian, my teacher. His presence baffled me for years because every time I was around him, I could think clearly, but when he moved away, I became the same idiot that I had always been.

"I had the privilege," don Juan went on, "of actually meeting and dealing with two naguals.

"For six years, at the request of the nagual Elias, who was the teacher of the nagual Julian, I went to live with him. The nagual Elias is the one who reared me, so to speak. It was a rare privilege. I had a ringside seat for watching what a nagual really is.

"The nagual Elias and the nagual Julian were two men of tremendously different temperaments. The nagual Elias was quieter, and lost in the darkness of his silence.

"The nagual Julian was bombastic; a compulsive talker. It seemed that he lived to dazzle women. There were more women in his life than one would care to think about.

"Yet both of them were astoundingly alike in that there was nothing inside them. They were empty. The nagual Elias was a collection of astounding, haunting stories of regions unknown. The nagual Julian was a collection of stories that would have anybody in stitches, sprawled on the ground laughing.

"Whenever I tried to pin down 'the man' in them, the real man, the way I could pinpoint 'the man' in my father, or 'the man' in everybody I knew, I found nothing. Instead of a real person inside them, there was a bunch of stories about persons unknown. Each of the two men had his own flair, but the end result was just the same: emptiness; an emptiness that reflected not the world, but infinity."

Don Juan went on explaining that the moment one crosses a peculiar threshold in infinity, either deliberately or, as in my case, unwittingly, everything that happens to one from then on is no longer exclusively in one's own domain, but enters into the realm of infinity.

"When we met in Arizona, both of us crossed a peculiar threshold," he continued. "And this threshold was not decided by either one of us, but by infinity itself.

"Infinity is everything that surrounds us." He said this and made a broad gesture with his arms. "The sorcerers of my lineage call it infinity, the spirit, the dark sea of awareness, and say that it is something that exists out there and rules our lives."

I was truly capable of comprehending everything he was saying, and yet I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I asked if crossing the threshold had been an accidental event, born of unpredictable circumstances ruled by chance.

He answered that his steps and mine were guided by infinity, and that circumstances that seemed to be ruled by chance were in essence ruled by the active side of infinity. He called it intent.

"What put you and me together," he went on, "was the intent of infinity. It is impossible to determine what this intent of infinity is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and I are.

"Sorcerers say that it is a tremor in the air. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the tremor in the air exists, and to know to acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there's no pondering, wondering, or speculating.

"They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the intent of infinity, and they just do it."

Nothing could have been clearer to me than those statements. As far as I was concerned, the truth of what he was telling me was so self-evident that it didn't permit me to ponder how such absurd assertions could have sounded so rational. I knew that everything that don Juan was saying was not only a truism, but I could corroborate it by referring to my own being. I knew about everything that he was saying. I had the sensation that I had lived every twist of his description.

Our interchange ended then. Something seemed to deflate inside me.

It was at that instant that the thought crossed my mind that I was losing my marbles. I had been blinded by weird statements and had lost every conceivable sense of objectivity. Accordingly, I left don Juan's house in a real hurry, feeling threatened to the core by an unseen enemy. Don Juan walked me to my car, fully cognizant of what was going on inside me.

"Don't worry," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. You're not going crazy. What you felt was a gentle tap of infinity."

As time went by, I was able to corroborate what don Juan had said about his two teachers. Don Juan Matus was exactly as he had described those two men to be. I would go as far as saying that he was an extraordinary blend of both of them; on the one hand, extremely quiet and introspective; on the other, extremely open and funny.

The most accurate statement about what a nagual is, which he voiced the day I found him, was that a nagual is empty, and that that emptiness doesn't reflect the world, but reflects infinity.

Nothing could have been more true than this in reference to don Juan Matus. His emptiness reflected infinity. There was no boisterousness on his part, or assertions about the self. There was not a speck of a need to have either grievances or remorse.

His was the emptiness of a 'warrior-traveler', seasoned to the point where he doesn't take anything for granted; a warrior traveler who doesn't underestimate or overestimate anything; a quiet, disciplined fighter whose elegance is so extreme that no one, no matter how hard they try to look, will ever find the seam where all that complexity has come together.