Version 2006.05.21

## "The Active Side of Infinity" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda
Beyond Syntax

### Inorganic Awareness

At a given moment in my apprenticeship, don Juan revealed to me the complexity of his life situation. He had maintained, to my chagrin and despondency, that he lived in the shack in the state of Sonora, Mexico, because that shack depicted my state of awareness. I didn't quite believe that he really meant that I was so meager, nor did I believe that he had other places to live, as he was claiming.

It turned out that he was right on both counts. My state of awareness was very meager, and he did have other places where he could live, infinitely more comfortable than the shack where I had first found him. Nor was he the solitary sorcerer that I had thought him to be. He was leader of a group of fifteen other warrior travelers: ten women and five men.

My surprise was gigantic when he took me to his house in central Mexico, where he and his companion sorcerers lived.

"Did you live in Sonora just because of me, don Juan?" I asked him, unable to stand the responsibility which filled me with guilt and remorse and a sensation of worthlessness. "Well, I didn't actually live there," he said, laughing. "I just met you there."

"But-but-but you never knew when I was coming to see you, don ]uan," I said. "I had no means to let you know!"

"Well, if you remember correctly," he said, "there were many, many times when you didn't find me. You had to sit patiently and wait for me, for days sometimes."

"Did you fly from here to Guaymas, don Juan?" I asked him in earnest. I thought that the shortest way would have been to take a plane.

"No, I didn't fly to Guaymas," he said with a big smile. "I flew directly, to the shack where you were waiting."

I knew that he was purposefully telling me something that my linear mind could not understand or accept; something that was confusing me no end. I was at the level of awareness, in those days, when I asked myself incessantly a fatal question: What if all that don Juan says is true?

I didn't want to ask him any more questions, because I was hopelessly lost, trying to bridge our two tracks of thought and action.

In his new surroundings, don Juan began painstakingly to instruct me in a more complex facet of his knowledge; a facet that required all my attention; a facet in which merely suspending judgment was not enough. This was the time when I had to plummet down into the depths of his knowledge. I had to cease to be objective, and at the same time I had to desist from being subjective.

One day, I was helping don Juan clean some bamboo poles in the back of his house. He asked me to put on some working gloves, because, he said, the splinters of bamboo were very sharp and easily caused infections. He directed me on how to use a knife to clean the bamboo. I became immersed in the work. When don Juan began to talk to me, I had to stop working in order to pay attention. He told me that I had worked long enough, and that we should go into the house.

He asked me to sit down in a very comfortable armchair in his spacious, almost empty living room. He gave me some nuts, dried apricots, and slices of cheese, neatly arranged on a plate. I protested that I wanted to finish cleaning the bamboo. I didn't want to eat. But he didn't pay attention to me. He recommended that I nibble slowly and carefully, for I would need a steady supply of food in order to be alert and attentive to what he was going to tell me.

"You already know," he began, "that there exists in the universe a perennial force, which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the dark sea of awareness. While they were at the maximum of their perceiving power, they saw something that made them shake in their pantaloonies, if they were wearing any. They saw that the dark sea of awareness is responsible not only for the awareness of organisms, but also for the awareness of entities that don't have an organism."

"What is this, don Juan, beings without an organism that have awareness?" I asked, astonished, for he had never mentioned such an idea before.

"The old shamans discovered that the entire universe is composed of twin forces," he began, "forces that are at the same time opposed and complementary to each other. It is inescapable that our world is a twin world. Its opposite and complementary world is one populated by beings that have awareness, but not an organism. For this reason, the old shamans called them inorganic beings."

"And where is this world, don Juan?" I asked, munching unconsciously on a piece of dried apricot.

Here, where you and I are sitting," he replied matter-of-factly, but laughing outright at my nervousness. "I told you that it's our twin world, so it's intimately related to us. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico didn't think like you do in terms of space and time. They thought exclusively in terms of awareness. Two types of awareness coexist without ever impinging on each other, because each type is entirely different from the other. The old shamans faced this problem of coexistence without concerning themselves with time and space. They reasoned that the degree of awareness of organic beings and the degree of awareness of inorganic beings were so different that both could coexist with the most minimal interference."

"Can we perceive those inorganic beings, don Juan?" I asked. "We certainly can," he replied. "Sorcerers do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize that they're doing it because they are not conscious of the existence of a twin world. When they think of a twin world, they enter into all kinds of mental masturbation, but it has never occurred to them that their fantasies have their origin in a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not alone."

I was riveted by don Juan's words. Suddenly, I had become voraciously hungry. There was an emptiness in the pit of my stomach. All I could do was to listen as carefully as I could, and eat.

"The difficulty with your facing things in terms of time and space," he continued, "is that you only notice if something has landed in the space and time at your disposal, which is very limited.

"Sorcerers, on the other hand, have a vast field on which they can notice if something extraneous has landed. Lots of entities from the universe at large, entities that possess awareness but not an organism, land in the field of awareness of our world, or the field of awareness of its twin world, without an average human being ever noticing them. The entities that land on our field of awareness, or the field of awareness of our twin world, belong to other worlds that exist besides our world and its twin. The universe at large is crammed to the brim with worlds of awareness, organic and inorganic."

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. I 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, and 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 I 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 inorganic 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.

"The energy from our first cousins is a drag!" don Juan went on. "They are as fucked up as we are. Let's say that the organic and inorganic beings of our twin worlds are the children of two sisters who live next door to each other. They are exactly alike although they look different. They cannot help us, and we cannot help them. Perhaps we could join together, and make a fabulous family business corporation, but that hasn't happened. Both branches of the family are extremely touchy and take offense over nothing, a typical relationship between touchy first cousins. The crux of the matter, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed, is that both human beings and inorganic beings from the twin worlds are profound egomaniacs."

According to don Juan, another classification that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico made of the inorganic beings was that of scouts, or explorers, and by this they meant inorganic beings that came from the depths of the universe, and which were possessors of awareness infinitely sharper and faster than that of human beings.

Don Juan asserted that the old sorcerers had spent generations polishing their classification schemes, and their conclusions were that certain types of inorganic beings from the category of scouts or explorers, because of their vivaciousness, were akin to man. They could make liaisons and establish a symbiotic relation with men. The old sorcerers called these kinds of inorganic beings the allies.

Don Juan explained that the crucial mistake of those shamans with reference to this type of inorganic being was to attribute human characteristics to that impersonal energy and to believe that they could harness it. They thought of those blocks of energy as their helpers, and they relied on them without comprehending that, being pure energy, they didn't have the power to sustain any effort.

"I've told you all there is to know about inorganic beings," don Juan said abruptly. "The only way you can put this to the test is by means of direct experience."

I didn't ask him what he wanted me to do. A deep fear made my body rattle with nervous spasms that burst like a volcanic eruption from my solar plexus and extended down to the tips of my toes and up to my upper trunk.

"Today, we will go to look for some inorganic beings," he announced.

Don Juan ordered me to sit on my bed and adopt again the position that fostered inner silence, I followed his command with unusual ease. Normally, I would have been reluctant, perhaps not overtly, but I would have felt a twinge of reluctance nonetheless.

I had a vague thought that by the time I sat down, I was already in a state of inner silence. My thoughts were no longer clear. I felt an impenetrable darkness surrounding me, making me feel as if I were falling asleep. My body was utterly motionless, either because I had no intention of setting up any commands to move or because I just couldn't formulate them.

A moment later, I found myself with don Juan, walking in the Sonoran desert. I recognized the surroundings. I had been there with him so many times that I had memorized every feature of it. It was the end of the day, and the light of the setting sun created in me a mood of desperation. I walked automatically, aware that I was feeling in my body sensations that were not accompanied by thoughts. I was not describing to myself my state of being. I wanted to tell this to don Juan, but the desire to communicate my bodily sensations to him vanished in an instant.

Don Juan said, very slowly, and in a low, grave voice, that the dry riverbed on which we were walking was a most appropriate place for our business at hand, and that I should sit on a small boulder, alone, while he went and sat on another boulder about fifty feet away. I didn't ask don Juan, as I ordinarily would have, what I was supposed to do. I knew what I had to do. I heard then the rustling steps of people walking through the bushes that were sparsely scattered around. There wasn't enough moisture in the area to allow the heavy growth of underbrush. Some sturdy bushes grew there, with a space of perhaps ten or fifteen feet between them.

I saw then two men approaching. They seemed to be local men, perhaps Yaqui Indians from one of the Yaqui towns in the vicinity. They came and stood by me. One of them nonchalantly asked me how I had been. I wanted to smile at him, laugh, but I couldn't. My face was extremely rigid. Yet I was ebullient. I wanted to jump up and down, but I couldn't. I told him that I had been fine. Then I asked them who they were. I said to them that I didn't know them, and yet I sensed an extraordinary familiarity with them- One of the men said, matter-of-factly, that they were my allies.

I stared at them, trying to memorize their features, but their features changed. They seemed to mold themselves to the mood of my stare. No thoughts were involved. Everything was a matter guided by visceral sensations. I stared at them long enough to erase their features completely, and finally, I was facing two shiny blobs of luminosity that vibrated. The blobs of luminosity did not have boundaries. They seemed to sustain themselves cohesively from within. At times, they became flat, wide. Then they would take on a verticality again, at the height of a man.

Suddenly, I felt don Juan's arm hooking my right arm and pulling me from the boulder. He said that it was time to go. The next moment, I was in his house again, in central Mexico, more bewildered than ever.

"Today, you found inorganic awareness, and then you saw it as it really is," he said. "Energy is the irreducible residue of everything. As far as we are concerned, to see energy directly is the bottom line for a human being. Perhaps there are other things beyond that, but they are not available to us."

Don Juan asserted all this over and over, and every time he said it, his words seemed to solidify me more and more, to help me return to my normal state.

I told don Juan everything I had witnessed; everything I had heard. Don Juan explained to me that I had succeeded that day in transforming the anthropomorphic shape of the inorganic beings into their essence: impersonal energy aware of itself.

"You are now in the position of having embodied the realization," he said, "that it is our cognition, which is in essence an interpretation system, that curtails our resources. Our cognitive interpretation system is what tells us what the parameters of our possibilities are. And since we have been using that system of interpretation all our lives, we cannot possibly dare to go against its dictums.

"The energy of those inorganic beings pushes us," don Juan went on, "and we interpret that push as we may, depending on our mood. The most sober thing to do, for a sorcerer, is to relegate those entities to an abstract level: The fewer interpretations sorcerers make, the better off they are.

"From now on," he continued, "whenever you are confronted with the strange sight of an apparition, hold your ground and gaze at it with an inflexible attitude. If it is an inorganic being, your interpretation of it will fall off like dead leaves. If nothing happens, it is just a chicken-shit aberration of your mind, which is not your mind anyway."