Version 2006.05.21

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

### The Clear View

For the first time in my life, I had found myself in a total quandary [* quandary- a state of uncertainty or perplexity] as to how to behave in the world. The world around me had not changed. It definitely stemmed from a flaw in me.

Don Juan's personal influence upon me, and my deep engagement in all the activities stemming from his practices were taking their toll on me; causing in me a serious incapacity to deal with my fellow men.

I had examined my problem and concluded that my flaw was my compulsion to measure everyone using don Juan as a yardstick.

Don Juan was, in my estimate, a being who lived his life professionally in every aspect of the term. Every one of his acts, no matter how insignificant, counted.

I, on the other hand, was surrounded by people who believed that they were immortal beings; people who contradicted themselves every step of the way. They were beings whose acts could never be accounted for.

It was an unfair game. The cards were stacked against the people I encountered. I had become accustomed to don Juan's unalterable behavior; to his total lack of self-importance; and to the unfathomable scope of his intellect.

Very few of the people I knew were even aware that there existed another pattern of behavior that fostered those qualities. Most of them knew only the behavioral pattern of self-reflection, which renders men weak and contorted.

Consequently, I was having a very difficult time in my academic studies. I was losing sight of them. I tried desperately to find a rationale that would justify my academic endeavors.

The only thing that came to my aid and gave me a connection, however flimsy, to academia was the recommendation that don Juan had made to me once that warrior travelers should have a romance with knowledge, in whatever form knowledge was presented.

Don Juan had defined the concept of warrior travelers by saying that it referred to sorcerer seers who traveled in the dark sea of awareness as total freedom warriors.

He had added that all human beings were travelers of the dark sea of awareness whether they were aware of it or not; and that this Earth can be considered as a station on their journey.

And for extraneous [* extraneous- not pertinent to the matter under consideration] reasons, which don Juan didn't care to divulge at the time, the bulk of the travelers have interrupted their voyage.

He said that human beings were caught in a sort of eddy; a current that went in circles, giving them the impression of moving while they were, in essence, stationary.

He maintained that sorcerers were the only opponents of whatever force kept human beings prisoners, and that by means of their discipline sorcerers broke loose from its grip and continued their journey of awareness.

What precipitated the final chaotic upheaval in my academic life was my incapacity to focus my interest on topics of anthropological concern that didn't mean a hoot to me, not because of their lack of appeal but because they were mostly matters where words and concepts had to be manipulated, as in a legal document, to obtain a given result that would establish precedents. It was argued that human knowledge is built in such a fashion, and that the effort of every individual was a building block in constructing a system of knowledge.

The example that was put to me was that of the legal system by which we live, and which is of invaluable importance to us. However, my romantic notions at the time impeded me from conceiving of myself as a 'barrister [* barrister- a lawyer who speaks in the higher courts of law] at anthropology'.

I had bought, lock, stock, and barrel, the concept that anthropology should be the matrix of all human endeavor, or the measure of man.

Don Juan, a consummate pragmatist, a true 'warrior traveler' of the unknown, said that I was full of prunes. He said that it didn't matter that the anthropological topics proposed to me were maneuvers of words and concepts, that what was important was the exercise of discipline.

"It doesn't make any difference," he said to me one time, "how good a reader you are, and how many wonderful books you can read. What's important is that you have the discipline to read what you don't want to read. The crux of the sorcerers' exercise of going to school is in what you refuse, not in what you accept."

I decided to take some time off from my studies and went to work in the art department of a company that made decals. My job engaged my efforts and thoughts to their fullest extent. My challenge was to carry out the tasks assigned to me as perfectly and as rapidly as I could. To set up the vinyl sheets with the images to be processed by silk-screening into decals was a standard procedure that wouldn't admit of any innovation, and the efficiency of the worker was measured by exactness and speed.

I became a workaholic and enjoyed myself tremendously.

The director of the art department and I became fast friends. He practically took me under his wing. His name was Ernest Lipton. I admired and respected him immensely. He was a fine artist and a magnificent craftsman.

His flaw was his softness, his incredible consideration for others, which bordered on passivity.

For example, one day we were driving out of the parking lot of a restaurant where we had eaten lunch. Very politely, he waited for another car to pull out of the parking space in front of him. The driver obviously didn't see us and began to back out at a considerable speed.

Ernest Lipton could easily have blown his horn to attract the man's attention to watch where he was going. Instead, he sat, grinning like an idiot as the guy crashed into his car. Then he turned and apologized to me. "Gee, I could have blown my horn," he said, "but it's so frigging loud, it embarrasses me."

The guy who had backed up into Ernest's car was furious and had to be placated.

"Don't worry," Ernest said. "There is no damage to your car. Besides, you only smashed my headlights; I was going to replace them anyway."

Another day, in the same restaurant, some Japanese people, clients of the decal company and Ernest Lipton's guests for lunch, were talking animatedly to us, asking questions. The waiter came with the food and cleared the table of some of the salad plates, making room, the best way he could on the narrow table, for the huge hot plates of the entree.

One of the Japanese clients needed more space. He pushed his plate forward. The push set Ernest's plate in motion and it began to slide off the table. Again, Ernest could have warned the man, but he didn't. He sat there grinning until the plate fell in his lap.

On another occasion, I went to his house to help him put up some rafters over his patio, where he was going to let a grape vine grow for partial shade and fruit. We prearranged the rafters into a huge frame and then lifted one side and bolted it to some beams. Ernest was a tall, very strong man, and using a length of two-by-four as a hoisting device, he lifted the other end for me to fit the bolts into holes that were already drilled into the supporting beams. But before I had a chance to put in the bolts there was an insistent knock on the door and Ernest asked me to see who it was while he held the frame of rafters.

His wife was at the door with her grocery packages. She engaged me in a lengthy conversation and I forgot about Ernest. I even helped her to put her groceries away. In the middle of arranging her celery bundles, I remembered that my friend was still holding the frame of rafters, and knowing him, I knew that he would still be at the job, expecting everybody else to have the consideration that he himself had.

I rushed desperately to the backyard, and there he was on the ground. He had collapsed from the exhaustion of holding the heavy wooden frame. He looked like a rag doll. We had to call his friends to lend a hand and hoist up the frame of rafters- he couldn't do it anymore. He had to go to bed. He thought for sure that he had a hernia.

The classic story about Ernest Lipton was that one day he went hiking for the weekend in the San Bernardino Mountains with some friends. They camped in the mountains for the night.

While everybody was sleeping, Ernest Lipton went to the bushes, and being such a considerate man, he walked some distance from the camp so as not to bother anybody. He slipped in the darkness and rolled down the side of the mountain. He told his friends afterward that he knew for a fact that he was falling to his death at the bottom of the valley.

He was lucky in that he grabbed on to a ledge with the tips of his fingers. He held on to it for hours, searching in the dark with his feet for any support, because his arms were about to give in- he was going to hold on until his death.

By extending his legs as wide as he could, he found tiny protuberances in the rock that helped him to hold on. He stayed stuck to the rock, like the decals that he made, until there was enough light for him to realize that he was only a foot from the ground.

"Ernest, you could have yelled for help!" his friends complained.

"Gee, I didn't think there was any use," he replied. "Who could have heard me? I thought I had rolled down at least a mile into the valley. Besides, everyone was asleep."

The final blow came for me when Ernest Lipton, who spent two hours daily commuting back and forth from his house to the shop, decided to buy an economy car, a Volkswagen Beetle, and began measuring how many miles he got per gallon of gasoline.

I was extremely surprised when he announced one morning that he had reached 125 miles per gallon. Being a very exact man, he qualified his statement, saying that most of his driving was not done in the city, but on the freeway, although at the peak hour of traffic, he had to slow down and accelerate quite often. A week later, he said that he had reached the 250 miles per gallon mark.

This marvelous event escalated until he reached an unbelievable figure: 645 miles to a gallon. His friends told him that he should enter this figure into the logs of the Volkswagen company. Ernest Lipton was as pleased as punch, and gloated, saying that he wouldn't know what to do if he reached the thousand-mile mark. His friends told him that he should claim a miracle.

This extraordinary situation went on until one morning when he caught one of his friends, who for months had been playing the oldest gag in the book on him, adding gasoline to his tank. Every morning he had been adding three or four cups so that Ernest's gas gauge was never on empty.

Ernest Lipton was nearly angry. His harshest comment was, "Gee! Is this supposed to be funny?"

I had known for weeks that his friends were playing that gag on him, but I was unable to intervene. I felt that it was none of my business. The people who were playing the gag on Ernest Lipton were his lifelong friends. I was a newcomer. When I saw his look of disappointment and hurt, and his incapacity to get angry, I felt a wave of guilt and anxiety. I was facing again an old enemy of mine. I despised Ernest Lipton, and at the same time, I liked him immensely. He was helpless.

The real truth of the matter was that Ernest Lipton looked like my father. His thick glasses and his receding hairline, as well as the stubble of graying beard that he could never quite shave completely, brought my father's features to mind. He had the same straight, pointed nose and pointed chin. But seeing Ernest Lipton's inability to get angry and punch the jokers in the nose was what really clinched his likeness to my father for me and pushed it beyond the threshold of safety.

I remembered how my father had been madly in love with the sister of his best friend. I spotted her one day in a resort town, holding hands with a young man. Her mother was with her as a chaperone. The girl seemed so happy. The two young people looked at each other, enraptured. As far as I could see, it was young love at its best.

When I saw my father, I told him, relishing every instant of my recounting with all the malice of my ten years, that his girlfriend had a real boyfriend. He was taken aback. He didn't believe me.

"But have you said anything at all to the girl?" I asked him daringly- "Does she know that you are in love with her?"

"Don't be stupid, you little creep!" he snapped at me. "I don't have to tell any woman any shit of that sort!" Like a spoiled child, he looked at me petulantly, his lips trembling with rage.

"She's mine! She should know that she's my woman without my having to tell her anything!"

He declared all this with the certainty of a child who has had everything in life given to him without having to fight for it.

At the apex of my form, I delivered my punch line. "Well," I said, "I think she expected someone to tell her that, and someone has just beaten you to it."

I was prepared to jump out of his reach and run because I thought he would slash at me with all the fury in the world, but instead, he crumpled down and began to weep. He asked me, sobbing uncontrollably, that since I was capable of anything, would I please spy on the girl for him and tell him what was going on?

I despised my father beyond anything I could say, and at the same time I loved him with a sadness that was unmatched. I cursed myself for precipitating that shame on him.

Ernest Lipton reminded me of my father so much that I quit my job, alleging that I had to go back to school. I didn't want to increase the burden that I already carried on my shoulders. I had never forgiven myself for causing my father that anguish, and I had never forgiven him for being so cowardly.

I went back to school and began the gigantic task of reintegrating myself into my studies of anthropology. What made this reintegration very difficult was the fact that if there was someone I could have worked with with ease and delight because of his admirable touch, his daring curiosity, and his willingness to expand his knowledge without getting flustered or defending. indefensible points, it was someone outside my department, an archaeologist. It was because of his influence that I had become interested in fieldwork in the first place. Perhaps because of the fact that he actually went into the field, literally to dig out information, his practicality was an oasis of sobriety for me. He was the only one who had encouraged me to go ahead and do field-work because I had nothing to lose.

"Lose it all, and you'll gain it all," he told me once, the soundest advice that I ever got in academia. If I followed don Juan's advice, and worked toward correcting my obsession with self-reflection, I veritably had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But this possibility hadn't been in the cards for me at that time.

When I told don Juan about the difficulty I encountered in finding a professor to work with, I thought that his reaction to what I said was vicious. He called me a petty fart, and worse. He told me what I already knew: that if I were not so tense, I could have worked successfully with anybody in academia, or in business.

"'Warrior travelers' don't complain," don Juan went on. "They take everything that infinity hands them as a challenge. A challenge is a challenge. It isn't personal. It cannot be taken as a curse or a blessing. A warrior-traveler either wins the challenge or the challenge demolishes him. It's more exciting to win, so win!"

I told him that it was easy for him or anyone else to say that, but to carry it out was another matter, and that my tribulations were insoluble because they originated in the incapacity of my fellow men to be consistent.

"It's not the people around you who are at fault," he said. "They cannot help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone."

"You are absolutely wrong this time, don Juan," I said. "Believe me, I have no interest whatsoever in judging them, or entangling myself with them in any way."

"You do understand what I'm talking about," he insisted doggedly. "If you're not conscious of your desire to judge them," he continued, "you are in even worse shape than I thought. This is the flaw of warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand."

I admitted to don Juan that my complaints were petty in the extreme. I knew that much. I said to him that I was confronted with daily events, events that had the nefarious quality of wearing down all my resolve, and that I was embarrassed to relate to don Juan the incidents that weighed heavily on my mind.

"Come on," he urged me. "Out with it! Don't have any secrets from me. I'm an empty tube. Whatever you say to me will be projected out into infinity."

"All I have are miserable complaints," I said. "I am exactly like all the people I know. There's no way to talk to a single one of them without hearing an overt or a covert complaint."

I related to don Juan how in even the simplest dialogues my friends managed to sneak in an endless number of complaints, such as in a dialogue like this one:

"How is everything, Jim?"

"Oh, fine, fine, Cal." A huge silence would follow.

I would be obliged to say, "Is there something wrong, Jim?"

"No! Everything's great. I have a bit of a problem with Mel, but you know how Mel is-selfish and shitty. But you have to take your friends as they come, true? He could, of course, have a little more consideration. But what the heck. He's himself. He always puts the burden on you- take me or leave me. He's been doing that since we were twelve, so it's really my fault. Why in the heck do I have to take him?"

"Well, you're right, Jim, you know Mel is very hard, yes. Yeah!"

"Well, speaking of shitty people, you're no better than Mel, Cal. I can never count on you," etc. Another classic dialogue was:

"How are you doing, Alex? How's your married life?"

"Oh, just great. For the first time, I'm eating on time, home-cooked meals, but I'm getting fat. There's nothing for me to do except watch TV. I used to go out with you guys, but now I can't. Theresa doesn't let me. Of course, I could tell her to go and shag herself, but I don't want to hurt her. I feel content, but miserable."

And Alex had been the most miserable guy before he got married. He was the one whose classic joke was to tell his friends, every time we ran into him, "Hey, come to my car, I want to introduce you to my bitch."

He enjoyed himself pink with our crushed expectations when we would see that what he had in his car was a female dog. He introduced his 'bitch' to all his friends. We were shocked when he actually married Theresa, a long-distance runner. They met at a marathon when Alex fainted. They were in the mountains, and Theresa had to revive him by any means.

So she pissed on his face. After that, Alex was her prisoner. She had marked her territory. His friends used to say, "Her pissy prisoner." His friends thought she was the true bitch who had turned weird Alex into a fat dog.

Don Juan and I laughed for a while. Then he looked at me with a serious expression.

"These are the ups and downs of daily living," don Juan said. "You win, and you lose, and you don't know when you win or when you lose. This is the price one pays for living under the rule of self-reflection. There is nothing that I can say to you, and there's nothing that you can say to yourself.

I could only recommend that you not feel guilty because you're an asshole, but that you strive to end the dominion of self-reflection. Go back to school. Don't give up yet."

My interest in remaining in academia was waning considerably. I began to live on automatic pilot. I felt heavy, despondent.

However, I noticed that my mind was not involved. I didn't calculate anything, or set up any goals or expectations of any sort. My thoughts were not obsessive, but my feelings were. I tried to conceptualize this dichotomy [* dichotomy- a classification into two opposed parts or subclasses] between a quiet mind and turbulent [* turbulent- characterized by unrest or disorder] feelings. It was in this frame of mindlessness and overwhelmed feelings that I walked one day from Haines Hall, where the anthropology department was, to the cafeteria to eat my lunch.

I was suddenly accosted by a strange tremor. I thought I was going to faint, and I sat down on some brick steps. I saw yellow spots in front of my eyes. I had the sensation that I was spinning. I was sure that I was going to get sick to my stomach. My vision became blurry, and finally I couldn't see a thing. My physical discomfort was so total and intense that it didn't leave room for a single thought.

I had only bodily sensations of fear and anxiety mixed with elation, and a strange anticipation that I was at the threshold of a gigantic event. They were sensations without the counterpart of thought. At a given moment, I no longer knew whether I was sitting or standing. I was surrounded by the most impenetrable darkness one can imagine, and then, I saw energy as it flowed in the universe.

I saw a succession of luminous spheres walking toward me or away from me. I saw them one at a time, as don Juan had always told me one sees them. I knew they were different individuals because of their differences in size.

I examined the details of their structures. Their luminosity and their roundness were made of fibers that seemed to be stuck together. They were thin or thick fibers. Every one of those luminous figures had a thick, shaggy covering. They looked like some strange, luminous, furry animals, or gigantic round insects covered with luminous hair.

What was the most shocking thing to me was the realization that I had seen those furry insects all my life. Every occasion on which don Juan had made me deliberately see them seemed to me at that moment to be like a detour that I had taken with him. I remembered every instance of his help in making me see people as luminous spheres, and all of those instances were set apart from the bulk of seeing to which I was having access now.

I knew then, as beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I had perceived energy as it flows in the universe all my life, on my own, without anybody's help. Such a realization was overwhelming to me. I felt infinitely, vulnerable, frail. I needed to seek cover; to hide somewhere.

It was exactly like the dream that most of us seem to have at one time or another in which we find ourselves naked and don't know what to do. I felt more than naked; I felt unprotected, weak, and I dreaded returning to my normal state. In a vague way, I sensed that I was lying down. I braced myself for my return to normality. I conceived of the idea that I was going to find myself lying on the brick walk, twitching convulsively, surrounded by a whole circle of spectators.

The sensation that I was lying down became more and more accentuated. I felt that I could move my eyes. I could see light through my closed eyelids, but I dreaded opening them. The odd part was that I didn't hear any of those people that I imagined were around me. I heard no noise at all. At last, I ventured opening my eyes. I was on my bed, in my office apartment by the corner of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards.

I became quite hysterical upon finding myself in my bed. But for some reason that was beyond my grasp, I calmed down almost immediately. My hysteria was replaced by a bodily indifference, or by a state of bodily satisfaction, something like what one feels after a good meal.

However, I could not quiet my mind. It had been the most shocking thing imaginable for me to realize that I had perceived energy directly all my life. How in the world could it have been possible that I hadn't known? What had been preventing me from gaining access to that facet of my being? Don Juan had said that every human being has the potential to see energy directly. What he hadn't said was that every human being already sees energy directly but doesn't know it.

I put that question to a psychiatrist friend. He couldn't shed any light on my quandary. He thought that my reaction was the result of fatigue and overstimulation. He gave me a prescription for Valium and told me to rest.

I hadn't dared mention to anyone that I had woken up in my bed without being able to account for how I had gotten there. Therefore, my haste to see don Juan was more than justified. I flew to Mexico City as soon as I could, rented a car, and drove to where he lived.

"You've done all this before!" don Juan said, laughing, when I narrated my mind-boggling experience to him. "There are only two things that are new. One is that now you have perceived energy all by yourself. What you did was to stop the world, and then you realized that you have always seen energy as it flows in the universe, as every human being does, but without knowing it deliberately. The other new thing is that you have traveled from your inner silence all by yourself.

"You know, without my having to tell you, that anything is possible if one departs from inner silence. This time your fear and vulnerability made it possible for you to end up in your bed, which is not really that far from the UCLA campus. If you would not indulge in your surprise, you would realize that what you did is nothing, nothing extraordinary for a warrior traveler.

"But the issue which is of the utmost importance isn't knowing that you have always perceived energy directly, or your journeying from inner silence, but, rather, a twofold affair.

"First, you experienced something which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the clear view, or losing the human form; the time when human pettiness vanishes, as if it had been a patch of fog looming over us, a fog that slowly clears up and dissipates.

"But under no circumstances must you consider this accomplishment as an end.

"The sorcerers' world is not an immutable [* immutable- not subject or susceptible to change] world like the world of everyday life, where they tell you that once you reach a goal, you remain a winner forever.

"In the sorcerers' world, to arrive at a certain goal means that you have simply acquired the most efficient tools to continue your fight, which, by the way, will never end.

"The second part of this twofold matter is that you experienced the most maddening question for the hearts of human beings. You expressed it yourself when you asked yourself the questions: 'How in the world could it have been possible that I didn't know that I had perceived energy directly all my life? What had been preventing me from gaining access to that facet of my being?'"