Version 2006.05.21

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

### The Interplay of Energy on the Horizon

The clarity the usher brought a new impetus to my recapitulation. A new mood replaced the old one. From then on, I began to recollect events in my life with maddening clarity. It was exactly as if a barrier had been built inside me that had kept me holding rigidly on to meager and unclear memories, and the usher had smashed it.

My memory faculty had been for me, prior to that event, a vague way of referring to things that had happened, but which I wanted most of the time to forget. Basically, I had no interest whatsoever in remembering anything of my life. Therefore, I honestly saw absolutely no point in this futile exercise of recapitulating, which don Juan had practically imposed on me. For me, it was a chore that tired me instantly and did nothing but point out my incapacity for concentrating.

I had dutifully made, nevertheless, lists of people, and I had engaged in a haphazard effort of quasi-remembering my interactions with them. My lack of clarity in bringing those people into focus didn't dissuade me. I fulfilled what I considered to be my duty, regardless of the way I really felt.

With practice, the clarity of my recollection improved, I thought remarkably. I was able to descend, so to speak, on certain choice events with a fair amount of keenness that was at once scary and rewarding. After don Juan presented me with the idea of the usher, however, the power of my recollection became something for which I had no name.

Following my list of people made the recapitulation extremely formal and exigent, the way don Juan wanted it. But from time to time, something in me got loose; something that forced me to focus on events unrelated to my list; events whose clarity was so maddening that I was caught and submerged in them, perhaps even more intensely than I had been when I had lived the experiences themselves. Every time I recapitulated in such a fashion, I had a degree of detachment which allowed me to see things I had disregarded when I had really been in the throes of them.

The first time in which the recollection of an event shook me to my foundations happened after I had given a lecture at a college in Oregon. The students in charge of organizing the lecture took me and another anthropology friend of mine to a house to spend the night.

I was going to go to a motel, but they insisted, for our comfort, on taking us to this house. They said that it was in the country, and there were no noises, the quietest place in the world, with no telephones, no interference from the outside world. I, like the fool that I was, agreed to go with them. Don Juan had not only warned me to always be a solitary bird, he had demanded that I observe his recommendation, something that I did most of the time, but there were occasions when the gregarious creature in me took the upper hand.

The committee took us to the house, quite a distance from Portland, of a professor who was on sabbatical. Very swiftly, they turned on the lights inside and outside of the house, which was located on a hill with spotlights all around it. With the spotlights on, the house must have been visible from five miles away. After that, the committee took off as fast as they could, some-thing that surprised me because I thought they were going to stay and talk. The house was a wooden A-frame, small, but very well constructed. It had an enormous living room and a mezzanine above it where the bedroom was. Right above, at the apex of the A-frame, there was a life-size crucifix hanging from a strange rotating hinge, which was drilled into the head of the figure. The spotlights on the wall were focused on the crucifix. It was quite an impressive sight, especially when it rotated, squeaking as if the hinge needed oil.

The bathroom of the house was another sight. It had mirrored tiles on the ceiling, the walls, and the floor, and it was illuminated with a reddish light. There was no way to go to the bathroom without seeing yourself from every conceivable angle. I enjoyed all those features of the house, which seemed to me stupendous.

When the time came for me to go to sleep, however, I encountered a serious problem because there was only one narrow, hard, quite monastic bed and my anthropologist friend was close to having pneumonia, wheezing and retching phlegm every time he coughed. He went straight for the bed and passed out. I looked for a place to sleep. I couldn't find one. That house was barren of comforts. Besides, it was cold. The committee had turned on the lights, but not the heater. I looked for the heater. My search was fruitless, as was my search for the switch to the spotlights or to any of the lights in the house, for that matter. The switches were there on the walls, but they seemed to be overruled by the effect of some main switch. The lights were on, and I had no way to turn them off.

The only place I could find to sleep was on a thin throw rug, and the only thing I found with which I could cover myself was the tanned hide of a giant French poodle. Obviously, it had been the pet of the house and had been preserved; it had shiny black-marble eyes and an open mouth with the tongue hanging out. I put the head of the poodle skin toward my knees. I still had to cover myself with the tanned rear end, which was on my neck. Its preserved head was like a hard object between my knees, quite unsettling! If it had been dark, it wouldn't have been as bad. I gathered a bundle of washcloths and used them as a pillow. I used as many as possible to cover the hide of the French poodle the best way I could. I couldn't sleep all night.

It was then, as I lay there cursing myself silently for being so stupid and not following don Juan's recommendation, that I had the first maddeningly clear recollection of my entire life. I had recollected the event that don Juan had called the usher with equal clarity, but my tendency had always been to half disregard what happened to me when I was with don Juan, on the basis that in his presence anything was possible. This time, however, I was alone.

Years before I met don Juan, I had worked painting signs on buildings. My boss's name was Luigi Palma. One day Luigi got a contract to paint a sign, advertising the sale and rental of bridal gowns and tuxedos, on the back wall of an old building. The owner of the store in the building wanted to catch the eye of possible customers with a large display. Luigi was going to paint a bride and groom, and I was going to do the lettering. We went to the flat roof of the building and set up a scaffold.

I was quite apprehensive although I had no overt reason to be so. I had painted dozens of signs on high buildings. Luigi thought that I was beginning to be afraid of heights, but that my fear was going to pass. When the time came to start working, he lowered the scaffold a few feet from the roof and jumped onto its flat boards. He went to one side, while I stood on the other in order to be totally out of his way. He was the artist.

Luigi began to show off. His painting movements were so erratic and agitated that the scaffold moved back and forth. I became dizzy. I wanted to go back to the flat roof, using the pretext that I needed more paint and other painters' paraphernalia. I grabbed the edge of the wall that fringed the flat roof and tried to hoist myself up, but the tips of my feet got stuck in the boards of the scaffold.

I tried to pull my feet and the scaffold toward the wall; the harder I pulled, the farther away I pushed the scaffold from the wall. Instead of helping me untangle my feet, Luigi sat down and braced himself with the cords that attached the scaffold to the flat roof. He crossed himself and looked at me in horror. From his sitting position, he knelt, weeping quietly as he recited the Lord's Prayer.

I held on to the edge of the wall for dear life. What gave me the desperate strength to endure was the certainty that if I was in control, I could keep the scaffold from moving farther and farther away. I wasn't going to lose my grip and fall thirteen floors to my death.

Luigi, being a compulsive taskmaster to the bitter end, yelled to me, in the midst of tears, that I should pray. He swore that both of us were going to fall to our deaths, and that the least we could do was to pray for the salvation of our souls. For a moment, I deliberated about whether it was functional to pray. I opted to yell for help. People in the building must have heard my yelling and sent for the firemen. I sincerely thought that it had taken only two or three seconds after I began to yell for the firemen to come onto the roof and grab Luigi and me and secure the scaffold.

In reality, I had hung on to the side of the building for at least twenty minutes. When the firemen finally pulled me onto the roof, I had lost any vestige of control. I vomited on the hard floor of the roof, sick to my stomach from fear and the odious smell of melted tar. It was a very hot day; the tar on the cracks of the scratchy roofing sheets was melting in the heat.

The ordeal had been so frightening and embarrassing that I didn't want to remember it, and I ended up hallucinating that the firemen had pulled me into a warm, yellow room. They had then put me in a supremely comfortable bed, and I had fallen peacefully asleep, safe, wearing my pajamas, delivered from danger.

My second recollection was another blast of incommensurable force. I was talking amiably to a group of friends when, for no apparent reason I could account for, I suddenly lost my breath under the impact of a thought; a memory which was vague for an instant, and then became an engrossing experience. Its force was so intense that I had to excuse myself and retreat for a moment to a corner.

My friends seemed to understand my reaction. They disbanded without any comments.

What I was remembering was an incident that had taken place in my last year of high school.

My best friend and I used to walk to school, passing a big mansion with a black wrought iron fence at least seven feet high and ending in pointed spikes. Behind the fence was an extensive, well-kept green lawn, and a huge, ferocious German shepherd dog.

Every day, we used to tease the dog and let him charge at us. He stopped physically at the wrought iron fence, but his rage seemed to cross over to us. My friend delighted in engaging the dog every day in a contest of mind over matter. He used to stand a few inches from the dog's snout which protruded between the iron bars at least six inches into the street, and my friend would bare his teeth, just like the dog did.

"Yield, yield!" my friend shouted every time. "Obey! Obey! I am more powerful than you!"

His daily displays of mental power, which lasted at least five minutes, never affected the dog, outside of leaving him more furious than ever. My friend assured me daily, as part of his ritual, that the dog was either going to obey him or die in front of us of heart failure brought about by rage. His conviction was so intense that I believed that the dog was going to drop dead any day.

One morning, when we came around, the dog wasn't there. We waited for a moment, but he didn't show up. Then we saw him, at the end of the extensive lawn. He seemed to be busy there, so we slowly began to walk away. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that the dog was running at full speed, toward us. When he was perhaps six or seven feet from the fence, he took a gigantic leap over it. I was sure that he was going to rip his belly on the spikes. He barely cleared them and fell onto the street like a sack of potatoes.

I thought for a moment that he was dead, but he was only stunned. Suddenly, he got up, and instead of chasing after the one who had brought about his rage, he ran after me. I jumped onto the roof of a car, but the car was nothing for the dog. He took a leap and was nearly on top of me. I scrambled down and climbed the first tree that was within reach, a flimsy little tree that could barely support my weight. I was sure that it would snap in the middle, sending me right into the dog's jaws to be mauled to death.

In the tree, I was nearly out of his reach. But the dog jumped again, and snapped his teeth, catching me by the seat of my pants and ripping them. His teeth actually nicked my buttocks. The moment I was safe at the top of the tree, the dog left. He just ran up the street, perhaps looking for my friend.

At the infirmary in school, the nurse told me that I had to ask the owner of the dog for a certificate of rabies vaccination.

"You must look into this," she said severely. "You may have rabies already. If the owner refuses to show you the vaccination certificate, you are within your rights to call the police."

I talked to the caretaker of the mansion where the dog lived. He accused me of luring the owner's most valuable dog, a pedigreed animal, out into the street.

"You better watch out, boy!" he said in an angry tone. "The dog got lost. The owner will send you to jail if you keep on bothering us."

"But I may have rabies," I said in a sincerely terrified tone.

"I don't give a shit if you have the bubonic plague," the man snapped. "Scram!"

"I'll call the police," I said.

"Call whoever you like," he retorted. "You call the police, and we'll turn them against you. In this house, we have enough clout to do that!"

I believed him, so I lied to the nurse and said that the dog could not be found, and that it had no owner.

"Oh my god!" the woman exclaimed. "Then brace yourself for the worst. I may have to send you to the doctor." She gave me a long list of symptoms that I should look for or wait for until they manifested themselves. She said that the injections for rabies were extremely painful, and that they had to be administered subcutaneously on the area of the abdomen.

"I wouldn't wish that treatment on my worst enemy," she said, plunging me into a horrid nightmare.

What followed was my first real depression. I just lay in my bed feeling every one of the symptoms enumerated by the nurse. I ended up going to the school infirmary, and begging the woman to give me the treatment for rabies, no matter how painful. I made a huge scene. I became hysterical. I didn't have rabies, but I had totally lost my control.

I related to don Juan my two recollections in all their detail, sparing nothing. He didn't make any comments. He nodded a few times.

"In both recollections, don Juan," I said, feeling myself the urgency of my voice, "I was as hysterical as anyone could be. My body was trembling. I was sick to my stomach.

"I don't want to say it was as if I were in the experiences, because that's not the truth. I was in the experiences themselves both times. And when I couldn't take them anymore, I jumped into my life now. For me, that was a jump into the future. I had the power of going over time. My jump into the past was not abrupt. The event developed slowly, as memories do. It was at the end that I did jump abruptly into the future: my life now."

"Something in you has begun to collapse for sure," he finally said. "It has been collapsing all along, but it repaired itself very quickly every time its supports failed. My feeling is that it is now collapsing totally."

After another long silence, don Juan explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed that, as he had told me already, we had two minds, and only one of them was truly ours. I had always understood don Juan as saying that there were two parts to our minds, and one of them was always silent because expression was denied to it by the force of the other part. Whatever don Juan had said, I had taken as a metaphorical way to explain, perhaps, the apparent dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain over the right, or something of the like.

"There is a secret option to the recapitulation," don Juan said.

"Just like I told you that there is a secret option to dying, an option that only sorcerers take. In the case of dying, the secret option is that human beings could retain their life force and relinquish only their awareness, the product of their lives.

"In the case of the recapitulation, the secret option that only sorcerers take is to choose to enhance their true minds.

"The haunting memory of your recollections," he went on, "could come only from your true mind, whereas, the other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model; economy strength; one size fits all.

"But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake now is the advent of a disintegrating force. But not a force that is disintegrating you- I don't mean it that way.

"It is disintegrating what the sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in every other human being. The natural result of the force that is descending on you and is disintegrating your foreign installation is that it pulls a sorcerer out of their syntax."

I had listened carefully to don Juan, but I couldn't say that I had understood what he had said. For some strange reason, which was to me as unknown as the cause of my vivid recollections, I couldn't ask him any questions.

"I know how difficult it is for you," don Juan said all of a sudden, "to deal with this facet of your life. Every sorcerer that I know has gone through it. The males going through it suffer infinitely more damage than the females. I suppose it's the condition of women to be more durable.

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico, acting as a group, tried their best to buttress the impact of this disintegrating force. In our day, we have no means of acting as a group, so we must brace ourselves to face in solitude a force that will sweep us away from language because there is no way to describe adequately what is going on."

Don Juan was right in that I was at a loss for explanations or ways of describing the effect that those recollections had had on me. Don Juan had told me that sorcerers face the unknown in the most common incidents one can imagine.

When they are confronted with the unknown, and cannot interpret what they are perceiving, they have to rely on an outside source for direction. Don Juan had called that source infinity, or the voice of the spirit, and had said that if sorcerers don't try to be rational about what can't be rationalized, the spirit unerringly [* unerringly- without making errors] tells them what's what.

Don Juan had guided me to accept the idea that infinity was a force that had a voice, which in a sense is true, but not altogether accurate; and he had guided me to accept that infinity was conscious of itself, which for all practial purposes is accurate.

Consequently, he had prepared me to be ready to listen to that voice and act efficiently always, but without antecedents, [* antecedents- preceding occurrences] using as little as possible the railings of the a priori. [* a priori- hypothesis or theory rather than experiment and direct experience]

I waited impatiently for the voice of the spirit to tell me the meaning of my recollections, but nothing happened.

Then one day, I was in a bookstore when a girl recognized me and came over to talk to me. She was tall and slim, and had an insecure, little girl's voice. I was trying to make her feel at ease when I was suddenly accosted by an instantaneous energetic change.

It was as if an alarm had been triggered in me, and as it had happened in the past, without any volition on my part whatsoever, I recollected another completely forgotten event in my life.

The memory of my grandparents' house flooded me. It was a veritable avalanche so intense that it was devastating, and once more, I had to retreat to a corner. My body shook, as if I had taken a chill.

I must have been eight years old. My grandfather was talking to me. He had begun by telling me that it was his utmost duty to set me straight. I had two cousins who were my age: Alfredo and Luis. My grandfather demanded mercilessly that I admit that my cousin Alfredo was really beautiful. In my vision, I heard my grandfather's raspy, constricted voice.

"Alfredo doesn't need any introductions," he had said to me on that occasion. "He needs only to be present and the doors will fly open for him because everybody practices the cult of beauty. Everybody likes beautiful people. They envy them, but they certainly seek their company. Take it from me. I am handsome, wouldn't you say?"

I sincerely agreed with my grandfather. He was certainly a very handsome man, small-boned, with laughing blue eyes and an exquisitely chiseled face with beautiful cheekbones. Everything seemed to be perfectly balanced in his face-his nose, his mouth, his eyes, his pointed jaw. He had blond hair growing on his ears, a feature that gave him an elflike appearance. He knew everything about himself, and he exploited his attributes to the maximum. Women adored him; first, according to him, for his beauty, and second, because he posed no threat to them. He, of course, took full advantage of all this.

"Your cousin Alfredo is a winner," my grandfather went on. "He will never have to crash a party because he'll be the first one on the list of guests. Have you ever noticed how people stop in the street to look at him, and how they want to touch him?

"He's so beautiful that I'm afraid he's going to turn out to be an asshole, but that's a different story. Let us say that he'll be the most welcome asshole you have ever met."

My grandfather compared my cousin Luis with Alfredo. He said that Luis was homely, and a little bit stupid, but that he had a heart of gold. And then he brought me into the picture.

"If we are going to proceed with our explanation," he continued, "you have to admit in sincerity that Alfredo is beautiful and Luis is good. Now, let's take you. You are neither handsome nor good. You are a veritable son of a bitch.

Nobody's going to invite you to a party. You'll have to get used to the idea that if you want to be at a party, you will have to crash it. Doors will never be open for you the way they will be open for Alfredo for being beautiful, and for Luis for being good, so you will have to get in through the window."

His analysis of his three grandsons was so accurate that he made me weep with the finality of what he had said. The more I wept, the happier he became. He finished his case with a most deleterious admonition.

"There's no need to feel bad," he said, "because there's nothing more exciting than getting in through the window. To do that, you have to be clever and on your toes. You have to watch everything, and be prepared for endless humiliations.

"If you have to go in through the window," he went on, "it's because you're definitely not on the list of guests; therefore, your presence is not welcome at all, so you have to work your butt off to stay. The only way I know is by possessing everybody. Scream! Demand! Advise! Make them feel that you are in charge! How could they throw you out if you're in charge?"

Remembering this scene caused a profound upheaval in me. I had buried this incident so deeply that I had forgotten all about it. What I had remembered all along, however, was his admonition to be in charge, which he must have repeated to me over and over throughout the years.

I didn't have a chance to examine this event, or ponder it, because another forgotten memory surfaced with the same force. In it, I was with the girl I had been engaged to. At that time, both of us were saving money to be married and have a house of our own. I heard myself demanding that we have a joint checking account; I wouldn't have it any other way. I felt an imperative need to lecture her on frugality. I heard myself telling her where to buy her clothes, and what the top affordable price should be.

Then I saw myself giving driving lessons to her younger sister and going veritably berserk when she said that she was planning to move out of her parents' house. Forcefully, I threatened her with canceling my lessons. She wept, confessing that she was having an affair with her boss. I jumped out of the car and began kicking the door.

However, that was not all. I heard myself telling my fiancee's father not to move to Oregon, where he planned to go. I shouted at the top of my voice that it was a stupid move. I really believed that my reasonings against it were unbeatable.

I presented him with budget figures in which I had meticulously calculated his losses. When he didn't pay any attention to me, I slammed the door and left, shaking with rage. I found my fiancee in the living room, playing her guitar. I pulled it out of her hands and yelled at her that she embraced the guitar instead of playing it, as if it were more than an object.

My desire to impose my will extended all across the board. I made no distinctions. Whoever was close to me was there for me to possess and mold, following my whims.

I didn't have to ponder anymore the significance of my vivid visions because an unquestionable certainty invaded me as if coming from outside me.

It told me that my weak point was the idea that I had to be the man in the director's chair at all times. It had been a deeply ingrained concept with me that I not only had to be in charge, but I had to be in control of any situation.

The way in which I had been brought up had reinforced this drive, which must have been arbitrary at its onset, but had turned, in my adulthood, into a deep necessity.

I was aware, beyond any doubt, that what was at stake was infinity. Don Juan had portrayed it as a conscious force that deliberately intervenes in the lives of sorcerers. And now it was intervening in mine. I knew that infinity was pointing out to me, through the vivid recollection of those forgotten experiences, the intensity and the depth of my drive for control, and thus preparing me for something transcendental to myself.

I knew with frightening certainty that something was going to bar any possibility of my being in control, and that I needed, more than anything else, sobriety, fluidity, and abandon in order to face the things that I felt were coming to me.

Naturally, I told all this to don Juan, elaborating to my heart's content on my speculations and inspirational insights about the possible significance of my recollections.

Don Juan laughed good-humoredly. "All this is psychological exaggeration on your part, wishful thinking," he said. "You are, as usual, seeking explanations with linear cause and effect.

"Each of your recollections becomes more and more vivid, more and more maddening to you, because as I told you already, you have entered an irreversible process. Your true mind is emerging, waking up from a state of lifelong lethargy.

"Infinity is claiming you," he continued. "Whatever means it uses to point that out to you cannot have any other reason, any other cause, any other value than that. What you should do, however, is to be prepared for the onslaughts of infinity. You must be in a state of continuously bracing yourself for a blow of tremendous magnitude. That is the sane, sober way in which sorcerers face infinity."

Don Juan's words left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I actually sensed the assault coming on me, and feared it. Since I had spent my entire life hiding behind some superfluous activity, I immersed myself in work. I gave lectures in classes taught by my friends in different schools in southern California. I wrote copiously. I could say without exaggeration that I threw dozens of manuscripts into the garbage can because they didn't fulfill an indispensable requirement that don Juan had described to me as the mark of something that is acceptable by infinity.

He had said that everything I did had to be an act of sorcery; an act free from encroaching expectations, fears of failure, hopes of success; free from the 'cult of me'. Eeverything I did had to be impromptu; a work of magic where I freely opened myself to the impulses of the infinite.

One night, I was sitting at my desk preparing myself for my daily activity of writing. I felt a moment of grogginess. I thought that I was feeling dizzy because I had gotten up too quickly from my mat where I had been doing my exercises.

My vision blurred. I saw yellow spots in front of my eyes. I thought I was going to faint. The fainting spell got worse. There was an enormous red spot in front of me. I began to breathe deeply, trying to quiet whatever agitation was causing this visual distortion.

I became extraordinarily silent, to the point where I noticed that I was surrounded by impenetrable darkness. The thought crossed my mind that I had fainted. However, I could feel the chair, my desk. I could feel everything around me from inside the darkness that surrounded me.

Don Juan had said that the sorcerers of his lineage considered that one of the most coveted results of inner silence was a specific interplay of energy, which is always heralded by a strong emotion. He felt that my recollections were the means to agitate me to the extreme, where I would experience this interplay. Such an interplay manifested itself in terms of hues that were projected on any horizon in the world of everyday life, be it a mountain, the sky, a wall, or simply the palms of the hands. He had explained that this interplay of hues begins with the appearance of a tenuous brushstroke of lavender on the horizon. In time, this lavender brushstroke starts to expand until it covers the visible horizon, like advancing storm clouds.

He assured me that a dot of a peculiar, rich, pomegranate red shows up, as if bursting from the lavender clouds. He stated that as sorcerers become more disciplined and experienced, the dot of pomegranate expands and finally explodes into thoughts or visions, or in the case of a literate man, into written words; sorcerers either see visions engendered by energy, hear thoughts being voiced as words, or read written words.

That night at my desk, I didn't see any lavender brushstrokes, nor did I see any advancing clouds. I was sure that I didn't have the discipline that sorcerers require for such an interplay of energy, but I had an enormous dot of pomegranate red in front of me. This enormous dot, without any preliminaries, exploded into disassociated words that I read as if they were on a sheet of paper coming out of a typewriter. The words moved at such tremendous speed in front of me that it was impossible to read anything. Then I heard a voice describing something to me. Again, the speed of the voice was wrong for my ears. The words were garbled, making it impossible to hear anything that would make sense.

As if that weren't enough, I began to see liverish scenes like one sees in dreams after a heavy meal. They were baroque, dark, ominous. I began to twirl, and I did so until I got sick to my stomach. The whole event ended there. I felt the effect of whatever had happened to me in every muscle of my body. I was exhausted. This violent intervention had made me angry and frustrated.

I rushed to don Juan's house to tell him about this happening. I sensed that I needed his help more than ever.

"There's nothing gentle about sorcerers or sorcery," don Juan commented after he heard my story. "This was the first time that infinity descended on you in such a fashion. It was like a blitz. It was a total takeover of your faculties. Insofar as the speed of your visions is concerned, you yourself will have to learn to adjust it. For some sorcerers, that's the job of a lifetime. But from now on, energy will appear to you as if it were being projected onto a movie screen.

"Whether or not you understand the projection," he went on, "is another matter. In order to make an accurate interpretation, you need experience. My recommendation is that you shouldn't be bashful, and you should begin now. Read energy on the wall! Your true mind is emerging, and it has nothing to do with the mind that is a foreign installation. Let your true mind adjust the speed. Be silent, and don't fret, no matter what happens."

"But, don Juan, is all this possible? Can one actually read energy as if it were a text?" I asked, overwhelmed by the idea.

"Of course it's possible!" he retorted. "In your case, it's not only possible, it's happening to you."

"But why reading it, as if it were a text?" I insisted, but it was a rhetorical insistence.

"It's an affectation on your part," he said. "If you read the text, you could repeat it verbatim. However, if you tried to be a viewer of infinity instead of a reader of infinity, you would find that you could not describe whatever you were viewing, and you would end up babbling inanities, incapable of verbalizing what you witness. The same thing if you tried to hear it. This is, of course, specific to you. Anyway, infinity chooses. The warrior-traveler simply acquiesces to the choice.

"But above all," he added after a calculated pause, "don't be overwhelmed by the event because you cannot describe it. It is an event beyond the syntax of our language."