Version 2006.05.21

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

### The Unavoidable Appointment

There was something that kept nagging at me in the back of my mind: I had to answer a most important letter I'd received, and I had to do it at any cost. My anthropologist friend who was responsible for my meeting don Juan Matus had written me a letter a couple of months earlier. He wanted to know how I was doing in my studies of anthropology, and urged me to pay him a visit.

What had prevented me from doing it was a mixture of indolence [* indolence- inactivity resulting from a dislike of work] and a deep desire to please. I composed three long letters. On rereading each of them, I found them so trite [* trite- repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse] and obsequious [* obsequious- attempting to win favour from influential people by flattery] that I tore them up.

I couldn't express in them the depth of my gratitude; the depth of my feelings for him. I rationalized my delay in answering with a genuine resolve to go to see him, and tell him personally what I was doing with don Juan Matus; but I kept postponing my imminent trip because I wasn't sure what it was that I was doing with don Juan. I wanted someday to show my friend real results. As it was, I had only vague sketches of possibilities, which, in his demanding eyes, wouldn't have been anthropological fieldwork anyway.

One day I found out that he had died. His death brought to me one of those dangerous silent depressions. I had no way to express what I felt because what I was feeling was not fully formulated in my mind. It was a mixture of dejection, despondency, and abhorrence at myself for not having answered his letter; for not having gone to see him.

I paid a visit to don Juan Matus soon after that. On arriving at his house, I sat down on one of the crates under his ramada and tried to search for words that would not sound banal to express my sense of dejection over the death of my friend. For reasons incomprehensible to me, don Juan knew the origin of my turmoil, and the overt reason for my visit to him.

"Yes," don Juan said dryly. "I know that your friend, the anthropologist who guided you to meet me, has died. For whatever reasons, I knew exactly the moment he died. I saw it."

His statements jolted me to my foundations.

"I saw it coming a long time ago. I even told you about it, but you disregarded what I said. I'm sure that you don't even remember it."

I remembered every word he had said, but it had no meaning for me at the time he had said it.

Don Juan had stated that a detail deeply related to our meeting, but not part of it, was the fact that he had seen my anthropologist friend as a dying man.

"I saw death as an outside force already opening your friend," he had said to me. "Every one of us has an energetic fissure, an energetic crack below the navel. That crack, which sorcerers call the gap, is closed when a man is in his prime."

He had said that, normally, all that is discernible to the sorcerer's eye is a tenuous discoloration in the otherwise whitish glow of the luminous sphere. But when a man is close to dying, that gap becomes quite apparent. He had assured me that my friend's gap was wide open.

"What is the significance of all this, don Juan?" I had asked perfunctorily.

"The significance is a terminal one," he had replied. "The spirit was signaling to me that something was coming to an end. I thought it was my life that was coming to an end, and I accepted it as gracefully as I could.

It dawned on me much, much later that it wasn't my life that was coming to an end, but my entire lineage."

I didn't know what he was talking about. But how could I have taken all that seriously? As far as I was concerned, it was, at the time he said it, like everything else in my life; just talk.

"Your friend himself told you, though not in so many words, that he was dying," don Juan said. "You acknowledged what he was saying just as you acknowledged what I said; but in both cases, you chose to bypass it."

I had no comments to make. I was overwhelmed by what he was saying. I wanted to sink into the crate I was sitting on; to disappear, swallowed up by the earth.

"It's not your fault that you bypass things like this," he went on. "It's youth. You have so many things to do, so many people around you. You are not alert. You never learned to be alert, anyway."

In the vein of defending the last bastion [* bastion- a stronghold into which people could go for shelter during a battle] of myself- my idea that I was watchful- I pointed out to don Juan that I had been in life and death situations that required my quick wit and vigilance. It wasn't that I lacked the capacity to be alert, but that I lacked the orientation for setting an appropriate list of priorities. Therefore, everything was either important or unimportant to me.

"To be alert doesn't mean to be watchful," don Juan said. "For sorcerers, to be alert means to be aware of the true underlying fabric of the everyday world that seems extraneous [* extraneous- not essential] to the interaction of the moment.

"On the trip that you took with your friend before you met me, you noticed only the details that were obvious. You didn't notice how his death was absorbing him, and yet something in you knew it."

I began to protest, to tell him that what he was saying wasn't true.

"Don't hide yourself behind banalities," [* banalities- obvious or often repeated remarks] he said in an accusing tone. "Stand up, if only for the moment you are with me. Assume responsibility for what you know.

"Don't get lost in the extraneous threads of the world around you; or in unimportant distractions from what's really going on in the fabric around you.

If you hadn't been so concerned with yourself and your problems, you would have known that that was his last trip. You would have noticed that he was closing his accounts; seeing the people who helped him; saying good-bye to them.

"Your anthropologist friend had talked to me once," don Juan went on. "I remembered him so clearly that I wasn't surprised at all when he brought you to me at that bus depot.

"I couldn't help him when he had talked to me. He wasn't the man I was looking for, but I wished him well from my sorcerer's emptiness, from my sorcerer's silence.

"For this reason, I know that on his last trip, he was saying thank you to the people who counted in his life."

I admitted to don Juan that he was so very right, that there had been so many details that I had been aware of, but that they hadn't meant a thing to me at the time; such as, for instance, my friend's ecstasy in watching the scenery around us. He would stop the car just to watch, for hours on end, the mountains in the distance, or the riverbed, or the desert.

I discarded this as the idiotic sentimentality of a middle-aged man. I even made vague hints to him that perhaps he was drinking too much. He told me that in dire cases a drink would allow a man a moment of peace and detachment, a moment long enough to savor something unrepeatable.

"That was, for a fact, the trip for his eyes only," don Juan said. "Sorcerers take such a trip, and, in it, nothing counts except what their eyes can absorb. Your friend was unburdening himself of everything superfluous."

I confessed to don Juan that I had disregarded what he had said to me about my dying friend because, at an unknown level, I had known that it was true.

"Sorcerers never say things idly," he said. "I am most careful about what I say to you or to anybody else. The difference between you and me is that I don't have any time at all, and I act accordingly. You, on the other hand, believe that you have all the time in the world, and you act accordingly. The end result of our individual behaviors is that I measure everything I do and say, and you don't."

I conceded that he was right, but I assured him that whatever he was saying did not alleviate my turmoil, or my sadness. I blurted out then, uncontrollably, every nuance of my confused feelings. I told him that I wasn't in search of advice. I wanted him to prescribe a sorcerer's way to end my anguish. I believed I was really interested in getting from him some natural relaxant, an organic Valium, and I said so to him. Don Juan shook his head in bewilderment.

"You are too much," he said. "Next you're going to ask for a sorcerer's medication to remove everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part- just the effort of swallowing whatever is given. The more awful the taste, the better the results. That's your Western man's motto. You want results- one potion and you're cured.

"Sorcerers face things in a different way," don Juan continued. "Since they don't have any time to spare, they give themselves fully to what's in front of them.

"Your turmoil is the result of your lack of sobriety. You didn't have the sobriety to thank your friend properly. That happens to every one of us. We never express what we feel, and when we want to, it's too late, because we have run out of time.

"It's not only your friend who ran out of time. You, too, ran out of it.

"You should have thanked him profusely in Arizona. He took the trouble to take you around, and whether you understand it or not, in the bus depot he gave you his best shot. But the moment when you should have thanked him, you were angry with him- you were judging him: He was nasty to you, or whatever.

"And then you postponed seeing him. In reality, what you did was to postpone thanking him. Now you're stuck with a ghost on your tail. You'll never be able to pay what you owe him."

I understood the immensity of what he was saying. Never had I faced my actions in such a light. In fact, I had never thanked anyone, ever.

Don Juan pushed his barb even deeper. "Your friend knew that he was dying," he said. "He wrote you one final letter to find out about your doings. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, or to you, you were his last thought."

The weight of don Juan's words was too much for my shoulders. I collapsed. I felt that I had to lie down. My head was spinning. Maybe it was the setting. I had made the terrible mistake of arriving at don Juan's house in the late afternoon. The setting sun seemed astoundingly golden, and the reflections on the bare mountains to the east of don Juan's house were gold and purple. The sky didn't have a speck of a cloud. Nothing seemed to move. It was as if the whole world were hiding, but its presence was overpowering. The quietness of the Sonoran desert was like a dagger. It went to the marrow of my bones. I wanted to leave, to get in my car and drive away. I wanted to be in the city; to get lost in its noise.

"You are having a taste of infinity," don Juan said with grave finality. "I know it, because I have been in your shoes. You want to run away, to plunge into something human, warm, contradictory, stupid, who cares? You want to forget the death of your friend.

"But infinity won't let you." His voice mellowed. "It has gripped you in its merciless clutches."

"What can I do now, don Juan?" I asked.

"The only thing you can do," don Juan said, "is to keep the memory of your friend fresh; to keep it alive for the rest of your life and perhaps even beyond. Sorcerers express, in this fashion, the thanks that they can no longer voice. You may think it is a silly way, but that's the best sorcerers can do."

It was my own sadness, doubtless, which made me believe that the typically ebullient [* ebullient- joyously unrestrained] don Juan was as sad as I was. I discarded the thought immediately. That couldn't be possible.

"Sadness, for sorcerers, is not personal," don Juan said, again erupting into my thoughts. "It is not quite sadness. It's a wave of energy that comes from the depths of the cosmos, and hits sorcerers when they are receptive; when they are like radios capable of catching radio waves.

"The sorcerers of olden times, who gave us the entire format of sorcery, believed that there is sadness in the universe, as a force, or a condition; like light; like intent. And that this perennial force acts especially on sorcerers- particularly because they no longer have any defensive shields. They cannot hide behind their friends or their studies. They cannot hide behind love, or hatred, or happiness, or misery. They can't hide behind anything.

"The condition of sorcerers," don Juan went on, "is that sadness, for them, is abstract. It doesn't come from coveting or lacking something, or from self-importance. It doesn't come from me. It comes from infinity. The sadness you feel for not thanking your friend is already leaning in that direction.

"My teacher, the nagual Julian," he went on, "was a fabulous actor. He actually worked professionally in the theater. He had a favorite story that he used to tell in his theater sessions. He used to push me into terrible outbursts of anguish with it. He said that it was a story for warriors who had everything and yet felt the sting of the universal sadness. I always thought he was telling it for me, personally."

Don Juan then paraphrased his teacher, telling me that the story referred to a man suffering from profound melancholy.

The man went to see the best doctors of his day and every one of those doctors failed to help him. He finally came to the office of a leading doctor, a healer of the soul.

The doctor suggested to his patient that perhaps he could find solace, and the end of his melancholy, in love. The man responded that love was no problem for him, that he was loved perhaps like no one else in the world.

The doctor's next suggestion was that maybe the patient should undertake a voyage and see other parts of the world. The man responded that, without exaggeration, he had been in every corner of the world.

The doctor recommended hobbies like the arts, sports, etc. The man responded to every one of his recommendations in the same terms: He had done that and had had no relief.

The doctor suspected that the man was possibly an incurable liar. He couldn't have done all those things, as he claimed. But being a good healer, the doctor had a final insight.

"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed. "I have the perfect solution for you, sir. You must attend a performance of the greatest comedian of our day. He will delight you to the point where you will forget every twist of your melancholy. You must attend a performance of the Great Garrick!"

Don Juan said that the man looked at the doctor with the saddest look you can imagine, and said, "Doctor, if that's your recommendation, I am a lost man and have no cure. I am Garrick."