This is an Excerpt from The Active Side of Infinity by Carlos Casteneda. He was the author of ten bestselling books, including the acknowledged classic The Teachings of Don Juan and most recently The Art of Dreaming and Magical Passes. He departed on his definitive journey in 1998. Here’s a  short quote from the book:

THIS BOOK IS a collection of the memorable events in my life. I gathered them following the recommendation of don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman from Mexico who, as a teacher, endeavored for thirteen years to make available to me the cognitive world of the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times. Don Juan Matus’s suggestion that I gather this collection of memorable events was made as if it were something casual, something that occurred to him on the spur of the moment. That was don Juan’s style of teaching. He veiled the importance of certain maneuvers behind the mundane. He hid, in this fashion, the sting of finality, presenting it as something no different from any of the concerns of everyday life.

Don Juan revealed to me as time went by that the shamans of ancient Mexico had conceived of this collection of memorable events as a bona-fide device to stir caches of energy that exist within the self. They explained these caches as being composed of energy that originates in the body itself and becomes displaced, pushed out of reach by the circumstances of our daily lives. In this sense, the collection of memorable events was, for don Juan and the shamans of his lineage, the means for redeploying their unused energy.

The prerequisite for this collection was the genuine and all-consuming act of putting together the sum total of one’s emotions and realizations, without sparing anything. According to don Juan, the shamans of his lineage were convinced that the collection of memorable events was the vehicle for the emotional and energetic adjustment necessary for venturing, in terms of perception, into the unknown.

Don Juan described the total goal of the shamanistic knowledge that he handled as the preparation for facing the definitive journey: the journey that every human being has to take at the end of his life. He said that through their discipline and resolve, shamans were capable of retaining their individual awareness and purpose after death. For them, the vague, idealistic state that modem man calls “life after death” was a concrete region filled to capacity with practical affairs of a different order than the practical affairs of daily life, yet bearing a similar functional practicality. Don Juan considered that to collect the memorable events in their lives was, for shamans, the preparation for their entrance into that concrete region which they called the active side of infinity.

Don Juan and I were talking one afternoon under his ramada, a loose structure made of thin poles of bamboo. It looked like a roofed porch that was partially shaded from the sun but that would not provide protection at all from the rain. There were some small, sturdy freight boxes there that served as benches. Their freight brands were faded, and appeared to be more ornament than identification. I was sitting on one of them. My back was against the front wall of the house. Don Juan was sitting on another box, leaning against a pole that supported the ramada. I had just driven in a few minutes earlier. It had been a daylong ride in hot, humid weather. I was nervous, fidgety,

and sweaty.

Don Juan began talking to me as soon as I had comfortably settled down on the box. With a broad smile, he commented that overweight people hardly ever knew how to fight fatness. The smile that played on his lips gave me an inkling that he wasn’t being facetious. He was just pointing out to me, in a most direct and at the same time indirect way, that I was overweight.

I became so nervous that I tipped over the freight box on which I was sitting and my back banged very hard against the thin wall of the house. The impact shook the house to its foundations. Don Juan looked at me inquiringly, but instead of asking me if I was all right, he assured me that I had not cracked the house. Then he expansively explained to me that his house was a temporary dwelling for him, that he really lived somewhere else. When I asked him where he really lived, he stared at me. His look was not belligerent; it was, rather, a firm deterrent to improper questions. I

didn’t comprehend what he wanted. I was about to ask the same question again, but he stopped me.

“Questions of that sort are not asked around here,” he said firmly. “Ask anything you wish about procedures or ideas. Whenever I’m ready to tell you where I live, if ever, I will tell you, without your having to ask me.”

I instantly felt rejected. My face turned red involuntarily. I was definitely offended. Don Juan’s explosion of laughter added immensely to my chagrin. Not only had he rejected me, he had insulted me and then laughed at me.

“I live here temporarily,” he went on, unconcerned with my foul mood, “because this is a magical center. In fact, I live here because of you.”

That statement unraveled me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought that he was probably saying that to ease my irritation at being insulted. “Do you really live here because of me?” I finally asked him, unable to contain my curiosity.

“Yes,” he said evenly. “I have to groom you. You are like me. I will repeat to you now what I have already told you: The quest of every nagual, or leader, in every generation of shamans, or sorcerers, is to find a new man or woman who, like himself, shows a double energetic structure; I saw this feature in you when we were in the bus depot in Nogales. When I see your energy, I see two balls of luminosity superimposed, one on top of the other, and that feature binds us together. I can’t refuse you any more than you can refuse me.” His words caused a most strange agitation in me. An instant before I had been angry, now I wanted to weep.

He went on, saying that he wanted to start me off on something shamans called the warriors’ way, backed by the strength of the area where he lived, which was the center of very strong emotions and reactions. Warlike people had lived there for thousands of years, soaking the land with their concern with war.

He lived at that time in the state of Sonora in northern Mexico, about a hundred miles south of the city of Guaymas. I always went there to visit him under the auspices of conducting my fieldwork. “Do I need to enter into war, don Juan?” I asked, genuinely worried after he declared that the concern with war was something that I would need someday. I had already learned to take everything he said with the utmost seriousness.

“You bet your boots,” he replied, smiling. “When you have absorbed all there is to be absorbed in this area, I’ll move away.”

I had no grounds to doubt what he was saying, but I couldn’t conceive of him as living anywhere else. He was absolutely part of everything that surrounded him. His house, however, seemed indeed to be a temporary dwelling. It was a shack typical of the Yaqui farmers; was made out of wattle and daub with a flat, thatched roof; and it had one big room for eating and sleeping and a roofless kitchen.

“It’s very difficult to deal with overweight people,” he said.

It seemed to be a non sequitur, but it wasn’t. Don Juan was simply going back to the subject he had introduced before I had interrupted him by hitting my back on the wall of his house.

“A minute ago, you hit my house like a demolition ball,” he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “What an impact! An impact worthy of a portly man.”

I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to me from the point of view of someone who had given up on me. I immediately took on a defensive attitude. He listened, smirking, to my frantic explanations that my weight was normal for my bone structure.

“That’s right,” he conceded facetiously. “You have big bones. You could probably carry thirty more pounds with great ease and no one, I assure you, no one, would notice. I would not notice.”

His mocking smile told me that I was definitely pudgy. He asked me then about my health in general, and I went on talking, desperately trying to get out of any further comment about my weight. He changed the subject himself.

“What’s new about your eccentricities and aberrations?” he asked with a deadpan expression. I idiotically answered that they were okay. “Eccentricities and aberrations” was how he labeled my interest in being a collector. At that time, I had taken up, with renewed zeal, something that I had enjoyed doing all my life: collecting anything collectible. I collected magazines, stamps, records, World War II paraphernalia such as daggers, military helmets, flags, etc.

“All I can tell you, don Juan, about my aberrations, is that I’m trying to sell my collections,” I said with the air of a martyr who is being forced to do something odious.

“To be a collector is not such a bad idea,” he said as if he really believed it. “The crux of the matter is not that you collect, but what you collect. You collect junk, worthless objects that imprison you as surely as your pet dog does. You can’t just up and leave if you have your pet to look after, or if you have to worry about what would happen to your collections if you were not around.”

“I’m seriously looking for buyers, don Juan, believe me,” I protested.

“No, no, no, don’t feel that I’m accusing you of anything,” he retorted. “In fact, I like your collector’s spirit. I just don’t like your collections, that’s all. However, I would like to engage your collector’s eye. I would like to propose to you a worthwhile collection.”

Don Juan paused for a long moment. He seemed to be in search of words; or perhaps it was only a dramatic, well-placed hesitation. He looked at me with a deep, penetrating stare. “Every warrior, as a matter of duty, collects a special album,” don Juan went on, “an album that reveals the warrior’s personality, an album that attests to the circumstances of his life.”

“Why do you call this a collection, don Juan?” I asked in an argumentative tone. “Or an album, for that matter?”

“Because it is both,” he retorted. “But above all, it is like an album of pictures made out of memories, pictures made out of the recollection of memorable events.”

“Are those memorable events memorable in some specific way?” I asked.

“They are memorable because they have a special significance in one’s life,” he said. “My proposal is that you assemble this album by putting in it the complete account of various events that have had profound significance for you.”.

?*?*?

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