Carlos Castaneda, Autor em Nagualismo

The Active Side of Infinity – The View I Could Not Stand

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 11 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Castaneda describes the final disintegration of his old way of life. After his perception was altered by the events of the previous chapter, he finds himself unable to relate to his “family of friends” in Los Angeles as he once did. He suddenly sees them as tense, self-absorbed, and banal, just like the psychiatrist and professor who had horrified him. This new judgmental attitude fills him with guilt. He recounts two final, tragicomic stories of his friends’ self-made dramas—one involving a violent domestic dispute sparked by the snapping of a towel, and another chronicling his friend Rodrigo’s repeatedly failed attempts to escape Los Angeles. Unable to feel his usual empathy, Castaneda is instead galvanized by the finality of the situations and flees to don Juan, confessing his new, critical view of his friends. Don Juan explains that this is a sign of the “end of an era,” which can only be complete when the “king dies”—that is, when Castaneda finally accepts the truth that he is just like the friends he now judges.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Unavoidable Appointment

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 12 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Castaneda is consumed by guilt and depression over the death of his anthropologist friend, Bill, to whom he never replied to his last letter. He seeks out don Juan, who reveals he “saw” the moment of Bill’s death and had previously warned Castaneda about his friend’s declining state by describing the open “gap” in his luminous body, a sign visible to a sorcerer. Don Juan chastises Castaneda for his lack of “sobriety” and for believing he had infinite time, which led him to postpone thanking his friend, leaving him “stuck with a ghost on his tail.” The only recourse, he explains, is to keep his friend’s memory alive. He then teaches Castaneda about the nature of sadness for a sorcerer, explaining it as an impersonal, abstract force from infinity that affects them because they have no shields. To illustrate this, he tells the story of the Great Garrick, the world’s funniest comedian, who, when advised to see his own show to cure his melancholy, reveals his identity, showing he has no external cure for his profound sadness.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Breaking Point

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 20 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan explains that sorcerers need a “breaking point” for inner silence to truly set in. He tells Castaneda that his breaking point is to leave his friends and his entire way of life, proposing that he “die” by isolating himself in a dilapidated hotel room until his “person”—his mind and its attachments—is gone. Castaneda initially refuses, and don Juan leaves him, seemingly for good. After a period of feeling elated and free, Castaneda’s old life resumes until his complete and frightening identification with a self-sabotaging friend pushes him to his own breaking point. He spontaneously rents a room in a Hollywood hotel and stays for months until his old self “dies.” Later, mired in a new, meaningless life and contemplating suicide, don Juan reappears. He tells Castaneda that he has finally reached his breaking point and gives him one hour to dissolve his current life before meeting him in Mexico. Failing to meet the deadline, Castaneda uses a technique to achieve inner silence and “dreams” he is with don Juan, who confirms he made the journey not through a dream, but through his inner silence.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Measurements of Cognition

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 20 minutes of reading

In this chapter, Castaneda explores the clash between two cognitive worlds: the academic world of Professor Lorca and the sorcerers’ world of don Juan. He becomes an admirer of Professor Lorca, a brilliant academic who lectures on the insular nature of different cognitive systems. Don Juan cautions him against admiring from afar and urges him to “test” the professor to see if he lives as a “being who is going to die,” arguing that this acceptance is the only way to have a true grip on the world. Professor Lorca, though intellectually brilliant, proposes a scientific study to measure and quantify the cognition of shamans. Don Juan finds this laughable, explaining that sorcerers’ cognition—based on perceiving energy directly—is experiential and cannot be measured by the tools of the everyday world. He concludes that the professor is an “immortal scientist” who, by not truly accepting his own mortality, cannot grasp the sorcerers’ path. Don Juan uses the metaphor of a Roman slave whispering “all glory is fleeting” to a victorious general, stating that for a sorcerer, death is that infallible advisor.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Saying Thank You

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 19 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan assigns Castaneda a final task before he can be “swallowed by infinity”: to atone for his personal indebtedness, he must find two women from his past, Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan, and give each a gift that will leave him penniless. Castaneda recounts his chaotic and emotionally devastating three-way relationship with them, which ended with all three fleeing from each other. After hiring a private investigator, he finds them both in New York. He meets with each woman, and in emotional reunions, he fulfills his task by buying Patricia a mink coat and Sandra a station wagon. However, instead of feeling liberated, he is overwhelmed by a renewed sense of loss and self-pity. When he reports this to don Juan, he is told to vanquish his self-pity. Castaneda then has a final realization: the true purpose of the task was not for his personal feelings, but to perform an act of magic in the spirit of a warrior-traveler—saying thank you and good-bye by storing the memory of what he loved in his silence.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Beyond Syntax: The Usher

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 31 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan introduces Castaneda to the sorcery technique of “the recapitulation”—a formal, meticulous recounting of one’s entire life in order to create a “space” for new knowledge. He explains the sorcerers’ view of the universe, where perception is assembled at the “assemblage point” as energy filaments from the “dark sea of awareness” are interpreted. The goal of the recapitulation is to offer one’s life experiences back to this cosmic awareness at the moment of death, thus saving one’s life force. To begin this process, don Juan tells Castaneda he must first find an “usher,” a single, powerfully clear memory that will illuminate all others. Left to the task, Castaneda vividly recalls a formative event from his childhood: being a billiards prodigy secretly employed by a notorious gambler, Falelo Quiroga. This arrangement culminates in Quiroga threateningly demanding that Castaneda throw a high-stakes game. Before Castaneda is forced to choose, his family moves away, leaving the dilemma unresolved. Don Juan explains this memory is the perfect usher, as it encapsulates the central, unresolved conflict of Castaneda’s life: being trapped between the desire to embrace infinity and the simultaneous urge to run away from it.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Interplay of Energy On The Horizon

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 28 minutes of reading

In this final chapter, Castaneda describes the culmination of his recapitulation. The initial “usher” memory has unlocked an unstoppable and maddeningly clear flow of recollections, each one relived with an intensity greater than the original experience. He recounts traumatic memories of a near-fatal fall from a scaffold and a terrifying encounter with a dog, realizing he was literally re-experiencing them and “jumping” through time. Don Juan explains this is his “true mind” emerging and that a “foreign installation” is collapsing, a process that pulls sorcerers “out of their syntax.” Later, a series of vivid recollections reveals Castaneda’s deeply ingrained, lifelong need to control everyone around him. One night, this process climaxes as he experiences the “interplay of energy on the horizon” that don Juan had described: a pomegranate-red dot explodes into unreadable text and garbled voices. Don Juan confirms this was infinity’s “takeover” and tells him he must now learn to “read energy” directly, a perception that is an event “beyond the syntax of our language.”

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The Active Side of Infinity – Journeys Through the Dark Sea Of Awareness

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 19 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan clarifies that Castaneda’s previous “dream-fantasy” of meeting him in town was, in sorcery terms, a real “journey through the dark sea of awareness,” made possible by his accrued inner silence. He distinguishes this from “dreaming,” which he redefines as the art of deliberately displacing the assemblage point to perceive other worlds. After Castaneda recounts a memory of “seeing” a sleeping person’s assemblage point shift, don Juan prompts him to undertake a deliberate journey. From a state of inner silence, Castaneda finds himself transported with don Juan to a hostile Yaqui town where he can suddenly understand their language, not word by word, but in patterns of thought. He then finds himself in another town, where he perceives people not as luminous eggs, but as strange, insectlike cores of geometric shapes with a stringlike filament on top. After these inexplicable journeys, don Juan explains that this is what inner silence does: it breaks the continuity of time and allows one to travel through the dark sea of awareness, guided by the force of intent.

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The Active Side of Infinity – Inorganic Awareness

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 21 minutes of reading

In this chapter, don Juan reveals that he is the leader of a group of fifteen sorcerers and did not actually live in the shack where they first met. He then introduces Castaneda to the concept of “inorganic awareness.” He explains that our world is a twin world, coexisting with a complementary world populated by “inorganic beings”—entities that possess awareness but no organism. He further classifies these beings, distinguishing between the “first cousins” from our twin world and the “scouts” or “explorers” from the depths of the universe, some of whom sorcerers call “allies.” To give Castaneda a direct experience, don Juan guides him on another journey from inner silence. In the Sonoran desert, Castaneda meets two beings who identify themselves as his allies. By staring at them, he is able to see past their humanlike appearance to their true form: vibrating, shapeless blobs of luminosity. Don Juan explains this is seeing energy directly, and that our normal cognition limits our perception by interpreting everything. He instructs Castaneda to henceforth gaze at any apparition with an inflexible attitude to see its true energetic nature.

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The Active Side of Infinity – The Clear View

Ancient Cycle, Authors, Carlos Castaneda, The Active side of Infinity / By Carlos Castaneda / 22 minutes of reading

In this final chapter of the book, Castaneda finds himself in a quandary, unable to deal with the world of everyday people after being influenced by don Juan. His new perception causes him to judge everyone by don Juan’s standards of impeccability, leading to a crisis in his academic and personal life. He recounts his experiences with a kind but passive boss, Ernest Lipton, whose helplessness reminds him of his own father, forcing him to quit his job. Don Juan advises him that the issue is not with others but with his own “self-reflection,” and that the challenge is to accept people as they are. The climax occurs one day on the UCLA campus when Castaneda is overcome by a strange tremor, loses his normal sight, and for the first time, consciously “sees” energy directly—perceiving people as luminous, furry spheres. He has the shocking realization that he has always perceived energy this way but was never aware of it. The experience ends with him inexplicably waking up in his apartment miles away. Don Juan confirms that he “stopped the world,” traveled from inner silence, and experienced “the clear view” or “losing the human form,” where human pettiness vanishes, leaving him with the maddening question of what had prevented him from accessing this perception all his life.

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