Magical Passes (4 page)

"The sorcerers of ancient Mexico," he went on, "believed that the performance of their magical passes was the only factor that prepared and led the body to the transcendental corroboration of the existence of that agglutinating force."

From don Juan's explanations, I derived the conclusion that the vibratory force he spoke about, which agglutinates our fields of energy, is apparently similar to what modern-day astronomers believe must happen at the core of all the galaxies that exist in the cosmos. They believe that there, at their cores, a force of incalculable strength holds the stars of galaxies in place. This force, called a "black hole," is a theoretical construct which seems to be the most reasonable explanation as to why stars do not fly away, driven by their own rotational speeds.

Don Juan said that the old sorcerers knew that human beings, taken as conglomerates of energy fields, are held together not by energetic wrappings or energetic ligaments, but by some sort of vibration that renders everything at once alive and in place. Don Juan explained that those sorcerers, by means of their practices and their discipline, became capable of handling that vibratory force once they were fully conscious of it. Their expertise in dealing with it became so extraordinary that their actions were transformed into legends, mythological events that existed only as fables. For instance, one of the stories that don Juan told about the ancient sorcerers was that they were capable of dissolving their physical mass by merely placing their full consciousness and intent on that force.

Don Juan stated that, although they were capable of actually going through a pinhole if they deemed it necessary, they were never quite satisfied with the result of this maneuver of dissolving their mass. The reason for their discontent was that once their mass was dissolved, their capacity to act vanished. They were left with the alternative of only witnessing events in which they were incapable of participating. Their ensuing frustration, the result of being incapacitated to act, turned, according to don Juan, into their damning flaw: their obsession with uncovering the nature of that vibratory force, an obsession driven by their concreteness, which made them want to hold and control that force. Their fervent desire was to strike from the ghostlike condition of masslessness, something which Jon Juan said could not ever be accomplished.

Modern-day practitioners, cultural heirs of those sorcerers of antiquity, having found out that it is not possible to be concrete and utilitarian about that vibratory force, have opted for the only rational alternative: to become conscious of that force with no other purpose in sight except the elegance and well-being brought about by knowledge.

"The only permissible time," don Juan said to me once, "when modem-day sorcerers use the power of this vibratory agglutinating force, is when they burn from within, when the time comes for them to leave this world. It is simplicity itself for sorcerers to place their absolute and total consciousness on the binding force with the intent to burn, and off they go, like a puff of air."

Tensegrity is the modem version of the magical passes of the shamans of ancient Mexico. The word Tensegrity is a most appropriate definition, because it is a mixture of two terms, tension and integrity: terms which connote the two driving forces of the magical passes. The activity created by contracting and relaxing the tendons and muscles of the body is tension. Integrity is the act of regarding the body as a sound, complete, perfect unit.

Tensegrity is taught as a system of movements, because that is the only manner in which the mysterious and vast subject of the magical passes could be faced in a modern setting. The people who now practice Tensegrity are not shaman practitioners in search of shamanistic alternating involve rigorous discipline, exertion, and hardships. Therefore, the emphasis of the magical passes has to be on their value as movements, and all the consequences that such movements bring forth.

Don Juan Matus had explained that the first drive of the sorcerers of his lineage who lived in Mexico in ancient times, in relation to the magical passes, was to saturate themselves with movement. They arranged every posture, every movement of the body that they could remember, into groups. They believed that the longer the group, the greater its effect of saturation, and the greater the need for the practitioners to use their memory to recall it.

The shamans of don Juan's lineage, after arranging the magical passes into long groups and practicing them as sequences, deemed that this criterion of saturation had fulfilled its purposes, and they dropped it. From then on, what was sought was the opposite: the fragmentation of the long groups into single segments, which were practiced as individual, independent units. The manner in which don Juan Matus taught the magical passes to his four disciples - Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau, Carol Figgs, and myself - was the product of this drive for fragmentation.

Don Juan's personal opinion was that the benefit of practicing the long groups was patently obvious; such practice forced the shaman initiates to use their kinesthetic memory. He considered the use of kines-thetic memory to be a real bonus, which those shamans had stumbled upon accidentally, and which had the marvelous effect of shutting off the noise of the mind: the internal dialogue.

Don Juan had explained to me that the way in which we reinforce our perception of the world and keep it fixed at a certain level of efficiency and function is by talking to ourselves.

"The entire human race," he said to me on one occasion, "keeps a determined level of function and efficiency by means of the internal dialogue. The internal dialogue is the key to maintaining the assemblage point stationary at the position shared by the entire human race: at the height of the shoulder blades, an arm's length away from them.

"By accomplishing the opposite of the internal dialogue," he went on, "that is to say inner silence, practitioners can break the fixation of their assemblage points, thus acquiring an extraordinary fluidity of perception."

The practice of Tensegrity has been arranged around the performance of the long groups, which in Tensegrity have been renamed series to avoid the generic implication of calling them just groups, as don Juan called them. In order to accomplish this arrangement, it was necessary to reestablish the criteria of saturation which had prompted the creation of the long groups. It took the practitioners of Tensegrity years of meticulous and concentrated work to reassemble a great number of the dismembered groups.

Reestablishing the criteria of saturation by performing the long series gave, as a result, something which don Juan had already defined as the modern goal of the magical passes: the redeployment of energy. Don Juan was convinced that this had always been the unspoken goal of the magical passes, even at the time of the old sorcerers. The old sorcerers didn't seem to have known this, but even if they did, they never conceptualized it in those terms. By all indications, what the old sorcerers sought avidly and experienced as a sensation of well-being and plenitude when they performed the magical passes was, in essence, the effect of unused energy being reclaimed by the centers of vitality in the body.

In Tensegrity, the long groups have been reassembled, and a great number of the fragments have been kept as single, functioning units. These units have been strung together by purpose - for instance, the purpose of intending, or the purpose of recapitulation, or the purpose of inner silence, and so on - creating in this fashion the Tensegrity series. In this manner, a system has been achieved in which the best results are obtained by performing long sequences of movements that definitely tax the kinesthetic memory of the practitioners.

In every other respect, the way Tensegrity is taught is a faithful reproduction of the way in which don Juan taught the magical passes to his disciples. He inundated them with a profusion of detail and let their minds be bewildered by the number and variety of magical passes taught to them, and by the implication that each of them individually was a pathway to infinity.

His disciples spent years overwhelmed, confused,  and above all despondent, because they felt that being inundated in such a manner was an unfair onslaught on them.

"When I teach you the magical passes," he explained to me once when I questioned him about the subject, "I am following the traditional sorcerers' device of clouding your linear view. By saturating your I kinesthetic memory, I am creating a pathway for you to inner silence.

"Since all of us," he continued, "are filled to the brim with the doings and undoings of the world of everyday life, we have very little room for I kinesthetic memory. You may have noticed that you have none. When, you want to imitate my movements, you cannot remain facing me. You have to stand side by side with me in order to establish in your own body what's right and what's left. Now, if a long sequence of movements were presented to you, it would take you weeks of repetition to remember all

the movements. While you're trying to memorize the movements, you have to make room for them in your memory by pushing other things out of the way. That was the effect that the old sorcerers sought."

Don Juan's contention was that if his disciples kept on doggedly practicing the magical passes, in spite of their confusion, they would arrive at a threshold when their redeployed energy would tip the scales, and they would be able to handle the magical passes with absolute clarity.

When don Juan made those statements, I could hardly believe them. Nevertheless, at one moment, just as he had said, I ceased to be confused and despondent. In a most mysterious way, the magical passes, since they are magical, arranged themselves into extraordinary sequences that cleared up everything. Don Juan explained that the clarity I was experiencing was the result of the redeployment of my energy.

The concern of people practicing Tensegrity nowadays matches exactly my concern and the concern of don Juan's other disciples when we first began to perform the magical passes. They feel bewildered by the number of movements. I reiterate to them what don Juan reiterated to me over and over: that what is of supreme importance is to practice whatever Tensegrity sequence is remembered. The saturation that has been carried on will give, in the end, the results sought by the shamans of ancient Mexico: the redeployment of energy, and its three concomitants - the shutting off of the internal dialogue, the possibility for inner silence, and the fluidity of the assemblage point.

As a personal assessment, I can say that by saturating me with the magical passes, don Juan accomplished two formidable feats: One, he brought to the surface a flock of hidden resources that I had but didn't know existed, such as the ability to concentrate and the ability to remember detail; and two, he gently broke my obsession with my linear mode of interpretation.

"What is happening to you," don Juan explained to me when I questioned him about what I was experiencing in this respect, "is that you are feeling the advent of inner silence, once your internal dialogue has been minimally offset. A new flux of things has begun to enter into your field of perception. These things were always there, on the periphery of your general awareness, but you never had enough energy to be deliberately conscious of them. As you chase away your internal dialogue, other items of awareness begin to fill in the empty space, so to speak.

"The new flux of energy," he went on, "which the magical passes have brought to your centers of vitality is making your assemblage point more fluid. It's no longer rigidly palisaded. You're no longer driven by our ancestral fears, which make us incapable of taking a step in any direction. Sorcerers say that energy makes us free, and that is the absolute truth."

The ideal state of Tensegrity practitioners, in relation to the Tensegrity movements, is the same as the ideal state of a practitioner of shamanism in relation to the execution of the magical passes. Both are being led by the movements themselves into an unprecedented culmination. From there, the practitioners of Tensegrity will be able to execute, by themselves, for whatever effect they see fit, without any coaching from outside sources, any movement from the bulk of movements with which they have been saturated; they will be able to execute them with precision and speed, as they walk, or eat, or rest, or do anything, because they will have the energy to do so.

The execution of the magical passes, as shown in Tensegrity, doesn't necessarily require a particular space or prearranged time. However, the movements should be done away from sharp currents of air. Don Juan dreaded currents of air on a perspiring body. He firmly believed that not every current of air was caused by the rising or lowering of temperature in the atmosphere, and that some currents of air were actually caused by conglomerates of consolidated energy fields moving purposefully through space.

Don Juan was convinced that such conglomerates of energy fields possessed a specific type of awareness, particularly deleterious because human beings cannot ordinarily detect them, and become exposed to them indiscriminately. The deleterious effect of such conglomerates of energy fields is especially prevalent in a large metropolis, where they could be easily disguised as, if nothing else, the momentum created by the speed of passing automobiles.

Something else to bear in mind when practicing Tensegrity is that MI ice the goal of the magical passes is something foreign to Western man, an effort should be made to keep the practice of Tensegrity detached from the concerns of our daily world. The practice of Tensegrity should not be mixed with elements with which we are already thoroughly familiar, such as conversation, music, or the sound of a radio or TV newsman reporting the news, no matter how muffled the sound might be.

The setting of modern urban life facilitates the formation of groups, and under these circumstances, the only manner in which Tensegrity can he taught and practiced in the seminars and workshops is in groups

of practitioners. Practicing in groups is beneficial in many aspects and deleterious in others. It is beneficial because it allows the creation of a consensus of movement and the opportunity to learn by examination and comparison. It is deleterious because it fosters the reliance on others, and the emergence of syntactic commands and solicitations dealing with hierarchy.