Book "Magical Passes · 2/2

1§ Содержание

2THE THIRD SERIES

3The Series of the Five Concerns: The Westwood Series

4One of the most important series for the practitioners of Tensegrity is called The Series of the Five Concerns. A nickname for this series is The Westwood Series, given to it because it was taught publicly for the first time in the Pauley Pavilion at the University of California at Los Angeles, which is located in an area called Westwood. This series was conceived as an attempt to integrate what don Juan Matus called the five concerns of the shamans of ancient Mexico. Everything those sorcerers did rotated around five concerns: one, the magical passes; two, the ener­getic center in the human body called the center for decisions; three, recapitulation, the means for enhancing the scope of human awareness; four, dreaming, the bone fide art of breaking the parameters of normal perception; five, inner silence, the stage of human perception from which those sorcerers launched every one of their perceptual attain­ments. This sequence of five concerns was an arrangement patterned on the understanding that those sorcerers had of the world around them.

5One of the astounding findings of those shamans, according to what don Juan taught, was the existence in the universe of an agglutinating force that binds energy fields together into concrete, functional units. The sorcerers who discovered the existence of this force described it as a vibration, or a vibratory condition, that permeates groups of energy fields and glues them together.

6In terms of this arrangement of the five concerns of the shamans of ancient Mexico, the magical passes fulfill the function of the vibratory condition those shamans talked about. When those sorcerers put together this shamanistic sequence of five concerns, they copied the patterning of energy that was revealed to them when they were capable of seeing energy as it flows in the universe. The binding force was the magical passes. The magical passes were the unit that permeated through the four remaining units and grouped them together into one functional whole.

7The Westwood Series, following the patterning of the shamans of ancient Mexico, has consequently been divided into four groups, arranged in terms of their importance as envisioned by the sorcerers who formulated them: one, the center for decisions; two, recapitulation; three, dreaming; four, inner silence.

8The First Group:

9The Center for Decisions

10The most important topic for the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and for all the shamans of don Juan's lineage, was the center for decisions. Shamans are convinced, by the practical results of their endeavors, that there is a spot on the human body which accounts for decision making, the V spot—the area on the crest of the sternum at the base of the neck, where the clavicles meet to form a letter V. It is a center where energy is rarefied to the point of being tremendously sub­tle, and it stores a specific type of energy which shamans are incapable of defining. They are utterly certain, however, that they can feel the presence of that energy, and its effects. It is the belief of shamans that this special energy is always pushed out of that center very early in the lives of human beings, and it never returns to it, thus depriving human beings of something perhaps more important than all the energy of the other centers combined: the capacity to make decisions.

11In relation to the issue of making decisions, don Juan expressed the hard opinion of the sorcerers of his lineage. Their observations, over the centuries, had led them to conclude that human beings are incapable of making decisions, and that for this reason, they have created the social order: gigantic institutions that assume responsibility for decision making. They let those gigantic institutions decide for them, and they merely fulfill the decisions already made on their behalf.

12The V spot at the base of the neck was, for those shamans, a place of such importance that they rarely touched it with their hands; if it was touched, the touch was ritualistic and always performed by someone else with the aid of an object. They used highly polished pieces of hard­wood or polished bones of animals, utilizing the round head of the bone so as to have an object of the perfect contour, the size of the hollow spot on the neck. They would press with those bones or pieces of wood to create pressure on the borders of that hollow spot. Those objects were also used, although rarely, for self-massage, or for what we understand nowadays as acupressure.

13"How did they come to find out that that hollow spot is the center for decisions?" I asked don Juan once.

14"Every center of energy in the body," he replied, "shows a concentra­tion of energy; a sort of vortex of energy, like a funnel that actually seems to rotate counterclockwise from the perspective of the seer who gazes into it. The strength of a particular center depends on the force of that movement. If it barely moves, the center is exhausted, depleted of energy.

15"When the sorcerers of ancient times," don Juan continued, "were scanning the body with their seeing eye, they noticed the presence of those vortexes. They became very curious about them, and made a map of them."

16"Are there many such centers in the body, don Juan?" I asked.

17"There are hundreds of them," he replied, "if not thousands! One can say that a human being is nothing else but a conglomerate of thousands of twirling vortexes, some of them so very small that they are, let's say, like pinholes, but very important pinholes. Most of the vortexes are vor­texes of energy. Energy flows freely through them, or is stuck in them. There are, however, six which are so enormous that they deserve special treatment. They are centers of life and vitality. Energy there is never stuck, but sometimes the supply of energy is so scarce that the center barely rotates."

18Don Juan explained that those enormous centers of vitality were located on six areas of the body. He enumerated them in terms of the importance that shamans accorded them. The first was on the area of the liver and gallbladder; the second on the area of the pancreas and spleen; the third on the area of the kidneys and adrenals; and the fourth on the hollow spot at the base of the neck on the frontal part of the body. The fifth was around the womb, and the sixth was on the top of the head.

19The fifth center, pertinent only to women, had, according to what don Juan said, a special kind of energy that gave sorcerers the impres­sion of liquidness. It was a feature that only some women had. It seemed to serve as a natural filter that screened out superfluous influences.

20The sixth center, located on top of the head, don Juan described as something more than an anomaly, and refrained absolutely from having anything to do with it. He portrayed it as possessing not a circular vor­tex of energy, like the others, but a pendulumlike, back-and-forth movement somehow reminiscent of the beating of a heart.

21"Why is the energy of that center so different, don Juan?" I asked him.

22"That sixth center of energy," he said, "doesn't quite belong to man. You see, we human beings are under siege, so to speak. That center has been taken over by an invader, an unseen predator. And the only way to overcome this predator is by fortifying all the other centers."

23"Isn't it a bit paranoiac to feel that we are under siege, don Juan?" I asked.

24"Well, maybe for you, but certainly not for me," he replied. "I see energy, and I see that the energy over the center on the top of the head doesn't fluctuate like the energy of the other centers. It has a back-and-forth movement, quite disgusting, and quite foreign. I also see that in a sorcerer who has been capable of vanquishing the mind, which sorcerers call a foreign installation, the fluctuation of that center has become exactly like the fluctuation of all the others."

25Don Juan, throughout the years of my apprenticeship, systematically refused to talk about that sixth center. On this occasion when he was telling me about the centers of vitality, he dismissed my frantic probes, rather rudely, and began to talk about the fourth center, the center for decisions.

26"This fourth center," he said, "has a special type of energy, which appears to the eye of the seer as possessing a unique transparency, some­thing that could be described as resembling water: energy so fluid that it seems liquid. The liquid appearance of this special energy is the mark of a filterlike quality of the center for decisions itself, which screens any energy coming to it, and draws from it only the aspect of it that is liquidlike. Such a quality of liquidness is a uniform and consistent feature of this center. Sorcerers also call it the watery center.

27"The rotation of the energy at the center for decisions is the weakest of them all," he went on. "That's why man can rarely decide anything. Sorcerers see that after they practice certain magical passes, that center becomes active, and they can certainly make decisions to their hearts' content, while they couldn't even take a first step before."

28Don Juan was quite emphatic about the fact that the shamans of ancient Mexico had an aversion that bordered on phobia about touch­ing their own hollow spot at the base of the neck. The only way in which they accepted any interference whatsoever with that spot was through the use of their magical passes, which reinforce that center by bringing dispersed energy to it, clearing away, in this manner, any hesi­tation in decision making born out of the natural energy dispersion brought about by the wear and tear of everyday life.

29"A human being," don Juan said, "perceived as a conglomerate of energy fields, is a concrete and sealed unit into which no energy can be injected, and from which no energy can escape. The feeling of losing energy, which all of us experience at one time or another, is the result of energy being chased away, dispersed from the five enormous natural cen­ters of life and vitality. Any sense of gaining energy is due to the redeployment of energy previously dispersed from those centers. That is to say, the energy is relocated onto those five centers of life and vitality."

30The Second Group:

31The Recapitulation

32The recapitulation, according to what don Juan taught his disciples, was a technique discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, and used by every shaman practitioner from then on, to view and relive all the expe­riences of their lives, in order to achieve two transcendental goals: one, the abstract goal of fulfilling a universal code that demands that aware­ness must he relinquished at the moment of death; and two, the extremely pragmatic goal of acquiring perceptual fluidity.

33He said that the formulation of their first goal was the result of observa­tions that those sorcerers made by means of their capacity to see energy directly as it flows in the universe. They had seen that there exists in the universe a gigantic force, an immense conglomerate of energy fields which they called the Eagle, or the dark sea of awareness. They observed that the dark sea of awareness is the force that lends awareness to all living beings, from viruses to men. They believed that it lends awareness to a newborn being, and that this being enhances that awareness by means of its life experiences until a moment in which the force demands its return.

34In the understanding of those sorcerers, all living beings die because they are forced to return the awareness lent to them. Sorcerers through out the ages have understood that there is no way for what modern man calls our linear mode of thinking to explain such a phenomenon, because there is no room for a cause-and-effect line of reasoning as to why and how awareness is lent and then taken back. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico viewed it as an energetic fact of the universe, a fact that can't be explained in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a purpose which can be determined a priori.

35The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage believed that to recapitulate meant to give the dark sea of awareness what it was seeking: their life experiences. They believed that by means of the recapitulation, however, they could acquire a degree of control that could permit them to separate their life experiences from their life force. For them, the two were not inextricably intertwined; they were joined only circumstantially.

36Those sorcerers affirmed that the dark sea of awareness doesn't want to take the lives of human beings; it wants only their life experiences. Lack of discipline in human beings prevents them from separating the two forces, and in the end, they lose their lives, when it is meant that they lose only the force of their life experiences. Those sorcerers viewed the recapitulation as the procedure by which they could give the dark sea of awareness a substitute for their lives. They gave up their life experiences by recounting them, but they retained their life force.

37The perceptual claims of sorcerers, when examined in terms of the lin­ear concepts of our Western world, make no sense whatsoever. Western civilization has been in contact with the shamans of the New World for five hundred years, and there has never been a genuine attempt on the part of scholars to formulate a serious philosophical discourse based on statements made by those shamans. For instance, the recapitulation may seem to any member of the Western world to be congruous with psychoanalysis, something in the line of a psychological procedure, a sort of self-help technique. Nothing could be further from the truth.

38According to don Juan Matus, man always loses by default. In the case of the premises of sorcery, he believed that Western man is missing a tremendous opportunity for the enhancement of his awareness, and that the way in which Western man relates himself to the universe, life, and awareness is only one of a multiplicity of options.

39To recapitulate, for shaman practitioners, means to give to an incompre­hensible force—the dark sea of awareness—the very thing it seems to be looking for: their life experiences, that is to say, the awareness that they have enhanced through those very life experiences. Since don Juan could not possibly explain these phenomena to me in terms of standard logic, he said that all that sorcerers could aspire to do was to accomplish the feat of retaining their life force without knowing how it was done. He also said that there were thousands of sorcerers who had achieved this. They had retained their life force after they had given the dark sea of awareness the force of their life experiences. This meant to don Juan that those sorcerers didn't die in the usual sense in which we understand death, but that they transcended it by retaining their life force and vanishing from the face of the earth, embarked on a definitive journey of perception.

40The belief of the shamans of don Juan's lineage was that when death takes place in this fashion, all of our being is turned into energy, a special kind of energy that retains the mark of our individuality. Don Juan tried to explain this in a metaphorical sense, saying that we are composed of a number of single nations: the nation of the lungs, the nation of the heart, the nation of the stomach, the nation of the kidneys, and so on. Each of these nations sometimes works independently of the others, but at the moment of death, all of them are unified into one single entity. The sorcerers of don Juan's lineage called this state total freedom. For those sorcerers, death is a unifier, and not an annihilator, as it is for the average man.

41"Is this state immortality, don Juan?" I asked.

42"This is in no way immortality," he replied. "It is merely the entrance into an evolutionary process, using the only medium for evolution that man has at his disposal: awareness. The sorcerers of my lineage were convinced that man could not evolve biologically any further; there­fore, they considered man's awareness to be the only medium for evolu­tion. At the moment of dying, sorcerers are not annihilated by death, but are transformed into inorganic beings: beings that have awareness, but not an organism. To be transformed into an inorganic being was evolution for them, and it meant that a new, indescribable type of awareness was lent to them, an awareness that would last for veritably millions of years, but which would also someday have to be returned to the giver: the dark sea of awareness."

43One of the most important findings of the shamans of don Juan's lin­eage was that, like everything else in the universe, our world is a combi­nation of two opposing, and at the same time complementary, forces. One of those forces is the world we know, which those sorcerers called the world of organic beings. The other force is something they called the world of inorganic beings.

44"The world of inorganic beings," don Juan said, "is populated by beings that possess awareness, but not an organism. They are conglom­erates of energy fields, just like we are. To the eye of a seer, instead of being luminous, as human beings are, they are rather opaque. They are not round, but long, candlelike energetic configurations. They are, in essence, conglomerates of energy fields which have cohesion and boundaries just like we do. They are held together by the same agglutinating force that holds our energy fields together."

45"Where is this inorganic world, don Juan?" I asked.

46"It is our twin world," he replied. "It occupies the same time and space as our world, but the type of awareness of our world is so different from the type of awareness of the inorganic world that we never notice the presence of inorganic beings, although they do notice ours."

47"Are those inorganic beings human beings that have evolved?" I asked.

48"Not at all!" he exclaimed. "The inorganic beings of our twin world have been intrinsically inorganic from the start, the same way that we have always been intrinsically organic beings, also from the start. They are beings whose consciousness can evolve just like ours, and it doubtlessly does, but I have no firsthand knowledge of how this happens. What I do know, however, is that a human being whose awareness has evolved is a bright, luminescent, round inorganic being of a special kind."

49Don Juan gave me a series of descriptions of this evolutionary process, which I always took to be poetic metaphors. I singled out the one that pleased me the most, which was total freedom. I fancied a human being that enters into total freedom to be the most courageous, the most imagi­native being possible. Don Juan said that I was not fancying anything at all—that to enter into total freedom, a human being must call on his or her sublime side, which, he said, human beings have, but which it never occurs to them to use.

50Don Juan described the second, the pragmatic goal of the recapitula­tion as the acquisition of fluidity. The sorcerers' rationale behind this had to do with one of the most elusive subjects of sorcery: the assemblage point, a point of intense luminosity the size of a tennis ball, perceivable when sorcerers see a human being as a conglomerate of energy fields.

51Sorcerers like don Juan see that trillions of energy fields in the form of fil­aments of light from the universe at large converge on the assemblage point and go through it. This confluence of filaments gives the assemblage point its brilliancy. The assemblage point makes it possible for a human being to per­ceive those trillions of energy filaments by turning them into sensorial data. The assemblage point then interprets this data as the world of everyday life, that is to say, in terms of human socialization and human potential.

52To recapitulate is to relive every, or nearly every, experience that we have had, and in doing so to displace the assemblage point, ever so slightly or a great deal, propelling it by the force of memory to adopt the position that it had when the event being recapitulated took place. This act of going back and forth from previous positions to the current one gives the shaman practitioners the necessary fluidity to withstand extraordinary odds in their journeys into infinity. To the Tensegrity practi­tioners, the recapitulation gives the necessary fluidity to withstand odds which are not in any way part of their habitual cognition.

53The recapitulation as a formal procedure was done in ancient times by recollecting every person the practitioners knew and every experience in which they had taken part. Don Juan suggested that in my case, which is the case of modern man, I make a written list of all the persons that I had met in my life, as a mnemonic device. Once I had written that list, he proceeded to tell me how to use it. I had to take the first person on the list, which went backwards in time from the present to the time of my very first life experience, and set up, in my memory, my last interaction with that first person on my list. This act is called arranging the event to be recapitulated.

54A detailed recollection of minutiae is required as the proper means to hone one's capacity to remember. This recollection entails getting all the pertinent physical details, such as the surroundings where the event being recollected took place. Once the event is arranged, one should enter into the locale itself, as if actually going into it, paying special attention to any relevant physical configurations. If, for instance, the interaction took place in an office, what should be remembered is the floor, the doors, the walls, the pictures, the windows, the desks, the objects on the desks, every­thing that could have been observed in a glance and then forgotten.

55The recapitulation as a formal procedure must begin by the recounting of events that have just taken place. In this fashion, the primacy of the experience takes precedence. Something that has just happened is something that one can remember with great accuracy. Sorcerers always count on the fact that human beings are capable of storing detailed information that they are not aware of, and that that detail is what the dark sea of awareness is after.

56The actual recapitulation of the event requires that one breathe deeply, fanning the head, so to speak, very slowly and gently from side to side, beginning on one side, left or right, whichever. This fanning of the head was done as many times as needed, while remembering all the details accessible. Don Juan said that sorcerers talked about this act as breathing in all of one's own feelings spent in the event being recol­lected, and expelling all the unwanted moods and extraneous feelings that were left with us.

57Sorcerers believe that the mystery of the recapitulation lies in the act of inhaling and exhaling. Since breathing is a life-sustaining function, sor­cerers are certain that by means of it, one can also deliver to the dark sea of awareness the facsimile of one's life experiences. When I pressed don Juan for a rational explanation of this idea, his position was that things like the recapitulation could only be experienced, not explained. He said that in the act of doing, one can find liberation, and that to explain it was to dissipate our energy in fruitless efforts. His invitation was congruous with every­thing related to his knowledge: the invitation to take action.

58The list of names is used in the recapitulation as a mnemonic device that propels memory into an inconceivable journey. Sorcerers' position in this respect is that remembering events that have just taken place prepares the ground for remembering events more distant in time with the same clarity and immediacy. To recollect experiences in this way is to relive them, and to draw from this recollection an extraordinary impetus that is capable of stirring energy dispersed from our centers of vitality, and returning it to them. Sorcerers refer to this redeployment of energy that the recapitulation causes as gaining fluidity after giving the dark sea of awareness what it is looking for.

59On a more mundane level, the recapitulation gives practitioners the capacity to examine the repetition in their lives. Recapitulating can con­vince them, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all of us are at the mercy of forces which ultimately make no sense, although at first sight they seem perfectly reasonable; such as being at the mercy of courtship. It seems that for some people, courtship is the pursuit of a lifetime. I have personally heard from people of advanced age that the only ideal that they had was to find a perfect companion, and that their aspiration was to have perhaps one year of happiness in love.

60Don Juan Matus used to say to me, over my vehement protests, that the problem was that nobody really wanted to love anybody, but that every one of us wanted to be loved. He said that this obsession with courtship, taken at face value, was the most natural thing in the world to us. To hear a seventy-five-year-old man or woman say that they are still in search of a perfect companion is an affirmation of something idealistic, romantic, beautiful. However, to examine this obsession in the context of the endless repetitions of a lifetime makes it appear as it really is: something grotesque.

61Don Juan assured me that if any behavioral change is going to be accom­plished, it has to be done through the recapitulation, since it is the only vehi­cle that can enhance awareness by liberating one from the unvoiced demands of socialization, which are so automatic, so taken for granted, that they are not even noticed under normal conditions, much less examined.

62The actual act of recapitulating is a lifetime endeavor. It takes years to exhaust the list of people, especially for those who have made the acquaintance of and have interacted with thousands of individuals. This list is augmented by the memory of impersonal events in which no people are involved, but which have to be examined because they are somehow related to the person being recapitulated.

63Don Juan asserted that what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico sought avidly in recapitulating was the memory of interaction, because in inter action lie the deep effects of socialization, which they struggled to over­come by any means available.

64The Magical Passes for The Recapitulation

65The recapitulation affects something that don Juan called the energy body. He formally explained the energy body as a conglomerate of energy fields that are the mirror image of the energy fields that make up the human body when it is seen directly as energy. He said that in the case of sorcerers, the physical body and the energy body are one single unit. The magical passes for the recapitulation bring the energy body to the physical body, which are essential for navigating into the unknown.

66The Third Group:

67Dreaming

68Don Juan Matus defined dreaming as the act of using normal dreams as a bona fide entrance for human awareness into other realms of perceiv­ing. This definition implied for him that ordinary dreams could be used as a hatch that led perception into other regions of energy different from the energy of the world of everyday life, and yet utterly similar to it at a basic core. The result of such an entrance was, for sorcerers, the per­ception of veritable worlds where they could live or die, worlds which were astoundingly different from ours, and yet utterly similar.

69Pressed for a linear explanation of this contradiction, don Juan Matus reiterated the standard position of sorcerers: that the answers to all those questions were in the practice, not in the intellectual inquiry. He said that in order to talk about such possibilities, we would have to use the syntax of language, whatever language we spoke, and that syntax, by the force of usage, limits the possibilities of expression. The syntax of any language refers only to perceptual possibilities found in the world in which we live.

70Don Juan made a significant differentiation, in Spanish, between two verbs: one was to dream, soсar; and the other was ensoсar which is to dream the way sorcerers dream. In English, there is no clear distinction between these two states: the normal dreaming, sueсo, and the more complex state that sorcerers call ensueсo.

71The art of dreaming, according to what don Juan taught, originated in a very casual observation that the shamans of ancient Mexico made when they saw people who were asleep. They noticed that during sleep the assemblage point was displaced in a very natural, easy way from its habitual position, and that it moved anywhere along the periphery of the luminous sphere, or to any place in the interior of it. Correlating their seeing with the reports of the people who had been observed sleeping, they realized that the greater the observed displacement of the assemblage point, the more astounding the reports of events and scenes experienced in dreams.

72After this observation took hold of them, those sorcerers began to look avidly for opportunities to displace their own assemblage points. They ended up using psychotropic plants to accomplish this. Very quickly, they realized that the displacement brought about by using these plants was erratic, forced, and out of control. In the midst of this failure, nonetheless they discovered one thing of great value. They called it dreaming attention.

73Don Juan explained this phenomenon, referring first to the daily awareness of human beings as the attention placed on the elements of the world of everyday life. He pointed out that human beings took only a cursory and yet sustained look at everything that surrounded them. More than examining things, human beings simply established the pres­ence of those elements by a special type of attention, a specific aspect of their general awareness. His contention was that the same type of cur­sory and yet sustained "look," so to speak, could be applied to the ele­ments of an ordinary dream. He called this other, specific aspect of gen­eral awareness dreaming attention or the capacity that practitioners acquire to maintain their awareness unwaveringly fixed on the items of their dreams.

74The cultivation of dreaming attention gave the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage a basic taxonomy of dreams. They found out that most of their dreams were imagery, products of the cognition of their daily world; however, there were some which escaped that classification. Such dreams were veritable states of heightened awareness in which the ele­ments of the dream were not mere imagery, but energy-generating affairs. Dreams which had energy-generating elements were, for those shamans, dreams in which they were capable of seeing energy as it flowed in the universe.

75Those shamans were able to focus their dreaming attention on any ele­ment of their dreams, and found out, in this fashion, that there are two kinds of dreams. One is the dreams that we are all familiar with, in which phantasmagorical elements come into play, something which we could categorize as the product of our mentality, our psyche; perhaps something that has to do with our neurological makeup. The other kind of dreams they called energy-generating dreams. Don Juan said that those sorcerers of ancient times found themselves in dreams which were not dreams, but actual visitations made in a dreamlike state to bona fide places other than this world—real places, just like the world in which we live; places where the objects of the dream generated energy, just as trees, or animals, or even rocks generate energy in our daily world, for a seeing sorcerer.

76Their visions of such places were, however, for those shamans, too fleeting, too temporary, to be of any value to them. They attributed this flaw to the fact that their assemblage points could not be held fixed for any considerable time at the position to which they had been displaced. Their attempts to remedy the situation resulted in the other high art of sorcery: the art of stalking.

77Don Juan defined the two arts very clearly one day when he said to me that the art of dreaming consisted of purposely displacing the assemblage point from its habitual position. The art of stalking consisted volitionally making it stay fixed on the new position to which it had been displaced.

78This fixation allowed the shamans of ancient Mexico the opportunity to witness other worlds in their full extent. Don Juan said that some those sorcerers never returned from their journeys. In other words, they opted for staying there, wherever "there" might have been.

79"When the old sorcerers finished mapping human beings as luminous spheres," don Juan said to me once, "they had discovered no less than six hundred spots in the total luminous sphere that were the sites bona fide worlds. Meaning that, if the assemblage point became attached to any of those places, the result was the entrance of the practitioner into a total new world."

80"But where are those six hundred other worlds, don Juan?" I asked.

81"The only answer to that question is incomprehensible," he said, laughing. "It's the essence of sorcery, and yet it means nothing to the average mind. Those six hundred worlds are in the position of the assemblage point. Incalculable amounts of energy are required to mat sense out of this answer. We have the energy. What we lack is the facility or disputation to use it."

82I could add that nothing could be truer than all these statements, an yet, nothing could make less sense.

83Don Juan explained usual perception in the terms in which the sorcerers of his lineage understood it: The assemblage point, at its habitual location, receives an inflow of energy fields from the universe at large in the form of luminous filaments, numbering in the trillions. Since its position is consistently the same, it stood to sorcerers' reasoning that the same energy fields, in the form of luminous filaments, converge on the assemblage point and go through it, giving as a consistent result the perception of the world that we know. Those sorcerers arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that if the assemblage point were displaced to another position, another set of energy filaments would go through it, resulting in the perception of a world that, by definition, was not the same as the world of everyday life.

84In don Juan's opinion, what human beings ordinarily regard as perceiving is rather the act of interpreting sensory data. He maintains that from the moment of birth, everything around us supplies us with possibility of interpretation, and that with time, this possibility turns into a full system by means of which we conduct all of our perceptual transactions in the world.

85He pointed out that the assemblage point is not only the center where perception is assembled, but also the center where the interpretation of sensory data is accomplished, so that if it were to change locations, it would interpret the new influx of energy fields in very much the same terms in which it interprets the world of everyday life. The result of this new interpretation is the perception of a world which is strangely simi­lar to ours, and yet intrinsically different. Don Juan said that energeti­cally, those other worlds are as different from ours as they could possibly be. It is only the interpretation of the assemblage point which accounts for the seeming similarities.

86Don Juan called for a new syntax that could be used in order to express this wondrous quality of the assemblage point and the possibilities of perception brought about by dreaming. He conceded, however, that perhaps the present syntax of our language could be forced to cover it if this experience became available to any one of us, and not merely to shaman initiates.

87Something related to dreaming that was of tremendous interest to me, but which bewildered me to no end, was don Juan's statement that there was really no procedure to speak of that would teach anyone how to dream. He said that more than anything else, dreaming was an arduous effort on the part of the practitioners to put themselves in contact with the indescribable all-pervading force that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called intent. Once this link was established, dreaming also mys­teriously became established. Don Juan asserted that this linkage could be accomplished following any pattern that implied discipline.

88When I asked him to give me a succinct explanation of the procedures involved, he laughed at me.

89"To venture into the world of sorcerers," he said, "is not like learning to drive a car. To drive a car, you need manuals and instructions. To dream, you need to intend it."

90"But how can I intend it?" I insisted.

91"The only way you could intend it is by intending it," he declared. "One of the most difficult things for a man of our day to accept is a lack of procedure. Modern man is in the throes of manuals, praxes, methods, steps leading to. He is ceaselessly taking notes, making diagrams, deeply involved in the 'know-how.' But in the world of sorcerers, procedures and rituals are mere designs to attract and focus attention. They art devices used to force a focusing of interest and determination. They have no other value."

92What don Juan considered to be of supreme importance in order to dream is the rigorous execution of the magical passes: the only device that the sorcerers of his lineage used to aid the displacement of the assemblage point. The execution of the magical passes gave those sorcerers the stability and the energy necessary to call forth their dreaming attention, without which there was no possibility of dreaming for them. Without the emergence of dreaming attention, practitioners could aspire at best, to have lucid dreams about phantasmagorical worlds. They could perhaps have views of worlds that generate energy, but these would make no sense to them whatsoever in the absence of an all-inclusive rationale that would properly categorize them.

93Once the shamans of don Juan's lineage had developed their dreaming attention, they realized that they had tapped on the doors of infinity. They had succeeded in enlarging the parameters of their normal perception. They discovered that their normal state of awareness was infinitely more varied than it had been before the advent of their dreaming attention. From that point on, those sorcerers could truthfully venture into the unknown.

94"The aphorism," don Juan said to me once, "that 'the sky is the limit' was most applicable to the sorcerers of ancient times. They certainly outdid themselves."

95"Was it really true for them that the sky was the limit, don Juan?" I asked.

96"This question could be answered only by each of us individually," he said, smiling expansively. "They gave us the tools. It is up to us individually to use them or refuse them. In essence, we are alone in front of infinity, and the issue of whether or not we are capable of reaching our limits has to be answered personally."

97The Fourth Group:

98Inner Silence

99Don Juan said that inner silence was the state most avidly sought by the shamans of ancient Mexico. He defined it as a natural state of human perception in which thoughts are blocked off and all of man's faculties operate from a level of awareness which doesn't require the utilization of our daily cognitive system.

100Inner silence has always been associated with darkness, for the shamans of don Juan's lineage, perhaps because human perception, deprived of its habitual companion, the internal dialogue, falls into some­thing that resembles a dark pit. He said that the body functions as usual, but awareness becomes sharper. Decisions are instantaneous, and seem to stem from a special sort of knowledge which is deprived of thought-verbalizations.

101Human perception functioning in a condition of inner silence, according to don Juan, is capable of reaching indescribable levels. Some of those levels of perception are worlds in themselves, and not at all like the worlds reached through dreaming. They are indescribable states, inexplicable in terms of the linear paradigms that the habitual state of human perception employs for explaining the universe.

102Inner silence, in don Juan's understanding, is the matrix for a gigantic step of evolution: silent knowledge, or the level of human awareness where knowing is automatic and instantaneous. Knowledge at this level is not the product of cerebral cogitation or logical induction and deduction, or of generalizations based on similarities and dissimilarities. There is nothing a priori at the level of silent knowledge, nothing that could constitute a body of knowledge, for everything is imminently now. Complex pieces of information could be grasped without any cognitive preliminaries.

103Don Juan believed that silent knowledge was insinuated to early man, but that early man was not really the possessor of silent knowledge. Such an insinuation was infinitely stronger than what modern man experiences, where the bulk of knowledge is the product of rote learning. It is a sorcerers' axiom that although we have lost that insinuation, the avenue that leads to silent knowledge will always be open to man by means of inner silence.

104Don Juan Matus taught the hard line of his lineage: that inner silence must be gained by a consistent pressure of discipline. It has to be accrued or stored, bit by bit, second by second. In other words, one has to force oneself to be silent, even if it is only for a few seconds. According don Juan, it was common knowledge among sorcerers that if one persists in this, persistence overcomes habit, and thus, it is possible to arrive at a threshold of accrued seconds or minutes, which differs from person to person. If the threshold of inner silence is ten minutes for a given individual, for instance, then once this threshold is reached, inner silence happens by itself, of its own accord, so to speak.

105I was warned beforehand that there was no possible way of knowing what my individual threshold might be, and that the only way of finding this out was through direct experience. This is exactly what happened to me. Following don Juan's suggestion, I had persisted in forcing myself to remain silent, and one day, while walking at UCLA, I reached my mysterious threshold. I knew I had reached it because in one instant, I experienced something don Juan had described at length to me. He had called it stopping the world. In the blink of an eye, the world ceased to be what it was, and for the first time in my life, I became conscious that I was seeing energy as it flowed in the universe. I had to sit down on some brick steps. I knew that I was sitting on some brick steps, but I knew it only intellectually, through memory. Experientially, I was resting on energy. I myself was energy, and so was everything around me. I had canceled out my interpretation system.

106After seeing energy directly, I realized something which became the horror of my day, something that no one could explain to me satisfacto­rily except don Juan. I became conscious that although I was seeing for the first time in my life, I had been seeing energy as it flows in the uni­verse all my life, but I had not been conscious of it. To see energy as it flows in the universe was not the novelty. The novelty was the query that arose with such fury that it made me surface back into the world of everyday life. I asked myself what had been keeping me from realizing that I had been seeing energy as it flows in the universe all my life.

107"There are two issues at stake here," don Juan explained to me, when I asked him about this maddening contradiction. "One is general aware­ness. The other is particular, deliberate consciousness. Every human being in the world is aware, in general terms, of seeing energy as it flows in the universe. However, only sorcerers are particularly and deliber­ately conscious of it. To become conscious of something that you are generally aware of requires energy, and the iron-hand discipline needed to get it. Your inner silence, the product of discipline and energy, bridged the gap between general awareness and particular consciousness."

108Don Juan stressed, in every way he was able, the value of a pragmatic atti­tude in order to buttress the advent of inner silence. He defined a pragmatic attitude as the capacity to absorb any contingency that might appear along the way. He himself was, to me, the living example of such an attitude. There wasn't any uncertainty or liability that his mere presence would not dispel.

109He reiterated every time he could that the effects of inner silence were very unsettling, and that the only deterrent to this condition was the pragmatic attitude which was the product of a superbly pliable, agile, strong body. He said that for sorcerers, the physical body was the only entity that made any sense to them, and that there was no such thing as a dualism between body and mind. He further stated that the physical body involved both the body and the mind as we knew them, and that in order to counterbalance the physical body as a holistic unit, sorcerers considered another configuration of energy which was reached through inner silence: the energy body. He explained that what I had experienced at the moment in which I had stopped the world was the resurgence of my energy body, and that this configuration of energy was the one which had always been able to see energy as it flowed in the universe.

110THE FOURTH SERIES

111The Separation of the Left Body and the Right Body: The Heat Series

112Don Juan taught his disciples that for the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, the concept that a human being is composed of two complete functioning bodies, one on the left and one on the right, was fundamental to their endeavors as sorcerers. Such a classificatory scheme had nothing to do with intellectual speculations on the part of those sorcerers, or with logical conclusions about possibilities of distri­bution of mass in the body.

113When don Juan explained this to me, I countered that modern biolo­gists had the concept of bilateral symmetry, which means "a basic body plan in which the left and right sides of the organism can be divided into approximate mirror images of each other along the midline."

114"The classifications of the shamans of ancient Mexico," don Juan replied, "were more profound than the conclusions of modern scientists, because they stemmed from perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe. When the human body is perceived as energy, it is utterly patent that it is composed not of two parts, but of two different types of energy: two different currents of energy, two opposing and at the same time complementary forces that coexist side by side, mirroring, in this fashion, the dual structure of everything in the universe at large."

115The shamans of ancient Mexico accorded each one of these two dif­ferent kinds of energy the stature of a total body, and spoke exclusively in terms of the left body and the right body. Their emphasis was on the left body, because they considered it to be the most effective, in terms of the nature of its energy configuration, for the ultimate goals of shamanism. The shamans of ancient Mexico, who depicted the two bodies as streams of energy, depicted the left stream as being more turbulent and aggressive, moving in undulating ripples and projecting out waves of energy. When illustrating what he was talking about, don Juan asked me to visualize a scene in which the left body was like half of the sun, and that all the solar flares happened on that half. The waves of energy pro­jected out of the left body were like those solar flares—always perpen­dicular to the round surface from which they originated.

116He depicted the stream of energy of the right body as not being turbulent at all on the surface. It moved like water inside a tank which was being slightly tilted back and forth. There were no ripples in it, but a continuous rocking motion. At a deeper level, however, it swirled in rotational circles in the form of spirals. Don Juan asked me to envision a very wide, peaceful-looking tropical river, where the water on the sur­face seemed barely to move, but which had shattering riptides below the surface. In the world of everyday life, these two currents are amalga­mated into a single unit: the human body as we know it.

117To the eye of the seer, however, the energy of the total body is circular. This meant to the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage that the right body was the predominant force.

118"What happens in the case of left-handed people?" I asked him once. "Are they more suitable for the endeavors of sorcerers?"

119"Why do you think they should be?" he replied, seemingly surprised by my question.

120"Because obviously, the left side is predominant," I said.

121"This predominance is of no importance whatsoever for sorcerers," he said. "Yes, the left side predominates in the sense that they can hold a hammer with their left hand very effectively. They write with their left hand. They can hold a knife with their left hand, and do it very well. If they are leg shakers, they can certainly shake the left knee with great rhythm. In other words, they have rhythm in their left body, but sorcery is not a matter of that kind of predominance. The right body still rules them with a circular motion."

122"But does left-handedness have any advantages or disadvantages for sorcerers?" I asked. I was driven by the implication built into many of the Indo-European languages of the sinister quality of left-handedness.

123"There are no advantages or disadvantages to my knowledge," he said. "The division of energy between the two bodies is not measured by dexterity, or the lack of it. The predominance of the right body is an energetic predominance, which was encountered by the shamans of those ancient times. They never tried to explain why this predomi­nance happened in the first place, nor did they try to further investigate the philosophical implications of it. For them, it was a fact, but a very special fact. It was a fact that could be changed."

124"Why did they want to change it, don Juan?" I asked.

125"Because the predominant circular motion of the right body's energy is too friggin’ boring!" he exclaimed. "That circular motion certainly takes care of any event of the daily world, but it does it circularly, if you know what I mean."

126"I don't know what you mean, don Juan," I said.

127"Every situation in life is met in this circular fashion," he replied, making a small circle with his hand. "On and on and on and on and on. It's a circular movement that seems to draw the energy inward always, and turns it around and around in a centripetal motion. Under these conditions, there's no expansion. Nothing can be new. There is nothing that cannot be inwardly accounted for. What a drag!"

128"In what way can this situation be changed, don Juan?" I asked.

129"It's too late to be really changed," he replied. "The damage is already done. The spiral quality is here to remain. But it doesn't have to be ceaseless. Yes, we walk the way we do, we can't change that, but we would also like to run, or to walk backward, or to climb a ladder; just to walk and walk and walk and walk is very effective, but meaningless. The contribution of the left body would make those centers of vitality more pliable. If they could undulate instead of moving in spirals, if only for an instant, different energy would get into them, with staggering results."

130I understood what he was talking about, at a level beyond thought, because there was really no way that I could have understood it linearly.

131"The sensation that human beings have of being utterly bored with themselves," he continued, "is due to this predominance of the right body. The only thing left for human beings to do, in a universal sense, is to find ways of ridding themselves of boredom. What they end up doing is finding ways of killing time: the only commodity no one has enough of. But what's worse is the reaction to this unbalanced distribution of energy. The violent reactions of people are due to this unbalanced dis­tribution. It seems that from time to time, helplessness builds furious currents of energy within the human body, which explode in violent behavior. Violence seems to be, for human beings, another way of killing time."

132"But why is it, don Juan, that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico never wanted to know why this situation happened?" I asked, bewildered. I found what I was feeling about this inward motion to be fascinating.

133"They never tried to find out," he said, "because the instant they for­mulated the question, they knew the answer."

134"So they knew why?" I asked.

135"No, they didn't know why, but they knew how it happened. But that's another story."

136He left me hanging there, but throughout the course of my associa­tion with him, he explained this seeming contradiction.

137"Awareness is the only avenue that human beings have for evolu­tion," he said to me once, "and something extraneous to us, something that has to do with the predatorial condition of the universe, has inter­rupted our possibility of evolving by taking possession of our awareness. Human beings have fallen prey to a predatorial force, which has imposed on them, for its own convenience, the passivity which is char­acteristic of the energy of the right body."

138Don Juan described our evolutionary possibility as a journey that our awareness takes across something the shamans of ancient Mexico called the dark sea of awareness: something which they considered to be an actual feature of the universe, an incommensurable element that per­meates the universe, like clouds of matter, or light.

139Don Juan was convinced that the predominance of the right body in this unbalanced merging of the right and left bodies marks the interruption of our journey of awareness. What seems to be for us the natural dominance of one side over the other was, for the sorcerers of his lin­eage, an aberration, which they strove to correct.

140Those shamans believed that in order to establish a harmonious divi­sion between the left and the right bodies, practitioners needed to enhance their awareness. Any enhancement of human awareness, how­ever, had to be buttressed by the most exigent discipline. Otherwise, this enhancement, painfully accomplished, would turn into an obses­sion, resulting in anything from psychological aberration to energetic injury.

141Don Juan Matus called the collection of magical passes which deal exclusively with the separation between the left body and the right body The Heat Group: the most crucial element in the training of the shamans of ancient Mexico. This was a nickname given to this collec­tion of magical passes because it makes the energy of the right body a little more turbulent. Don Juan Matus used to joke about this phenome­non, saying that the movements for the left body put an enormous pres­sure on the right body, which has been accustomed from birth to ruling without opposition. The moment it is faced with opposition, it gets hot with anger. Don Juan urged all his disciples to practice the Heat Group assiduously, in order to use its aggressiveness to reinforce the weak left body.

142In Tensegrity, this group is called The Heat Series, in order to make it more congruous with the aims of Tensegrity, which are extremely prag­matic on the one hand and extremely abstract on the other, such as the practical utilization of energy for well-being coupled with the abstract idea of how that energy is obtained. In all the magical passes of this series, it is recommended to adopt the division of left and right bodies, rather than left and right sides of the body. The end result of this obser­vance would be to say that during the execution of these magical passes, the body that doesn't perform the movements is kept immobile. However, all its muscles should be engaged, not in activity, but in awareness. This immobility of the body that is not performing the movements should be extended to include its head; that is to say, to the opposite side of the head. Such immobility of half of the face and head is more difficult to attain, but it can be accomplished with practice.

143The series is divided into four groups.

144The First Group:

145Stirring Energy on the Left Body and the Right Body

146The first group comprises sixteen magical passes that stir the energy of the left body and the right body, each independently from the other. Each magical pass is performed with either the left arm or the right arm, and in some cases with both at the same time. The arms never go, however, beyond the vertical line that separates the two bodies.

147THE FIFTH SERIES

148The Masculinity Series

149Masculinity was the name given to a specific group of magical passes by the shamans who first discovered and used them. Don Juan thought that perhaps it was the oldest name given to any such group of magical passes. This group was practiced originally for generations only by male shaman practitioners, and this discrimination in favor of male shamans was done not out of necessity, but rather for reasons of ritual and to sat­isfy an original drive for male supremacy. Nevertheless, this drive was soon terminated under the impact of enhanced perception.

150The well-established tradition of this group of magical passes being practiced only by men persisted in a pseudo-official way for generations while it was being practiced on the sly by female practitioners as well. The old sorcerers' rationale for including females was that for reasons of strife and social disorder around them, the women needed extra strength and vitality, which they believed was found only in males who practiced this group of magical passes. Therefore, women were allowed to execute the movements as a token of solidarity. In don Juan's time, the division lines between males and females became even more dif­fused. The secrecy and exclusivity of the old sorcerers was completely shattered, and even the old rationale for allowing women to practice these specific magical passes could not be upheld. Female practitioners performed these magical passes openly.

151The value of this group of magical passes—the oldest named group in existence—is its continuity. All of its magical passes were generic from the beginning, and this condition provided the only instance in don Juan's lineage of sorcerers in which a whole party of shaman practition­ers, whatever their number may have been, were allowed to move in unison. The number of participants in any party of sorcerers, throughout the ages, could never have been more than sixteen. Therefore, none of those sorcerers were ever in the position to witness the stupendous energetic contribution of human mass. For them, there existed only the specialized consensus of a few initiates, a consensus which brought in the possibility of idiosyncratic preferences and more isolationism.

152The fact that the movements of Tensegrity are practiced in seminars and workshops by hundreds of participants at the same time has given rise, as stated before, to the possibility of experiencing the energetic effects of human mass. Such an energetic effect is twofold: not only are the participants of Tensegrity performing an activity that unites them energetically, but they are also involved in a quest delineated in states of enhanced awareness by the shamans of ancient Mexico: the redeployment of energy. Performing these magical passes in the setting of semi­nars on Tensegrity is a unique experience. It permits the participants to arrive, pushed or pulled by the magical passes themselves and by the human mass, at energetic conclusions never even alluded to in don Juan's teachings.

153The reason for calling this set of movements Masculinity is its aggres­sive quality, and because its magical passes are very brisk and forcefully executed, characteristics easily identified with maleness. Don Juan stated that their practice fostered not only a sensation of well-being, but a special sensorial quality, which, if not examined, could easily be con­fused with strife and aggressiveness. However, if it is carefully scruti­nized, it is immediately apparent that it is, rather, an unmistakable sen­sation of readiness that places the practitioners at a level from which they could strike toward the unknown.

154Another reason that the shamans of ancient Mexico called this group of magical passes Masculinity was because the males who practiced it became a special type of practitioner who didn't need to be taken by the hand. They became men who benefited indirectly from everything they did. Ideally, the energy generated by this group of magical passes goes to the centers of vitality themselves, as if every center made an automatic bidding for energy, which goes first to the center that needs it the most.

155For don Juan Matus's disciples, this set of magical passes became the most crucial element in their training. Don Juan himself introduced it to them as a common denominator, meaning that he urged them to practice the set unaltered. What he wanted was to prepare his disciples to withstand the rigors of journeying in the unknown.

156In Tensegrity, the word Series has been added to the name Masculinity to put it on a par with the other series of Tensegrity. The Masculinity Series is divided into three groups, each consisting of ten magical passes. The goal of the first and second groups of the Masculinity Series is the tuning of tendon energy. Each of these twenty magical passes is short, but extremely focused. Tensegrity practitioners are seriously encouraged, as the shamanistic practitioners of ancient times were, to get the maxi­mum effect from the short movements by aiming to release a jolt of ten­don energy every time they execute them.

157"But don’t you think, don Juan, that every time I release this jolt of energy, I'm actually wasting my tendon energy, and draining it out of me?" I asked him on one occasion.

158"You can't drain any energy out of yourself," he said. "The energy that you are seemingly wasting by delivering a jolt to the air is not really being wasted, because it never leaves your boundaries, wherever those boundaries may be. So what you're really doing is delivering a jolt of energy to what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called our 'crust,' our 'bark.' Those sorcerers stated that energetically, human beings are like luminous balls that have a thick peel around them, like an orange; some of them have something even harder and thicker, like the bark of an old tree."

159Don Juan explained carefully that this simile of human beings being like an orange was somehow misleading because the peel or the bark that we have is located inside our boundaries, just as if an orange had its peel inside the orange itself. He said that this bark or peel was the crusted-down energy that had been discarded throughout our lifetime from our vital centers of energy, because of the wear and tear of daily life.

160"Is it beneficial to hit this bark, don Juan?" I asked.

161"Most beneficial," he said. "Especially if the practitioners aim all their intent at reaching that bark with their blows. If they intend to shatter portions of this crusted-down energy by means of the magical passes, that shattered energy could be absorbed by the vital centers of energy."

162The magical passes of the third group of the Masculinity Series are broader, more extensive. What practitioners need in order to execute the ten magical passes of the third group is steadiness of the hands, the legs, and the rest of the body. The aim of this third series, for the shamans of ancient Mexico, was the building of endurance, of stability. Those shamans believed that holding the body steadily in position while executing those long movements gives the practitioners a foothold from which they can stand on their own.

163What modern practitioners of Tensegrity have found out through their practice is that the Masculinity Series can be executed only in moderation, in order to avoid overtiring the tendons of the arms and the muscles of the back.

164The First Group:

165Magical Passes in Which the Hands Are Moved in Unison but Held Separately

1661. Fists Above the Shoulders

167The hands are held by the sides, clasped into fists, the palms facing up. They are raised then to a point above the head by bending the elbows so the forearms are at a ninety-degree angle with the upper arms. The driv­ing force of this movement is equally divided between the muscles of the arms and the contraction of the muscles of the abdomen. As the fists are raised and the muscles of the front of the body are tensed, the body leans slightly backward by bending the knees (fig. 404). The arms, with hands fisted, are brought down to the sides of the thighs by straightening the elbows a bit; as the arms move down, the body leans forward, contracting the muscles of the back and the diaphragm (fig. 405).

1682. Using a Cutting Tool in Each Hand

169The hands are made into fists, with the palms facing each other at the level of the waist (fig. 406). From there, they move in a downward strike to the level of the groin, a foot and a half away from it, always keeping the width of the body as the distance between the fists (fig. 407). Once the fists strike, they are retrieved to the position where they started, by the edge of the rib cage.

170THE SIXTH SERIES

171Devices Used in Conjunction with Specific Magical Passes

172As previously stated, the shamans of ancient Mexico put a special emphasis on a force they called tendon energy. Don Juan said that they asserted that vital energy moves along the body via an exclusive track formed by tendons.

173I asked don Juan if by tendon he meant the tissue that attaches the muscles to the bones.

174"I am at a loss to explain tendon energy," he said. "I'm following the easy path of usage. I was taught that it’s called tendon energy. If I don’t have to be specific about it, you understand what tendon energy is, don't you?"

175"In a vague sense, I think I do, don Juan," I said. "What confuses me is that you use the word tendon where there are no bones, such as the abdomen."

176"The old sorcerers," he said, "gave the name of tendon energy to a cur­rent of energy that moves along the deep muscles from the neck down to the chest and arms, and the spine. It cuts across the upper and lower abdomen from the edge of the rib cage to the groin, and from there it goes to the toes."

177"Doesn't this current include the head, don Juan?" I asked, bewil­dered. As a Western man, I expected that anything of this sort would have originated in the brain.

178"No," he said emphatically, "it doesn't include the head. What comes from the head is a different kind of energetic current; not what I am talking about. One of the formidable attainments of sorcerers is that in the end, they push out whatever exists in the center of energy located at the top of the head, and then they anchor the tendon energy of the rest of their bodies there. But that is a paragon of success. At the moment, what we have at hand, as in your case, is the average situation of tendon energy beginning at the neck at the place where it joins the head. In some cases tendon energy goes up to a point below the cheekbones, but never higher than that point.

179"This energy," he went on, "which I call tendon energy for lack of a better name, is a dire necessity in the lives of those who travel in infinity, or want to travel in it."

180Don Juan said that the traditional beginning in the utilization of tendon energy was the use of some simple devices which were employed by the shamans of ancient Mexico in two ways. One was to create a vibratory effect on specific centers of tendon energy, and the other was to cre­ate a pressure effect on the same centers. He explained that those shamans considered the vibratory effect to be the agent for loosening the energy which has become stagnant. The second effect, the pressure effect, was thought to be the agent that disperses the energy.

181What seems to be a cognitive contradiction for modern man—that vibration would loosen anything that was stuck, and that pressure would disperse it—was deeply emphasized by don Juan Matus, who taught his disciples that what appears to be natural to us in terms of our cognition in the world is not at all natural in terms of the flow of energy. He said that in the world of everyday life, human beings would crack something with a blow, or by applying pressure, and disperse it by mak­ing it vibrate. However, energy which had become lodged in a tendon center had to be rendered fluid through vibration, and then it had to be pressed, so that it would continue flowing. Don Juan Matus was horrified at the idea of directly pressing points of energy in the body without the preliminary vibration. His contention was that energy that was stuck would get even more inert if pressure were applied to it.

182Don Juan started off his disciples with two basic devices. He explained that the shamans of ancient times used to search for a pair of round pebbles or dry round seed pods, and use them as vibratory and pressure devices to aid in manipulating the flow of energy in the body, which they believed becomes periodically stuck along the tendon track. However, the round pebbles that shaman practitioners normally used were definitely too hard, and the seed pods too fragile. Other objects that those shamans searched for avidly were flat rocks the size of the hand or pieces of heavy wood, in order to place them on specific areas of tendon energy on their abdomens while they were lying flat on their backs. The first area is just below the navel; another is right on top of the navel, and another yet, on the area of the solar plexus. The problem with using rocks or other objects is that they have to be heated or cooled to approximate the temperature of the body, and besides, these objects are usually too stiff, and they slide and move around.

183Tensegrity practitioners have found a much better equivalent to the devices of the shamans of ancient Mexico: a pair of round balls and a small, flat, circular leather weight. The balls are the same size as the ones used by those shamans, but they are not fragile at all; they are made of a mixture of Teflon reinforced by a ceramic compound. This mixture gives the balls a weight, a hardness, and a smoothness which are thoroughly congruous with the purpose of the magical passes.

184The other device, the leather weight, has been found to be an ideal device for creating a steady pressure on centers of tendon energy. Unlike rocks, it is pliable enough to adapt itself to the contours of the body. Its leather cover makes it possible to be applied directly to the body with­out needing to be warmed or cooled. However, its most remarkable fea­ture is its weight. It is light enough not to cause any discomfort, and yet heavy enough to aid some specific magical passes that foster inner silence by pressing centers on the abdomen. Don Juan Matus said that a weight placed on any of the three areas mentioned above engages the totality of one's energy fields, which means a momentary shutting off of the internal dialogue: the first step toward inner silence.

185The modern devices used in conjunction with specific magical passes are divided by their very nature into two categories.

186The First Category

187This first category of magical passes that use the help of a device con­sists of sixteen magical passes aided by the Teflon balls. Eight of these magical passes are performed on the left arm and wrist, and eight on the points of the liver and gallbladder, the pancreas and spleen, the bridge of the nose, the temples, and the crown of the head. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico considered the first eight magical passes to be the first step toward the liberation of the left body from the unwarranted dominion of the right body.

188The Second Category

189The second category comprises the uses of the leather weight for the purpose of creating a steady pressure on a larger area of tendon energy. There are two magical passes used in conjunction with the leather weight.

190The hand positions for both of these magical passes are shown here with the practitioner standing. The actual practice of these magical passes is performed lying flat on the back with the leather weight pressing right above the navel or on either of the other two choice spots on the abdomen: below the navel, or above it by the solar plexus, if placing the weight on them is more comfortable.