The magical passes were treated by the shamans of ancient Mexico as something unique, not as exercises for developing musculature. Don Juan described the “magic” of the movements as a subtle change practitioners experience, a “touch of the spirit” that reestablishes an unused link with the life force. “Because of this quality,” don Juan said, “the passes must be practiced not as exercises, but as a way of beckoning power”.
Tensegrity, the modernized version, is taught as a system of movements for a modern setting. Don Juan, following sorcerers’ tradition, saturated his disciples’ kinesthetic memory with a profusion of movements. His contention was that if they kept practicing despite the confusion, they would attain inner silence. In inner silence, everything becomes clear, and a practitioner knows exactly what to do with the movements without guidance.
“Human beings are on a journey of awareness, which has been momentarily interrupted by strenuous forces,” don Juan said. “Believe me, we are travelers. If we don’t have traveling, we have nothing”.
Tensegrity must be practiced with the idea that its benefit comes by itself. At the beginner’s level, there is no way to direct the effect of the passes. The goal of the saturation with movements is to lead the practitioner to inner silence, from where they can decide the next step.
The magical passes were treated by the shamans of ancient Mexico from the start as something unique, and were never used as sets of exercises for developing musculature or agility. Don Juan said that they were viewed as magical passes from the first moment that they were formulated. He described the “magic” of the movements as a subtle change that the practitioners experience on executing them; an ephemeral quality that the movement brings to their physical and mental states, a kind of shine, a light in the eyes. He spoke of this subtle change as a “touch of the spirit”; as if practitioners, through the movements, reestablish an unused link with the life force that sustains them. He further explained that the movements were called magical passes because by means of practicing them, sorcerers were transported, in terms of perception, to other states of being in which they could sense the world in an indescribable manner.
“Because of this quality, because of this magic,” don Juan said to me once, “the passes must be practiced not as exercises, but as a way of beckoning power.”
“But can they be taken as physical movements, although they have never been taken as such?” I asked. I had faithfully practiced all the movements that don Juan had taught me, and I felt extraordinarily well. This feeling of well-being was sufficient for me.
“You can practice them as you wish,” don Juan replied. “The magical passes enhance awareness, regardless of how you take them. The intelligent thing would be to take them as what they are: magical passes that on being practiced lead the practitioners to drop the mask of socialization.”
“What is the mask of socialization?” I asked. “The veneer that all of us defend and die for,” he said. “The veneer we acquire in the world; the one that prevents us from reaching all our potential; the one that makes us believe we are immortal.”
Tensegrity, being the modernized version of those magical passes, has been taught so far as a system of movements because that has been the only manner in which this mysterious and vast sub- ject of the magical passes could be faced in a mod- ern setting. The people who now practice Tensegrity are not shaman practitioners; therefore, the empha- sis of the magical passes has to be on their value as
movements.
The point of view that has been adopted in this case is that the physical effect of the magical passes is the most important issue for the purpose of establishing a solid base of energy in the practitioners. Since the shamans of ancient Mexico were interested in other effects of the magical passes, they fragmented long series of movements into single units, and practiced each fragment as an individual segment. In Tensegrity, the fragments have been reassembled into their original long forms. In this manner, a system of movements has been obtained, a system in which the movements themselves are emphasized above all.
The execution of the magical passes, as shown in Tensegrity, does require a particular space or prearranged time, but ideally, the movements should be done in solitariness, on the spur of the moment, or as the necessity arises. However, the setting of urban life facilitates the formation of groups, and under these circumstances, the only manner in which Tensegrity can be taught is to groups of practitioners. Practicing in groups is beneficial in many aspects and deleterious in others. It is beneficial because it allows the creation of consensus of movement and the opportunity to learn by examination and comparison. It is deleterious because it fosters the emergence of syntactical commands and solicitations dealing with hierarchy; and what sorcerers want is to run away from subjectivity derived from syntactical commands. Unfortunately, you cannot have your cake and eat it, too; so Tensegrity should be practiced in whatever form is easier: either in groups, or alone, or both.
In every other respect, the way Tensegrity has been taught is a faithful reproduction of the way in which don Juan taught the magical passes to his disciples. He bombarded them with a profusion of detail and let their minds be bewildered by the amount and variety of movements, 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 bombarded in such a manner was an unfair onslaught on them. Don Juan, following the traditional sorcerers’ device of clouding the linear view of practitioners, saturated the kinesthetic memory of his disciples. His contention was that if they kept on practicing the movements, in spite of their confusion, some of them, or all of them, would attain inner silence. He said that in inner silence everything becomes clear to the point that we are able not only to remember, with absolute precision, magical passes already forgotten, but that we know exactly what to do with them, or what to expect from them, without anybody telling us or guiding us.
Don Juan’s disciples could hardly believe such statements. However, at one moment, every one of them 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.
The concern of people practicing Tensegrity nowadays matches exactly the concern of don Juan’s disciples. People who have attended the seminars and workshops on Tensegrity feel bewildered by the amount of movements. They are clamoring for a system that would allow them to integrate the movements into categories that could be practiced and taught.
I must emphasize again what I have been emphasizing from the beginning: Tensegrity is not a standard system of movements for developing the body. It indeed develops the body, but only as a byproduct of a more transcendental purpose. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were convinced that the magical passes conduce the practitioners to a level of awareness in which the parameters of normal, traditional perception are canceled out by the fact that they are enlarged. And the practitioners are thus allowed to enter into unimaginable worlds; worlds which are as inclusive and total as the one in which we
live.
“But why would I want to enter into those worlds?” I asked don Juan on one occasion.
“Because you are a traveler, like the rest of us human beings,” he said, somewhat annoyed by my question. “Human beings are on a journey of awareness, which has been momentarily interrupted by strenuous forces. Believe me, we are travelers. If we don’t have traveling, we have nothing.”
His answer didn’t satisfy me in the least. He further explained that human beings have decayed morally, physically and intellectually since the moment they ceased to travel, and that they are caught in an eddy, so to speak, and are spinning around, having the impression of moving with the current, and yet remaining stationary.
It took me thirty years of hard discipline to come to a cognitive plateau in which don Juan’s statements were recognizable and their validity was established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Human beings are indeed travelers. If we don’t have that, we have nothing.
Tensegrity must be practiced with the idea that the benefit of those movements comes by itself. This idea must be stressed at any cost. At the beginner’s level, there is no way to direct the effect of the magical passes, and there is no possibility whatsoever that some of them could be beneficial for one organ or another. As we gain in discipline and our intending becomes clearer, the effect of magical passes can be selected by each one of us personally and individually, for specific purposes pertinent to each of us only.
What is of supreme importance at the present is to practice whatever Tensegrity sequence one remembers, or whatever set of movements comes to mind. The saturation that has been carried on will give, in the end, the results sought by the shamans of ancient Mexico: entering into a state of inner silence and deciding from inner silence what the next step will be.
Naturally, when I was told, in more or less the same terms, about the sorcerers’ maneuver to saturate the mind into inner silence, my response was the response of any person who is interested in Tensegrity today: “It’s not that I don’t believe you, but it’s something very hard to believe.”
The only answer that don Juan had to my more than justified queries and the queries of his other three disciples was to say, “Take my word, because mine are not arbitrary statements. My word is the result of corroborating, for myself, what the sorcerers of ancient Mexico found out: that we human beings are magical beings.”
Don Juan’s legacy includes something that I have been repeating and I will continue to repeat: human beings are beings unknown to themselves, filled to the brim with incredible resources that are never used.
By saturating his disciples with movement, don Juan accomplished two formidable feats: he brought those hidden resources to the surface, and he gently broke our obsession with our linear mode of interpretation. By forcing his disciples to reach inner silence, he set up the continuation of their interrupted journey of awareness. In this manner, the ideal state of any Tensegrity practitioner, in relation to the Tensegrity movements, is the same as the ideal state of a practitioner of sorcery, in relation to the execution of magical passes. Both are being led by the movements themselves into an unprecedented culmination: inner silence.
From inner silence, 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.
(Carlos Castaneda, A Journal of Applied Hermeneutics)
