TENSEGRITY
Tensegrity is the modern 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
he faced in a modern setting. The people who now practice Tensegrity are
not shaman practitioners in search of shamanistic alternatives that 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 postures 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 Tiggs, 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 kinesthetic 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 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
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 hulk 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 he 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 hear in mind when practicing Tensegrity is that since
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
he 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 he.
The setting of modern urban life facilitates the formation of groups, and
under these circumstances, the only manner in which Tensegrity can be 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.
Don Juan conceived that since the totality of human behavior was ruled
by language, human beings have learned to respond to what he called syntactic
commands, praising or deprecatory formulas built into language—for
example, the responses that each individual makes, or elicits in others,
with slogans such as No problem, Piece of cake, It's time
to worry, You could do better, I can't do it, My butt
is too big, I'm the best, I'm the worst in the world,
I could live with that, I'm coping, Everything's going
to be okay, etc., etc. Don Juan maintained that what sorcerers have
always wanted, as a basic rule of thumb, is to run away from activities
derived from syntactic commands.
Originally, as don Juan described it, the magical passes were performed
by the shamans of ancient Mexico individually and in solitariness, on the
spur of the moment or as the necessity arose. He taught them to his disciples
in the same fashion. Don Juan stated that for the shaman practitioners,
the challenge of performing the magical passes has always been to execute
them perfectly, holding in mind only the abstract view of their perfect
execution. Ideally, Tensegrity should be taught and practiced in the same
fashion. However, the conditions of modern life and the fact that the goal
of the magical passes has been formulated to apply to a great number of
people make it imperative that a new approach be taken. Tensegrity should
be practiced in whatever form is easiest: either in groups, or alone, or
both.
In my particular case, the practice of Tensegrity in very large groups
has been more than ideal, because it has given me the unique opportunity
of witnessing something which don Juan Matus and all the sorcerers of his
lineage never did: the effects of human mass. Don Juan and all the
shamans of his lineage, which he considered to be twenty-seven generations
long, never were capable of witnessing the effects of human mass. They
practiced the magical passes alone, or in groups of up to five practitioners.
For them, the magical passes were highly individualistic.
If the number of Tensegrity practitioners is in the hundreds, an energetic
current is nearly instantaneously formed among them. This energetic current,
which a shaman could easily see, creates in the practitioners a
sense of urgency. It is like a vibratory wind that sweeps through them,
and gives them the primary elements of purpose. I have been privileged
to see something I considered to be a portentous sight: the awakening of
purpose, the energetic basis of man. Don Juan Matus used to call this unbending
intent. He taught me that unbending intent is the essential
tool of those who journeyed into the unknown.
A very important issue to consider when practicing Tensegrity is that the
movements must be executed with the idea that the benefit of the magical
passes comes by itself. This idea must be stressed at any cost. At the
beginning, it is very difficult to discern the fact that Tensegrity is
not a standard system of movements for developing the body. It indeed develops
the body, but only as a by-product of a more transcendental effect. By
redeploying unused energy, the magical passes can conduce the practitioner
to a level of awareness in which the parameters of normal, traditional
perception are canceled out by the fact that they are expanded. The practitioner
can thus be allowed even to enter into unimaginable worlds.
"But why would I want to enter into those worlds?" I asked don Juan when
he described this post-effect of the magical passes.
"Because you are a creature of awareness, a perceived like the rest of
us," he said. "Human beings are on a journey of awareness, which has been
momentarily interrupted by extraneous forces. Believe me, we are magical
creatures of awareness. If we don't have this conviction, we have nothing."
He further explained that human beings, from the moment their journey
of awareness was interrupted, have been caught in an eddy, so to speak,
and are spinning around, having the impression of moving with the current,
and yet remaining stationary.
"Take my word," don Juan went on, "because mine are not arbitrary statements.
My word is the result of corroborating, for myself, what the shamans of
ancient Mexico found out: that we human beings are magical beings."
It has taken me thirty years of hard discipline to come to a cognitive
plateau in which don Juan's statements are recognizable and their validity
is established beyond the shadow of a doubt. I know now that human beings
are creatures of awareness, involved in an evolutionary journey of awareness,
beings indeed unknown to themselves, filled to the brim with incredible
resources that are never used.
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