THE FOURTH SERIES
The Separation of the Left Body and the Right Body: The Heat Series
Don 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.
When 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."
"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."
The 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.
He 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.
To 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.
"What happens in the case of left-handed people?" I asked him once. "Are
they more suitable for the endeavors of sorcerers?"
"Why do you think they should be?" he replied, seemingly surprised by my
question.
"Because obviously, the left side is predominant," I said.
"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."
"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.
"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."
"Why did they want to change it, don Juan?" I asked.
"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."
"I don't know what you mean, don Juan," I said.
"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!"
"In what way can this situation be changed, don Juan?" I asked.
"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."
I understood what he was talking about, at a level beyond thought, because
there was really no way that I could have understood it linearly.
"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."
"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.
"They never tried to find out," he said, "because the instant they formulated
the question, they knew the answer."
"So they knew why?" I asked.
"No, they didn't know why, but they knew how it happened. But that's another
story."
He left me hanging there, but throughout the course of my association with
him, he explained this seeming contradiction.
"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."
Don 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.
Don 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.
Those 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.
Don 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.
In 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.
The series is divided into four groups.
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