Magical Passes (17 page)

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, Ix-cause 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 10 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 rime, 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 for us to be 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.

The First Group : Stirring Energy on the Left Body and the Right Body

The 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.

1. Gathering Energy in a Ball from the Front of the Left and the Right Bodies and Breaking It with the Back of the Hand

With the palm of the hand slightly curved and facing the right, the left arm circles inward twice in front of the body (fig. 213). All the muscles of the arm are held tense as this circular motion is executed. Then the back of the hand strikes forcefully to the left as if breaking the top of a ball gathered with the movement of the arm (fig. 214).

 The hand strikes a point an arm's length away from the body above the shoulders, at a forty-five-degree angle. While this strike is being executed, all the muscles are kept tense, including the muscles of the arms, a tension that permits controlling the strike. The impact is felt on the areas of the pancreas and spleen and the left kidney and adrenals.

The same movements are repeated on the right side, and the impact is felt on the areas of the liver and the right kidney and adrenals.

2. Gathering Energy of the Left and Right Bodies in a Circle Which Is Perforated with the Tips of the Fingers

The left forearm is held in front of the body, at a ninety-degree angle in relation to it. The wrist is kept straight. The palm of the hand faces to the right as the fingers point to the front. The thumb is kept locked. As in the previous magical pass, the forearm circles twice, going from the left up to the level of the shoulder and turning toward tin- center of the body (fig.215). The elbow is then quickly pulled all the way back, and the circle drawn by the forearm is perforated by the tips of the fingers in a forward thrust (fig. 216). The elbow is moved all the way back once more in order to gain striking power, and then the hand shoots forward again. The same sequence of movements is performed with the right arm.

 3. Hoisting Left and Right Energy Upward

Both knees are slightly bent. The left knee is then raised to the level of the pancreas, fully bent, while the foot is held with the toes pointing to the ground. At the same time that this movement is performed, the left forearm shoots upward until it reaches a point at a forty-five-degree angle with the body; the elbow is kept tight against the body. Both the leg and the arm move in total synchronicity, jolting the midsection (fig. 217). The same movements are repeated with The right leg and the right arm. The tendency of energy is to sink, and it is of great importance to spread it upward to The midsection of the body. It is the belief of shamans that the left body is ruled by the area of the pancreas and spleen, and the right body by the area of the liver and gallbladder. Shamans understand this process of hoisting energy as a maneuver to energize those two centers separately.

4. The Up-and-Down Pressure

The left elbow is raised in front of the body to the level of the shoulder, bent at a ninety-degree angle with the forearm. The hand is clenched in a fist, and the wrist is bent toward the right as acutely as possible (fig. 218). Using the elbow as a pivot by keeping it at the same position, the forearm is bent downward until it reaches the area right in front of the solar plexus (fig. 219). The forearm then returns to the upright position. The same movement is performed with the right arm.

This magical pass is used to stir up the energy that exists in an arc between a point just above the head and in line with the left shoulder and a point right above the solar plexus.

5. The Inward Turn

The first part of this magical pass is exactly like the first part of the preceding one, but instead of bending the forearm downward, it is made to rotate inwardly, making a complete circle, pivoting on the elbow at a forty-five-degree angle with the body. The top of the circle is at a point just above the ear and in line with the left shoulder. The wrist is also made to rotate as the circle is drawn (fig. 220).

The same movement is performed with the right hand.

 6. The Outward Turn

This magical pass is almost identical to the preceding one, except that instead of turning the left forearm to the right to make a circle, it turns to the left (fig. 221). It makes what don Juan called an outward circle, as opposed to the circle made in the previous magical pass, which he called an inward circle.

The same movement is performed with the right hand.

In this magical pass, the energy stirred is part of the arc of energy dealt with in the two preceding magical passes. The fourth, fifth, and sixth magical passes of this group are performed together. Shamans have found out, by means of their seeing, that human beings have enormous caches of unused energy lying around inside their luminous spheres. They have also found out, in this manner, that these magical passes stir the energy dispersed from the respective centers of vitality - the one around the liver and the one around the pancreas - which stays suspended for quite a while before it begins to sink down to the bottom of the luminous sphere.

 7. A High Push with the Fists

The arms are held in front of the body at the level of the shoulders. The hands are fisted with the palms turned inward the ground. The elbows are bent. The left hand strikes forward with a short punch, without first retrieving the elbow to gain strength. The left hand is retrieved to its initial position; the right hand follows with another similar punch and is then retrieved to its original position (fig. 222). The strike of the fists comes from the contraction of the muscles of the arms, shoulder blades, and abdomen.

8. A Low Push with the Fists