Tensegrity Seminars

Los Angeles (3) - August 1997 [ 1997 Index | Previous | Next ] To:   The Ixtlan Mailing List Date:   Mon, 15 Sep 1997 17:26:54 -0400 (EDT) LA WORKSHOP, August 23 to 27, 1997 by Vincent Sargenti and Randy Stark DAY THREE (morning) Monday . . . Carol's First Day Walking into the large football field size room on Monday morning, attendees entered a space whose mood had been transformed. Most of the floor was marked off with gray tape into roughly 3' by 7' rectangles. Suspended from the ceiling above the middle platform not used for lectures was a video camera pointing straight down. Six huge, slightly concave, projection screens -- one at each end of the hall and two on the longer walls -- had now come to life. The almost floor to ceiling screens (the ceiling being about fifteen to twenty feet high) had been in the room all along, flush against the walls. Seeing them now, all displaying the view from the ceiling mounted video camera, was a little disorienting -- like seeing scenes from space. As participants rolled out their pastel blue mats, or whatever they had brought with them, and put down their small pillows, a buzz of anticipation could be felt rising in the room. At one point, attendees were asked to move their mats away from the area to each side and in front of the platform used for lectures. People started settling in on the floor around the platform, waiting for the day's speaker to arrive. No one knew from one lecture to the next who might be speaking. The video camera was eventually shut off and the six huge screens returned to their previous anonymous white. After everyone had settle down on the floor, Carol Tiggs came strolling briskly out from the side door, smiling broadly and waving at the crowd, most of whom jumped to their feet and started applauding. Carol (short black hair, fair skin, looks like she's in her thirties) arranged her notes, stated her name, made a few light comments, then opened all three of the water bottles on the podium. The following notes may not convey it, but Carol, like Florinda and Taisha (who, by the way, is the tall one of the group, with short reddish brown hair), has a unique ability to go from being very funny and intimate to serious and direct in a heartbeat. She began by saying that she was there to tell us about the real thing: Not-doing. She said you have to prepare for Not-doing because it packs a serious punch -- cognitive dissonance. She explained that by laying on a mat being supported from behind, our musculature is used in ways we're not accustomed to. She introduced the existence of what she called 'the lull'. There was a point when practicing the passes for Not-Doing when we would pause between passes and allow room for that 'lull' to transpire. She explained to the audience that they needn't be aware that the 'lull' had taken place, only that they had allowed a space for it to be present. Carol explained that our cognitive system is fooled by being horizontal and that there is the possibility that a split second can contain a lull, a moment that lends itself to a cognitive pause. That moment, that fraction of a second, can give one an opportunity to cultivate a cognitive opening. However . . . "When you're messing with energy fields," Carol admonished the audience, "you must go slowly, you must approach them with infinite care. It can take years for a practitioner to be capable of handling them. You must learn to utilize that fraction of a second." In relation to Bobby, Carol spoke about a movie she had seen called, 'They Live'. Here's a synopsis of the movie by a workshop participant: "In the movie 'They Live,' a blue collar man attempts to wrench control of his own perception away from an ultra-advanced race of interloping aliens that have enslaved the entire human race by masking their existence from our sight. These aliens have been conspiring over time so as to occupy all the choice positions of steerage in our society -- reducing humanity to thralls, and stripping the Earth of it's natural resources in the process. The hero contrives a daring scheme to infiltrate the main control facility, and sabotage the system in order to expose the aliens hidden among us." Carol told the audience that the old nagual lent his personal touch to everything he did. Don Juan had a predilection for traumatizing his apprentices whenever possible, and the instance of teaching them the passes for Not-Doing was no different. He brought all four of them together and told them that to learn the passes for Not-Doing they had to be naked. They disrobed and he had them lie down on mats. They were a bunch of STIFF-Os, according to Carol. To make matters worse the old nagual could not just allow them to concentrate on the matter at hand, he had to bring up the issue of natural body odors. Don Juan told Carlos that when he was going to be practicing the Not-Doing passes on a mat he should try to do something about his dirty butt. On hearing this the audience was sent into gales of laughter, but it must have been an embarrassing moment for Carlos. Carol made several humorous comments at this point about female vulnerabilities with regard to their bodies and social situations, then went on to say that, "Men are forever secure behind closed buttocks." Don Juan literally demolished the three women with Not-Doing. Carol said that she was so traumatized by the way the passes for Not-Doing were taught to them that she was still in denial about it. She explained how Florinda never had a problem with her body in this regard or with nudity. "Flo was wild, Taisha was tight," Carol said, "and I was fat." She made feigned gestures of deep humiliation. She continued to explain that it took a lifetime to comprehend what the Not-Doings really are. She said that it is an untouchable subject. The real meaning of Not-Doing will appear when the debris of our lives is gone. Women are blessed with the natural ability to do whatever they need to do. They have a direct connection to the Dark Sea of Awareness. "However, it is precisely because of this that they don't give a damn," Carol said. Women need to rely occasionally on the inherent sobriety of their male counterparts. Men, on the other hand, because they don't have this inherent connection to the Dark Sea of Awareness need to talk endlessly about all the minute facets of the warrior's way so they can be absolutely clear -- then they will act. Eventually men overcome themselves and go beyond their sexual identity to become warrior-navigators. "Something happened recently," Carol said, "that had a profound impact on the four of us. Something that changed everything and rendered us unknown to ourselves." She continued by explaining the idea of the 100th Monkey. There are all these monkeys on an island, and one monkey figures out that if he keeps knocking a coconut over a rock he can break it open. At that same moment, other monkeys on completely different islands hundreds of miles away start pounding coconuts and breaking them over rocks. According to Carol, something similar has occurred with them. She explained it by saying that Carlos punched a hole in an energetic ceiling and they all wound up in a different 'room' together. Suddenly they were being attacked by realizations. The most obvious difference about this 'room' was something that she would only describe as the presence of a higher vibration. "Vibration is key," she said, but did not go into much depth on the subject. "Who are we? We don't know." The result of Carlos punching a hole in an energetic ceiling was their simultaneous eruption into a new vibratory level. Because of this they weren't sure where, in the vastness of infinity, Carlos was at the moment. Carol then began further clarifying the subject of Not-Doing. The old nagual described Not-Doing as, "An interruption in the flow of the cognitive system." "Not-Doing delivers a deliberate blow," she said, "that holds us in a lull. The whole works come to a halt in an instant." "Not-Doings have to be performed," she continued, saying that the passes we were about to learn had to be performed with precision and exactitude. She said this was a requisite for practicing the passes. The other passes you could learn and do as best you could, but these passes needed to be very precisely 'performed'. Carol talked about how things get when one is dealing with the interruption of the cognitive system. She said that sometimes when she was learning how to operate within the old nagual's world, things would become weird and the inconceivable would confront her from every side. She explained that when she found herself in this position there was a tremendous danger that her thoughts, or the thoughts of anyone in this position, would become unstable. "When thought becomes unstable," she said, "go for inner silence. Not-Doing is introducing a dissonant element to interrupt the flow of ordinary events. Doing, on the other hand, is the established order of cognition." Carol made a few comments on the Vatican's stand against cloning. It had issued a statement saying that cloning was bad because the clone would not have a soul. The very issue of cloning, in other words, had created a form of cognitive dissonance in the social order. Not-Doing to don Juan meant introducing an element that did not belong in the network. Shamans undo. Carol spoke of how we're always trying to talk over each other in conversation. Shamans 'undo' this. "The world is a horribly charted network of doings," Carol explained. "We are creatures of habit, creatures of inventories." She said that it took many years for an individual to acquire membership to any given set of inventories, and that the audience should examine their inventories then discard them, not be slaves to them. The difference between scholars and beggars is that scholars know the ins and outs of elaborate inventories. Shamans on the other hand know that, when confronted with a barrage of data from outside the inventory, the average man's cognitive system collapses. "The inventory itself collapses. The inventory is the mind," she said. Carol went on to talk about all sorts of other things. One in particular was that Carlos had several female friends he had wanted to help. One of these ladies in particular was a woman with really 'serious hair'. She told Carlos she would do, "ANYTHING, anything in the world to help him." Carlos, knowing the one thing she would not do, said, "Well, you COULD cut your hair." To which she replied, "Oh Carlos, you're such a kidder." Carlos, ever tactful, laughed along with her, learning on the fly that there were people he would never be able to reach out to. Shamans break the binding that holds the world together, the binding agreement that blinds one to other possibilities. Carol said that the act of performing the magical passes for Not-Doing creates a forced dissonance. What horizontality does to vertical beings is devastating to the bindings of their cognitive system. "Urban beings tend to sit alot. Some muscles that you have never used before will be awakened today. These movements tap the central force that binds together our being." Carol concluded her morning lecture with, "Let's DO IT!" After she left, workshop participants spread out across the room. Imagine 850 people lying on mats; six monstrous screens, at least one or two of which can be seen from anywhere in the room, are projecting the image of two Elements lying head to toe on a platform. The lights are dimmed to a diffuse orangish glow in the center of the room. The two Elements begin to demonstrate the first series of passes, The Running Man. Elements on the other platforms provide contrast to the straight-down view on the screens. But the view on the screens is riveting. There's a weightless quality to the image, as if the two Elements are in outer space. Scenes broadcast from the Space Shuttle come to mind. After having stood up for two days doing passes, 'time' itself took on a whole new quality as participants lay on their mats in the dimly lit room and began the first series of Not-Doing passes. (It's time once again to point out that this account is by no means complete. In fact, as someone pointed out recently, it doesn't capture much of Florinda, Taisha and Carol's humor at all, darn it! So, corrections and additions are welcome. :-) DAY THREE (afternoon, evening) Standing up after a morning of doing the Running Man series, some participants commented on feeling a bit untethered. There was also mention of popping off into dreams and blank spaces experienced in the sequence of time during 'lulls'. Carol's afternoon lecture was the last one of the day. At its conclusion, the Energy Trackers came out and taught the next series, On the Run. When participants returned from a dinner break, the Elements taught Unbending Purpose, the third series of Not-Doing passes, to end the day. After the lunch break, Carol strolled back in wearing a black dress with what looked like white pictographs of some sort on it. She mounted the platform and walked around the podium smiling as she greeted participants and stated her name. Back behind the podium, she took out her notes, opened her water bottles, and launched off into her lecture. She began with a few words about her identity and the 'identity crisis' her and her cohorts were experiencing. The issue was one that they had all brought up at the beginning of each lecture. They were becoming unknown to themselves. Carol went on to talk about our being members of western civilization. She said that because we have been brought up and socialized as members of western civilization we always place the blame for things on somebody else. We do not take responsibility for our actions. She said that this is the price tag of being at the mercy of energy and awareness other than our own. All of our social molds have been taken from Bobby, and as a result we have become just like him; petty, sluggish, lazy and unwilling to take responsibility. She talked again about Carlos' recent breakthrough to a new vibratory level and what it meant for them. She said the implications were staggering and that they may not be able to formulate what exactly it means for some time, if ever. She said again that vibration is key to everything, and that they were learning new things about it and its relationship to everything they knew about energy and awareness. Carol then related something that Carlos said to her recently that was the most exquisite thing she had ever heard. He had grabbed her by the arm and said very movingly, "I never thought I'd live forever . . . let's do it!" It has since become an axiom which guides them. After a short hush and light applause, Carol returned to the subject of the Not-Doing passes. "The Running man must be known perfectly," she said. "The energetic fact of the Running Man is that one is dipping into the fringe, or into the stream, of awareness. The old nagual said that the fringe of awareness is attached to the bottom of the luminous cocoon." It is an ankle-high area around the feet, like a skirt, through which we can dip into the Dark Sea of Awareness. "We have no inventory for energy fields," she went on to say. "They are not part of our socialized cognitive system." You cannot say that you know what it's like to see energy because the possibility does not exist within our cognition. It is outside the uninterrupted flow of our cognitive experience. Carol said that scientists and physicists were creating all these very complex mathematical equations to represent something that could not, under any circumstances, be understood through socialized cognitive effort. She said that what they were trying to understand existed beneath and behind, between the 'fractions' of, their equations. When, through the practice of not-doing, one experiences a 'lull', the whole works stop. There is an energetic halt. Carol explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico were experts at making practical use of this 'lull'. She said that it made them move faster. They were able to bring about the halt . . . and then run . . . halt . . . run . . . in a place that existed only between the 'fractions'. The ancient shamans understood the impetus of people's actions. They knew the Not-Doing of things, how to be calm and listen to whatever is said. To take ordinary daily life situations and turn them around, transforming them into something extraordinary. Returning to the subject of the Running Man series, Carol said the old nagual maintained that one had to be able to perform it to perfection. He said that in teaching them to perform the passes for Not-Doing he was showing them how to begin stirring the shallow stream of awareness in order to start a new generation of the glow of awareness. The passes for Not-Doing actually stir the shallow stream of awareness, our only avenue to the Dark Sea. She explained, like a medical professor, that in performing the Running Man and On the Run series we were bringing energy and awareness up, splashing it onto our legs and intentionally bringing it even further up the body to our vital centers (the liver, gallbladder, spleen, pancreas, V-spot, and womb for women). She stressed that this progressive movement of energy and awareness upward had to be accompanied by a sense of increased discipline and behavioral change. Carol went on to discuss what it had been like for her to 'have all this new energy' from practicing the magical passes, too much energy, and how she had not been able to use it to go in the direction she wanted to, that she hadn't known how to harness it. She told the audience that she stayed awake far too much, which seemed to her like a terrible waste of all this good energy because she wanted to be able to use it for dreaming and other sorceric activities. The old nagual said it was the plight of the western mind to be overly absorbed in a sense of unyielding self-concern. He told her that we've all been reared to only search through a small range of possibilities. Having an unusual amount of energy and knowing how to utilize it was not one of them. Don Juan told her how stimulants create an acidic condition in the body. He said that this condition was not conducive to harnessing the unusual amount of energy that comes from practicing the magical passes. Don Juan said that acidity -- caused by using too many stimulants; sugar, coffee, etc. -- keeps us awake. "Do the Running Man instead," Carol admonished audience. She went on to talk about the On the Run series, and how its original Spanish name meant 'fugitive'. She said that the practice of the On the Run passes create a strange heat or agitation. Carol said the old sorcerers were obsessed with controlling the 'lull' and the strange force that it is. Her and her cohorts drove themselves bonkers trying to figure out a way to handle it and never did. "We have to break free," she said, "to go on this journey of awareness." She emphasized the way the movements are to be performed, saying that, "The jolting style of the arm is the essence." She described how tendon energy is what actually shakes loose encrusted energy on the outside of the luminous sphere. She told the audience that they need to use intent to focus tendon energy on various areas of the encrusted shell to aid in redistribution of energy to the vital centers. This use of tendon energy is how we can tap the central binding force that holds our entire being together. Carol continued talking about the Running Man movements and how pass #3 is an example of bringing energy up from around the feet to the vital centers. She said that verticality creates an energy spill on the ground around us. Horizontality, combined with the passes for Not-Doing, helps repool this energy spill and redistribute it to places where it will do some good -- our vital energy centers. Carol said that warriors weren't built in a day. (One note of caution in doing the passes, she said, is that the jerk is preferred when it comes to tendon energy.) Carol stressed the practical functionality Tensegrity practice had for the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage. "I am here to close the topic of Not-Doing," she continued. "The policy of Tensegrity is saturation. After a while, warriors realize that they don't need anyone to help them. All that is needed is time and determination, and the Dark Sea of Awareness will determine what is what." Carol told a story of how don Juan gave Carlos something to try. He told him that man is a being deeply connected to the ground. He said there were a multitude of strange energies that ran only along the ground. He told Carlos to find the tallest building he could find and experiment. He said to go up in the building and find a particular floor where these energies ceased to have as deep a hold and then work his way down one story at a time until he noticed a distinct difference. Carol said Carlos asked her if she wanted to go somewhere with him, but wouldn't tell her where. He took her up into a large building. When they exited the elevator on the 12th floor of this high-rise, Carlos lay down on the floor. He explained to Carol that the ground has unusual energies, energies capable of tapping the binding force. She went into a demonstration of what she felt like and how awkward it was for her to be there with him laying down on the floor in the middle of this office building. She was so afraid that someone was going to come along and see him there. Carol's demonstration of the anxiety she felt was hair raising. 'What's going to happen to me?' was the theme of it. She was so filled with concern for herself and what others would think that she was beside herself. She was not yet capable at that age of breaking free to see the wonder in what the new nagual was trying to achieve. "But now," she said with fierce determination in her voice, "after a lifetime of remaking ourselves, we are capable of that and much more. And if we are capable of it, anyone is. Thus we gather behind an axiom of deadly use: I never thought I'd live forever . . . let’s do it!" Carol then introduced the third and final musical theme of the workshop. It was a bit more up tempo and lighter than the previous two. It's mood seemed to evoke a sense of hope, yet despair. It was more of a dance number that took the rich, heart-rending moods of the previous days and turned them upward and outward, aiming everyone's attention towards infinity. USELESS HOPE by Pedro Flores Useless hope Flower of sorrow Why do you persecute me In my loneliness? Why don't you let me Drown my yearnings In the bitter cup Of reality? Why don't you kill me By opening my eyes? Why don't you wound me With unrequited love? Useless hope If you see that I'm fooling myself Why don't you die? Why don't you die In my heart? Useless hope, Flower of my sorrow, Why don't you die In my heart? [ 1997 Index | Previous | Next ]

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