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Carlos Castaneda Interviews and Articles
Yoga Journal - Jan 1998
The following is the text of the article that appeared in the January/ February issue of the Yoga Journal. The original article contains photographs which accompany the descriptions of the 15 magical passes. I've included the text that was associated with these photos, but you may or may not be able to execute the passes without seeing the pictures.
Magical Passes by Carlos Castaneda
The first time don Juan talked to me at length about magical passes was when he made a derogatory comment about my weight.
"You are way too chubby," he said looking at me from head to toe and shaking his head in disapproval. "You are one step from being fat. Wear and tear is beginning to show in you. Like any other member of your race, you are developing a lump of fat on your neck, like a bull. It's time that you take seriously one of the sorcerers' greatest findings: the magical passes."
"What magical passes are you talking about, don Juan?" I asked. "You have never mentioned this topic to me before. Or, if you have, it must have been so lightly that I can't recall anything about it."
"Not only have I told you a great deal about magical passes," he said, "you know a great number of them already. I have been teaching them to you all along."
As far as I was concerned, it wasn't true that he had taught me any magical passes all along. I protested vehemently.
"Don't be so passionate about defending your wonderful self," he joked, making a ridiculous gesture of apology with his eyebrows. "What I meant to say is that you imitate everything I do, so I have been cashing in on your imitation capacity. I have shown you various magical passes, all along, and you have always taken them to be my delight in cracking my joints. I like the way you interpret them: cracking my joints! We're going to keep on referring to them in that manner.
"I have shown you 10 different ways of cracking my joints," he continued. "Each one of them is a magical pass that fits to perfection my body, and yours. You could say that those 10 magical passes are in your line, and mine. They belong to us personally and individually, as they belonged to other sorcerers who were just like the two of us in the 25 generations that preceded us."
The magical passes don Juan was referring to, as he himself had said, were ways in which I thought cracked his joints. He used to move his arms, legs, torso, and hips in specific ways, I thought, in order to create a maximum stretch of his muscles, bones, and ligaments. The result of these stretching movements, from my point of view, was a succession of cracking sounds which I always thought that he was producing for my amazement and amusement.
He, indeed, had asked me time and time again to imitate him. In a challenging manner, he had even dared me to memorize the movements and repeat them at home until I could get my joints to make cracking noises, just like his.
I had never succeeded in reproducing the sounds, yet I had definitely but unwittingly learned all the movements. I know now that not achieving that cracking sound was a blessing in disguise, because the muscles and tendons of the arms and back should never be stressed to that point. Don Juan was born with a facility to crack the joints of his arms and back, just as some people have the facility to crack their knuckles.
"How did the old sorcerers invent those magical passes, don Juan?" I asked.
"Nobody invented them," he said sternly. "To think that they were invented implies instantly the intervention of the mind, and this is not the case when it comes to those magical passes. They were, rather, discovered by the old shamans. I was told that it all began with the extraordinary sensation of well-being that those shamans experienced when they were in shamanistic states of heightened awareness. They felt such tremendous, enthralling vigor that they struggled to repeat it in their hours of vigil.
"At first, those shamans believed," don Juan explained to me once, "that it was a mood of well-being that heightened awareness created in general. Soon, they found out that not all the states of shamanistic heightened awareness which they entered produced in them the same sensation of well-being.
"A more careful scrutiny revealed to them that whenever that sensation of well-being occurred, they had always been engaged in some specific kind of bodily movement. They realized that while they were in states of heightened awareness, their bodies moved involuntarily in certain ways, and that those certain ways were indeed the cause of that unusual sensation of physical and mental plenitude."
Don Juan speculated that it had always appeared to him that the movements that the bodies of those shamans executed automatically in heightened awareness were a sort of hidden heritage of mankind, something that had been put in deep storage, to be revealed only to those who were looking for it. He portrayed those sorcerers as deep-sea divers, who without knowing it, reclaimed it.
Tensegrity
Tensegrity is the modern version of the magical passes of the shamans of ancient Mexico. The word Tensegrity is most appropriate for defining it, 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 this mysterious and vast subject of the magical passes could be 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 posture, 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 who founded 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 reinforced our perception of the world and kept it fixed at a certain level of efficiency and function was 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 thus acquiring an extraordinary fluidity of perception."
Reestablishing the criterion of saturation by performing the long series gave, as a result, something which don Juan had already defined as the modem 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 which they 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 the recapitulation, or the purpose of inner silence, etc.-- creating in this fashion the Tensegrity series. In this manner, a system has been obtained in which the best results are sought 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 amount 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 amount 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, or 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 execution of the magical passes doesn't necessarily require a particular space or prearranged time. However, the movements should be 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.
Something else to bear 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 be 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 be.
Inner Silence
Don Juan said that inner silence was the state most avidly sought by the shamans of ancient Mexico. He defined it as a natural state of human perception in which thoughts were blocked off, and all of man's faculties operated from a level of awareness which didn't require the utilization of our daily cognitive system.
Inner silence has always been associated with darkness for the shamans of don Juan's lineage, perhaps because human perception, deprived of its habitual companion, the internal dialogue, falls into something that resembled a dark pit. He said that the body functioned as usual, but awareness became sharper. Decisions were instantaneous, and seemed to stem from a special sort of knowledge which was deprived of thought-verbalizations.
Inner silence, in don Juan's understanding, was the matrix for a gigantic step of evolution: silent knowledge, or the level of human awareness where knowing was automatic and instantaneous. Knowledge at this levels was not the product of cerebral cogitation or logical induction and deduction, or of generalizations based on similarities and dissimilarities.
There was nothing a priori at the level of silent knowledge, nothing that could constitute a body of knowledge, for everything was imminently now. Complex pieces of information could be grasped without any cognitive preliminaries.
Don Juan Matus taught the hard line of his lineage: that inner silence must be gained by a consistent pressure of discipline. It had to be accrued, or it had to be stored, bit by bit, second by second. In other words; one had to force oneself to be silent, even if it was only for a few seconds.
According to don Juan, it was common knowledge among sorcerers that if one persisted in this, persistence overcame habit, and thus it was possible to arrive at a threshold of accrued seconds or minutes, which differed from person to person. If the threshold of inner silence was for any given individual, for instance, 10 minutes, once this threshold. was reached, inner silence happened by itself, of its own accord, so to speak.
I was warned beforehand that there was no possible way of knowing what my individual threshold might be, and that the only way of finding this out was through direct experience. This is exactly what happened to me. Following don Juan's suggestion, I had persisted in forcing myself to remain silent, and one day, while walking at UCLA, I reached my mysterious threshold.
I knew I had reached it, because in one instant, I experienced something don Juan had described it at length to me. He had called it stopping the world. In the blink of an eye, the world ceased to be what it was, and for the first time in my life, I became conscious that I was seeing energy as it flowed in the universe. I had to sit down on some brick steps. I knew that I was sitting on some brick steps, but I knew it only intellectually, through memory.
Experientially, I was resting on energy. I myself was energy, and so was everything around me. I had canceled out my interpretation system.
After seeing energy directly, I realized something which became the horror of my day, something that no one could explain to me satisfactorily except don Juan. I became conscious that although I was seeing for the first time in my life, I had been seeing energy as it flows in the universe all my life, but I had not been conscious of it.
To see energy as it flows in the universe was not the novelty. The novelty was the query that arose with such fury that it made me surface back into the world of everyday life. I asked myself what had been keeping me from realizing that I had been seeing energy as it flows in the universe all my life.
"There are two issues at stake here," don Juan explained to me, when I asked him about this maddening contradiction. "One is general awareness. The other is particular, deliberate consciousness. Every human being in the world is aware, in general terms, of seeing energy as it flows in the universe.
"However, only sorcerers are particularly and deliberately conscious of it. To become conscious of something that you are generally aware of requires energy, and the iron-hand discipline needed to get it. Your inner silence, the product of discipline and energy, bridged the gap between general awareness and particular consciousness."
Don Juan stressed, in every way he was able, the value of a pragmatic attitude in order to buttress the advent of inner silence. He defined a pragmatic attitude as the capacity to absorb any contingency that might appear along the way. He himself was, to me, the living example of such an attitude. There wasn't any uncertainty or liability that his mere presence would not dispel.
He reiterated every time he could that the effects of inner silence were very unsettling, and that the only deterrent to this condition was the pragmatic attitude which was the product of a superbly pliable, agile, strong body. He said that for sorcerers, the physical body was the only entity that made any sense to them, and that there was no such thing as a dualism between body and mind.
He further stated that the physical body involved both the body and the mind as we knew them, and that in order to counterbalance the physical body as a holistic unit, sorcerers considered another configuration of energy which was reached through inner silence: the energy body. He explained that what I had experience: at the moment in which I had stopped the world was the resurgence of my energy body, and that this configuration of energy was the one which had always been able to see energy as it flowed in the universe.
1 - Drawing Two Half-Circles with Each Foot:
The total weight of the body is on the right leg. The left foot is placed half a step in front of it, and it slides on the floor, drawing a half circle to the left; the ball of the foot comes to rest almost touching the right heel. From there, it draws another half circle to the back. These circles are drawn with the ball of the left foot. The heel is kept off the ground, in order to make the movement smooth and uniform. The movement is reversed and two more half-circles are drawn in this fashion, starting from the back and going to the front.
The same movements are executed with the right foot after the whole weight of the body is transferred to the left leg. The knee of the leg that supports the weight is bent for strength and stability.
2 - Drawing a Half-Moon with Each Foot:
The weight of the body is placed on the right leg. The left foot goes half a step in front of the right one, drawing a wide semicircle on the ground around the body from the front, to the left, to the back of the body. This semicircle is drawn with the ball of the foot. Another semicircle is drawn from the back to the front, in the same fashion. The same movements are executed with the right leg, after transferring the weight to the left leg.
3 - Scarecrow In the Wind with the Arms Down:
The arms are kept extended laterally at the level 6f the shoulders with the elbows bent and the forearms dangling downward at a strict 90-degree angle. The forearms swing freely from side to side, as if moved by the wind alone. The forearms and the wrists are kept straight and vertical. The knees are locked, but in a gentle way, without unnecessary force.
4 - Scarecrow in the Wind with the Arms Up:
Just as in the preceding magical pass, the arms are extended laterally at the level of the shoulders, except the forearms are turned upward, bent at a 90-degree angle. The forearms and wrists are kept straight and vertical. Then they swing freely downward to the front, and upward again. The knees are gently locked.
5 - Pushing Energy Backward with the Full Arm:
The elbows are acutely bent, and the forearms held tight against the sides of the body, as high as possible, holding the hands in a fist. The forearms are fully extended downward and backward as high as possible. The knees are locked, and the trunk bends slightly forward as the air is exhaled. As an inhalation is made, the arms are then brought forward to the original position by bending the elbows.
Then the breathing is reversed as this movement is repeated; instead of exhaling as the arms are pulled backwards, an inhalation is taken. An exhalation follows as the elbows are bent, and the forearms are brought upward against the axilla.
6 - Pivoting the Forearm:
The arms are held in front of the body with the elbows bent and the forearms vertical. Each hand is bent at the wrist, resembling the head of a bird, which is at eye level, with the fingers pointing toward the face. Keeping the elbows vertical and straight, the wrists are flipped back and forth, pivoting on the forearms, making the fingers of the hands move from pointing at the face to pointing onward. The knees are kept bent for stability and strength.
7 - Moving Energy in a Ripple:
The knees are kept straight, and the trunk stoops over. Both arms are kept dangling at the sides. The left arm moves forward with three ripples of the hand, as if the hand were following the contour of a surface with three half-circles on it. Then the hand cuts across the front of the body in a straight line from left to right and then from right to left, and moves backward at the side of the body with three more ripples, drawing in this fashion the thick shape of an inverted capital letter L-- at least six inches thick. The same movements are repeated with the right arm.
8 - The T Energy of the Hands:
The two forearms are held at right angles in front of the solar plexus, making the shape of a letter T. The left hand is the horizontal bar of the letter T with the palm turned upward. The right hand is the vertical bar of the letter T with the palm turned downward. Next, the hands turn back and forth at the same time with considerable force. The palm of the left hand is turned to face downward, and the palm of the right hand is turned to face upward, both hands maintaining the same letter T shape.
This same movement is executed again, placing the right hand as the horizontal bar of the letter and the left hand as the vertical one.
9 - Pressing Energy with the Thumbs:
The forearms, bent at the elbows, are held in front of the body in perfectly horizontal position, maintaining the width of the body. The fingers are curled in a loose fist, and the thumbs are held straight, cradled on the curled index fingers. An intermittent pressure is exerted between the thumb against the index finger and the curled fingers against the palm of the hand. They contract and relax, spreading the impulse to the arms. The knees are kept bent for stability.
10 - Drawing an Acute Angle with the Arms Between the Legs:
The knees are gently locked, with the hamstrings held tight. The trunk is bent forward, with the head almost at the level of the knees. The arms dangle in front and, moving repeatedly forward and backward, they draw an cute angle, with its vertex between the legs.
11 - Drawing an Acute Angle with the Arms in Front of the Face:
The knees are locked, with the hamstrings as tight as possible. The trunk is bent forward, with the head almost at the level of the knees. The arms dangle in front of the body and, moving repeatedly from the back to the front, they draw an acute angle, with its vertex in front of the face.
12 - Drawing a Circle of Energy Between the Legs and In Front of the Body:
The knees are kept gently locked, with the hamstrings held tight. The trunk is bent forward, with the head almost at the level of the knees. The arms dangle in front of the body. The two arms cross at the wrists, the left forearm on top of the right one. The crossed arms swing back between the legs. From there, each one makes an outward circle in front of the face, ending with the left wrist on top of the right one. From there, they draw two inward circles that end between the legs, with the wrists crossed once more in the initial position. Then the right wrist is made to rest on top of the left one, and the same movements are repeated.
13 - Three Fingers on the Floor:
The arms are brought slowly over the head as a deep inhalation is taken. A slow exhalation begins while the arms are brought all the way down to the floor, keeping the knees locked and the ham-strings as tight as possible. The index and middle fingers of each hand touch the floor a foot in front of the body, and then the thumb is also brought to rest on the floor. A deep inhalation is taken, holding that position. The body straightens, and the arms are raised above the head. The air is exhaled as the arms come down to the level of the waist.
14 - The Knuckles on the Toes:
The arms are raised above the head as a deep inhalation is taken. As the air is exhaled, the arms are brought all the way down to the floor, keeping the knees locked and the hamstrings as tight as possible. The knuckles are brought to rest on top of the toes as the exhalation ends. A deep inhalation is taken while holding that position. The body straightens, and the arms are raised above the head. The exhalation begins when the arms are brought down to the level of waist.
15 - Drawing Energy from the Floor with the Breath:
A deep inhalation is taken as the arms are raised above the head; the knees are kept bent. The exhalation begins as the trunk turns to the left, and bends down as far as possible. The hands, with the palms down, come to rest around the left foot, with the right hand in front of the foot and the left hand behind it; they move back and forth five times as the exhalation ends. A deep inhalation is taken then, and the body straightens as the arms move over the head. The trunk turns to the right, and the exhalation begins as the trunk bends down as far as possible. The exhalation ends after the hands move back and forth five times by the right foot. Another deep breath is taken, and the body straightens up as the arms move above the head and the trunk pivots to face the front; then the arms come down as the air is exhaled.
Carlos Castaneda is author of The Art of Dreaming and other books.
From the book Magical Passes by Carlos Castaneda, published by Harper
Collins Publishers Inc. Copyright 1998 by Carlos Castaneda.