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 bulk 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 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.
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 bear in mind when practicing Tensegrity is that MI ice 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.
The setting of modern urban life facilitates the formation of groups, and under these circumstances, the only manner in which Tensegrity can he 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