The Magical Passes

They were discovered by the ancient sorcerers. It all began with the extraordinary sensation of well-being that those sorcerers experienced when they were in states of heightened awareness. They felt such tremendous, enthralling vigor that they struggled to repeat it in their hours of vigil.

At first they believed that it was a mood of well-being that heightened awareness created in general. Soon, they found out that not all the states of heightened awareness 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.

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. The ancient sorcerers were like deep-sea divers, who without knowing it, had reclaimed that heritance.

They arduously began to piece together some of the movements they remembered. Their efforts paid off. They were capable of re-creating movements that had seemed to them to be automatic reactions of the body in a state of heightened awareness. 

Encouraged by their success, they were capable of re-creating hundreds of movements, which they performed without ever attempting to classify them into an understandable scheme. Their idea was that in heightened awareness, the movements happened spontaneously, and that there was a force that guided their effect, without the intervention of their volition.

They are not just called magical passes, they are magical! They produce an effect that cannot be accounted for by means of ordinary explanations. These movements are not physical exercises or mere postures of the body; they are real attempts at reaching an optimal state of being.

The magic of the movements is a subtle change that the practitioners experience upon executing them. It is an ephemeral quality that the movement brings to their physical and mental states, a kind of shine, a light in the eyes. This subtle change is a touch of the spirit. It is as if the practitioners, through the movements, reestablish an unused link with the life force that sustains them.

Another reason that the movements are called magical passes is that by means of practicing them, the practitioners are transported, in terms of perception, to other states of being in which they can sense the world in an indescribable manner. Because of this quality, because of this magic the passes must be practiced not as exercises, but as a way of beckoning power.

You can practice them any way you wish. The magical passes enhance awareness, regardless of how you take them. The intelligent thing would be to take them as what they are: magical passes that on being practiced lead the practitioner to drop the mask of socialization. The veneer that all of us defend and die for. The veneer we acquire in the world. The one that prevents us from reaching all our potential. The one that makes us believe we are immortal.

The intent of thousands of sorcerers permeates these movements. Executing them, even in a casual way, makes the mind come to a halt

Come to a halt

Everything that we do in the world we recognize and identify by converting it into lines of similarity, lines of things that are strung together by purpose. For example, if I say to you fork, this immediately brings to your mind the idea of spoon, knife, tablecloth, napkin, plate, cup and saucer, glass of wine, chili con came, banquet, birthday, fiesta. You could certainly go on naming things strung together by purpose, nearly forever. Everything we do is strung like this.

The strange part for sorcerers is that they see that all these lines of affinity, all these lines of things strung together by purpose, are associated with man’s idea that things are unchangeable and forever, like the word of God

It seems to be that in our minds, the entire universe is like the word of God: absolute and unchanging. This is the way we conduct ourselves. In the depths of our minds, there is a checking device that doesn’t permit us to stop to examine that the word of God, as we accept it and believe it to be, pertains to a dead world. A live world, on the other hand, is in constant flux. It moves. It changes. It reverses itself.

The most abstract reason why the magical passes of the sorcerers of my lineage are magical is that in practicing them, the body of the practitioner realizes that everything, instead of being an unbroken chain of objects that have affinity for each other, is a current, a flux. And if everything in the universe is a flux, a current, that current can be stopped. A dam can be put on it, and in this manner, its flux can be halted or deviated.

The sorcerers of my lineage were shocked half to death upon realizing that practicing their magical passes brought about the halt of the otherwise uninterrupted flux of things. They constructed a series of metaphors to describe this halt, and in their effort to explain it, or reconsider it, they flubbed it. They lapsed into ritual and ceremony. They began to enact the act of halting the flux of things. They believed that if certain ceremonies and rituals were focused on a definite aspect of their magical passes, the magical passes themselves would beckon a specific result.

Very soon, the number and complexity of their rituals and ceremonies became more encumbering than the number of their magical passes. It is very important to focus the attention of the practitioner on some definite aspect of the magical passes. However, that fixation should be light, funny, void of morbidity and grimness. It should be done for the hell of it, without really expecting returns.