Carol Tiggs' Talk at the Los Angeles Workshop 1997 - Morning

Notes by Vincent Sargenti and Randy Stark

Los Angeles Workshop, August 23 to 27, 1997

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.

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