The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (29 page)

My brain continued to produce worlds; it was an immense hurricane of creative madness. The “I” lived within a multifaceted demented god. Reason was a small boat sailing an infinite ocean, rocked by every storm, traversed by every entity, angelic or demonic, there was no distinction; by every language, living, dead, or as yet uncreated; by the inconceivable multitude of forms; by the absolute dismembering of unity.

After this extreme vision, which in certain ways I used to create my
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books, I did not dream again for a long time. Lucid dreams started to become a popular topic, first in the United States, then worldwide. There was even an American who tried to sell machines that could produce them. Several books were published, some of them serious, others less so, as in the case of one author who claimed to have magical powers. I read the books avidly. They helped me to understand something fundamental: people who describe their lucid dreams describe things that correspond to their level of consciousness and to their beliefs. If they are Catholic, for example, they see Christ with great emotion. If they have some form of morality, the messages in their dreams will corroborate it. I remembered having a conversation with a psychoanalyst friend who gave me examples of dreams: the patients of Freudian analysts had dreams with sexual symbols in them, Jungians had mandalas and shape shifting, Lacanians had word games, and so on. That is to say, they dream in accordance with their analysts’ theories, which for them have the power of dogma. I realized that something similar happened with lucid dreaming: a pretentious writer will direct her consciousness within the dream like a pretentious person; a mythomaniacal ethnologist will create adventures in his dream world in which he holds the nontransmissible secrets of indigenous magic. I examined my vision of the creative center. When I became one with it, I had eight gates. That is, a double square. Tocopilla! Toco: double square. Pilla: devil consciousness. Was it a coincidence? Had the Quechuas dreamed my same dream? Does the eternal creator, Pillán, communicate with other creators through his eight bridges? Either that or the name of my hometown had influenced my images. Why not nine gates, or ten, or a thousand?

I decided to proceed with the greatest of caution. I had reached the peak of the mountain: I had blended myself into mad universal creation. What more could I want? For what purpose was I trying to modify my dreams? If I wanted to achieve something useful, I would do better to modify the dreamer, the being who is awake, who introduces himself into the dream world in order to try to control it. To do this, I had to undertake some other experiences, following a different path in the dream.

I observed that remaining conscious during the lucid dream required a considerable effort. Ultimately, the great lesson I learned was less about the extraordinary world I was able to create than about this requirement of lucidity. Without lucidity, nothing was possible. From the moment that I let myself be drawn into events, feeling the emotions they aroused in me, the dream absorbed me, and I lost the clarity. The magic only worked at a distance; what made the game possible was the clarity of the witness, while fusion with events narrowed the field of possibilities. I told myself, “Dreams have a reason for being. As products of universal creation, they are perfect; there is nothing to remove from them or add to them. The spider in itself is not terrible; it is only so to the fly. If I have overcome fear, the dream world does not have to affect me. And if I have conquered vanity and I see sublime images, they should not alter me either. In fact, the person who wakes up in the dream is not a superior being endowed with fabulous powers, it is a consciousness whose role is to become an impassive witness. If one intervenes in dreams, in the beginning one does so to experience an unknown reality, but later vanity can lead one into a trap. The microbe that is conscious of the Caribbean is not the Caribbean. Divinity can be me and continue being itself; I cannot be divinity and continue being myself.” I decided then to set aside my will and surrender to the lucid dream as an observer. I should mention that being the observer does not mean removing oneself from the action, it means to live through it indifferently; if a beast attacks me, I defend myself without fear. If it wins, I let it devour me and observe what it means to be mauled. At the beginning of these new experiences, I found myself in situations where I could kill. I did not. While awake I am not a criminal, so why should I be in the dream? As a result of my work, which extended over several years, many things in my primitive personality were vanquished. By deciding not to intervene in the events in my dreams, I ceased having nightmares altogether. The distressing, disgusting, and perverse images also stopped. It seems that the subconscious, knowing that I was open to all its messages without wishing to defend myself or adulterate it, became my partner.

Whether or not to wake up within a dream becomes a secondary consideration. One reaches a level of consciousness where one knows that one is dreaming in all the dreams that occur. The dream images are experiences that transform us just like events in real life. Indeed, sleep and wakefulness go hand in hand so much that when speaking of them we refer to a single world. One stops searching for detachment, for lucidity, and humbly accepts the blessing. Lucid dreams become happy dreams. But this cannot be achieved all at once; one must pass through different stages. In my case, once I stopped playing the magician and had tamed my nightmares, turning every menace into an ally, into a gift, into positive energy, I began to dream of transforming myself into my own therapist. I healed emotional wounds and alleviated deficiencies. For example:

I am lying naked in my bedroom, just as it is in reality: a room with white walls and curtains. A bed made of boards, a hard mattress, a bedside table, a chair, and a small wardrobe, nothing more. No decorations. My father appears, the same age as me. He is on his bicycle, with a box full of merchandise on the rear fender: women’s underwear, ties, trinkets. He is dressed in a suit copied from a photograph of Stalin. He asks me, with an intense expression of surprise, what I am doing here. I reply, “I am your son, you’re not in Matucana. Now you live in my level of consciousness. Leave that bike behind; you’re not a merchant, you’re a human being. Forget your communist uniform and recognize that you’re worshiping a false hero.”

As I speak, the bicycle disappears, as does his suit. He is naked. I approach him with open arms. He draws back in fear or disgust.

“Calm down, stop being ashamed of your penis. I’ve known it’s small for ages; it doesn’t matter. Filial love exists, and so does paternal love. You were so afraid of turning out gay like your brother you eliminated all physical contact between us. Men don’t touch each other, you said. And throughout my childhood, you never gave me a hug, never kissed me. You made me fear you, nothing more. At the slightest fault, you hit me or yelled at me in rage. It is a mistake to build paternity on a foundation of fear. I want love, not terror, to be what binds me to you. I was a victim as a child, but now that I’m grown I will hold you in my arms and you’ll do the same.” And without fear, I take him in my arms, kiss him, and then rock him like a toddler. And as he quiets down, I feel the surprising strength of his back.

Now he is a hundred years old, and so am I! We are two old men, tough, full of energy. “Love extends life, my father!” I still rock him, boldly, tenderly. “Because you never communicated with me through touch, I also refused all physical contact with my son, Axel Cristóbal.” And now my son appears, the same age as I am in the dream, twenty-six years old. I caress him with great tenderness and ask him to cradle me as I have just cradled my father. He takes me in his arms, weeping with happiness, as do I . . .

Then I woke up. My son telephoned me and suggested that we have breakfast together. I told him to come and see me. As soon as I opened the door, I embraced him. He was not surprised and returned equal affection, as if we had communicated physically all his life. I explained the dream and asked him if he felt that he could give nurture as well as receiving it.

“Hold me like a child and rock me, whispering a lullaby.”

At first Cristóbal did so timidly, but little by little, he was touched, and we established a contact in which filial and paternal love intermingled indivisibly. Finally, there is prosperity and peace in our relationship.

Naturally, without intending to, I transitioned from these dreams in which I healed myself to some in which I cared for others:

I am flying over the Champs-Élysées Avenue in Paris. Below me, thousands of people are marching, demanding world peace. They carry a cardboard dove a kilometer long with its wings and chest stained with blood. I begin to circle around them to get their attention. The people, astonished, point up at me, seeing me levitate. Then I ask them to join hands and form a chain so that they can fly with me. I gently take one hand and lift. The others, still holding hands, also rise up. I fly through the air, drawing beautiful figures with this human chain. The cardboard dove follows us. Its bloodstains have vanished. I wake up with the feeling of peace and joy that comes from good dreams.

Three days later, while walking with my children along the Champs-Élysées Avenue, I saw an elderly gentleman under the trees near the obelisk whose entire body was covered by sparrows. He was sitting completely still on one of the metal benches put there by the city council with his hand outstretched, holding out a piece of cake. There were birds flitting around tearing off crumbs while others waited their turn, lovingly perched on his head, his shoulders, his legs. There were hundreds of birds. I was surprised to see tourists passing by without paying much attention to what I considered a miracle. Unable to contain my curiosity, I approached the old man. As soon as I got within a couple of meters of him, all the sparrows flew away to take refuge in the tree branches.

“Excuse me,” I said, “how does this happen?”

The gentleman answered me amiably.

“I come here every year at this time of the season. The birds know me. They pass on the memory of my person through their generations. I make the cake that I offer. I know what they like and what ingredients to use. The arm and hand must be still and the wrist tilted so that they can clearly see the food. And then, when they come, stop thinking and love them very much. Would you like to try?”

I asked my children to sit and wait on a nearby bench. I took the piece of cake, reached my hand out, and stood still. No sparrow dared approach. The kind old man stood beside me and took my hand. Immediately, some of the birds came and landed on my head, shoulders, and arm, while others pecked at the treat. The gentleman let go of me. Immediately the birds fled. He took my hand and asked me to take my son’s hand, and he another hand, so that my children formed a chain. We did. The birds returned and perched fearlessly on our bodies. Every time the old man let go of us, the sparrows fled. I realized that for the birds when their benefactor, full of goodness, took us by the hand, we became part of him. When he let go of us, we went back to being ourselves, frightening humans. I did not want to disrupt the work of this saintly man any longer. I offered him money. He absolutely would not accept. I never saw him again. Thanks to him, I understood certain passages of the Gospels: Jesus blesses children without uttering any prayer, just by putting his hands on them (Matthew 19:13–15). In Mark 16:18, the Messiah commands his apostles, “They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” St. John the Apostle says mysteriously in his first epistle, 1.1, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.”

There was an amazing coincidence between my lucid dreams and the bird man. In a certain way, the same laws operate in the waking world as in the world of dreams. Someone who has achieved conscious detachment through humility and love in order to be useful to others, communicating his level to them, must not only unite with them spiritually but also physically. The soul can be transmitted through physical contact. This was the beginning of the development of what I later called “initiatory massage.” I told myself, the method by which Jesus touched the children, placing his hands on them and conveying his doctrine without saying a word, was not the method of a doctor. The doctor listens to a biological machine and discovers an illness there; this is not a communication from soul to soul but from body to body. Nor did Jesus act as a soldier, a guard, a warrior, or a master, people who command our bodies by imposing their rules, beating us, terrorizing us, humiliating us, and limiting our freedom. Nor did he act as a seducer, giving the body a purely sexual or emotional significance. He considered those things secondary and made his hands the continuation of his spirit; he transmitted consciousness through physical contact. Was this possible? To do this, he had to defeat the intellectual center that brings about the doctor’s attitude, the sexual center that produces lasciviousness, and the physical center with its animal nature engendering abuses of power.

I concentrated on my hands and felt the power of evolution in them, those millions of years it took for them to become human, emerging from hooves and paws, evolving from the prehensile fingers to the opposable thumb, developing into extremities that not only manipulate instruments and seek food, shelter, and touch, but that can also transmit spiritual energy . . . Desiring to awaken this sensibility, I had the idea of putting my hands in contact with sacred symbols or beneficent idols. I stood before the Aztec solar calendar in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. This great granite wheel on which the mysterious wisdom of an ancient civilization is engraved is a mandala with a face in the center surrounded by an inner circle of twenty symbols, with another circle on the edge formed by two serpents with their tails joined together at the top and their human faces forehead to forehead at the bottom. This mandala, today a symbol of the Mexican nation, drew me like a magnet. In the inexplicable dance of reality the room in which the monument was exhibited among other sculptures, also of immense value, was momentarily empty of visitors and the guard was absent, perhaps having gone to relieve himself. I was alone with the calendar. I stepped over the barrier and put my hands on the center, right on the bas-relief face that looks out at the viewer (the faces of the two snakes are presented in profile). As soon as I placed my hands on that surface, a chill ran through my body. I do not claim that the mandala produced it; it may have been a psychological reaction, not caused by the stone. However, wherever it came from, a tremendous energy filled my cells. My vision changed, and I no longer saw this monument as a disc, but as a cone. The apex was the face that was under my hands and the base, a hundred meters distant, was composed of the two serpents that formed the outer circle. That is to say, the stone began at the animal level and rose in twenty rings, each one formed by an encircling symbol, until reaching the angelic/demonic consciousness represented by the forward-facing face. I felt that this face, bright as a sun, looked at me as if I were its mirror. I felt that the body of a serpent was growing behind it. And if I was its reflection, my spirit also had the body of a serpent: two snakes in profile forming a circle, and now two snakes facing forward, this face and I forming another circle because in addition to this union at the top our animal natures were also intermingling at the roots, far down below. This intense experience lasted about five minutes. Then I heard the footsteps of the guard and also a large group of tourists. The room filled with people. I left the museum feeling like a different person.