The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (51 page)

Life is a source of health, but this energy comes forth only where we concentrate our attention. This attention must be not only mental but also emotional, sexual, and corporeal. The power does not lie in the past or in the future, which are the seats of illness. Health is found here and now. Toxic habits can be abandoned instantaneously if we cease to identify ourselves with the past. The power of the “now” grows with the sensory attention. The patient must be led to explore the present moment, to become aware of colors, lines, volumes, sizes, shadows, spaces between objects. One should feel every part of one’s body in order then to unite the parts into a whole; breathing should become pleasure, and one should capture its warmth and energy flowing in and out and understand that to love is to be happy with what one is and with what others are. Love grows to the extent that criticism decreases. Everything is alive, awake, and responding. Everything gains power if the patient bestows it . . . A mother using a phytotherapeutic treatment to heal her baby, in which she had to give him water to drink with forty drops of a mixture of essential oils added, found that the disease continued. I told her, “What is happening is that you do not believe in this medicine. Since your religion is Catholicism, say the Lord’s Prayer every time you give him the drops to drink.” She did this, and the boy was quickly cured. If we do not give spiritual power to medicine, it does not act.

Here, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of imagination. In a certain way, I have undertaken an exercise of imaginary autobiography in this book. This was not in the “fictional” sense, since all the characters, places, and events are real, but by virtue of the fact that the profound history of my life is a constant effort to expand the imagination and widen its boundaries in order to grasp its therapeutic and transformative potential. Along with intellectual imagination are emotional imagination, sexual imagination, physical imagination, sensory imagination, and economic, mystical, scientific, and poetic imaginations. It acts in all areas of our lives, even those considered “rational.” It is for this reason that one cannot tackle reality without developing the imagination from multiple angles. Normally, we visualize everything according to the narrow limits of our conditioned beliefs. We perceive nothing more of the mysterious reality, so vast and unpredictable, than what is filtered through our limited point of view.
Active imagination
is the key to a broad vision: it permits us to focus on life from angles that are not our own,
imagining
other levels of consciousness that are higher than ours. If I were a mountain, or the planet, or the universe, what would I say? What would a great teacher say? And what if God spoke through my mouth, what would the message be? And what if I were Death? The Death that revealed a dog to me that deposited a white stone at my feet, that separated me from my illusory “I,” that made me flee Chile, that drove me to search with desperation for a meaning in life—that Death has changed from a dreadful enemy to my amiable companion.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, age 72. Photo: Roger Farin.

To conclude this book, I would like to return to my youth, sitting once again on the branch of a tree next to my poet friend, and, as on that memorable occasion, deduce from the many things that we do not know what precious little we do know:

I do not know where I’m going, but I know who I am going with.

I do not know where I am, but I know that I am in myself.

I do not know what God is, but God knows what I am.

I do not know what the world is, but I know it is mine.

I do not know what I’m worth, but I know not to compare myself.

I do not know what love is, but I know that I rejoice at its existence.

I cannot avoid blows, but I know how to resist them.

I cannot deny violence, but I can deny cruelty.

I cannot change the world, but I can change myself.

I do not know what I make, but I know that what I make makes me.

I do not know who I am, but I know that I am not the one who does not know.

APPENDIX I

Psychomagical Acts

Transcribed by Marianne Costa

1. A young man would like to work in the tourism industry, going to Hong Kong and other legendary cities. But this professional desire seems impossible. He doubts himself. After questioning him, A.J. found that the client’s mother had died and that during childhood his brother had captured all the maternal love.

Response
: On one side of a can of sardines stick a picture of your mother, and on the other side, a picture of your brother. Walk along the right-hand side of Champs-Élysées, from the Obelisk of Luxor to the Arc de Triomphe, kicking the can along in front of you until you reach the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then leave without looking back.

2. After this young man, a young woman came in to consult. She is his girlfriend, but their relationship has not gone beyond the platonic. She also doubts her professional abilities, and her psychological problems are similar to those of her boyfriend: an older sister favored by the parents, a distant and perhaps incestuous father.

Response:
Do the same thing your boyfriend was advised to do, but instead of a can of sardines buy a fake phallus in a sex shop. To avoid being bothered by the police wrap it in a bag, along with a picture of your father. Walk with your boyfriend, each of you kicking your own item along. Face each other before leaving the Arc de Triomphe, with your faces an inch apart, and roar in anger until you are exhausted.

3. An Algerian woman is possessed by great sadness. The Tarot shows that this pain is that of her mother, who died in exile, separated from her homeland.

Response:
Since you cannot go there, have someone in Algeria send you a bag containing seven kilos of earth from the village where your mother lived. Go to the cemetery and deposit this soil on her grave. Then, to celebrate this event, go to the Grand Mosque and drink seven cups of mint tea.

4. Another sad woman; she does not know the joy of living. When her mother was six months pregnant with her, her father left to go and live with another woman.

Response:
Go to see your father, disguised as if you were six months pregnant. Ask him to kneel before your belly and ask forgiveness from the fetus he abandoned.

5. The client, a vegetarian pacifist, admits to having such rage against his mother that he wants to kill her.

Response:
How can you realize your desire without killing an animal? Buy two watermelons to symbolize your mother’s breasts and destroy them with your fists. Put the pieces of watermelon in a flesh-colored sack that you will make yourself. At midnight, throw the sack into the Seine and leave without looking back.

6. A young man who is professionally disoriented says he does not know what profession he should go into. When questioned, he confesses that he studied law and political science at a good school but failed to get his diploma.

Response:
Fabricate a diploma identical to what you would have received, but thirty centimeters larger in width and length. Frame it, hang it on the wall of your bedroom, and put a boxing champion’s cup under it. Then go find the job you want.

7. A thirty-year-old woman doubts herself. She is greedy, materially and emotionally.

Response:
If you live insecurely asking for things, it is because your parents, blinded by their own projections, did not see you as you truly were. Buy two nice red apples. Keep one in your bag and carry the other in your hand. Take the metro and observe the passengers. If a person, man, woman, or child, awakens in you the desire to give them the apple, do so. Keep riding the metro until you get that urge, even if it takes several days. When you have given someone the apple, leave the subway and walk along the street savoring the other apple, which you have kept in your bag. Thus you will understand that to give is to receive.

8. A thirty-year-old man cannot achieve success as a musician. As a child he studied piano, but his father, a garage mechanic, made fun of his hobby, considering it gay. He has a sister who lives symbiotically with their mother, both of them hating men. The two worlds, masculine and feminine, are separated by an abyss in their home.

Response
: You must take on your feminine sensibility in order to express yourself artistically. Cover your body with auto grease and play the piano naked, dirty like your father. Of course you will get grease on the keys. Furiously play all the melodies that you fancy then clean the keys. After this massage the piano as if it were a woman, for exactly one hour. Stick a picture of your mother on the sole of your left foot, one of your sister on your right foot, and start playing again. You will see the anger converted into creative pleasure. To thank me, bring me a white rose.

9. A fifty-year-old man cannot bear the process of divorce from his wife. Three months earlier, after living with him for eight years, his wife expressed her deep desire to become pregnant. He rejected the proposition outright. She thought it over, then suggested divorce, which he accepted calmly. But after three months he suddenly repented and proposed to his wife that they have the desired child. She was inflexible and told him she would have it with someone else. The Tarot reveals that this man has a twin brother. When asked how his relationship is with this brother, he stammers a bit and answers laconically, “Okay.”

Response
: Call your wife and tell her you do not want one child, but two. That being a twin, you could not imagine having an only child, and that was the reason why you refused to get her pregnant when she asked for “a” child. This will require you to consider: would you really want to be a father of two children? If you want that, call her. She is very likely to accept.

10. A brunette woman with large black eyes, about forty years old, has a very conflicted relationship with a coworker in the office where she works. He refuses to resolve the conflict, despite the pacifying efforts she makes.

Response:
We see in the Tarot that your relationship with your older brother was disastrous. You project this original conflict, which is very much part of you, onto your colleague. You need him to hate you, to reproduce your childhood love/hate relationship. He, in turn, must project his sister onto you. You must destabilize his view. If you see yourself differently, you will not be the object of his rage. You must go to the office as soon as possible with a different appearance: a new haircut, dyed blond, with contact lenses that make your eyes light, and a different style of clothing.

11. A woman who has moved to a new house does not feel good in her new territory; it seems alien to her. What should she do?

Response:
Put your urine in a bowl, fill a dropper with it, and put a drop in every corner of the new house.

12. A forty-year-old therapist is in a passionate but troubled relationship with a woman who feels a great aggressiveness toward men due to her having seen her father kill her mother with a hunting rifle that had been given to him by his grandfather. How to calm this hatred of men that she constantly projects onto him?

Response:
Go to see your partner carrying a hunting rifle loaded with blanks and ask her to shoot at your chest. Keep a plastic bag filled with artificial blood hidden there. When she fires, break the bag to spill the blood. Before this, you will have told her that the bullets are blanks, but will have kept the blood effect secret. You’ll see, she will burst into tears and embrace you. From that time on the relationship will improve.

13. A twenty-year-old woman consults the Tarot to see how relations are going with her lover. It seems that nothing is wrong; he has agreed to marry her and have children. But she suffers from not knowing what she wants, what she likes, what she truly feels. The Tarot reveals the strong influence of her mother, who she feels is like a vampire. How can she tell if it is really she who is seeing and thinking, or if it is her mother taking over her mind?

Response:
Enlarge a picture of your mother’s face to actual size. Cut holes in the eyes and make it into a Venetian-style mask on a stick. When you find yourself in a situation where you want to dissociate your view from that of your mother, put the mask over your face and become aware that you see and feel like her. Then take the mask off and observe how you see and how you feel things as yourself.

14. A thirty-year-old woman is still suffering as an adult from her father’s rejection of her as a child. This attitude was the result of her younger brother’s dying three weeks after being born. The father, who wanted to pass on his name, considered it unfair that his son died and not his daughter.

Response
: When your brother died, he must have weighed about three kilos. Buy a calf ’s head and, if necessary, some meat and bone to make it up to three kilos. Put this in a waterproof, airtight bag and then into a black backpack, which you will wear on your back for three full days (symbolizing the three weeks for which the boy lived). Then go to your father’s house, without him knowing, and bury your burden in the garden. Afterward, offer your father a sausage, watch him eat a few slices, and ask him to give you a box of chocolates.

15. A well-dressed lady, sixty years old, cannot get over her deep resentment toward a doctor who misdiagnosed her with Alzheimer’s disease and kept her in anguish for two years. During those years, her relationships with her children completely deteriorated. The Tarot reveals that she projects her own paralyzing parents onto this doctor who predicted the paralysis of her mental functions.

Response
: You must protest in a childish manner. Put some of your excrement in a cookie tin and mail it to the doctor. The box must be wrapped as a Christmas gift.

16. A young man with a childlike face, voice, and gestures says he has “existential suffering.” According to him, the reason he cannot leave childhood and become a man is his mother, who conceived him out of wedlock with a stranger.

Response
: You are right. If your mother hates men, you must remain a child in order not to lose her love. Dress as you imagine this father you have never seen would dress. Over these clothes, put on women’s clothes, stolen from your mother. Go out and wander the streets dressed like that. As soon as you find a woman whom you like the look of, begin to stare at her while taking off the women’s clothes to expose your male suit. When you’ve made the change, go to the woman and tell her that you like her. She may reject you; she may accept. Experience the situation with pleasure. Later, paint an apple black and wrap your mother’s clothing around it, then wrap your “father’s” clothes around those. Then bring the package to your mother, giving it to her without explanation, saying only, “I am returning what you gave me.” The black apple symbolizes your existential angst.

17. A woman of seventy, who suffers from deafness, comes for a consultation to solve a problem with her forty-eight-year-old daughter, who complains that she has never listened to her.

Response
: In the presence of your daughter, wash each ear seven times with rose-scented soap. Then anoint your ear canals with acacia honey, using the middle finger of the right hand for your left ear and the middle finger of the left hand for your right ear. Then ask your daughter to lick the honey while whispering everything that she wants to tell you.

18. An alcoholic woman who is about forty years old complains of being “nothing” and that she “cannot achieve.” She was raised Catholic and now practices Buddhism. When I ask her what her favorite drink is, she replies “red Bordeaux wine.”

Response
: Buy a bottle of red Bordeaux wine. Go to church with it, sit on a bench, put it in front of you, and pray to it as if it were a saint. Then go to your Buddhist temple and meditate with the bottle between your legs to consecrate it. Then make a small altar in your home with flowers, incense sticks, and two lamps, one obtained from the church, the other from the temple. Thus you will have your own sanctuary in your home, and wine will become a magical elixir. At night, before going to sleep, rub your chest with it. This sacred wine will protect and heal you.

19. A very fat woman wants to lose weight. “My mother began to gain weight after giving birth to me. I carry with me the responsibility for her incessant diets, her ‘body drama.’ I weigh ten kilos more than she does.”

Response
: Buy any object that weighs ten kilos, for example a TV, a vacuum cleaner, a collection of pots, and so forth. Put a picture of yourself on the package, naked and sad, and offer it to your mother, saying: “This is yours. I’m returning your gift to you.”

20. A painter of fifty years old who is a well-known artist confesses with shame that he hates his younger brother, born late to his parents. The baby came when he was twenty-two years old and “stole” his mother’s love.