(From Psychomagie. Approches d’une thérapie panique) I am no drunkard, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and the joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and fear of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug or soar like an eagle. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That’s sacred too.

JOHN (FIRE) LAME DEER (SIOUX MEDICINE MAN OF THE LAKOTA TRIBE)

After many evenings spent in his library discussing Psychomagic, I asked Alejandro Jodorowsky if he intended to prescribe a psychomagic act for me. He retorted that the mere act of producing this book in his company constituted a sufficiently powerful act. Why not?

To tell the truth, Jodorowsky himself is a walking psychomagic act, an elevated and definitely “panic” character whose vibrational frequency introduces some cracks into the organization of our seemingly predictable universe.

A director who, with his accomplices Arrabal and Topor, has marked the history of theater with his (rightly named) “panic” movement; a maker of cult films like El Topo or The Holy Mountain, to which unpaid Americans devote theses and scholarly studies; an author and comic-strip writer who can afford the luxury of working with the best cartoonists; an attentive father of five children, with each of whom he actually maintains a prismatic relationship to this day; “Jodo” is also an unconventional tarot reader whose dazzling intuitions have left more than one person speechless; the convulsive clown of the Mystical Cabaret^*1 who, when the Parisian public was generally boycotting events like this, regularly packed his conferences by word-of-mouth promotional power only; an international magician — one could say interstellar (as influenced by Moebius) — whom rock stars and artists from around the world have consulted.

This Chilean of Russian origin, who lived many years in Mexico and is now rooted in France, is a character that the overly cautious novelists of today could not create, a being who infuses the power of the imagination into all the recesses of his multidimensional existence.

His residence, an erudite alloy of order and disorder, organization and chaos, is the spitting image of its owner, if not simply the image of life itself. It is an experience in itself to surrender to this seedbed strewn with books, videos, toys. . It is a place where you could run into the cartoonists Moebius, Boucq, or Bess, as well as a cat or a woman from who knows where who appears for a moment to take care of the household. . It is a place of poetic power, a concentration of excess, yet controlled, energies.

To be more precise, to work with a panic character is not a sinecure. This is because, above all, Jodo superbly ignores schedules, agendas, and other temporal constraints that govern terrestrial life. When we had completed La Trampa Sagrada [The Sacred Trickster] and he proposed to help me put his psychomagic adventure to paper, I understood that I would have to totally dedicate myself and suspend all business. With him there are no advance arrangements, no fixed dates, no well-noted meetings — all is done spontaneously. Everything is on the order of the dazzling. Not that he is incapable of submitting to discipline or to a schedule, quite the contrary; but finally, there is the mystery: how could this man (who, as soon as our interviews were finished, left to direct a film with the evocative title The Rainbow Thief, a big-budget shoot) tame sacred monsters like Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, or Christopher Lee and impose his sensibility on producers (who are, at the same time, enthusiastic and worried) and accept, in September, a conference for March, without the least effort in the world to jot anything down on any written agenda? It is always necessary, as an intended date approaches, to track him down for fear that he totally forgot and has disappeared to the other side of the world.

Convinced of the convulsive character of reality, Alejandro has that fascinating and exhausting aspect that makes him excessive in all manifestations. When in front of the public, he rarely resists the temptation to go to the limit. Notably very South American, this exceptional being knows how to be, in private, kind and most humble, and he can, in the blink of an eye, transform himself into a baroque opera, in the same vein as his films, where the grotesque competes with the grave, the obscene with the sacred. He is always on the fringe: he dances on the subtle edge separating creation from gratuitous provocation, innovation from savage attacks on good taste, audacity from indecency. . Familiar with his methods after more than fifteen years of collaboration, Moebius, the genius cartoonist of El Incal, sees all this as “the technique employed by Alejandro in order to undermine the resistances of the universe.”

Whatever the case, with Jodorowsky things always end up arranging themselves, regardless of the traumas inflicted on the nerves of the organizers. He has no rival when it comes to spinning a situation presented under the worst auspices into a new direction, and he changes reality as easily as if it were a glove.

Why not mention here a representative anecdote, which will appear again later in the book. It clearly illustrates this capacity to give reality a spin — something you’d better be prepared for if you have the audacity to accompany him on his trajectory.

Motivated by an annual fair, we had agreed to appear together. The fair included an organic vegetable market, vendors of whirlpools, and all sorts of the esoteric: poets of Mother Nature, editors and doctors in alternative medicine. . Was it a tactical error? What happened was this: When I arrived at Vincennes in search of my hero, I found him immersed in the development of a comic strip and little disposed to detaching himself from his focus to go talk at “the marjoram”^*2 (as he sweetly called it).

I insisted, however, arguing that they were waiting for us and that we must keep our word, until finally Jodorowsky consented to get into my car, repeating all the while, “I don’t feel it, all this. . I don’t believe we should go to the Marjolaine. .”

Upon arriving at our destination, we found the worst: a hall open to the four winds, without microphone or chairs for the panelists, and a crowd of about a hundred people who had come to listen, not to Jodorowsky, because of an error in programming, but to Dr. Woestlandt, the nice author of esoteric-medicine bestsellers. .

While I was furious, my genius companion, after capturing at a glance the magnitude of the catastrophe, threw at me, in a fatalistic tone, “You see? I already told you!” and he turned to leave.

My friend ran behind Jodo and advised him to talk anyway. Obviously being sensitive to feminine reasoning, Alejandro turned again and said, “Alright, these people want to hear Dr. Westphaler. Why not introduce me as if I were him? Tell them I am Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen and that I’m going to talk to them.”

Perhaps today I would rise to this challenge, but I was, at the time, still too immersed in the conventional idea according to which Dr. Woestlandt is Dr. Woestlandt, Gilles is Gilles, and Jodorowsky is Jodorowsky. . My reality principle forbade me from aiding in this masquerade. So I mumbled some polite words to introduce my dangerous friend, who planted himself solidly in front of the disconcerted audience and spoke in a sweet tone, “Listen, I am not Dr. Westphallus, but that doesn’t matter. The person is not important! So, take me for Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen and ask me all your questions. It makes no difference the person. I will respond to you as if I were Dr. Wouf-Wouf. .”

Dumbfounded at first, the audience did not take long to give in to the spell and enter into Jodorowsky’s game, with which he, before my incredulous eyes, achieved great success. Soon enough he invited his improvised audience to tell him their problems, and in a singsong tone he urged them to take full advantage of the fortune granted by destiny’s whim, “Hark! Ask well your questions. This is the last time I will come to Marjolaine. .”

After stopping at the Dervy Publishers booth to buy Dr. Woestlandt’s book (“All the same, I must know who this Dr. Westphaller is, no?”), Alejandro returned to the lunchroom where he held court at the center of a vast circle of admirers, continuing with endless kindness to distribute advice and enlightened comments. This was how an afternoon that began as a fiasco ended as an apotheosis.

We should also recall his striking intuition. It is not rare that Alejandro meets a person for the first time and delivers point-blank some hidden truth, thus giving the interlocutor the disturbing impression of being in the presence of an omniscient magician.

A friend — we’ll call Claude Salzmann — has not forgotten the evening after a conference, which was already epic, while sitting on the terrace of a café at Saint-Sulpice, Jodo proceeded, incongruously but not without delicacy, to give one of his small revelations: “Listen to me, Salzmann, can I talk to you? You are a friend of my friend, so I permit myself to talk to you. Listen, Salzmann, if I look at you, I see a man divided into two natures — your upper lip is very different from your lower lip.” Glancing at Claude, I noticed for the first time, this striking facial feature. “Your upper lip, very thin, is that of a serious man, spiritual, almost rigid! It is the lip of an ascetic. But your bottom lip, a lot bigger, fleshy, is the lip of a sensual man, a lover of pleasure. Yes, you have these two natures in you. You must reconcile them.” Albeit in itself very simple, this observation affected my friend, who was applying himself more than ever precisely to unifying in himself these two tendencies: contradictory, according to traditional logic; complementary, according to profound, spiritual logic.

How many people have I heard give similar reports that Jodorowsky had, with the aid of a tarot card or solely with the power of observation, summed up their current difficulty in a word and exposed some arcane secret of their nature to broad daylight?

During a visit one day, I was shocked to witness Jodorowsky, who had never previously met the friend I had brought along, and without her formulating a question or drawing a card, sum up in a few sentences the essentials of the situation in which she found herself. No surprise then that our man inspires such passion and devotion.

The king Jodorowsky sits enthroned in his court, surrounded by swarms of followers for whom the Mystical Cabaret is like a very holy mass. There are those who for years have not missed a service, gathering with devotion to follow the master’s most unusual sermons. .

I would like to make it clear that I am not part of the flock. To use the terms Jodorowsky uses in the postscript to La Trampa Sagrada, the “nearly young man” that I am has more to learn from the “nearly old man,” and it is, above all, as friends that we have conversed. It is with a healthy confusion that I sometimes oppose his stories, and this has the positive result of obliging him to clarify his thoughts.

Because of his dazzle, which always provokes fascination, one can also become doubtful or even irritated; for, as exact as they often are, these right-out-of-the-box intuitions sometimes seem a bit hasty. After seeing him indulge in his lightning treatments in the framework of the Cabaret where, in the space of one evening, he boasts about unraveling old psychological knots as a result of the genealogy tree embellished with the zest of “Psychomagic,” the spectator, sympathetic but having conserved a wisp of critical sense, cannot help but swing between admiration and skepticism, amazement and doubt. Admiration and amazement, at the breathtaking performance of this actor par excellence, his ability to manage and to guide the energy of a hall of five hundred people, and the iron relevance of his observations. Skepticism and doubt, as these evenings are garnished with laughter and emotion while human woes are staged with a mad audacity in which complexes and traumas are exposed to broad daylight then treated by the “master” with a clever combination of keenness, outrageousness, and benevolence. . ushering in a new genre, that of spiritual-analytical “reality show.” One leaves the hall both seduced and worried, wondering about the real consequences and the long-term effects of this jumble of artistic therapy.

There is something of the old-fashioned tooth puller and snake oil peddler in this visionary of Vincennes who describes himself as a “sacred trickster.” But this facet of “transcendental charlatan,” an integral part of the Jodorowsky character, is in the final analysis at the service of a rare compassionate energy. One can also very well say that Alejandro is a bodhisattva à la South American salsa — a spicy salsa, very spicy. .

He is not a sacred trickster simply because he claims to be; under the excess and the apparent ease of this unconventional artist is a lot of rigor (a particular rigor, but rigor all the same), an inexhaustible creative potential, a profound poetic vision, and, I believe, a lot of kindness.

Our man has a pure heart. If he is king, Jodo doesn’t abuse his absolute power, which some of his subjects have granted him. His Majesty is his own fool, never hesitating to put his teachings on trial and through a good measure of buffoonery. Although he doesn’t disregard homage from his disciples, he also has no desire to become an idol. Fundamentally disinterested — as I myself have had numerous occasions to verify — Jodorowsky remains, in my opinion, a lucid being, made of his talents as well as of his limitations.

Having had the chance to be in contact with some true masters, such as the Japanese Ejo Takata who marked him with the red iron of Zazen, he knows not to be a guru in the strict and noble sense of the word but rather to be a kind and disturbing genius with whom anyone can walk a stretch of the way.

“Grow up a little,” Jodorowsky yelled one day to his daughter Eugenie, aged twenty; and she replied: “Why don’t you grow down a little!” The fact that Alejandro himself, not without pride, related this to me — his progeny’s fine response — says a lot about his character.

Servant of the truth, although at times with the air of an impostor, a brazen acrobat who asks no more than to be silent and bow down before those who surpass him, Jodorowsky is very much a crazy shaman. If the mystical clown indeed has what it takes to immediately inspire fascination or repulsion — and sometimes both — there is much to be gained by knowing him in all of his interior richness.

Even though he has published several novels and countless comic strips, Jodo waited for retirement age to put down on paper what he holds closest to his heart. Following the thread of our conversations, Alejandro took me on a magical journey with all the art of a Castaneda writing for the theater. It is this journey to which you are now invited. This book is as much an artistic-spiritual autobiography as it is a guide for a new therapy. As an open window to a world in which poetry embodies riots, in which theater transforms into ritual sacrifice, and in which a real witch, armed with a kitchen knife, cures cancers, transplants hearts, and nourishes dreams, it is my hope that this book will remain as the legacy of a far from ordinary individual’s journey among us.

GIILS FARCET

THE POETIC ACT

I suppose the birth of what you call Psychomagic responded to a need. .

Exactly. During the time of my life that marks my activity as a tarologist,^*3 I received at least two people per day to read their cards. .

You predicted their future?

Not at all! I do not believe in the real possibility of predicting the future, insofar as from the moment you see the future, you modify it or you create it. To foretell an event is to provoke it; in social psychology this is called “self-fulfilling prophecies.” I have here a text by Anne Ancelin Schutzberger, professor at the University of Nice, which evokes precisely this phenomenon:

If one carefully observes the pasts of a certain number of terminally ill cancer patients, one will notice that many times it has to do with people in infancy predicting something about themselves, which developed into an unconscious “life script” (of themselves or of their families) related to their life and death, at times including the date and time, their age, the very moment that they actually find themselves in the position of dying. For example, at thirty-three years (Jesus Christ’s age at death) or at forty-five (the age of the person’s mother or father at the time of their deaths) or when his son turned seven years old (because this person was orphaned at seven). . These are examples of a kind of automatic realization of personal or family predictions.

In the same way, according to [Robert] Rosenthal, if a professor predicts (in his own head) that a poor student’s performance will remain so, it is certain that it will not change. By contrast, when the professor considers that the student is intelligent but timid and predicts (again, only in his own head) that the student will make progress, the student begins to progress. It is a surprising discovery but verified often and sufficiently enough to inspire a serious distrust of those who, under the pretext of possessing supernatural gifts, take the liberty of predicting events that their client’s unconscious will translate into personal desires with the purpose of obeying the soothsayer’s orders. As a result, the client assumes the work of realizing these predictions, many times with fatal consequences. All predictions are a seizing of power whereby the soothsayer takes pleasure in writing destinies, thus high-jacking the normal course of a life.

But why does this phenomenon have to have necessarily harmful consequences? What do you think then about those soothsayers who predict happy things, prosperity, fertility, and other wholesomeness?

In any case, there is a seizure of power, a manipulation. Moreover, I am firmly convinced that under the label of “professional fortune-teller” hide, with rare exceptions, unstable, dishonest, harebrained individuals. At heart, only the predictions of a genuine saint would be deserving of trust. This explains, for example, why I refuse to dedicate myself to clairvoyance.

Let’s go back to the origins of Psychomagic and your activity as a tarot reader. What was your practice?

I considered the tarot as a projective test to facilitate locating a person’s needs and knowing where his or her problems reside. It is well known that the mere recognition of an unconscious or poorly understood problem already holds a key to the solution. Working with me, people become aware of their identity, of their difficulties, of what causes them to act. I make them walk through their genealogy tree to show them the ancient origin of some of their discomfort. Nevertheless, I realized immediately that no true healing could take place if one did not take some concrete action. For the consultation to have a therapeutic effect, a creative action accomplished in reality would have to come out of it. To manage this, I had to suggest to those who came to see me one or two specific acts to carry out. The person and I had to, by common consent and with full awareness, figure out a very precise program of action. This is how I came to practice Psychomagic.

You practiced this therapy for a decade and achieved quite convincing results. How did you invent it?

Something like this is not invented; one sees the birth through oneself. But this birth has deep roots.

Before going into detail about Psychomagic, to examine its relationship with psychoanalysis, to mention precise acts, to look into the letters written to you by your clients, it would be interesting to return to those roots.

The first thing that came to help me was poetry, my contact with the poets.

At the occasion of our interviews for La Trampa Sagrada [The Sacred Trickster], you told me you saw a lot of the grand poets of your native country, Chile.

Yes, it was during my youth, in the 1950s. As it happens, I had the luck to be born in Chile. After all, I could just as easily have been born elsewhere. If it had not been for the Russo-Japanese war, my grandparents would not have emigrated and I would have surely been born in Russia. The flip side of this is: “Why did the ship on which they embarked bring them to Chile?” I would like to believe that we choose in advance our destiny and that none of what happens to us is the fruit of coincidence. Yet, if there is no coincidence, everything makes sense. For me, it is my introduction to poetry that justifies my birth in Chile.

All the same, Chile has never had sole rights to poetry.

No, poets are everywhere. But the poetic life is a more rare property. In how many countries does a real poetic atmosphere exist? Without a doubt, ancient China was a land of poetry. But I think, in the 1950s in Chile, we lived poetically like in no other country in the world.

Can you explain?

Poetry permeated everything: teaching, politics, cultural life. . The country itself lived immersed in poetry. This was due to the temperament of the Chileans and in particular the influence of five of our poets, who were transformed for me into a species of archetypes. These poets were the ones who molded my existence from the beginning. The most well known of them was no less than Pablo Neruda, a politically active man, exuberant, very prolific in his writing and who, above all, lived like an authentic poet.

What does it mean to live like an authentic poet?

In the first place not to fear, to dare to give, to have the audacity to live with true excess. Neruda constructed a house in the form of a castle, gathering together around it a whole village; he was a senator, and he nearly managed to become president of the republic. He handed his life over to the Communist Party, for idealism, because he truly wanted to achieve a social revolution, to build a more just world. And his poetry touched all of the Chilean youth. In Chile, even drunks on a full-blown alcoholic binge recited Neruda’s verse! His poetry was recited as much in school as on the street. The whole world wanted to be a poet, like him. I’m not only talking about students, but workers and even drunks spoke in verse! He knew how to capture in his texts all the crazy atmosphere of the country.

Listen to this poem that comes to mind. We would recite it in unison when, in university-student fashion, we intoxicated ourselves with the patriotic wine of our Chilean land:

THE THEATRICAL ACT

We have discussed the metaphysical dimension of the act, but let’s go back to its artistic aspect. If, before all else, poetry is action, what place should writing occupy? Did you and your friends write or were you content to only execute acts?

Lihn continued to write and became one of the country’s greatest poets, so much so that today no one remembers his acts. Chileans would be surprised to know what kinds of games their national poet devoted himself to. As for me, I abandoned poetry as such to dedicate myself to theater.

How did this transition take place?

Love for the act required creating props. Among other things marionettes, with which I quickly fell in love. Straightaway, I saw in the marionette a highly metaphysical form. I loved to see an object fabricated by my own hands escape from me. From the moment I put my hands on the marionette to animate it, the character began to live in an almost autonomous way. I witnessed the development of an unknown personality, as if the doll made use of my voice and my hands to take on an identity that was entirely his own. It seemed that I became a servant more than a creator.

Finally, I had the feeling of being directed by — manipulated by — the doll! This very deep relationship with the marionettes gave birth to a desire to become a marionette myself, in other words a stage actor.

You really think an actor is like a marionette? That’s debatable.

In any case, this was what I thought of theater and acting. I never liked psychological theater, dedicated to imitating “reality.” For me, this realistic theater was a vulgar expression in which, under the pretext of restoring something real, the most obvious aspects are re-created as well as the most hollow and the crudest, just as it is perceived normally. What is generally called “reality” is just a part, an aspect of a much greater order. This so-called realistic theater appeared to me — and it still does — to wash its hands of the unconscious dimension, the dreamlike magic of reality. Because, I repeat, reality is not rational, no matter how much we want to believe that it is to reassure ourselves. Human behavior is in general motivated by unconscious forces, those to which we can attribute rational explanations later. The world itself is not a rigid place but an amalgam of mysterious influences. To retain from reality no more than the immediate appearance is a betrayal, a surrender to illusion disguised as “realism.” Hating, as I hated the realistic theater, I began to feel repulsion toward the notion of author. I did not want to watch actors rehearse a previously written text; I would prefer to attend a theatrical performance that had nothing to do with literature. I asked myself: “Why call something a play that’s based on a text? Everything can be acted by direction. I could stage the daily newspaper, raise a marvelous drama from the front page of the newspaper.” That’s how I began to work and to experience an expanding freedom. Since I did not try to imitate reality, I could move as I fancied, make the most extravagant gestures, howl. . Very quickly, the stage itself appeared to me as a limitation. I wanted to remove the theater from theater. For example, I imagined a piece staged on a bus. The public waited at the stops and got on the bus, which traveled through the city. Suddenly, one had to disembark and enter a bar, the maternity ward, a slaughterhouse; in essence, to get in there where something was happening before setting off again. The events that I enacted were taken up again later by others. When it was announced that my piece would take place in a theater, sometimes I would take the audience to the cellar, to the rest rooms, or to the rooftops. Later, the idea occurred to me that the theater could do without spectators and should not involve more than actors. So I organized big parties at which everyone could perform. Finally, interpreting a character seemed useless to me. The actor, so I believed, should try to interpret his own mystery, to externalize what he carries inside. One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are. Theater interested me less as a distraction than as an instrument for self-knowledge. For this reason, I replaced the classical “performance” with what I called “the ephemeral panic.”

What is “ephemeral panic” exactly?

At this point in our discussion, I should refer to a passage published in 1973 in a book conceived by [Fernando] Arrabal titled Le Panique. This book allowed me to formulate the essential concepts of my process and my theatrical conceptions: “To attain panic euphoria, one must liberate oneself from the theater structure — this is a necessary precondition.” From the architectural point of view, whichever form they have, theaters are designed for actors and spectators; they obey the primordial law of the game, which amounts to delimiting a space, that is to say, isolating the stage from reality, and that is why they impose (such imposition being anti-panic) an understanding a priori of the relationship of the actors and the space. Before everything else, the actor must serve the architect and then the author. Theaters impose corporeal movements, even though, in general, it is a human gesture that determines the architecture. By eliminating the spectator from the panic party, one automatically eliminates the “seat” and the “interpretation” from the unmoving stare. The place where the “ephemeral” takes place is a non-delimited space in which one does not know where the stage ends and where reality begins. The “panic company” will choose the most attractive place: a useless terrain, a forest, a public place, an operating room, a pool, a dilapidated house, or even a traditional theater, but using all of its spaces: euphoric demonstrations between the seats, in the dressing room or the restrooms, going beyond the long corridors, in the cellar, the foyer, the roof, and so on. One can also make an “ephemeral” act in the ocean, in an airplane, in a very fast train, in a cemetery, in a maternity ward, a slaughterhouse, a nursing home, a prehistoric cave, a gay bar, a convent, or at a funeral. Since the “ephemeral” is a concrete manifestation, it cannot call up problems of space and time. The space has its real measurements and cannot symbolize another space; it is what it is in that moment. This is also true for time: there can be no depiction of aging. The time that passes is truly the time during which the actions last. In this real time and this objective space the ex-actor moves. An actor divides his activity between a “person” and a “character.” Before panic, one could describe, in a clear and precise manner, two theater schools. In the first, the person-actor subsumes himself totally in the “personality,” lying to himself and to others with such precision that he ends up losing his “person” to turn into an other, a character with more concise restrictions and more precise definition. In the second school, one learns to act in an eclectic manner, in a way that the actor in being the person was simultaneously the character. The actor should never forget being in the process of acting, and the person, during the performance, could criticize his character.

The ex-actor, panic man, does not act a performance and has totally eliminated the character. In the “ephemeral,” this panic man tries to bring to the person what he is trying to be.

Playwrights love to force a performance. It often happens that atop one stage another stage is staged where other actors perform before the first actors. Panic man thinks that in everyday life the “majestic” go around disguised, interpreting characters, and that the mission of the theater is to quit interpreting characters facing other characters, to eliminate that in order to ultimately get closer, little by little, to the person.

It is the inverse path of the old theater schools: Instead of going from the person to the character — as the old schools believed — panic man tries to begin with the character, which is (according to the anti-panic education implanted by the “majestic”) the person he carries inside himself. This “other” who wakes up in a panic euphoria is not a puppet made by definitions and lies but a being with fewer restrictions. The euphoria of the “ephemeral” drives the totality, to the liberation of superior forces, to a state of grace.

To conclude: Panic man does not hide behind “characters” but tries to find his mode of real expression. Instead of being a lying exhibitionist, he is a poet in a trance state. (We understand by poet, not the office writer but the athlete creator.)

How did you put this program-manifesto together?

I promoted among the spectator-actors the practice of a radical theater act, which consisted of interpreting one’s own drama, exploring one’s own intimate enigma. It was for me the beginning of the sacred theater and was almost therapeutic. Then I came to realize that if I had, in my theatrical expression, shattered form, space, the relationship between actor and spectator, I had not yet attacked time. I was still a prisoner of the idea that the show must be repeated, performed many times. At the time when “happenings” were taking place in the United States, on my part in Mexico, I had invented what I called the “ephemeral panic,” which consisted in staging a show that could be presented only once. It had to be accomplished by introducing perishable things: smoke, fruits, jelly, live animals. . It had to do with accomplishing acts that could not ever be repeated. In summary, I wanted the theater, instead of tending toward the fixed, toward death, to return to its uniqueness: the instantaneous, the fugitive, the only moment forever. This way, theater is made in the image of life where, according to a saying by Heraclitus [of Ephesus], one never bathes in the same river. Thus, to conceive the theater was to carry it to the extreme, to go to the paroxysm of this art form. Through the happenings, I rediscovered the theatrical act and its therapeutic potential.

How did you pull it off? What were the ingredients for the happening?

Well, I would rather choose an ordinary place than a theater: the School of Fine Arts, a psychiatric ward, a sanatorium, a school for people with Down’s syndrome. . I chose existing places and placed the action there.

You really wanted to set up the “ephemeral panic” in these places?

Yes, that’s the marvel of Mexico! Discipline does not exist; they let you do this kind of thing. One day, we performed a large ballet in a cemetery. It was a strong act, the dance of the living among the dead. . So then, once a place was selected, I made calls to a group of people who wanted to express themselves. In no way did I direct actors. These people came to carry out a free, public act. All the conditions were thus brought together for the coming of the ephemeral.

The ephemeral, such as what you practiced, had, if I’m not mistaken, something impressive: it had all the ingredients of a sumptuous party. How did you find the means to finance such events?

I always found the money. For me the ephemeral panic had to be precisely a party. Now, when one throws a party, one does not charge his guests for the drinks or food they consume. I always gave that free. I received money from royalties, from staging more classical pieces, many times under another name. The fact is that, like [Ivanovitch] Gurdjieff, I never had financial problems, which, seeing as it always worked out, is truly a miracle! Apart from that, I believe in miracles, or rather in the existence of a law that if my intentions are pure and I do what I must do, the money will follow, in some way or another. Maybe I will never be what a person calls rich, but I will always arrange the financial means that are required each moment. When I had money in my safes, I would invest it in a happening. I asked acquaintances if they wanted to express something, then I gave them the means to do so. This method of approaching the happening already had a therapeutic value. It was also a way to continue in line with the poetic acts we have talked about.

What lessons did you extract from your happenings?

I realized that many people carry an act inside, which ordinary conditions do not let them materialize. When someone is offered the concrete possibility and favorable circumstances to publicly express the act asleep inside him, it is very rare that the person hesitates. If I asked you what act you would like to carry out in public, I am sure that an answer would occur to you immediately, and if I brought together the favorable conditions for actualizing this expression, you would treasure participating in the game.

Okay. .

I’m going to give you some examples. In the 1960s, I founded a panic group in Mexico, not with actors and other artists, but with enthusiastic people in search of an authentic way to express themselves, far from conformity. I had obtained the main playground of San Carlos school. I proposed that my friends envision an act that they would like to carry out, and I would find the means to make it happen. The celebrated painter Manuel Felguérez joined the panic demonstration and decided to execute a chicken publicly and make an abstract painting with the animal’s guts and blood, while his wife, dressed in a nazi uniform, devoured a dozen chicken tacos at his side.

What a good show. . Really delicious. Are there more?

Hundreds! A young woman wanted to dance naked to African rhythms while a bearded man covered her body with shaving cream.

Another wanted to be a classical ballerina, with a tutu but without underwear, and urinate while interpreting Swan Lake.

An architectural student used a mannequin and hit it violently with an ax in its stomach and privates. Once the mannequin was destroyed, he took from its insides various casings of sausage and hundreds of crystal balls.

Another student appeared dressed as a math professor with a big bag full of eggs. As he recited his algebraic formulas, he broke one egg after the other on his forehead.

Another arrived with a tin bowl and several liters of milk. With a foot in the bowl, he began to recite a classic Mother’s Day poem while he emptied the milk over his head.

A woman with long blond hair, dressed in black stockings decorated with pearls on the ankles and walking with crutches, yelled at the top of her voice: “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!” while she took from between her breasts slices of raw meat and lanced them at the public. Then she sat in a child’s chair and a hairdresser completely shaved her head. In front of her was a baby carriage filled with doll heads of all sizes, without eyes or hair. Once shaved, the woman began to throw the heads at the public while screaming, “I am me! I am me!”

A young man wearing a tuxedo jacket pushed a bathtub covered by a towel toward the center of the stage. By its weight, one could guess it was full of liquid. He left the stage and returned carrying in his hands a young woman dressed as a bride. Without putting her down, he removed the towel from the tub. It was full of blood. Without letting go of the woman, he began to stroke her breasts, her crotch, and her legs, becoming more and more excited about submerging her in the blood. Then he started to rub her with a live viper while she sang an opera melody.

An exceedingly attractive woman, with the air of a Hollywood vampiress, wearing a long golden dress that clung to her body, appeared onstage with a pair of large scissors in her hands. Several dark-skinned men crawled toward her, each offering her an enormous banana, which she cut with her scissors roaring with laughter.

These are sufficient examples. One can see in these baroque descriptions a panoply of images. You speak in the first place of the therapeutic value of these acts. But isn’t there a risk of sinking into perversion?

In Mexico I was prohibited from carrying out in public acts that had openly sexual connotations. Since I did not want to have problems with the law, I exercised some control and excluded people whose acts could have been viewed as attacks on modesty. Likewise, I always tried to keep myself far from drugs. But, to be sure, censorship was only exercised in two cases. One day a lunatic was determined to eat a live dove onstage. His act produced a commotion. Some people fainted, and articles of protest appeared in the newspaper. But they couldn’t put me in jail, which would have happened had it been a sex scandal. Outside of sex, everything is permitted.

You speak of a limit imposed outside the country’s law. What would happen if this restriction did not exist?

In the United States it was common, in the framework of the happenings, to give oneself up to a kind of collective orgy in which the participants stroked themselves while smoking marijuana. I was invited on multiple occasions to this type of celebration in New York or in other places, but I always declined the invitation because I quickly realized that this way was a dead end. All of this finally translated into a kind of shifty pornography. Now, pornography is not constructive but destructive: under the appearance of liberty, what is really presented to us is another form of slavery.

Let’s go back to the story of the pepper and the butterfly. If the act is an action and not a reaction, where is the boundary between the releasing of monsters sleeping deeply inside us, with the consequent risk that they will devour us, and the conscious materialization of a liberating act?

This has to do with a subtle border, which is precisely where the danger of this type of practice is located. I was soon approached by people to whom pornography and vandalism constituted acts. I did not encourage them, because the experience of poetic acts had taught me to direct only positive things. However, it is very difficult to achieve the “positive,” that is to say, something that creates a feeling of life and of expansion; by the “negative” I mean “acts” that, when brought to the stage, create a feeling of death and destruction. The act itself implies connecting with the dark and violent, the unutterable and repressed, that we carry inside ourselves. As positive as it is, all acts carry a certain “negativity.”

What is important is that this destructive energy, which, when allowed to stagnate, eats at us from the inside, can release itself as a channeled and transformed expression. The alchemy of the successful act changes the darkness to light.

Your responsibility is, at the very least, overwhelming! Don’t you run the risk of playing the apprentice wizard?

Not anymore. I am not safe from all risks, because danger is part of life. If one wants to remain surrounded by his little world without questioning his function, it’s not worth it to try an act that entails risk! Better to stay at home watching television. But the work that I propose actually is founded on a lot of experience, experience that I did not have in that long-ago time of the happenings. Apart from that, it wasn’t my place to be a therapist. I was, first in the quality of an artist, a man of the theater in search of a total expression. As I explored this art form, I saw in it, in addition, therapeutic effects. It is necessary to restore this experience in context. That being said, I admit to having committed some failures during this time. For example, the public devouring of the dove seems to me today an all-around error, a purely destructive act. But I didn’t expect it! I did not imagine the man could manifest something like that. He had never stated to me that this was his intention. When I saw him arrive with this live animal, it had a strong impact on me, and I was overwhelmed. I recognize my insanity at that time. But, what can I do? One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.

Was there a time when you felt afraid of losing control of an energy you had generated? Were there moments in which the ephemeral panic transformed into panic pure and simple?

(Laughter.) There were extreme instances, but I believe them to have always been mysteriously protected. To see Jerry Lee Lewis burn his piano at the end of his concerts really affected me; this influenced me to set fire to a piano and to generate a panic movement in a theater. On another occasion, in the American center of Paris, during an ephemeral that made history, I had a basket full of vipers, which I planned to throw on the audience. Can you imagine the apocalypse that would have caused? But just as I was going to act, a kind of sixth sense warned me of the danger. I suddenly had the vision of a horrific panic, heart attacks, people trampled or crushed in the stampede for the exit. . It could have been a real catastrophe. .

Can you give me an example of an extreme happening that you value as an initiation?

At the time, I was very young and quite handsome. So, I had a few admirers. Four of them wanted to stage a strange show. In Mexico, it is customary to drink tequila with a kind of spicy tomato juice called sangrita. There are, therefore, always two bottles: one of tequila and one of sangrita. The young ladies came onstage to offer me a bottle of tequila, asking me to drink it. Once I had done it, a doctor came and extracted a bit of blood from each one of them. This blood was spilled in a glass that they presented to me saying: “Now drink the sangrita: drink the blood of your disciples.” For me this was a real shock. I went off on a long speech about bread, wine, supper, the Last Supper, all the while telling myself that since I had been so crazy as to organize these happenings, I would now have to face the consequences of my own acts. When I finally decided to drink the blood, it had coagulated! As creator of the ephemeral panic, it was impossible to draw back: I therefore had to not drink but eat the blood of my flock.

Beyond the outrageous or scandalous character of such experiences, they have value as initiation rites. They force you to go, if only for a moment, beyond attraction and repulsion, beyond cultural conditioning, beyond the criteria of beauty and of faith.

These women put me up against a wall, and I had to abandon speech and pure aesthetics. It was a lesson. I admit that these acts were not always conscientiously conducted and that they were part of this experimental period, but you have to get into the cage if you’re going to tame the tiger.

From the artistic point of view, these practices earned you a rather changed reputation.

The polemic was considerable. I received a lot of letters in which the dithyramb rubbed shoulders with an insult, even a threat. The world of Mexican theater found itself revolutionized. From Mexico, I came to Paris, where this extraordinary Central American happening took place.

Maybe you can talk to us about that, about the extent to which it was a kind of apotheosis for you, a convulsive act and purifier.

Yes, it was a grandiose party, a celebration where the forces of darkness emerged from the trap to fight out in the open with the forces of light, a battle between angels and beasts, a ritual saturated with insanity and with wisdom. . This panic show had been meticulously prepared. I had acquired certain experience, and nothing tempted me. The risks were assumed with full knowledge of the cause. Putting on this event, I was aware of heading toward a death, a rite of passage from which I would come out either destroyed or transformed. . For me, it was not about amusing myself by surrendering to a little intellectual masturbation in front of a select public. I didn’t care in the least about the avant-garde flights of fancy coming from the deteriorated brains of some self-satisfied pseudo-artists. I did not worry then, any more than I do now, about the little apprehensive “spirituality” milieu, or about the opinions of those perpetually frightened people who see refuge in a cheap junk nirvana in an effort to avoid facing the monstrosities of life, the daily panic dimension. . It was not a question of staging a nice little show whose audacity would be applauded in trendy reviews, but to question myself completely. I wanted to expose myself: to put life, death, madness, wisdom in a game and to undertake a kind of ritual sacrifice.

What happened?

The first part was based on creations by Topor, Arrabal, and Alain-Yves Leyaouanc. Topor gave me four drawings, which I staged with Graciela Martínez’s ballet company, with suits made of white fabric on which the artist himself drew, and figures carved in wood. That way the public could attend Topor’s ballet, which took place slowly on a black platform. It portrayed the stages of initiation of a very young girl: her first pair of stockings, brought in a little wheelbarrow by an elderly lady without legs; her first pair of shoes; her first bra (two Chaplinesque characters came throwing kicks on an enormous plaster breast, lifting up a cloud of dust); her first lipstick; her first jewelry. .

Arrabal entrusted me with a little four-page comedy: the story of a princess in love with a dog-faced prince who ends up by deception with a bull-faced prince. For this scene, I filled the stage with a thousand chicks chirping deafeningly. The princess masturbated a bullhorn until a stream of milk gushed out. To me, these first two parts constituted understanding the comic-poetic prologue of the “Sacramental Melodrama.” Some of the more well-known American Beat poets, like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, attended the event. The latter was so impressed that he asked me for a written description of “Sacramental Melodrama” for his City Lights Journal, an article that would be preceded by a little explanatory preface. The simplest is to let you read this document, composed immediately after the event and published in San Francisco in 1966. It conveys all the craziness and the beauty of this ephemeral panic, better than my memory could today.

The goal of theater is to provoke accidents. Theater should be based on what has been called “errors”: ephemeral accidents. In accepting its ephemeral character, theater will discover what distinguishes it from other arts and consequently opens it to its own core. Other arts leave written pages, recordings, canvas, volumes: objective traces that time erases very slowly. Theater itself should not last even a day in the life of a man. Just born, it should immediately die. The only traces it will leave will be carved into the interior of human beings and will manifest in psychological changes. If the objective of other arts is to create oeuvres, the goal of theater is specifically to change man. If theater is not a life science, it cannot know how to be an art.

SACRAMENTAL MELODRAMA

A panic ephemeral presented May 24, 1965, at the Second Festival of Free expression in Paris

A scene from which all the twists, cords, pretenses, and decorations had been removed. In other words, a stage cleaned of all the refuse and triviality: nothing but naked walls.

THE ONEIRIC ACT

The interpretation of dreams is a major part of the work of the artist-shaman-director theater-clown mystic in the search for that other form of madness, which is wisdom.

Yes, although the interpretation of dreams is a practice as old as the world. With time, the only thing that has changed is the forms of interpretations, from a simplistic system, which consists of systematically attributing a concrete symbolic significance to this or that image, to Jung’s concept, which holds that one should not explain the dream but rather continue living it, by means of analysis, in the enlightened state, for the end result of seeing where this leads. The next stage, situated beyond all interpretation, consists of entering the lucid dream, in which you know you are dreaming; this knowledge gives you the ability to work on the contents of the dream.

It is the practice made popular through the writings of Carlos Castaneda.

He popularized it, but he didn’t invent it. Actually, the first book dedicated to lucid dreaming that I know of was published in France: Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger [Dreams and How to Direct Them] by Hervey de Saint-Denis. As early as 1867, this author hit on the essential question, as you can appreciate in this excerpt that I want to read to you:

As a dream is like a reflection of real life, the events that appear to take place in it generally follow, even in their incoherence, certain coherent chronological laws within the normal sequence of all true events. I want to say that if, for example, I dream that I have broken my arm, it will appear to me that I wear it in a sling or that I use it gingerly, or if I dream that they close the bedroom shutters, it will seem to me that the light is blocked and that darkness is all around me. From this perspective, I imagined that if, in dreams, I make the gesture of putting a hand over my eyes, I should obtain, in the first place, a similar illusion to what really happens if I do the same thing while awake; that is to say, I would make the images of objects, which appear to be placed in front of me, disappear. Then I asked myself if, after producing this interruption of preexisting visions, my imagination could not more easily evoke new objects, ones that I would fix in my thoughts. Experience follows closely with this reasoning. The placing, in my dream, of a hand on my eyes erased, in that moment, the vision of the countryside during harvest time which, beforehand, I had uselessly tried to change using only the strength of my imagination. I did not see anything for a moment — exactly what happened to me in real life. I then made another energetic call to the memory of the much talked-about eruption of the monster and, as if by magic, this memory, nicely placed now in the focus of my thoughts, suddenly appeared clear, brilliant, stormy; and before I woke up, I had an understanding of how the transition itself operated. . If we manage to establish a conclusive way for the will to conserve enough strength during the dream to direct the course of the spirit through the world of illusions and reminiscences (as it directs the body during the day through the events of the real world), we will realize that certain habits of exercising this faculty — joined with being conscious, within our dreams, of the true state — can lead us gradually, through persistence of effort, to very conclusive results. Not only must the dreamer recognize above all that the directing action of his will is reflected in lucid and calm dreams, but he will soon perceive the influence of this same will in his incoherent or passionate dreams. The incoherent dreams will sensibly coordinate themselves under this influence; as for the passionate dreams, full of stormy desires or painful thoughts, the result of this consciousness and of this acquired freedom of spirit will put the painful images aside, favoring, by contrast, happy hopes. The fear of having disagreeable visions will decrease as a result of becoming aware that they are wrong, and the desire to see pleasant images appear will become more effective through recognizing the capacity to evoke them. The desire will soon be stronger than the fear, and since the dominant thought is what makes the images crop up, the agreeable dream will prevail. This, at least, is the way I understand it, in theory, a perceived phenomenon, one that I practice constantly.

Fascinating, right? I don’t know if Castaneda would be inspired by this book or if his discoveries coincide with those of the author by chance. What is certain is that this late-nineteenth-century text shows clearly the method that Castaneda would later elucidate. It was André Breton who recommended this reading to me.

Did you begin to have lucid dreams after having read it, or were you already familiar with the experience?

I had the great luck of having my first lucid dream at seventeen years old. In this dream, I was in a movie theater watching an animated film worthy of Dali. Suddenly I saw myself seated in the center of the theater, and I knew that I was dreaming. I looked toward the exit, but, as I was not more than an adolescent lacking spiritual training or psychoanalytical ability, I thought: “If I cross this door, I will enter into another world and I will die.” And I panicked! My only solution was to wake myself up, and I made enormous efforts to leave the dream, until I felt that I could ascend from the depths toward my body, which seemed to be situated on the surface. I reintegrated into my physical shell, and I woke up. That’s how my first experience went, and frankly, it left me terrified. From then on, I began to familiarize myself with the lucid dream.

How can a person be sure that he is dreaming? After all I also could decide right now, while talking to you, that I am dreaming.

In the beginning I made a test. I supported myself in the air with my two hands as if on an invisible table, and I propelled myself upward. If I floated, I knew I was dreaming. Quickly, I looped around and began working on the dream. I will read you a lucid dream written in my yellow notebook in 1970, which covers for me an important detail: I made an effort for the first time to practice the technique described here.

I am alone in an unknown home. Everything seems completely real, but without knowing why, as nothing indicated that, I think, “Maybe I’m dreaming. If I am dreaming, I can fly.” I make an effort. I support myself in the air with the palms of my hands, and I propel myself up. I float in the room. “It is a dream!” I tell myself. I decide to take advantage of the opportunity to perfect my flight, and not only to see myself fly but to feel myself fly. I turn over; I go up and down. I am satisfied. I decide to plane glide around the whole house. I fly through a corridor, and I arrive in a dark living room. In the corner, I see two five-year-old boys. I go toward them to see them better: they are not boys but old gnomes, skinny and wrinkled. They laugh and hide. They are the spirits of the house. They have a disturbing air. They avoid me. They disappear in the shadows and laugh at me. They don’t dare me to look for them. The dream absorbs me; I lose lucidity. . I travel in a bus without a conductor or passengers. I look out the window and see a petrified forest. I tell myself, “This is probably a dream. I am going to confirm it.” I fly. I get out of the bus by passing through the window glass, and I glide through the forest. I lose lucidity again. . Now I find myself in a cellar, before an opaque window. I don’t hesitate to realize that I am dreaming, and I tell myself, “Surely, this is a dream.” I try to exit flying out the window, but I don’t achieve this. I have the feeling that the walls have various meters of thickness. But I must get through them. I feel this is impossible. I force myself to try. I pass through the wall without difficulty, and I exit the space. Outside there is a blue sky; I float between the clouds. While I let myself be taken by a soft breeze, I think, “I must take advantage of this dream to see my interior God.” Suddenly, I feel a profound exhaustion invade me, obviously caused by a terrible fear. I give myself explanations: “It is too hard a test. I am still not prepared for this meeting; I will leave it for another day.”

And I wake up. On the one hand, I feel content to have discovered this technique that lets me know if I am dreaming, but, on the other hand, I am irritated because of my inability and my lack of value. In my dreams notebook, I write this commentary:

I believe the moment has arrived to go further in the lucid dream: to run risks. But I’m still scared of dying; I do not dare. . I cannot have entered into my unconscious until I find the interior God: trust in Him. . I must pursue the gnomes, confront them, speak to them without confusing myself with their mockery and establish a real contact with them, to know their secrets. I must create worlds, cross Death’s path, get to the center of my being, defeat the monsters and the terrors. . I want to be more courageous next time and overpower my fear. Also, I have to find allies and accept them, not always do all the work alone.

I suppose your lucid dream practice passed through different phases.

I began directing the game. I told myself, “I want to see elephants walking by in Africa.” And in a few seconds I was in Africa, seeing a herd of elephants. I could change the set, desire to go to the South Pole and then to see thousands of penguins. . This gave me such joy that I stopped waking myself up. I have experimented with all kinds of adventures with myself. Once, I wanted to know what it was like to die: I threw myself from the top of a building, and I smashed against the wall. Immediately, I found myself alive in another body, among the multitude that looked at the suicided corpse. This is how I discovered that the brain doesn’t know death. Another time, I decided to let myself be possessed by a mythological god.

Did you have a female orgasm?

The experience of being penetrated was more complete than that of a usual sexual relation. Don’t forget that I worked with oneiric images that exceeded the limits of reality. So that you understand better my practice, I can read the dream exactly as I wrote it down, in detail, in my notebook, with the date April 9, 1978.

I am in a dorm, spread out between two twin beds. I am supporting my back against the wall. In front of my feet appears an Invunche. .

An Invunche?

Yes. I’ll explain: The afternoon before the dream, I had been at a café with a Chilean exile whom I asked about the mapuche folklore. He told me that, according to the legend, the witches of Chiloé stole children and mutilated them so that, converted into monsters, they would serve as helpers with the name “Invunche.” I’ll continue:

. . a blind dwarf, naked, hairless, with a bird’s beak, stumps for arms, a deformed torso, and bowlegged: a kind of large fetus, as horrible as it was disturbing. And so I think, “It is a god with whom I have to have relations. His faith should breed something in my spirit.” Now I know I am dreaming and that I have the power to guide my dream. I decide to work on this monster with the objective of transforming it into a positive deity. I achieve this. The Invunche acquires good posture, normal features, and turns into a beautiful being, indescribable, like a live statue. I get out from between the beds, and I lay down with my mouth to the sky in the middle of the bedroom. I know that I must be inseminated by a god. I look for my femininity, lifting my legs to do so. A transparent tube, some forty centimeters long, comes out from between the legs of the god. I decide to surrender myself without resistance so that he can introduce the tube between the sex and the anus, this space, the perineum, in Tantra called chakra muladhara. I know that I do not have a vagina, and I am not trying anal penetration. The god kneels down between my open legs and begins to penetrate me. His organ rises up my spinal column until I feel it enter my brain. My awareness shatters.

Impressive. .

If you call this cataclysmic explosion “female orgasm,” yes, Gilles, I have experienced it, and it was a marvelous feeling. I felt very emotional letting myself be possessed by this god created from my own monstrosity. Then I dedicated myself to achieving unreachable desires in the state of wakefulness, especially sexual desires, of course. In dreams, I gave myself to fantastic orgies with half-human, half-panther women. Allow me to read to you another annotation made after one of these dreams. Although I want to clarify a point: Before achieving the lucid dream, in which I controlled the images, I had to overcome a series of obstacles that appeared like so many other tests of initiation. Only then could I claim the right to be the owner and god of my dreams. This passage taken from my notebook shows well this aspect of the process:

I am in an industrial world, without nature, only made up of buildings. It is a border. I do not have identification documents. Three soldiers prevent my passage. I jump the barrier and take off running, pursued by the soldiers. After opening a garage door, I find myself in front of a well a thousand kilometers deep. At the edge of this abyss, I realize that I am dreaming. The pursuers have ceased to exist. I decide to throw myself to the bottom, knowing already that nothing can happen to me. I jump and I fall with a great velocity. I am not afraid. I feel the desire to stop the fall. The fall stops. On the wall there appears a door. I enter and now I am at the entrance of a cathedral.

Understand that I have the magical power to make whatever I want appear before my eyes. So, I feel the desire to conduct an erotic experience. I create three women-creatures, half-panther and half-human, crouching or on all-fours. I kiss one on the mouth, and her long lips seem like the vulva’s labia. I try to put my index finger in their sex, under the tail. I possess one while the others scratch me agreeably, and I try to reach orgasm. But inevitably I quit being lucid, and the dream absorbs me and, finally, it turns into a nightmare. I wake up with palpitations. .

Where do these experiences reside in the initiation dimension?

In the special feature of which, at the moment that I began making love with those women animals, the desire overtook me, making me lose lucidity, and the dream escaped my control. I forgot I was dreaming. The same thing happened to me with wealth. When I quit being fascinated by money, my dream quit being lucid. Each time I tried to satisfy my human passions, the script absorbed me and I lost lucidity. It was a big lesson: I finally understood that, in life as in dreams, in order to remain lucid it is necessary to distance oneself, to not identify oneself with the action. It is an old spiritual principle that the lucid dream made me remember. Desire and fear are, as all traditions affirm, the two faces of our identity.

Justifiably, the dream also showed me how to behave in the face of my fears. There was a period in which I often had the same nightmare: I found myself in a desert when a psychic entity surged from the horizon like an immense cloud of negativity with the intent to destroy me. I woke up screaming, soaked in sweat. One day, I got fed up and I decided to offer myself in a sacrifice to this entity. Stronger than the dream, in a state of lucid terror, I told myself, “Okay, I’m going to stop wanting to wake up. You don’t have to do anything but come and destroy me.” The entity approached and suddenly disappeared. I woke up for a few seconds to return to a light, very pleasurable, and refreshing sleep. So I understood that we ourselves nourish our own terrors. What scares us loses all power over us when we loosen our grip. It is one of the classic events of lucid dreaming. I, thus, made several attempts to control my fear of the final passage while crossing my own death.

Can you give me other examples of this process?

Well, it suffices to consult my notebook. Listen:

I have a strong desire to urinate. I feel the accumulation of liquid in my bladder. In a white bathtub, I piss a huge jet of blood. I know it is serious, but I don’t worry. I tell myself, “The liquid is red because I make too much effort. I cannot stop urinating; to change this, I can relax and, with my will, transform the red into yellow.” At no moment did I let myself be beat by the anxiety. Little by little, I transform the color. Then the nightmare dominates me again, and again I urinate blood. I take back control of my dream, without losing my cool, and the jet definitely turns amber.

Another dream:

I am at a café, in a public plaza. I sit in a corner among the other clients. Suddenly, in the middle of the terrace, a bearded man, crazy and aggressive, takes out a gun. With a burst of frightening laughter, he points the gun at a colleague’s temple. Indignant, I rise and tell him he should prove himself with greater delicacy. I remind him that my friend previously attempted suicide by firing a bullet into his head and risks being traumatized by this detestable joke. The madman looks at me and takes aim while murmuring in a sadistic tone, “Fine. Now what?” He waits for me to start to tremble, but I am not afraid. The madman walks around me. I do not move. I know he will not shoot, and I tell him, “You won’t do it.”

“And why not?” he asks.

“Because I am too little for your delusions of grandeur.”

Indeed I know this madman, obsessed by his own spirit, cannot truly be interested enough in me to seek to annihilate me. I wake up happy. This, which could have been a nightmare, did not scare me.

Another dream in which I tame my monster:

I walk upon unknown territory and reach a hole like the mouth of a huge sewer. A horrible, giant monster about twenty meters high springs up. I immediately subdue my distaste, because I know this hideous creature is part of me, an obscure energy of my spirit. I decide not to destroy it but to transform it. So it covers itself with white feathers, turns luminous, deploys six wings, and rises. Turned into a very beautiful angelic entity, he proposes to take me along with him into the cosmos. I overcome the temptation. The angel is the luminous energy of my spirit that I must absorb. I arrange for him to cover me as I sweat from all of the pores in my skin. Now it is I who has turned into a being of light and energy. I rise calmly. I wake up full of joy.

Now, listen to this very poetic dream where I see myself entering, eyes big and open, the kingdom of the dead:

I am in the anteroom of death. Seated in front of me on a bench is the singer Carlos Gardel, deceased for forty years. I say hello and he says, “Go ahead, have courage, decide to die.” We pass into another room where a door going directly to death is found. A gloomy doorman touches everyone present and decides who will go through the last door and who will not. Before us, two adolescents arrive. After they are frisked, the doorman forces them back, and they go, sorry to still have to live. Gardel is declared dead; it is now my turn. The doorman touches me and declares me deceased. Carlos Gardel hesitates, he is afraid, and I tell him, “What does it matter! Good! Now we are going to truly know what is behind this door!” Firmly decided, I push him so that he passes into this dimension with me. Upon passing through the door, the singer disappears into an explosion of light. Having barely crossed the border of death, I find myself in a green landscape. I am in the company of very agreeable people. I throw blank paper envelopes into the air. They fall down again full of sweets and precious objects. I can perform miracles as I dominate this dimension, and I know that the tossed envelopes will always fall back down full. I offer the gifts to the people who accompany me, and I wake up feeling very content.

Finally, a last dream among many others where I find myself once again confronted by monsters:

I must cross the dark underground on a dirt floor. A stranger waits to let me pass. I divine in the shadows the presence of an animal. I know that it acts like a black panther and that the unknown is the trainer. He signals me to cross directly, without fear. I follow his instructions, but the panther jumps on me, throws me to the ground, and, with his claws, first immobilizes my head. It nibbles at my cranium without hurting me, the way a cat does playing with a mouse. I see the decomposed face of the trainer who watches me at the mercy of his big cat; he feels powerless. The animal never frightens me. Without moving, I let it caress my hair with its mouth. I know I must abandon myself, become one with her, accept the situation with love, dissolve into the panther. I begin to vibrate with love, and I become one with her. At this instant, the panther disappears. I get up, cross the underground, and go on my way. I wake up full of joy.

If I understand right, you have applied what you’ve learned in your dreams to the course of your daily life, and you have afterward integrated these lessons into the practice of Pyschomagic.

Exactly. I have forced myself from day to day to be faithful to what has been given to me to understand in the dream. For what good is it to receive the lessons without applying them to the core of daily troubles? A lesson doesn’t become operative, does not acquire its transformative force, until it’s applied.

Can you give me an example of application in daily life of a principle perceived in a dream?

Well, as I have said, the lucid dream taught me to confront the monster. It’s okay to run away if one does not feel strong enough to face it; but the moment comes when one must look it in the eyes. Sometimes, the disguised monster turns into an ally. Our fear nourishes the adversary’s hostility while our will to face him with love disarms him, causing his purpose to change. While I shot The Holy Mountain in Mexico, there were two scandalous rumors. Because I was shooting in front of a cathedral, they said I celebrated black masses. They also whispered that I ridiculed the army and the Mexican police. . One day, two police officers called out to me and said, “Such and so minister wants to see you.” So they brought me to the office of this minister, who said, more or less, “Listen, Jodorowsky, the president knows you very well. He admires what you do; you have a friend in him. But be careful: Just as a government can be a very good friend, it can, if you displease it, turn into a formidable enemy. Do not show any uniform in the film, erase all of the religious symbols, and you will live in peace.” In Mexico, such remarks by the minister were the equivalent of a death threat. Upon returning home that evening, I heard voices in the garden, “Attention, Jodorowsky! We are going to skin you.” There was at the time in Mexico a paramilitary group of young people called “the Falcons” who were in charge of the dirty jobs. I understood that all this could turn out badly, so the next day I took all my family to the United States and decided to finish shooting there. However, I did not want this minister to become an enemy, nor did I want the ghosts of any death threats on my conscience. Once the film was finished, I assembled all of The Holy Mountain’s good reviews from Europe and the United States. I went back to Mexico, and I asked for a hearing with the minister who remained angry with me for having taken my team and left Mexico. Offering the press clippings, I told him, “See what my film did for Mexico? They talk about it around the world.” Aware that I had again put myself in the mouth of the wolf, he smiled and gave me a pat on the back. “It’s good, Jodorowsky. You are brave. I applaud you.” Not only did he not present any more problems for me, but he even gave me presents! So there is the true antidote, which shows to what point it is sometimes beneficial to dare to brave the monster. The essential principle is, as often as possible, never leave an account unsettled with an enemy. Because, the more things stay at the latent stage, the more hate nourishes it, at the risk of growing. A bomb with a long fuse can be lit years before it explodes, but the day when the detonation occurs, the harm is considerable. It’s better to defuse the bomb, to not let the threats of death linger around us or in the unconscious. One never needs to kill the adversary; it works better to transform it, to make it an ally.

Another principle of the lucid dream consists in consciously changing the content of the dream. How have you applied this in the course of your daily life?

Well, for example, I have told you that in my dreams I loved to change the scene, to go from Africa to the United States, for example, to transform the environment. . In the same way, I understood that I should not, in any way, allow myself to be a prisoner of my surroundings in my everyday life. Daily reality is not rigid, or no more so than the conceptions we have in our heads. If we feel ourselves pressured, we can always evolve within the given environment — we’re free to change! Who says it is impossible? The lucid dream taught me to move within a subtle reality, where all the mutations, all the transformations can serve at every moment. That depends entirely on my intention. In the lucid dream, the single intention of finding myself in Africa among a herd of elephants transported me there. In this other dream mode — which is “reality”—it is also my brain, the representation that I make in the world, which controls the game. “Reality” does not exist in itself, instant after instant. I create my reality, happy or nightmarish, monotone or passionate.

Example?

The other day, when you came to visit me at my home, you noticed I had changed everything. I was tired of the old decor. I bought new furniture, and everything in the house that I did not want anymore I put out on the street. My cleaning out turned into a kind of neighborhood party; people began to help themselves. . Some days later, the neighbors heckled me, “Ah! We know you!”

“Go on,” I replied. “How do you know me? By my comics, my films?”

“By your garbage!” they replied. “We recovered incredible things from in front of your house!”

In short, I not only changed my decor, but I also transformed a bit of the atmosphere of my neighborhood.

All the same, Alejandro, it is easier, if one has money, to change the furniture than to transport oneself among the African elephants.

No, the fundamental principle is the same; this all takes place in the head, in our conception of reality! One can see reality as a nightmare, and God knows that in the worst situation, anything can happen. But it is in this same reality that one can develop lucidity and accomplish responsive acts to transform the negative into positive.

Some might say this is a question of the purse: if you have a large sum of money, you can effectively take a jet and go to Africa or New York.

Yes, but one must attract life! Your life corresponds to the conception that you make of it. Well, for example, I have never been a millionaire or even very wealthy, but I have always applied the lucid dream principle to my daily life: why not go there? Thus, I have attracted favorable circumstances when I have had real need. The other day, I had the desire to treat myself to a little escapade. I had been invited to a film festival in Chicago, so I went there secretly for three days. I left on Friday; I came back on Sunday. No one knew. (Laughter.)

I remember one day, a billionaire friend asked me, “What are you doing this weekend?”

“Nothing,” I told him.

“You want to go to Acapulco?”

And there it was! His private jet brought us to Acapulco for the weekend.

As you tell this, it seems very simple, but not everyone runs with billionaires.

Listen, you are trying to make me a liar, but you know as well as I do, from your own experience, that each person creates his own reality.

I needed to leave for the other side of the world for the weekend. I was intimately convinced of the flexibility of reality, and this sent me a billionaire with a private jet. That’s all! As for you, what you loved in life was meeting sages and listening to rock ’n’ roll. You really wanted to reconcile these two seemingly rather different aspects of your existence. And then, since you did not have a rigid idea of reality, you attracted the adequate circumstances, and you finally found, in Arizona, a true sage who, not content with having created an ashram, is also leader of a rock band. Without a doubt, he is the only such person on the planet. He was then very little known in the United States and totally unknown in Europe, but the magic of life sent him to you all the same. (See Gilles Farcet’s L’Homme se leve a l’Ouest: Les nouveaux Sages de l’Occident [The Man Rises to the West: The New Wisdoms of the West].)

Also when you were a youngster, you went to see my films and collected articles about me; and then, here we are! Friends! And we amuse ourselves making books together. In your innocence and determination, you attracted these statistically improbable circumstances.

Fine. .

Listen, let me tell you another story. In 1957, long before I theorized all this, I asked my wife, “Where do you want to go for vacation?”

“I would really like to go to Greece,” she replied.

“Very well,” I replied. “We will go to Greece.”

“But how? We don’t have a penny.”

“We are going to Greece!”

At that moment, someone knocked on the door of the garret where we lived. It was a friend and member of Francisco Marín’s well-known (at the time) South American music group, Los Guaraníes. He said to me, “Listen, we have to leave on tour to Greece in three days to give a show at a folk festival, and one of our dancers has fallen ill. Would you replace him?”

“But I do not know these dances. .”

“It doesn’t matter. My wife is going to teach you!”

Right away I learned two dances, Bailecito and Carnavalito. Then, sure as you please, we left for Greece. After that, how can I not consider reality like a dream that belongs to me to create as I go along?

I agree on the principle; but your anecdotes and the way in which you express them appear to me to be open to confusion. After all, the earth is populated with people who don’t ask for anything but to realize their dreams without effort. Experience shows that to desire is not enough; one must also merit it.

What you say here appears very important. Of course, these things that I’m telling you happened to me, so I can say that my life is commensurate with my craziest dreams. I truly believe in the magic of reality. But for this magic to operate, it is befitting to cultivate in oneself a certain number of qualities that are at times contradictory, at least in appearance: innocence, self-control, faith, bravery. . Putting this magic into motion requires a lot of audacity, and also purity, and a lot of work on oneself. So I insist that I devote my existence to perfecting myself, to knowing myself, and to making myself internally accessible. It is important to never lose sight of all the discipline without which this approach to existence would be but an illusion. Life is not there for satisfying the desires of the first sloth that was created! Life is wonderful to us when we abandon ourselves to it and when we overcome our egocentrism.

Does this asceticism work then include an application of lessons received by means of the lucid dream? Because, in brief, asceticism requires a great deal of effort, unlike the lucid dream where it is enough just to hold the intention for something to be achieved.

Believe me! To remain conscious within the dream requires a considerable effort.

In addition, the perceived emotions during the dream are very real. If you are terrorized, you really are; you perceive the terror, and it is difficult to face up to things. Finally, the greatest lesson of the lucid dream does not reside as such in the demand for lucidity. So, do not forget that without lucidity, nothing is possible. Thus, as I said, from the instant when one lets oneself be caught up by the experience one crosses into, the dream absorbs us, and the lucidity that was the only guarantor of this initiation dimension ends. The magic we have called forth does not operate except by detachment. What makes the game possible is the lucidity of the witness, whereas identification with consensus reality, on the contrary, shrinks existence and reduces the realm of possibility. In dreams, as in daily life, the same laws operate: The more one is detached, the more one can enjoy perceiving all of existence as a vast playground. The less one is detached, the more life turns into a dead end. Dreaming thus taught me, paradoxically, to wake up and maintain a lucid current as a thread of existence, even if this requires a major effort. Because God knows how marvelous life can be when one is, above all, open to its magic! The danger of identification is the temptation to let oneself be captured by the spell as one opens up. On the other hand, lucidity strengthens itself with practice.

Another lesson of lucid dreaming, which we have already made allusion to, another facet of magic: the flexibility of the real. Not only do you not hold back life in a rigid process, but you train yourself to be flexible.

Yes, I pay close attention to not allowing too much self-definition, to not caging myself into a narrow-minded self-vision. In the dream, I can perceive myself as a sixty-year-old man, but also as a young boy, or as an elder, you see, or as a woman, why not? Diverse facets of my being manifest. In reality, I try to let these facets express themselves while responding to the demands of the situation without clinging to a preconceived idea of what I am or what I should be. When I travel, people often ask what is my nationality. If someone strikes up a conversation on an airplane and they say to me, “Are you Italian?” I respond, “Yes.”

If someone takes me for Greek, French, Russian, Israeli — whatever — I always respond with the affirmative. Delighted to have guessed, the person then relates to me as an Italian, a Russian, a Greek, or a Chilean, and that does not change anything. Our adventure the other day at the Marjolaine is a good example of this attitude. When we arrived, the public was not waiting for us; they had come for Dr. Westphaler.

Dr. Woestlandt, Alejandro.

Yes, Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen.

In brief. .

I asked you to introduce me as Dr. Westphallus, but you did not dare. Yet, I could have given two hours of lecture under the provisional identity of Dr. Wouf-Wouf. I would have spoken about health and conveyed my message. Little matter who broadcasts it! Little matter who I am! I always behave according to what one desires to see in me. If she expects a filmmaker, I play the filmmaker; if he expects a comic strip writer, I play the writer. . I accept whatever role, while knowing in my inner conscience that I do not reduce myself to what another perceives of me, to what someone else believes me to be.

Have you explored other aspects of the lucid dream?

Later, I wanted to explore other, more metaphysical dimensions: I put myself to the search for my inner master. Permit me, again, to read to you a dream in this decisive respect:

I am in the company of two ordinary, fat Mexicans whom I sense to be friends although I do not know them. We cross a courtyard and go to the stone wall, which could equally likely be that of a school, a temple, or a government palace. Everything is very spacious. We walk, hugging the wall. Suddenly an enormous telluric hum bursts out. The noise really alarms the Mexicans. One of them exclaims, “An earthquake is coming!” They study the stones, anxiously awaiting the first tremors. Beginning to realize then that I was dreaming, I told them, “Do not be afraid; nothing will happen to you. It’s a dream.” Everything seems, however, so real that I begin to doubt. But, in making the deafening noise stop by force of will, I acquire a certitude that I am really dreaming. Right away, I suggest to myself to make good use of this lucidity. “This time,” I tell myself, “I am going to ask to gaze at the Divinity.” Although I would be seized by a deep terror, I decided to do it. “Help me to face God,” I say to my friends. They place themselves under each of my armpits, resembling human crutches, to help me move toward a staircase of black stones, which comprises twenty-two steps and rises up in the middle of the courtyard like a pedestal. “I now feel capable of facing the Divinity alone,” I say to my friends. Knowing they are parts of the dream, I make them disappear with a push, and I begin to climb the steps. Again I am prey to terror. Maybe I am going to see a horrible image stand before me. . I glide up the stairs, which are covered with water, and I make enormous efforts to avoid sliding. Then an animated photograph appears on which a gigantic actor grimaces like a clown. I can’t believe it. “A photo, a role-player, the Divinity. . this is not possible!” The actor disappears, and I take his place. I am sixty years old and dressed in a cashmere suit. I have the appearance of an old university professor, with glasses on the tip of the nose. I know that this immense image of myself is a necessary veil, the projection of bygone ideals, and that it let me survive without anguish my first meeting with the Divinity. The photo animates itself and begins to speak to me with sympathy. It communicates a message to me; it gives me a lesson. I retain very little of it, not more than a few words: the treasure of humanity. I often replay this first experience, which allows me to make a first step in the search for the inner God, the guide, the master inside of me, the impersonal me — little matter the name that one attributes to it — and this without being in terror. I muster my strength, take support in the air, mount, and put myself to floating. Like a ram, I throw myself against the screen and cross it to topple over into the vault of heaven, a vast infinity spotted with stars. I want to again contemplate my inner God. In front of me appears, huge like Cheops, two interlocked pyramids resembling the Star of David in relief. I tell myself that I must not be content to just look at them — one is black, the other is white — but that I must melt into them. So I penetrate their center, and I explode like a universe on fire.

There you have it: the dream, just as I recorded it. It is from this memorable experience that I wrote the screenplay, El Incal.

So the practice of lucid dreaming consists of planting an act or intention within the oneiric script. Can you go further than the lucid dream?

Yes, it is possible to go to what I call the therapeutic dream, in which the lucidity is utilized to heal a wound, to make up for a deficiency in the enlightened state. I want to give you four examples taken from my notebook:

I find myself in the company of Theresa, my paternal grandmother, whom I never had the occasion to meet, following some family quarrels. She is a plump little woman, with a big forehead. In the dream, I realize that we do not really know one another: we have never spoken or even once taken a walk together. I ask her, “How is it possible that you, my grandmother, have never taken me in your arms?” I realize that I’m verging on tactlessness, and I correct myself, “Or rather, how can it be, Grandmother, that I, your grandson, have never hugged you?” I suggest that I do it, and she accepts. We embrace. I wake up in the clear memory of the dream, happy to have found this family archetype.

Second example:

I am in my bedroom, such as it is in reality, standing face to face with my father. I say to him, “All my life, you never hugged me like a father. You gave me your fear, and nothing else. But now that I am an adult, I am going to take you in my arms.” With that, and without fear, I hug him, kiss him, and rock him. Cradling him this way, I feel with my hands the amazing vigor of his back. With pleasure, I exclaim, “You are ninety years old, and you are still strong!” I continue to cradle him, with audacity and tenderness, and I tell him, “Just as you never communicated with me by touch, I also have deprived my son Axel of physical contact.” Axel appears, at the age he is now, twenty-six. I take him in my arms and ask him to rock me as I have just done with my father. I wake up.

During the day, I chat with Axel, and I tell him joyously that he was part of the dream. I ask him to embrace me and cradle me. A bit shy and bothered at first, he does it by forcing himself and, progressively, the act touches him. We end up having a contact from which we draw a feeling of well-being and peace. Thus, I achieved in a dream something that was missing in my relationship with my father, which then gave my son the possibility of having it in reality.

Third example:

I have financial problems and dream that they are going to hire me as an actor in a theater company. I am going to see the producer to discuss my salary. I explain to him that he must pay me very well as “knowing me as I know myself” I am not going to be happy to just act but to also make sure his show goes very well. I will supervise the lighting, the music, the costumes, my comrades’ roles, and so forth. Briefly, I am going to occupy myself with everything. The producer understands me and agrees to give me a good salary, what I deserve. I wake up reassured, my confidence in myself regained. I know that my material difficulties are going to be resolved.

Finally, fourth example: For three days, I suffered strong pains in the stomach, probably an intestinal infection. I couldn’t sleep, and I did not want to take antibiotics. I went to bed and dreamed:

I lie in my bed, prey to the same pains I had while awake. The healer Pachita arrives. She lies on top of me and begins to suck the right side of my neck while saying, “I am going to heal you, little brother.” In a supreme effort, she slides my left hand between us and puts it on my stomach. Then she rises in the air without separating from me. We levitate a moment, horizontally, then we descend to the bed. She slowly fades. I wake up cured, without ever feeling any pain again.

It occurs to me to say that I have thus incorporated healing and that I have access to an inner doctor, a kind of Divinity. I remember that in Mexico, before dying, Pachita made a ring appear in the palm of her hand, and she put it on my left ring finger, then said, “I will come visit you in your dreams.”

As you can imagine, dreams like this are tremendously beneficial. They are truly repair dreams, in which the unconscious channels its power to effectively dress the wound.

If it is possible to use this knowledge acquired in the practice of lucid dreaming to unblock in the therapeutic dream, can you go further, to touch in the dream a dimension of knowledge?

Yes, and this other stage, I call the humble dream. One day, I stopped planning scenarios, preferring to attend a dream only as an observer. I let it roll, follow its own course, but because I wasn’t caught up by it, everything remaining lucid. I am spectator of my own dream, and I abstain from all intervention. In fact, I believe I have recently passed to another level even more subtle that I call the wise dream. At present, the protagonist of the dream I attend, as spectator is a sage. He pronounces speeches, which I take note of upon waking up, which are not original and may be extracts from some sacred text. But from the deepest place in my unconscious, these texts surge just as I observed lucidly during the dream.

Can you recount some from these “wise dreams”?

Yes, but not without reluctance. .

Why? Are you now going to play modest?

It does not have to do with that! I simply fear not being believed. (Alejandro extracts from his library an immense notebook that resembles a golden book.) You see it is in this other notebook that I note my most positive dreams. I can open it and read you an example of a wise dream; but will our readers be ready to admit that a man is able to have such dreams? Maybe you should, first, give me your word of honor. .

Why not? This could be kind of surreal: I declare on my honor that you have wisely dreamed. .

Okay. I certify then on my honor to have actually had the following dream! Each is free to believe me or not.

These dreams are that extraordinary?

No, in fact, they are very simple. What is unusual is precisely the element that makes them sage dreams. Everything is in the interior climate of the dream. (Jodorowsky reads from his big notebook, translating simultaneously as all of his dreams are written in Spanish):

I find myself in the company of a master in martial arts who is teaching me. He tells me, “Let yourself fall into my arms without tensing up at all.” The thought comes to me, “Well, I am going to reach an absolute relaxation,” and I let myself fall without tensing up at all. The master receives me, then lays me on the studio floor and tries a capture. I am so relaxed that he does not succeed. He then says to his assistant, “Impossible to fight with him. He is as if dead, and against the dead, one can do nothing.”

You see? An example of a sage dream in which I achieved absolute relaxation. Another example:

I go out on the street in a tight suit that makes me appear extremely puny. So I tell myself, “It is good that people see me as weak, as I know me and I feel myself so strong on the inside.”

Or, more, this other dream:

I attend a class of a professor of philosophy who declares, “The secret is to be in thought.” And I respond, “If you have not accepted death, you have achieved nothing. Only the acceptance of death delivers us from the thought of death.”

Permit me to give you another reading of two sage dreams:

Gypsies brought me to their warehouse where they have amassed all sorts of furniture. They want to consult with me, and they show me a cardboard box and a big cutout that looks like the Ace in the Tarot of Marseille. With it, they think to devote themselves to alchemy and discover the universal solvent, the material capable of dissolving all other materials. I smile at them and ask them, “Do you know what the universal solvent is?” Seeing they have no response, I tell them, “It is the blood of Christ. One drop of the blood of Christ on your heart dissolves all other feelings. So only love lasts.”

A depressed child tells me, “I am insignificant. I have no value. God does not see me. He is occupied with more important things.” I respond, “You represent the surface of a sphere composed of infinite points. Imagine now the center of this sphere: it is a lone point, which is, at the same time, communicating with all the other points.”

I was expecting your dreams to be a bit more crazy, a proliferation of symbols of initiations, like in your films or comic strips. The dreams that you tell of here are a bit more sober, unusual for you.

Well, my comic books and my films correspond with the lucid dream.

As you have seen, these dreams are often very short. Their special character resides in their impact and in the sensation that I have of myself in them. In the dream, I am a sage, detached, happy, and this sensation persists for a time upon waking.

I would like for you to now give some examples of the “ humble” dreams.

Here is a typical dream in which I admire the value of others:

I find myself in the home of friends. I am in the company of an undistinguished woman who, however, has a very distinguished style. She can’t have been more than fifty-eight years old. I find her very perceptive, extremely kind, and understanding. After a moment, she asks me, “Do you know who I am?” I reply in the negative. “I am Christine,” she says. “It is I who cared for you when you were an infant.” I realize then that I’ve found myself in the presence of my first nanny. I then say to my friends, “Understand this! She is the first woman I ever loved!” Knowing that she is still living and has reached such a degree of evolution gives me great joy. Christine and I embrace, then she goes. My friends then say to me, in a very affirmative tone, “She is eighty years old and yet she seems so young!” I wake up with joy in my heart.

Another example:

I am surprised in the middle of the road by a student rebellion. The youths burn cars, and there are police officers everywhere. Someone shoots a machine gun, so I lie on the ground without feeling any fear. A policeman takes me in. I am interrogated: I remain calm. I have in my pockets heaps of antimilitary tracts as well as newspaper clippings of rather funny facts showing the police and military in their ridiculousness. I explain to them that I am a professor of the tarot, and they release me. I walk the streets. My suit is a wreck, and I have even lost my shoes. Instead of shoes, I slide the tips of my feet into an eyeglass case. I enter a café to ask directions. Among the clients, a plump-enough woman of the popular kind, who seems full of goodness, looks sadly at me as she takes me for a hobo. She murmurs, “Look what a state this poor man is in. Something must be done.” She takes me for a derelict. I find her to be so good, and I am so touched by her charity that I decide not to set her straight. I resolve to accept the role that she gives so as not to disappoint her, and I permit her to freely give course to these good feelings. I open my black leather suitcase and look for a little game of tarot that I can offer her. Among the tarots, there is a bottle of pills. They are vitamins, but the woman is persuaded that I transport drugs, and she experiences even greater pity. Without knowing anything about the tarot, she takes a card, that of the Magician. “Bad,” says she. “You should not carry this card. Look: the young man has a pill between his fingers.” She actually takes the yellow circle from between the Magician’s fingers. I tell her thank you for her good intentions, and I promise to no longer use drugs. I leave the café. At no point do I have the intention to make myself seem important; to the contrary: it is with joy that I am abased.

Do you make distinctions among other kinds of dreams?

Of course! There are “generous dreams” in which the dreamer shares with the rest of humanity what he has learned. For example:

I find myself in an immense space, flying over a peace march of millions of demonstrators. I suddenly realize that I am dreaming. I go around in the air in order to attract their attention. The public reacts in admiration upon seeing me levitated. I ask them all to join hands and form a huge chain so they can fly with me. Upon touching them, I make them rise and try to make them fly by force of my thoughts, but they do not move. I must touch them with tenderness, hang on to them. They then fly toward me, and we give ourselves up to the exercise of drawing figures in the sky, all together in a chain, until I wake up.

To know not only how to give but also how to receive, to accept the service that another can give, is equally part of the art of generosity. This I understood from the following dream:

I am in Paris. The newspapers have a problem with the government, as it did not provide the raw material for printing. France-Soir feels obligated to publish with a typewriter and print according to a primitive process using sugar. At the side of a newspaper stand, seated in front of a wooden table, is Bernadette, the deceased mother of my eldest son, Brontis. I sit facing her, and I find her beautiful, happy, as she rarely was in her life. Unlike before her death, she is totally positive toward me. Now, she inspires my self-confidence; I know I can count on her. Realizing that I am dreaming, I tell myself, “Bernadette is dead, but in the dream she lives. To speak with the dead does not scare me. I trust her. It is an archetype, which can be useful to me, since she knows politics (in which I am totally ignorant) and will always be available whenever I want to consult her on this subject.” Bernadette begins to explain why the situation is so tense, and why the president is wrong to trust the minister he has just named. Then she speaks to me of the future, “We live,” she tells me, “in the idea that the future does not belong to us, that it is not for us. . although we are totally tied together with the future. In the future, we will be very active.” I think she makes reference to the future in general, the millions of years remaining to know the universe.

After this dream, I very lucidly delighted in this reconciliation with the mother of my son, all the more so as we lived with so much conflict. Bernadette became an ally who proposed to collaborate on the perfecting of my spirit while adding the best of herself. I have thus accepted her new presence in my life, through the dream.

Lucid dream, therapeutic dream, sage dream, humble dream, generous dream. . What is for you the ultimate dream, the oneiric ne plus ultra?

The magical, creative dream. All these years of oneiric exploration, I have only known one. Here it is:

I am in my bedroom. Supporting myself in the air with my hands, I take off. I decide to feel all the power of my voice. Letting the song come to me, I emit, with an almost limitless force, sounds, which go well beyond those of the opera. The voice does not depend on me: I invoke it and it comes. I don’t have to do more than let it out through my mouth to discover it, living magic. . Very touched, I feel I have opened a dimension of myself unknown until now. In plain lucidity, I open my eyes, and I wake up. I note that my heart beats fast. Without moving, I recall all the details of the dream. Suddenly, a song not far and not close comes to my ears. It is not emitted from a human voice, but it cannot be less than human resonance — as if all the neighborhoods in the city were singing. This song seems to arise out of another dimension. I tell myself that I am still half asleep, and I must observe more lucidly what happens. The phenomenon repeats, and I abandon myself to listening, especially since this totally new and extraordinary experience alters the rhythm of my heart. On the one hand, I believe myself prey to hallucination; on the other hand, it appears to me that a little door opens that could be called the third ear, like one speaks of the third eye, a door of clear hearing. . I sleep deeply and, in another dream, I see myself on a street in Montmartre. I walk murmuring, “It was a divine voice, the voice of a goddess. She does not come from a throat but was exhaled by reality itself. She comes from the streets, from the homes and from the air. .”

Superb! Now, come back to the dream called reality. Can we, as some sages affirm, envision our life like a dream from which we must wake up?

I would say rather that one must turn this unconscious dream that is more often our life into a lucid dream. At one time, I had the habit of, before going to sleep, reviewing all the events of my day. I replayed them like a film from first to last then in reverse, according to the advice of an old book of magic. This practice of “walking backward” allowed me to distance myself from the incidents of the day. After having analyzed, judged, and taken part in the first exam, I would return to pass through the day again in reverse, and so I found myself in a detached state. Reality thus captured takes on the same qualities as a lucid dream. Through this activity I saw at what point, like everyone, I dream my dream! To review my day at night compares to remembering my dreams in the morning.

The sole fact of remembering a dream is already like organizing it. I do not see the dream again just as it was, but I see selected parts of it. On the same note, seeing again the last twenty-four hours, I do not have access to all the events of the day but only to those that I have retained. This selection already constitutes an interpretation on which, additionally, I patch my judgments, my appreciations. . To become more conscious, we can begin to distinguish our subjective perception of the day from the objective reality. When one does not confuse these anymore, one is able to attend as a spectator the unwinding of the passing day, without being carried away by judgments and appraisals. From this position as witness, it becomes possible to interpret one’s life as one interprets a dream. Permit me to give you an example of the application of this approach: One of my students, named Guy Mauchamp, one day asked me for advice. He did not know how to take some young dishonest punks squatting in the house that belonged to him. Surprised that he had not called the police, since the law was on his side, I told him, “In a certain way, this situation suits you. Thanks to it, you are expressing an old distress. I suggest the following approach: Consider this situation as a dream. Try to interpret it as you would a dream you had the previous night. Do you have a younger brother?” He responded in the affirmative, and I asked him then if, in his infancy, he had not felt betrayed by this baby capturing the attention of his parents. He, of course, confirmed that he had. I quickly interrogated him about the relationship he maintains today with the brother in question. As I expected, Guy confessed to me that they had a bad rapport and never saw one another. I explained to him that it was he himself who maintained this encroaching situation with the squatters in order to express the distress caused by the arrival of his brother. I added that he needed to forgive his brother, treat him well, and make peace with him if he wanted the situation resolved. I gave him psychomagic advice and, a week later, I received a post card from Strasbourg, “Firecrackers over the cathedral — big explosion of sacred joy,” with the following message: “Following my question, you prescribed a psychomagic act, and I give you the end results. It resulted that I gave my brother a bouquet of flowers and treated him to a bite to eat as we renewed our fraternal rapport and put the past, when I felt betrayed by him, aside. The goal was to obtain the departure from my house of the fraudulent and illegal renters. I offered the flowers to my brother and spoke with him Friday noon. Friday night, the two squatters left — with my furniture! But finally they are gone, and I can return to my home. Thank you.” Interesting, no? Taking the furniture was like taking some of Guy’s past.

So, you had asked this young man to interpret an existential situation as if it were a dream filled with symbols to decipher.

Exactly. Since we dream our life, we will interpret it and discover what it wants to say to us, the messages that it wants to transmit to us, as if transforming it into a lucid dream. Once the lucidity is reached, we are free to act in reality, knowing that if we seek only to satisfy our egotistical desires, we will be taken, we will lose all detachment, all control, and all possibility for a true act. To live amusing and effective lives — as much in the nocturnal dream as in the diurnal dream that we call our life — we must become less and less involved.

This detachment, which does not prevent action or compassion and does not authorize greed or sentimentality, looks a lot like wisdom.

Of course! What good is it to live with the dreams and to make an effort at lucidity if not to move toward wisdom? Reality is a dream on which we must work in order to progressively pass from the unconscious dream, lacking all lucidity, and which can be a nightmare, to what I call the sage dream.

And the Enlightened? The spiritual traditions say those that are Enlightened. .

To wake up is to stop dreaming, to vanish from this oneiric universe, to become the dreamer.

THE MAGIC ACT

How does one pass from the oneiric act to the magic act? Above all, what is the magic act according to Jodorowsky?

As I have said, it was in Mexico where I acquired a true command of the oneiric act. If Chile was, in the past, a poetic country, Mexico is an absolutely oneiric country where the unconscious flourishes. Any person just a little bit sensitive feels this dimension there, understands this dream presence in the very texture of Mexican reality. On the other hand, you could travel there for ten years without ever catching a glimpse of the Mexico magic. Mexico City comprises a whole world of sorcerers, a world that is very costly for uninformed foreigners to enter. When people are in bad shape or when things are not going well, they pay a call to a sorcerer who carries out a kind of purification. She scrubs the whole body using a heap of herbs soaked in holy water. This is an extremely common practice, and not only among the peasants. Intellectuals and politicians do not hesitate to devote themselves to it; so much is witchcraft part of Mexican life. Among these sorcerers, there are, of course, healers expert in hallucinogenic mushrooms and medicinal plants. Some are acquainted with up to three thousand herbs. Others use animal excrement exclusively. There are also bizarre creatures presenting phenomena that may be swindle or may be magic. For example, I remember a woman from a remote village who always went about scantily dressed in a nightshirt: steel spikes came out of her whole body.

Black magic is also practiced, and a number of sorcerers operate with evil spells. You can ask these sorcerers to cast an evil spell on an enemy. I have personally been witness to some things. For example, in one of my shows, I made fun of an influential woman whom everyone called la Tigresa and said she was the president’s mistress. My actors refused to perform, convinced that la Tigresa had cast a spell over the theater. So I agreed to have a sorcerer’s assistant come to lift the spell. I have to admit that I laughed when I saw him splash the theater with holy water. But then, while we had a coffee, he began to complain, and an immense boil pushed its way out onto his anus. This sudden eruption grew to such proportions that he had to go to the hospital. There was no doubt in his mind that he had absorbed into his body the bad spell cast over the theater.

Psychosomatic reaction?

It’s possible. But in any case, sometimes strange things happen. . One day, a director of a fine arts school with whom I had just signed a contract told me, “You are naive. You swear by Mexico. Everything seems wonderful to you. But if you dare to look here in this drawer, you will discover there another aspect of this country.” So I moved near the drawer, opened it, and straightaway was overcome by an atrocious headache.

What then did this infernal drawer contain?

Horrible wax statuettes used by sorcerers to torture from afar the designated victims of their clients. Their features were, in themselves, so horrible to look at that I felt faint. If they were exhibited at Beaubourg or the Louvre, the public could see what power an art object can have, beneficial or maleficent. A work bearing such energy directly affects the organism of anyone who contemplates it. Although strongly disagreeable in itself, this experience made me wonder. I asked myself what could a beneficial artist be: the good magician whose works of art would be charged with such a positive force that they would push a spectator into ecstasy. It is a principle that served me thereafter in Psychomagic.

Can you give me an example?

I received a visit one day from a mother whose son was homosexual. This woman had never accepted her son’s difference. While continuing to devote a real affection to him, she felt real shame. The son wanted to become a pianist, but each time he took an exam or gave a concert, his mother panicked fearing his failure. The poor boy felt it and was so disturbed that he indeed failed. I quickly realized that this woman saw the pianist profession as an effeminate activity, one of homosexual character. So I gave her an exercise. The sorcerers who cast spells make little effigies of their victim then riddle it with pins. I asked this mother to proceed in the same way. So she made a figurine in the image of her son and used bitten fingernails, hair, and a piece of the boy’s clothing so that the object would be truly soaked with his energy. In accordance with my instructions, she glued a gold Louis under each foot and sprinkled a drop of white wine on each of the chakras. She splashed the statuette with holy water and placed it on the side of a piano with honey-coated keys — symbol of smoothness, sweetness. She left a candle constantly burning in the room, and for one hour each day, she came to pray for the success of her son. The following concert was a success, and the pianist’s relationship with his mother was transformed.

Is that good magic?

No, it is Psychomagic! Later, we will get back to the principles of Psychomagic, but I gave this example to show how I was inspired by the standard practice of black magic in Mexico. I wanted to reverse the process: if it can do evil from a distance, why not do good?

Okay, but it is not enough to have good intentions and simulate the reverse of popular evil spells. How do similar practices work?

Son and mother are connected psychically. If the mother had not made a step in the direction of adopting a different attitude — and performing the psychomagic act with the effigy came to embody the change, to confer a solidity, a materiality that would have otherwise been absent — the son would feel it, even if he were far away. He cannot but react. As the mother could not rationally accept the homosexuality of her child and forgive him, I gave her the concrete possibility of making a step in that direction by complying with a prearranged meticulous ceremony. That is the language the unconscious can understand. In the traditional analysis, it has to do with detecting messages sent by the unconscious and interpreting them into everyday language. Me, I do the reverse: I send messages to the unconscious using appropriate symbolic language. In Psychomagic, it is the unconscious that deciphers the information transported by the conscious.

If I understand you well, one must, in Psychomagic, learn to speak the language of the unconscious in order to consciously send it messages.

Exactly. And if one directly addresses the unconscious in its own language, in theory it is going to answer. But we will get to that. For now, I would like to explain how the magic act contributed to the advent of Psychomagic. While in Mexico, I found myself confronted with the power of harmful sorcery. I, very naturally, asked the same power of beneficial sorcery. If those forces could be put to the service of evil, couldn’t they be used for the service of good? I also searched for a good wizard. Then a friend spoke to me of the famous Pachita, a small, good eighty-year-old woman. People came from far away to consult her in the hope of being healed. I was very moved by the prospect of meeting this famous sorceress, so I prepared myself for this.

What do you mean “moved”?

I had my guard up. After all, nothing guaranteed me that this woman wasn’t also evil. In Mexico, there are very dangerous sorcerers who can covertly introduce a little soreness into the unconscious of a visitor and trigger a delayed reaction. You see, at first you don’t feel a thing, but at the end of three or six months, you’re in agony. . I therefore protected myself when I visited Pachita. You understand, she wasn’t just any sorceress: her consultations could easily attract three thousand visitors. I tell you, it was sometimes necessary to evacuate her by helicopter. So it suited me to take precautions.

How does one protect oneself from the influence of a sorcerer?

It was in a way my first psychomagic act. Above all, I felt that at all costs, I had to disguise myself. To go to her in the fullness of my old identity was to expose myself to the worst. So I began by dressing myself in brand new clothing from head to toe. It was important that my clothes not be chosen by me. I gave money and my measurements to three friends and asked them to go buy all the clothing they wanted to.

Why three friends?

For depersonalization and so that the outfit thus obtained did not reflect the taste of any particular individual. Socks, underwear, everything had to be absolutely new. It was not until I departed for the meeting with Pachita that I put on these new garments. In addition, I prepared a false identity card: another name, another birth date, another photo. .

I bought a slab of pork, wrapped it in silver paper, and put it in my pocket as a reminder. So each time I put my hand in my pocket, the rather unusual contact with the meat would remind me that I was in a special situation and that I should avoid letting myself get caught up, no matter what happened. I arrived at the apartment where Pachita was operating that day, and I found myself in the presence of about thirty other people, some of whom occupied important social positions. I should point out that I met her under relatively privileged conditions, far from those crazies who press around her while she operates in a public place. I made myself part of the intelligentsia. Although she had never been to the cinema, Pachita knew that I was a filmmaker, director of the film El Topo, which had been talked about a lot. I approached and saw a tiny old woman, stocky and nearly blind. Her forehead was rounded and her nose fell downward giving her the appearance of a monster. I had just entered when she tossed me a piercing look and heckled me, “Boy, my boy!”—it was a little strange to hear myself called “boy” at more than forty years old—“What are you are afraid of? Get closer to this poor old lady.”

Slowly, I got near her, stupefied. She had used the right expression to address me. At this age, indeed, I was not mature. While I was no child, my level of maturity was not really that of a forty-year-old man. At heart, I had remained an adolescent.

“What do you want from me? What do you want from this poor old lady?” she asked me.

“You are a healer, right?” I responded. “I would like to see your hands.”

To general astonishment — everyone wondered why she suddenly granted me so much importance — she put her hand in mine. This old lady’s hand had such softness, such purity. . It could have belonged to a young girl of fifteen. I couldn’t believe my senses.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You have the hand of a young girl, of a beautiful young girl!”

At that moment, instantly, I was invaded by a feeling, difficult to describe. Facing this deformed old woman, I felt myself in the presence of an ideal adolescent, the girl that the young man in me had always searched for. She had her hand raised, palm toward me, and it clearly appeared to receive something. I was completely lost, and I did not know what to do. From her assistants a murmur arose. “Accept the gift,” they all told me, “accept it!” I thought quickly: the gift of Pachita is of an unspeakable nature; but I wanted to act like I accepted the invisible gift. So I made a gesture as if taking something in my hand. But as soon as I approached her, I saw something shining between her ring finger and middle finger. I seized the metallic object that was nothing other than an eye on the inside of a triangle. Now, it was precisely the symbol of El Topo. . I began to draw some conclusions from this — at the very least — striking experience: “This woman is an exceptional magician. When she first put her hand in mine, I clearly felt that she was not hiding anything. She had prepared her blow, but how did she make this eye emerge from out of nowhere? How did she know this object was the symbol of my film? In any case, she had me.” I then asked her if I could serve as her assistant, and she immediately accepted.

“Yes,” she told me. “You will be the one to read the poem that will cause me to go into trance.”

So I began to recite a consecrated poem to the divinized Mexican hero, Cuauhtémoc. Suddenly, this shriveled old lady let out an enormous cry, close to the roaring of a lion, and she began to speak in a man’s voice, “My friends, I am happy to be among you. Bring me the first of the sick!”

The patients began to line up, each holding an egg in his hand. After rubbing their whole bodies with it, the sorceress broke it and examined the white and the yellow to detect the evil. . If she found nothing grave, she prescribed infusions, or sometimes stranger things like café au lait enemas. It happened that she advised eating termite eggs and making a plaster with mashed potatoes and human excrement. . When she judged the problem serious, she proposed a “surgical operation.” Witnessing these interventions, I saw incredible things; compared to these operations, the work of Filipino healers would seem innocent.

Example?

Oh! I could tell you of hundreds of operations. Later, indeed, I continued to serve as her assistant. I wanted to be the first to scrutinize the phenomenon, and thus I was witness to the most unprecedented things. I’ll first describe the ambiance. The majority of the time Pachita operated at her home at the rate of one or two sessions per week. This apartment was pervaded by a pestilential odor because she gathered up all the sick animals in the neighborhood to live there for a time and do their business. . It was torture to wait in this place breathing in the dog, cat, parakeet droppings. . Yet, as soon as Pachita entered the room to operate, the odor seemed to disappear just from her presence. Without a doubt, it was her incredible presence, the allure of a queen who made us forget these nauseating fragrances. This little old lady had the aura of a great reincarnated lama.

What do you believe made her so impressive?

I often asked myself. . Because in the end Pachita impressed the disbelievers as well as the followers! What is certain is that she was disposed of an energy superior to the normal. One day, the wife of the president of the Republic of Mexico invited her to a reception given on the patio of the government palace where a number of cages held a great variety of birds. When Pachita arrived, these hundreds of sleeping birds at once woke up and began to chirp as if to greet the dawn. There were a number of witnesses there to confirm this incident. But she did not leave it to her charisma alone. She knew how to create an ambiance around her appropriate to captivating the guest and the patient alike. Her house was kept in semidarkness; thick curtains prevented any light from entering and were so effective that arriving from outside, one was plunged into a world of darkness. Some assistants — all of whom were convinced of the objective existence of the “ hermanito” (little brother), as Pachita had named the spirit that she supposedly contacted and who, in her opinion, worked the healing — led the newcomer down the hall in his sudden blindness. These assistants played, it seems to me, a key role in the smoothness of the “operations.”

You mean to say they helped the sorceress execute the conjuring?

It could be that Pachita was a genius conjurer. . In fact, it will never be known. What’s for sure is that all these assistants, in the role they played, were not accomplices to trickery; all of them had an immense faith in “the Little Brother.” In the eyes of these brave people, the hermanito was the one that mattered. Pachita was but an excellent healer; a “channel,” as one would say today, an instrument of God. They respected the old lady, but they did not venerate her until she was in trance. For them, the disembodied being was more real than the person in the flesh through which he manifested. This faith by which Pachita was surrounded generated a magic atmosphere, which contributed to persuading the patient of his chances for a cure.

How would an ordinary consultation with Pachita proceed?

Seated in an obscure hall, a group of clients waited their turn to enter the room where the sorceress operated. All the assistants spoke with low voices, like in a temple. At times, one left the “operating room” concealing a mysterious bundle in his hands. He went into the bathroom, and by the half-opened door, those in the waiting area could see the glow of a burning object. The assistant came out and murmured, “Do not go in there before the evil is burned. As long as it is active, it is dangerous to approach. You could catch it.” What was this “evil”? The waiting clients didn’t know anything, but knowing they had to hold their urine as long as the immolation lasted created a strange impression. Little by little, they were leaving consensus reality, to topple over into a completely irrational parallel world. Then suddenly, from the operating room, four assistants appeared carrying an inert body wrapped in a bloodstained cloth. They put the body down like a corpse. Indeed, once the operation was over and the bandages in place, Pachita required the patient’s absolute immobility for a half hour — or sudden death. Fearing being crushed by magic forces, the recovering patients do not make even the slightest movement. Immobile as a rock, they definitely appear dead. It goes without saying that this clever staging puts the next candidate into a state. When Pachita calls in a deep voice, always using the same expression, “It is now your turn, darling child of my soul,” that generally makes them shake and regress into childhood. In this sense, this sorceress does not treat adults but children, and all are treated as such, whatever their age. I once saw her give a bonbon to a minister and ask him in a serious and tender voice, “What hurts you, my little boy?” People give up body and soul to her, taking her as an antidote for their terror.

You have described the ambiance and the preliminaries, which is certainly very important; but I would like to know how the operation itself proceeds in general. As “assistant,” you were a privileged witness.

Only up to a point, because I was, like the others, captivated by the magical ambiance! Pachita always had the patient lie on a cot, by the light of a candle, because the internal organs in her opinion faced damage from electric lights. She marked the place on the body where she was going to “operate” and surrounded it with alcohol-soaked cotton. The odor filled the room, enhancing the “operating room” atmosphere. The healer was always followed by two helpers — I was often one of these two assistants — as well as half a dozen followers who were forbidden to cross their legs, arms, or fingers, so that energy could circulate freely. At her side, I saw her finger sink almost entirely into the eye of a blind man. . I watched her “change the heart” of a patient: with her hands, she seemed to open his chest; the blood ran. .

She made me plunge my hand into the wound. I felt the flesh wriggle, and I withdrew my fingers, bloodied. From a jar to the side, I passed her a heart from who knows where — from the morgue or the hospital — that she “transplanted” to the patient in a magical way. Soon after being placed on the chest, the heart seemed to be absorbed and disappeared just like that, as if inhaled by the body of the patient. This phenomenon of “inhalation” was common with all of the “transplants”: she would place a piece of intestine on the person being operated on and no sooner would it disappear into him. I saw her open a head and put her hands in it. There was an odor of burning bone, the sounds of liquid. . The operations were not lacking in violence and constituted a rather shocking show, in Mexican fashion, but Pachita showed, at the same time, an extraordinary softness.

What was the role of the followers present?

The sorceress relied on their presence. Should an operation seem to be going badly, both Pachita and the patient would solicit the active help of all the people present.

Can you give me an example?

I remember an operation during which El Hermanito screamed sharply from Pachita’s mouth, “The child is getting cold! Quick, heat the air or we are going to lose him.” A second later, we were all running, on the verge of hysteria, in search of an electric heater. As soon as we plugged it in, we realized the electricity was out! “Do something or the child is going to be in agony!” growled the Little Brother, while the patient, on the verge of cardiac arrest from actually seeing his stomach opened and the guts in the air, whimpered, frozen in terror, “My brothers, I beseech you, help me!” And we all gathered around and put our mouths against his body, blowing on it with all our might, worried, forgetting about ourselves, trying frantically to warm him with our breath. “Very good, my children, my dears,” the Little Brother cried suddenly. “The temperature is back up, and the danger is passed. I can continue.”

Did you ever lose a patient?

No. To my knowledge, Pachita has never killed a person while trying to heal him, even if the operations often had critical moments. That seemed in a certain way to be part of the process.

Did the patients suffer?

In general, yes. The operations could be painful. When Pachita died, her gift was transferred to her son Enrique, who operates like his mother. When I assisted him, I noticed that the hermanito spoke more sweetly and that the knife no longer caused pain.

I remarked about this to one of the assistants who responded, “From incarnation to incarnation, El Hermanito makes progress. He has learned recently to not make his patients suffer.”

You have said that Pachita showed a lot of tenderness, in spite of her big knife. You were treated by her yourself, weren’t you?

Yes, I had a pain in my liver, and I was curious to try having an “operation” myself. Pachita told me that I had a tumor on my liver, and she agreed to treat me. I decided to make a game of it, telling myself that she couldn’t possibly kill me. Because, of all the people she had operated on, there had not been a single mishap. The time had come to put myself on the hot seat.

And you weren’t afraid, about the pain?

No, because for me it was all theater. I wanted to undergo an operation to see what would happen. But when I found myself on the bed in front of Pachita, with a huge knife in her hand and surrounded by her praying followers, I did begin to feel afraid. I would very much have liked to get up and leave, but it was too late. I realized that she was cutting me with her scissors. .

I felt the pain of my flesh being cut with scissors. Blood ran, and I thought I was going to die. After she made the cut in my stomach, it felt like my belly had been ripped open. I had never felt that bad in my life. For about eight minutes, I suffered atrociously, and I went completely white. Pachita made me drink some herbal tea, and then I could feel blood rushing through my body again. Then she acted like she was pulling out my liver. . Finally, she passed her hands over my stomach to close the wound. And the pain instantly disappeared! If it was sleight of hand, the illusion was perfect. Not only did those present see the blood running and my opened belly, but they also felt the same pain as the patient. Since then, my liver has never bothered me. Leaving aside the cure, that was one of the greatest experiences of my life. That woman was something spectacular, as impressive as a mystical Tibetan lama. Never had I felt so much pain, nor so much gratitude, as in that moment when she told me I was cured and that I could go. In that instant, I saw in her the Mother Goddess. What a psychological shock! Pachita was a great psychologist; she knew the human soul.

Were you ever afraid with Pachita again?

Oh yes, she knew very well how to use terror therapy. On this subject, I would like to cite, as written testimony, my ex-wife, Valérie Trumblay, who was assistant to the healer at the same time I was:

After suffering a miscarriage — I lost the baby from dancing too much during a theatrical tryout — I had pain in my ovaries. The doctors did not find the cause, and they saw in the symptoms psychosomatic effects from feelings of guilt. Whatever the cause, the pain was real, unbearable, and lasted for months. . I decided to consult Pachita. She touched my stomach, without even having me undress, and she told me, “You were pregnant with twins. You still have a dead fetus inside you. I will have to operate — soon. Come back on Friday in the afternoon with a package of cotton, a bandage, and a liter of alcohol. Drink this tea for the three days preceding the operation.” On Friday, Pachita, in trance, had me assist with an operation before my appointment. The Little Brother opened a body, took out a beating heart, and put in another (which she said had been bought at a hospital). Pachita had me touch the entrails, close the wound with a single sweep of my hand, and organize the helpers to bring the patient into the recovery room. “Now you,” the witch then told me. I started to shake from head to toe, my teeth chattered, I was sweating. When I saw her lift the bloody knife, I fell on the floor, and I stayed there terrified. So the Little Brother told me, severely, through the mouth of Pachita, who suddenly acquired the hoarse voice of a man: “Calm yourself and lie down here. If not, I cannot do anything and your ovaries will catch gangrene.” With a lot of difficulty, I got up and laid myself on the folding bed. While a helper raised my skirt to show my stomach, the others began to pray under a painting of Cuauhtémoc, the adored emperor who, according to them, was none other than the spirit who possessed the witch. She soaked the cotton with alcohol and put it on my stomach, around the area marked to be cut. Then, very quickly, with the cold blow of a surgeon, she opened my stomach. I felt a live pain, I heard sounds of liquid, I perceived the smell of blood, and I believed I was dead. The three minutes of the operation seemed interminable; my heart beat a thousand times per second, my guts were in the open, and my whole body was frozen. But she, or better said, the Little Brother, was unruffled: not a word, not a useless gesture, an incredible precision. Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain, as if they tore off a fragment of viscera, and Pachita showed me a black and viscose thing, which looked like a squid. “This is the fetus. It is rotten.” The smell was unbearable. “Bring me that bag,” she ordered. The helpers ran to the kitchen and returned with a plastic supermarket bag. With great care, Pachita made a package and tied it with a red belt and gave it to her son saying, “Tonight you will throw this into the canal, into the dark waters, with your back turned on it, and you will leave without looking back. Malignant things are caught in glimpses. .” Then she closed the wound with her hands, and the pain disappeared in an instant, as did the fear. She bandaged my stomach, and she ordered me to rest for three days and to drink a liquid prepared especially for me. As I was the last patient of the day, at this time Pachita had to restore her own body and have the Little Brother return to his kingdom. I began to cry so hard that my sobs seemed to take over the little room. While the helpers prayed that Pachita would return to being a woman, I heard a little voice crying, shouting in the corridor, “Mommy, mommy. .” It seemed to me that only I could hear it, and I exclaimed, “Outside there, there is a child calling for her mommy.” They ordered me, severely, to quiet down and to let the vampire go. After a month, I could walk normally. A very sharp pain perforated my stomach at the tiniest sudden movement. But the result of the operation was unequivocal: I never again suffered pain of the ovaries, after so much agony. Since then, I converted into a faithful follower of Pachita and, in the company of Alejandro, I have assisted many operations. I cannot affirm categorically if what I saw was real or an illusion, but regardless of what I saw, this woman cured those who had faith in her and, above all, in the Little Brother. Pachita dedicated her entire life to those who suffer. If that was a trap, it had to be a “sacred trap” as Alejandro would say.

Now I would like to relate a failure that, seems to me, was due to a lack of faith or the bad faith of a patient. I knew a rich American divorcée who suffered from a persecution complex. She was convinced that death pursued her; that it circled around her using her as a channel. Her cleaning lady had drowned in the pool; her mother had died in an airplane accident on her way to visit her; a friend of hers committed suicide. . I advised Pachita that I was going to introduce her to someone possessed. I tried to persuade her to believe, but she was closed in distrust toward the white woman who visits an Indian village. The American arrived at the witch’s house in an ambiguous mood. She entered the room with a repugnant, disdainful air. Upon seeing her enter, El Hermanito, embodied in Pachita, went red in the face and, expelling foam from the mouth and brandishing the knife with the expression of an assassin, attacked her, determined to kill her. Between the eight of us present, we held the witch, who fought with a force that seemed nearly impossible to subdue. We sang a spell, and after several minutes of complete panic and rage — a crisis bordering on an epileptic fit—El Hermanito calmed down. Pachita began to caress the head of the American, who was suddenly very submissive, like a frightened child. “Now I see, my little daughter,” murmured El Hermanito through Pachita’s mouth. “You are possessed by a criminal demon. Without knowing it, you give death. You want to kill. Don’t deceive yourself, be sincere and realize that you, because of fear of the world and out of resentment, you are full of a thirst for destruction. If you want to free yourself, you must follow my instructions to the letter.” El Hermanito ordered her to go to the herb market and buy seven belts of different colors and a piece of coral. For twenty-one days, while sleeping, she should wrap her body with the seven belts and sleep covered like a mummy, with the coral on her chest, like a medallion. For me, the message was clear: she should have slept every night wrapped in the rainbow, symbol of an alliance with God, and purified by the humble beauty of the coral. But the patient did not see it like that. She terminated the consultation, again assumed her old personality, and created every obstacle imaginable in order to not follow the instructions of going to the market. First she broke a toe. Then she suggested she buy the belts in a store in the metropolitan area, because the herb market seemed like a dirty place to her, full of filthy Indians. . After two or three weeks, I convinced her to go with me to the market. Once we were there, she proved to be absurdly mean; she haggled on the price of the coral and the belts until she was angry over a few pennies. Finally we left the market with the package in her hand, but she almost forgot it in the taxi and didn’t show the least interest in taking it with her. That was it! I decided to cut our ties, and I never saw her again. I left her in that world, her world without faith and without love, a victim of herself. Years later, I was informed by the press that she had killed her lover. Pachita was right: that woman was an assassin. El Hermanito, trying to leap on her to kill her, acted as a mirror. The American, moored in her suffering, did not want to change, which was reason enough for her not wanting to benefit from the knowledge transmitted by Pachita, to whom she had gone for a consultation only because I asked her to, although she had no true faith in the power. My point is that it is necessary to collaborate with a sorcerer. El Hermanito could not heal someone who did not deeply desire it or who refused to collaborate.

It could be that a person had faith but did not desire to recover their health. I remember, for example, a woman named Henriette, the patient of a doctor friend of ours, who was told she had no more than two years to live. Henriette was sick with cancer, and they had already removed her breasts. At the request of her doctor, who supported trying anything, she traveled with me to Mexico. Although very depressed, she agreed to an operation by Pachita, who suggested purifying her blood by injecting two liters of plasma that arrived from another dimension, made by El Hermanito. The day arrived and, after the usual ceremony, Henriette found herself lying on the bed. El Hermanito stuck a knife in her arm, and we heard the blood fall into a metal bucket. It was a thick, stinking stream. Then El Hermanito introduced into the wound the end of a meter-long plastic tube, lifting the other end into the air to connect it to the invisible. We could hear the sound of liquid pouring smoothly from an unknown place, while El Hermanito said, “Receive the holy plasma, little daughter, do not reject it.” The day after the operation, not believing in the effects of the “transfusion,” Henriette was sad and listless. I tried to get her to respond, but it was impossible. She was smug like a kid, gruff, egotistical. She accused me of wanting to take her to Calvary. Two days later, a huge infected abscess appeared on her arm. Very afraid, I called Enrique, Pachita’s son, who, after consulting his mother, told me, “Your friend has faith in medicine, but she rejects it. She wants to undo the holy plasma. So tonight have her do her business in a bedpan, and tomorrow morning apply the excrement to her arm to explode the seat of the infection.” I gave the message to Henriette, who closed herself in her room. I do not know if she followed the advice or not, but the truth is that the abscess exploded leaving a very large scar, so deep the bone was visible. Immediately I took her back to Pachita who, converted into El Hermanito, said to the patient in a man’s voice, “I was waiting for you, daughter. I am going to give you what you desire. Come. .” The healer took her by the hand like a little girl and brought her to the bed and surprisingly started humming an old French song, while swinging a knife before the open eyes of the patient. I had the impression that she was hypnotizing her. So she asked her, “Why did you want them to cut off your breasts?” To which Henriette answered, in a child’s voice, “To not be a mother.”

“And now, my dear girl, what do you want them to cut?”

“The glands that swell in my neck.”

“Why?”

“To not have to speak to people.”

“And then, little daughter?”

“For them to cut the glands that swell under my arm.”

“Why?” “To not have to work.”

“And then?”

“That they cut those that swell near my sex, so I can be alone with myself.”

“And then?”

“The glands in my legs, so that they cannot force me to go

anywhere.”

“And then what do you want?”

“To die. .”

“Very well, my little daughter, now you know the path your illness will take. Choose: follow this path or heal yourself.”

Pachita put a dressing on her arm, and three days later the wound had healed. Henriette decided to go back to Paris, and she died two weeks later. When I told Pachita the sad news, she replied, “El Hermanito does not come only to heal. He also helps those who desire it, to die. Cancer and other grave illnesses present themselves like warriors, following a plan of precise conquest. When you show an ill patient, who seeks to wipe himself out, the path the illness takes, he will hurry to follow it. For this reason, the French woman, instead of spending two years suffering, quit fighting. She yielded to the illness and helped it realize its plan in two weeks.” Before this I had believed that it was enough to make someone conscious of self-destructive impulses in order to save them. From this case, I learned the lesson that such knowledge could also accelerate the person’s death.

Valérie’s testimony is indeed really interesting in that it concerns the relationship between healing and faith, as well as the importance of the desire to live. For your part, what do you think, Alejandro? To heal, is faith necessary?

Not necessarily. Everything Valérie recounts is rigorously exact, but one cannot draw a generalization from it. Without a doubt, it would be preferable to have faith, but this is not a requirement. Moreover, Pachita appears to know exactly how to shake the skeptics who come to her, as she did by putting the symbol of my film in her hand. One day, I brought her the French stuntman Jean-Pierre Vignau. He was a giant karate champion who did not believe in these things and did not intend to be tricked by an old Mexican woman. He had hurt his leg, and I urged him to go with my wife to Pachita’s house. He was very hesitant, but as I accused him of being afraid, he finally consented while swearing he would not be duped.

And what was the result of this confrontation between the old sorceress and this stuntman no one messes with?

It happens that Vignau himself, very touched by the episode, tells of it in Corps d’acier, his memoirs published through éditions Robert Laffont in 1984. So I am going to read the related passage. This testimony of a skeptic cannot but add weight to what I have already told you about Pachita:

During that visit to Mexico, to the home of Alejandro, I was to meet the strangest person I had ever met. The strangest and the truest of beings. I had lived with a muscle tear in my thigh for months. Not a little tear either. A huge thing like two closed fists with a hole in the middle. I had searched for weeks in Paris, going from quack doctor to specialist, trying to find someone who could repair this. No luck. They advised me simply to completely quit karate because it was irreparable. One evening, Jodorowsky asked his wife Valérie if she would take me to see Pachita, an old-style Mexican healer. Here, one would call her a sorceress. And like that, one early morning, I left for Pachita’s house with Valérie carrying a raw egg in her hand, something that had to do with the treatment.

We come to a narrow little lane. A big, wooden carriage entrance. Valérie knocks. The door half opens on an old chap to whom Valérie explains the nature of our visit. He lets us in. The courtyard is full of people. Men, women, children, from all social classes but mostly the poor, Indians, mestizos, very typical Mexicans with baskets, snacks, babies strapped to their backs — all that, that discussion, that debate, endless talking. At the heart of the courtyard, on a heap of wood, a little eagle stares at it all with his sharply serene eye.

We wait. After about twenty minutes, a door opens to the house at the end of the courtyard. A little old woman comes out, an old lady. She looks like a lot of the women in the courtyard. Except that she is very small, fat, round, with a white eye, which seems to see better than the other one: to see what the good one can’t see anymore. Impossible to guess her age. She could be one hundred or fifty. She is there, in the courtyard; she looks at everyone and chooses a chap, extending a hand to him.

“You. .” The guy gets up and follows her into the house. A long moment later, he comes out. She again looks about the people gathered there, and she points her finger at me. “You. .” It is me. I realize that I’m adopting a mental attitude of openness in front of this strange person. I tell myself, “I do not know anyone or anything. So, I open myself. Anyway, she cannot damage my leg anymore than it already is.”

A bit surprised anyway to pass by everyone — but Alejandro explained to me that she thinks men should go ahead of women because men deal less well with suffering; women can wait — so I enter behind her, accompanied by Valérie who explains my case in Spanish.

Suddenly, this little old lady turns toward me and does two or three very quick karate moves while looking at me with her white eye. Right then, I would have said she was twenty years old if someone had asked her age. So she takes the raw egg Valérie brought, breaks it and rubs it all over me, on my face, on my sleeves, on my shirt, on my pants. Then she takes a kind of white liquid in a big bottle behind her and does the same as with the egg. Voilà! Completely whitewashed. She touches my leg on the knots left from the tear. Then she goes back to an altar, like a little nativity scene with figurines and candles, and she begins to pray, to mumble. I listen. I don’t understand anything, but I listen. The room is shadowy, only lit by three or four candles; there is an operating table, two or three assistants who are here to learn or to whom she relays the gift, and Pachita, who prays. Then she stops, she moves toward her assistants and dictates a list of products, herbs, plants. They give the list to Valérie for me. I turn toward her.

“What do I have to give her for all that?”

“You give what you want, a peso, two pesos. .”

I took out by chance the first bill in my pocket, which was I don’t know how many pesos, I forget, and we again crossed the courtyard. Then we went out to the big, colorful Mexican market, filled with shouts and agitation, where people bustle about in such a way, one could say, like in Africa, as the heat did not affect them. In this mad market we bought everything we had to. Upon returning to their home, Valérie made a stew with everything, which she put on my thigh as a poultice. I kept it there for three weeks. I lived normally; I trained with it. And at the end of three weeks, she took it off. It was gone! The only pain I felt was when taking off the poultice; it pulled out hairs. My tear had disappeared, completely. And I never had another problem with it. Of course, those who have never lived through something like this could question the veracity of the minority who have. But Pachita really cured me.

There you have it. The testimony of Jean-Pierre. Interesting, no?

True. According to you, what must one conclude?

I will never confirm that Pachita’s manipulations were true operations; but I will never confirm the contrary. . And I concluded that it was not important. It is our belief in an “objective” world, our modern, self-stylized rational mentality that makes this kind of question torment us. We always allege to place ourselves as detached observers of a supposed exterior phenomenon, and so the mechanisms should be clearly defined. In the “shamanic” mentality, to contrast, this kind of problem is not even posed. There is not a subject-observer and an object-observed; there is the world as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet. In this context, to know if Pachita’s operations are “real” or not proves illogical. What is real? From the time you move into the energetic field of the sorcerer, you incorporate yourself into his reality and he enters into yours; you both move inside the real where the practices of healing are revealed operative. And the fact is that a number of people have been made well and truly healed! In addition, if I return to the said “objective” point of view, I could never describe the “thing” even if I stayed with her week after week, for hours. . Whatever the case may be, one cannot but recognize Pachita’s genius. If it were theater, what an actress! If it has to do with conjuring, this good woman was the greatest illusionist of all time! And what a psychologist. .

What did she teach you? What did you keep for your future psycho-magic practice?

First of all, I learned how to treat people. Thanks to her, I understood that everyone — or almost — is a child, at times an adolescent. Each time someone went to her, she began immediately by touching hands with them, establishing a sensory relationship and putting people in her trust. It produced a strange phenomenon: from feeling this old lady’s hands, she appeared like the universal mother, and there was no way to resist her. I testify to this all the more since I was, at the time, extremely rebellious with teachers, and I refused to subject myself to anyone. But with her contact, my resistances melted like snow in the sun. Pachita knew that within every adult, even the most secure, slept a child eager to be loved and that touch would do more than words to immediately establish trust and put the subject in a state of receptivity. This first touch also allowed her to establish a diagnosis. I remember, for example, the day when I brought my French friend to her. He had suffered for some time, and it had taken six months with the French doctors to discover the presence of a polyp in the bowels. Pachita passed her hands over his body and pronounced straightaway the presence of a thickness in the intestines. My friend was astonished!

But in addition to these quasi-divine faculties, this sorceress sometimes performed what appears to me today to be marvelous psycho-magic acts. One day she received a man who was on the verge of suicide because he couldn’t bear losing his hair at thirty years of age. He had tried all the treatments possible without success, and he could not allow himself to be seen bald. El Hermanito asked him through the mouth of the old lady, “Do you believe in me?” He responded in the affirmative and, in fact, that he had faith in Pachita. So the spirit gave him the following instructions, “Get a kilo of rat excrement. Pee on it. Mix it all together to make a paste that you will apply to your head. This medicine will make your hair grow again.” The man vaguely protested, but Pachita insisted, telling him that if he wanted to avoid baldness, he would have to do it this way. He bowed and decided to submit to the illogical treatment. Three months later, he returned and addressed the old lady, “It was very difficult to find the rat excrement, but I tracked down a laboratory raising white rats. I gave a lab assistant a tip, and he consented to saving the excrement to give me. When I had the kilo, I pissed on it and made the paste, then suddenly realized that it made no difference to me whether or not I had hair. As it turned out, I did not apply the mixture. I decided to be content with my fate.”

I saw it as an essential psychomagic act. Pachita asked for a payment he was not really ready to pay. Finding himself there, at the moment of performing the act, he realized that he could perfectly accept his fate. Confronted with the reality of the difficult act that was asked of him, he saw that he preferred to remain bald. He left his world of thoughts, of his imagination, to look the real in the eye. These directives, absurd at first glance, gave him the opportunity to mature; they made it possible to pass through a whole process that resulted in making it possible for him to accept himself as he was.

It is just as I conceived Psychomagic. It was not rare that Pachita lead people on a bizarre walk destined, in the final analysis, to reconcile them with an aspect of themselves. I remember a person who had a big problem with money and was incapable of earning his living. The old lady imposed on him a strange ceremony: The “patient,” each night, had to urinate in a chamber pot until it was full. He must then leave the pot under his bed and sleep over his pee-pee for thirty days. As witness to this consultation, I, of course, wondered what could be the significance. Little by little, I began to glimpse the sense of it: If a person does not suffer any particular handicap from the physical or intellectual point of view and cannot earn a living, the truth is that the person does not want to. A part of the person opposes it and comes into conflict with money. Yet, following the directives of Pachita quickly exposes a person to a truer torment: it does not take long for the urine, preserved day after day under the bed, to let out a pestilential odor. Forced to sleep above the pot, the patient becomes saturated in his own stench; he sleeps in the fragrances of his own waste. Such an exercise requires a spirit of sacrifice and develops the will. He must have these in order to bear the nightly get-together with his pee-pee.

I don’t doubt it, Alejandro, but how does this relate to his money problems?

First, a symbolic relationship: pee is yellow, like gold. But, at the same time, it is waste. Producing waste proceeds from a natural need; the need to urinate or to defecate is a consequence of another need: to eat and to drink. Yet, to sustain these needs, one must earn money. Money, because it is a form of energy, must circulate. . And that person could not earn a living because he felt a repulsion toward money, considered it dirty and vile. . The money energy was, in this case, blocked. It was a necessity, but he did not want to be involved in its manipulation. A part of this person refused to take part in the movements of money, its coming and going, its transformation into food or other necessities of life. He was averse to recognizing the legitimate place of “gold” in this web that constitutes all of existence. Pachita forced him to domesticate this fear. Finding himself each night alone with his stagnant pee, the patient subtly understood that nothing becomes “dirty” unless it does not circulate. If one refuses to see it and puts it under the bed, the troubles begin. . “Gold” stinks only because it was allotted a disgraceful place. Finally, as I have already mentioned, the sole fact of practicing the exercise from the beginning forced him to show will, an indispensable quality for earning a living, normally.

By the way, Pachita asked her patients to pay her?

No, she did not ask for fees, but the people made donations. When she operated, there was always a nearby basket with a deep pouch in which the patients deposited what they wanted. One could not accuse her of running a “business.” It happened that those who had the means to pay, paid her well; it was, in effect, an invaluable experience to be healed by this woman. She didn’t heal people to earn money; she earned money because she healed people.

Let’s go back to your experience and to what this encounter provided, from the viewpoint of Psychomagic.

I’ve already recounted the operation that I myself underwent. So I won’t go back there. In fact, Pachita deserves a book devoted entirely to her.

Her contribution to Psychomagic is as simple as it is essential: observing her, I discovered that when one goes through the motions of operating, the human body reacts as if it underwent a true operation. If I tell you that I am going to open your stomach to take out a piece of your liver, and I put you on a table and exactly reproduce all the odors and all the maneuverings, if you feel a knife on your skin, if you see blood spurt, if you have the feeling that my hands rummage through your entrails and take something out, you are then “operated on.” The human body accepts directly and naively the symbolic language, in the manner of a child. Pachita knew this and was accomplished in the art of using this vocabulary in an operational — no better way to say it — an operational manner.

So, to you, she was above all an expert in symbolic communication?

Absolutely. She was, moreover, very attentive to objects, to the jewelry a person wore, for example. I remember a woman wearing an oval bracelet. On the inside of it, in a little hole, also oval-shaped, a watch was inset. It was evidentially a gift from her mother, and Pachita quickly saw that this woman would not settle her problems as long as she was not disengaged from the influence of her mama. It’s important to note that the hole symbolized the mother; in the sense that it was still the mother that made the daughter-watch tick. . Pachita instinctively deciphered the symbolic message and recommended a complete ritual to get rid of the object. For her, nothing was innocent; the world was truly a forest of symbols in constant interaction. It is through this contact that I was opened to the language of objects, to the significance that they take on. For example, the gift: anything given has an essence, registered in the dynamics of possession and communication. In the same way, leaving something behind at a friend’s house or in a public place is not an accident. Primitive sorcery knows the mechanism of these interactions and has more or less mastered them. But, of course, it has to do with an intuitive wisdom, not an intellectual or a scientific one. The sorcerer or shaman would probably be incapable of having an elaborate discussion on his own practice; for that, it would be necessary to be positioned on the outside, to watch oneself acting and decipher one’s own performance.

The sorcerer or shaman is not the unconscious “objective” spectator but an integral part of the subjective universe in which everything is alive. Pachita, too, saw ailments as animated beings: the tumor was an evil creature that deserved to be burned alive — and right away you hear birds chirping. At times, she removed from a sick body a moving shape that seemed to fidget like a marionette in the half-light. She materialized the sickness, which thus lost its status as an invisible enemy — which had made it seem all the more menacing — to embody a vaguely grotesque figure that deserved to die. From the stomach of a homosexual patient, a black phallus blowing like a toad was removed.

Worthy of your happenings! They are “panic” scenes that you describe.

Worthy of Goya! I do not know how she succeeded in leading us to that baroque world. . Trance, collective hallucination, brilliant conjuring? Anyway, if there was a trap, it was a sacred trap. I want to say that her magic acts proved effective. She actually relieved the majority of those who came to her. That is why I wanted to observe her and learn from her.

You position yourself, though, somewhat differently; unlike Castaneda, who, having received the teachings from Don Juan, became himself a shaman, you do not claim to be a sorcerer. You content yourself in assimilating fixed universal principles, making them not magic but “Psychomagic.”

Yes, for I am not, in the end, from a culture called “primitive.” In my opinion, with few exceptions — and I do not give an opinion in the case of Castaneda, whom I met in Mexico during this time — one cannot become a shaman or sorcerer if one is not born into a primitive context. Even with the strongest will and the biggest opportunity in the world, one does not disconnect so easily from all of the rational mainstream baggage.

Castaneda is an elusive character whom few can boast of having seen. Under what circumstances did you meet him?

At that time, in the seventies, I was well known in certain circles, thanks to the film El Topo, which, to many, was an example of film magic. Castaneda had seen it twice and liked it. I found myself in Mexico in a restaurant at which they serve a splendid steak and good wine. Castaneda was there in the company of a Mexican actress whom he had met in the dive of a lady friend who was also there with a man. Castaneda — for it couldn’t have been anyone else — upon learning who I was, sent his friend to our table. The woman asked me if I wanted to meet Castaneda. “Of course,” I replied, “I am a great admirer of his!” She said that he would come sit at my table, but I insisted on going to his.

A fantastic coincidence. .

Life is fantastic! I proposed to Castaneda that we go to his hotel, but he wanted to come to mine. We were like two Chinese, competing in politeness. He did not cease to give me preference, and I did the same, of course.

And you didn’t wonder if in fact you really were in the presence of Castaneda?

Not for an instant. Later, in the United States, he published a book in which a portrait appears, a drawing. And it is the portrait of the man I met.

What was your first impression?

In Mexico, it is easy to determine the social class to which a man belongs simply by looking at him physically. Castaneda has the appearance of a truck driver.

What!

Yes, he looks like any other man on the street. He is not fat, but very stocky, with curly hair and a nose slightly flattened: a Mexican of the popular class. But, as soon as he opens his mouth, he is transformed into a prince; behind each of his words one senses a huge culture.

It gives the impression of wisdom?

More than wisdom, of friendliness. Quickly we became friends. He dressed simply and was having a nice fillet, washed down with a Beaujolais. . It seemed like it wasn’t Don Juan but rather Castaneda who was featured in the books. I found myself caught up again in his tone, his voice, that was how it seemed. .

In your opinion do his books narrate real stories or fiction?

It is difficult to say. My impression is that they are based on a real experience except for the parts that elaborate and introduce concepts extracted from universal esoteric literature. In his books you find Zen, the Upanishads, the tarots, work with dreams. . One thing is for sure: he went all over Mexico in order to do his investigations.

Do you believe in the existence of Don Juan?

No. I believe that this character is a genius invention of Castaneda, who, of course, has met a number of Yaqui witches.

How did the conversation in the hotel room develop?

In the first place, he called to tell me he would arrive five minutes early. Such gentlemanliness affected me. Then, when he arrived, I said, “I don’t know if you are a madman, a genius, a swindler, or if you tell the truth.” He assured me that he said only the truth, and immediately afterwards he told me an incredible story, of how Don Juan, with a simple slap on the back, projected him forty kilometers away — because he had been distracted by a woman who passed by. He also talked to me about the sex life of Don Juan, who was capable of ejaculating fifteen times in a row. On the other hand, it appeared to me that Castaneda himself liked women a lot. He asked me if we might make a movie together. Hollywood had offered him a lot of money, but he didn’t want Don Juan to be Anthony Quinn. . Then he began to have diarrhea, with a lot of pain in his stomach, something that, he said, never happened to him, ever. I also had strong pains in the liver and in the right leg. It was strange that those pains came when we started to make plans for a joint project. The pain made us crawl about the room. I called a taxi and accompanied him to his hotel. Then I went to have Pachita operate on me. I had insisted that Castaneda go meet that exceptional woman, but he did not appear. I had to stay in bed for three days. Once recovered, I called the hotel, but he had left. I did not ever see him again: Life separated us. A warrior doesn’t leave footprints.

That is to say, he seemed to be at the same time a con and a very interesting person. .

He told me his stories of Don Juan with such conviction. . I am accustomed to the theater, to actors, and he did not seem to be a liar. Maybe he’s both crazy and a genius?

In your opinion, what has been Castaneda’s contribution?

His contribution has been immense. He created a fountain of different knowledge, a South American fountain. He revived the concept of the spiritual warrior. He put into motion the present notion of waking dreams. Without a doubt, he published too much, but the American publishers made him sign contracts for hundreds of books. And he always, in spite of everything, had something new to say. His books reveal a lot of forgotten things. In this regard truth or fantasy is of little importance. If it is a trap, it is a sacred trap.

As a Chilean with Russian roots, having lived a long time in Mexico, you are truly not the prototype of the western worshiper of the Goddess Reason.

It is true. I am relatively crazy, as you know.

Oh, yes. . (sigh)

But my madness, my excesses, remain rooted in a culture that is nevertheless very modern. Like it or not, I am the product of a materialistic society, which claims to maintain an “objective” rapport with the world. My most extreme boldness is always placed within this context; we can’t get away from that. I exaggerate, maybe, to emphasize the contradictions and the dead ends, but that doesn’t make it false. To be a sorcerer or a shaman is to live in a shamanic world. For my own part, I do not believe enough in primitive magic for me myself to become a magician.

That is why, while I wanted to learn from Pachita, I never envisioned receiving her gift in order to take my turn to become a healer. I would even say that I always refused.

Without a doubt, you don’t believe enough in magic to become a magician; but you believe all the same. .

The fact is that I can’t say what is truth and what is fantasy. But I quickly realized that to learn from Pachita, it was necessary to adopt a clear stance and to act as if I absolutely didn’t believe at all.

Why?

If I had come from the principle that all this could be true, that magic as such could be a reality, I would very quickly have found myself at a dead end. I would have endeavored to follow her magic trail, to become myself a magician, and I would have achieved only partial or mediocre results because one cannot become a shaman by saying, “All this could be true.” So I forced myself to act as if this could not be anything but false. By “false,” I do not want to say nonexistent — one was well obliged to acknowledge the healing and the strange phenomena that arose around Pachita — but better if it could be explained by an ensemble of psycho-physiological laws. I thus found myself able to truly learn from this woman something that I could then reuse in my context.

To. .

To know the way to use the language of objects and the symbolic vocabulary in order to produce certain affects in people; basically, how specifically to direct the unconscious in its own language, be that by words, by objects, by acts. That’s what I learned from Pachita!

Pachita was truly exceptional, but she was part of a tradition.

Of course, and that is why, after having met her, I concerned myself with the function of magic in all primitive cultures. I read hundreds of books on the subject to try to glean some universal elements that I could use in a conscious way in my own practice. I do not want to belabor this, but I want to give you some examples. All cultures have an idea of the power of the word, the conviction that desire expressed in a healthy way leads to fulfillment. But often, the name of God or the spirit is reinforced by its association to an image. The ancients knew intuitively that the unconscious is receptive not only to the oral language but also to shapes, images, and objects. In addition, the Egyptians accorded a capital importance to the written word. It was more about what was written than about what was said. In Psychomagic, I often ask people to draft letters, not so much for where the letters go or what they say as for the mere act of writing and of instilling these missives with therapeutic virtues. Another universal practice is that of purification, ablution rituals. In Babylon, during the healing ceremonies, the exorcists enjoined the patient to undress, to throw all their old clothes away (symbolic of the old me), and to dress anew. The Egyptians considered purification a prerequisite to the reciting of magic formulas, as is witnessed in ancient texts. I’ve forgotten the exact source, but this greatly inspired me: “If a man recites this formula for his own use, he must be coated in oil and ointment, the censer in the hand and filled with burning incenses; he must have a good quality natron in the mouth; he must be dressed in new clothing, after washing in flowing waters, to be wearing white sandals, and to have painted the image of Ma’at in fresh india ink on the tongue.” According to this, it is not unusual that I ask those who come for a consultation to take a bath, to have an enema, because I know that this act, in innocent appearance, greatly influences their psychology; it puts them in a different disposition. If someone dreads going to see his mother, I suggest rinsing the mouth seven times before the meeting and filling pockets with lavender. These details suffice to make them approach the meeting in a different way.

The ancients also attributed a role of the ally to a number of symbolic objects: the magic texts were recited over an insect, a small animal, or even a collar. Also bands of flax, wax figurines, feathers, or hair were used. . Finding in the texts traces of these practices, I gave myself up to reflecting on the projections people make onto objects, and I asked myself how to use this in a positive way. Magicians would engrave the names of their enemies on vases, which then were shattered and buried, causing similar destructions and disappearances for their adversaries. The portraits of the “bad guys” were painted on the soles of royal sandals, so the king trampled the potential invaders every day. In Psychomagic, I have often resorted to the same “primitive” principles — but exclusively to a positive end. I advise people to “bring evidence against” an object, to assign it a name. . Along the same line, from the Hittite sorcerers, I learned the concepts of substitution, replacement, and identification: the magician, in effect, does not shatter evil by finding its origins, but rather ends it, eradicating it from the victim’s body or spirit and sending it to hell. Based on an old text, “an object will be attached to the right hand and foot of the officiant, then withdrawn and attached secondly to a mouse, while the officiant says: ‘I remove the evil and I attach it to this mouse’; and then frees the mouse.” In the same way, Pachita removed the evil by attaching it to a plant, a tree, or a cactus, which had the effect of making the plant die before our very eyes. It is also possible to replace the victim with a lamb or a goat: it is the old concept of sacrifice by substitution where the animal takes the place of the patient. One ties a turban on the head of a goat and then slits its throat with a knife that has previously been put to the throat of the suffering patient. . According to Jewish magic, an evil force can be a mistaken hoax, induced by error. To do this, one disguises himself as the person on whom he wishes to vent his anger, changes his name. . I have myself had the occasion to verify how to change a name, even a handwritten one could prove effective. I also apply this principle to a tarot card: as a rule, the Tower reflects a catastrophe; but why not call it the “Soul and Its God” and, in this way, change it positively? All of these old rituals taught me to use burial as an act of purification.

These are only a few examples of the universal principles of magic acts that I use in Psychomagic, in other words: in therapeutic actions.

THE PSYCHOMAGIC ACT

After the magic act, we come to the psychomagic act. In the context of magic that surrounds a sorceress like Pachita, faith plays an essential role. Yet you said earlier that faith is not a prerequisite.

Then, rather than speak of “faith,” let’s use the word “obedience.” I would like simply to say that even if one does not believe in the power of the sorcerer, it is appropriate to remain impartial and to leave an opening for the sorcery to work. Otherwise stated, faith or not, a patient must show enough integrity to follow to the letter the instructions received. If you consult a doctor and, once gone from her office, you do not put the least effort to buying the prescribed medicines, how can you then evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment? If Pachita prescribes whatever act, the person believes it and completes it without seeking to understand. Obedience, that’s all, because of the mysteries that the suggested practice can encompass. As we have already emphasized, all this is part of a culture radically different from ours. The editor of an important Parisian monthly magazine got cancer and asked me if I could introduce him to Pachita. So I brought him to her house; she operated on him and said, “You are healed, but be careful: let six months pass before telling anyone!” He did not obey. As soon as he was back in France, he had exams by a battery of doctors in the hope of confirming the sorceress’s verdict. They old him that he was not healed, and he died three months later. On the other hand, one of my French friends, a reporter for a big film syndicate, already the victim of several heart attacks, under my insistence, was brought to Pachita’s house so that she could “change” his heart. The operation complete, the sorceress asked him to wait three months to tell. After this time had passed, he submitted to exams and an EKG to reveal great improvements. Years have passed, and he is still alive to this day. I can also cite the case of the assistant to the director François Reichenbach. Following a traffic accident, she seemed condemned to be paralyzed. Pachita operated on her, and she began to walk. Some time has passed, and she even has come to thank me for having introduced her to the sorceress. I profited from the occasion to ask her to testify at a conference I gave at the Sorbonne before an audience of about five hundred people. Let me read to you a part of her testimony, as it was recorded and then transcribed:

EXAMPLES OF PSYCHOMAGIC ACTS

This will be the last segment of our dialogue, and I’d like for it to be a bit more relaxed. Let’s dedicate it to a description of some psychomagic acts.

That’s fine with me, but a warning: to describe a psychomagic act is to enter directly into the language of the unconscious. It is not an innocent walk. You might be shocked — not to mention our readers. .

Well, I’ ll cling to my chair so I won’t be blown away by the power of the descriptions.

Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve warned you! Not that, by these acts, I tried to solve extraordinary enigmas; I am satisfied dealing with small, simple human problems. But what is more mysterious, more irrational, than our little problems? Our daily difficulties conceal an abyss; they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

I agree. Give some examples.

Okay. We take the case of a dancer friend of mine. She had a child with a man who has the same name as her father. That is already very significant. Yet, it turns out that this dancer has the same name as her lover’s mother!

It’s as if each one of them was searching for their father and mother, respectively, in the other.

Curious, huh? In fact, people often fall in love with a name or a profession that reminds them of their mother or father. In her childhood, this dancer was left alone with only her mother at an early age and never had any more contact with her father. Not only did she find a man with the same name as her father, but she also arranged for him to abandon her and disappear, so she arranged for her daughter to have the same kind of relationship she had with her own father. Of course, she did not scheme all of that consciously; it has to do with a completely crude, unconscious strategy. Beginning to understand the extent of her havoc, she came to ask me to prescribe an act that would allow her to forgive her father and thus overcome her hatred of men. I asked her to tell me at what moment her father had broken off relations with her. “When I started menstruating,” she responded. It is common for a father to break relations with his daughter when she becomes a woman. He feels that he’s lost his little girl who sat in his lap, and he has a hard time giving up that kind of intimacy, that contact. Right away I asked her where her father was buried; then I suggested that she go to his grave. “There,” I told her, “you bury, as close as possible to the body, cotton soaked in your menstrual blood, as well as a jar of honey.”

Blood and honey. .

The honey is there to breathe in life with sweetness, to signify that it is not an aggressive act but rather a loving one, an attempt at communication. There! An example of a very simple psychomagic act that allowed the reactivation of a brutally broken relationship and at the same time the resumption of an emotional evolution interrupted by a shock. Although an adult, this woman remained at the emotional stage of the young girl confronted with her first menses and the divorce from her father.

Another example.

A young Chantal, at four years old, found herself placed in a school directed by the sister of the mother of her mother.

In other words, her great-aunt.

Precisely. This great-aunt sadistically tyrannized the child. In working with me, Chantal discovered all the hate she held toward this woman. She could not forgive her, and she had no way to avenge her because the torturer was no longer in this world. So I advised her to go to the grave of this woman and, once there, give free reign to this hate: that she kick, scream, piss, and defecate on the tomb, but provided that she dedicate herself to paying close attention to her subsequent reactions to her demonstrations of vengeance. She followed my advice, and after letting off some steam atop the sepulcher, she felt a deep desire to clean it up and cover it with flowers. And, little by little, she couldn’t help but surrender to the evidence that she, in fact, felt love for her great-aunt.

Had you expected that?

Of course. It was evident that all this hate was nothing but the deformed face of a scoffed-at affection. I knew that Chantal still held the long bottled-up love toward this woman who, even as the sinister headmistress, had represented Chantal’s only link to her family. Following the expression of her hate-filled urge, Chantal would have to allow this long-contained love to come out.

Another example.

A woman had persistent vertigo. Simply drinking a bit of water made her feel bad. I advised her to place her feet between the thighs of another woman and rub the sole against her vulva.

Ahem. . What was the result of this shock treatment?

The execution of this act provoked a crisis of tears followed by a saving awakening. There was a symbolic significance of her vertigo: fear of being swallowed by her mother, fear in relation to the female sex, and so forth. As you can see my technique is somewhat bizarre.

To say the least, yes. How do you get such crazy ideas?

They come. That’s all! The truth is that I am an artist. That is indeed why I have taken the pain to explain my journeys. The diverse creative stages of my existence shaped me and developed my imagination.

Has it ever happened, facing a patient, that nothing comes?

Up until now, this has not happened to me. A response has always come. I suppose that my advice varies in quality and effectiveness; but that, I cannot say. It is up to the people who come to consult me to carry out the act and judge for themselves. But, in fact, I can hardly imagine myself mute in front of someone. Either it is magic or it is not! If you address me, I will inevitably have something to tell you. My prescription will always be well intentioned and will never be totally lacking in efficacy. To say what my accuracy rate is would be impossible. One thing must be clear: I do not place myself on scientific ground but on an artistic map. Psychomagic wants nothing of science but a kind of applied art possessing therapeutic virtues, which is absolutely different. Picasso produced more than ten thousand drawings. All of them more or less good. None is totally devoid of value; still not all of them are masterpieces. But, at the same time, each one is by Picasso, in other words, a product of the talent of a whole artist. “I do not look for, I find,” said Picasso rightly; to find is a habit, a second nature. Anyone who has not developed the habit “To Find” has not felt this spontaneous spurt coming from the depths, but anyone connected to the creative fountain lets it flow, simply. Imagine a Zen master who does not accept a challenge posed by a student’s question. Such assurance is rooted neither in science nor in megalomania but in faith, in the obvious.

Let’s continue. Give me other examples.

A young man complains of “living in his head.” He explains that he is unable to “take hold of reality” and to “advance” in the direction of financial autonomy. I take his word for it and advise him to find two pieces of gold and paste them to the soles of his shoes — he’ll walk on gold all day! This should allow him to leave his head, put his feet in reality, and advance. In this example, I took hold of the terms used by the client himself.

I would also like to tell you of an act that involved my eldest son, Brontis.

I’m listening.

Brontis, at seven years old, played in my film El Topo. Before I tell the story, some clarifications need to be made. First of all, Bernadette, his mother, never really lived with me. When he was conceived, I had believed myself sterile. My father hated his own father and never signed his name “Jodorowsky.” Not having any desire to carry on the family name, he had succeeded in convincing me in a subtle way that I would never have children and that I was thus the last Jodorowsky.

An actress with whom I was working said to me one day that she was convinced of my fecundity, to which I replied that procreation was not part of my destiny. We ended up sleeping together and, some time later, she announced that she was pregnant by me. Trusting her and knowing then that this child was definitely mine, I went through a kind of intimacy revolution, both inside and outside. The woman with whom I had been living had left, and I found myself alone, faced with this responsibility for which I was not prepared at all. I accepted the coming of the child — abortion was ruled out — but I felt that I would be handicapped for a very long time filling the role of father. In addition, I did not have resources, and I could not really lend any financial support to the woman and her child, although at Brontis’s birth, I did give him a teddy bear. A while later, this actress went to work in Europe and took the child with her. Six or seven years later, although I told this story in La Trampa Sagrada, I went through a deep awakening and made contact again with the mother of my son, telling her that I would from then on earn a good living and that she could, if she wanted to, send Brontis to me. He arrived with his teddy bear and a photo of his mother. I then decided to have him play in El Topo. Here’s how the film begins: I arrive playing a flute. I am accompanied by a little boy, and I tell him solemnly, “Now, you are seven years old; you are a man. Bury your toys and your mother’s picture.” The child does it, buries the teddy bear in the sand, putting the photo in the hole with it. After the filming, we moved away together.

As the years passed, I realized that Brontis and I were communicating badly on the spiritual level. I had to admit that I had committed errors, and I sought to repair them. Brontis had often spoken of the toy that I asked him to bury when he came to live with me. That teddy bear was his very first toy, the one that I had given to him at his birth, before we were separated from one another for seven years. After the filming finished, we did not go back to get the teddy bear that Brontis had buried in the sand according to my script. I realized that I had brutally cut him off from his childhood and from his mother. After burying the portrait next to the toy, he did not speak again about Bernadette and quit writing to her. Later, he made this confession: “I did not suffer, because I imagined that the ants would go to live inside the teddy bear, that it would be their home.” This thought was what had consoled the child at the time. One day, a long time after, when Brontis was twenty-four years old, I imagined a new act to repair the old act. On his birthday, I told myself, “I am going to bury a teddy bear in our garden and cover it with sand beside a picture of his mother.” Then I put on a black hat, similar to the one I wore in El Topo, and asked Brontis to disrobe and come to the garden — in the film, the child was naked — to dig up the teddy bear and the photo. I made these remarks to him: “Today, you are seven years old, and you have the right to be a child. Come dig up your first toy and the portrait of your mother.” When I decided to carry out the act, I came across some stumbling blocks. My idea had been to buy a teddy bear as similar to the first one as I could find. It had been a hard toy, filled with straw. But the industry had progressed, and all the teddy bears are now soft and flexible. So the old rigid teddy bear turned into a beautiful, supple, delicate teddy bear. As for the photo, the one that Brontis buried when he was seven years old was in black and white; but when I looked for a picture of his mother to use in the act — she had perished in an airplane accident — I only found one in color, so that having buried a gray snapshot, my son would dig up a colored image. These modifications, caused by “coincidence,” greatly contributed to the act’s success. What I want to tell you is that the stumbling blocks, the elements that one cannot control, also play an important role in Psychomagic. It is appropriate to try hard to accomplish a prescribed act following the given instructions and in the best conditions, but once one finds oneself in the situation, unpredictable incidents and other changes independent of our will become part of the process. In El Topo, I sheltered Brontis under a black parasol to protect him from the sweltering desert sun. The day when, here in Vincennes, we accomplished the act, it rained, so that I had to shelter him under a black umbrella. He did not really know what I was going to do, but he suddenly understood when he saw me imitate the clippety-clop of the horse and make like I was on my horse with him behind. He climbed on my back, and we went through the rain to the place where I had buried the teddy bear. He told me, curiously, “Today, I did not take the umbrella. I knew you would wait for me and shelter me,” as if he had sensed what was going to happen. He dug up the teddy bear and the colored photograph of his mother, we fell into each other’s arms, and he cried for a long time with his head on my shoulder, cries of gratitude, like a child full of tenderness. From that day forward, he decided to mail a poem to me every day. Since that time, I have received some text from him every day. I keep these poems in a special box. I have to say that the communication between us is much better. As I speak to you now [1993], he is thirty years old, and we have a really beautiful relationship.

That is a very beautiful story. Through this act, you voluntarily overturned a difficulty from his childhood.

Yes, but in just the right way. I took the same elements associated with a negative emotional charge and breathed a positive charge into them. And in so doing, I also paid my own psychological debt.

PSYCHOMAGIC LETTERS

Once an act is completed, you told me, the only payment you ask is that the client sends you a letter reporting the execution of the act. I would like to have specifics on the subject of this psychomagic mail.

I demand this letter for two reasons: the psychomagic act, having all the characteristics of a dream, is very quickly forgotten if one does not put it immediately to paper; and what one receives must be shared. The best way to show retribution to a therapist is to report back on one’s healing, the result of the therapist’s efforts. It is a great sign of spiritual health to know how to thank. These letters are an integral part of the psychomagic act. They sanction and conclude it, so to speak.

Whoa! That intrigues me. Would you consider reading some of them to me?

With pleasure. Since I cannot show an actual act, the letters will give you a taste of it. For you to really know the process, I am going to comment on the first letter, sentence by sentence. Afterward, while I read the others to you, I will leave it to you to guess the hidden reason behind each act. Remember, they seem irrational at first glance.

Let’s go. .

Do not forget as I read these letters, that it is not me speaking but the person to whom I prescribed an act, the person rendering an account to me. This is the first letter, then, that I will comment on as I go along:

(Alejandro’s comments are between brackets in the text. Some minor corrections in grammar have been made to the letters. Most of the originals are in Alejandro’s possession and can be verified.)

I am a psychologist and I came to see you because I have not succeeded in working in my profession. I cannot earn a buck. You gave me the following psychomagic act: Take a double square flowerpot [I told her to take a double square flowerpot, like the tarot cards. Double square magic, also known as the spirit and the body. It was necessary to work with the two.] of a color chosen as an initiatory color. [What color? The person chooses the color that has symbolic strength for him, so that the object speaks to the person.] Then, divide the flowerpot into two parts and plant wheat! [There, I play with words. When you plant wheat, you put wheat in your pocket. It is not by coincidence that in French one sometimes calls money “wheat” (“dough” in English).] One part of the wheat is planted on one side of the double square flowerpot in order, in four lines, two lines of even possibilities and two lines of odd possibilities. [For me, to make the lines even and odd symbolizes the recognition of the man and woman inside oneself. In every initiation ceremony, the odd is masculine and the even is feminine. Giving the same attention to man and to woman, we recognize the couple, man and woman, inside each of us.] On the other side of the double square flowerpot, the wheat is scattered randomly. [There is an ordered side, which symbolizes the necessity of the intellect to work methodically, and a side in disorder, indicating trust given to the unconscious. This spatial condition demonstrates that perfect order only exists next to disorder.] You told me to put potter’s clay on the other side, the sterile side, and water it in the evenings with holy water [For me, clay is the human body. God made Adam by taking clay from the four corners of the earth — north, south, east, west. And with this clay from the four corners, he made a balanced man. So, the four corners reside equally inside us. If a person has not established equilibrium between his physical needs, his desires, his emotions, and his intellect, he cannot feel good. In a well-adjusted human being, these four energies are balanced. Concerning the holy water — that was prescribed so that the body is blessed. That is the first thing to do in an effort to recover contact with the feminine dimension inside oneself. In asking this woman to bless her body, I invited her to make it sacred and thus to no longer despise it, to recover possession of it.] then to make little hearts of wire and put them in the four corners of the room; you told me to then pray to my female ancestors. I buy green potter’s clay. I put it on the left side and, at night, I water it with holy water (water I had beforehand kept on my altar next to my Buddha). I likewise obtained the wire to make the little hearts. [I gave her work to do because in order to find work, it is necessary that one learns how to work. These little markers should fulfill her and mean: learn to love work, or you will never work.] February 20. I make the little hearts and put them where indicated. I also add more potter’s clay and holy water, and I pray to the women of my genealogy tree so that they will help me. The 24th, I continue adding the potter’s clay, the holy water, and prayer. For a month, nothing happened. [In fact, everything has already happened.] Some little sprouts appear on the left, but not like the right side. [Here, she expresses a refusal to see the differences between the left and the right. She puts them in a competition. It is as if she says, “A woman is not like a man. She is weak, inferior.” And while she remarks, “It is not like the right side,” one cannot but reply, “Of course not! Because the left side is the left side!” What a mystery! We know that in our patriarchal society, the left side is the feminine: the symbol of the passive side of the body. In India, the right hand is the hand of God (the hand used for eating) and the left is the hand of Earth (the hand used for cleaning the backside). And when one spits, one has to do it toward the left, never toward the right. In this case, we should understand the message transmitted to the inner woman: negate your femininity. And the Psychomagic, which operates through synchrony or, if you will, poetry, becomes apparent through these squares of wheat: guard your femininity, do not neglect your intuition, attend to your inner woman! As if the wheat said, “I do not grow because you do not love the earth. And you do not love the earth because you do not love yourself in your feminine dimension.”] After having added potter’s clay and holy water from time to time, I saw that the wheat had sprouted. [Interesting. Supposedly nothing happened, yet wheat sprouted!] The sterile side is less dense than the other. [Always the comparison. . But even if only one tiny plant had sprouted, in a handful of earth stolen from a cemetery in the dead of winter, that would still be a miracle. Wheat sprouted in her bedroom — what a miracle!] I have two rows of six plants and two of five. [Adding them up makes 22. We remember I had her use a double square flowerpot so that this forms a tarot card. So, in this square, in the shape of a tarot card, are twenty-two plants, as many as are in the Major Arcana — another miracle!] I found work on March 2, and I am still working at the moment. I thank you for having helped me.

Success. So. . I would be curious to hear another letter.

So, here’s another one, but I will not add any comments. The author is an American writer by the name of R. M. Koster. He had gotten writer’s block and began to sink into alcoholism. His wife knew of my work, and feeling that I could help him recover his creativity, she encouraged him to make a trip from Panama — where he was living then — to Paris so that I could prescribe a psychomagic act for him. I noted that he had not written a book in more than ten years. I’ll read the letter that he sent me after he was free of alcoholism and had started to write again. He describes a done deal.

This should be good.

In this writing, Koster adopts a humorous style that does not mask the tragedy that he has lived through. Listen:

Situation early March 1987: During the 1970s, I wrote three novels, all three very good, whose subject is an imaginary country of Central America, a metaphor of Panama, and my reactions to this country. Without my knowing it, these books would prefigure the story of the Republic of Panama because once these books were written, God decided to plagiarize me and turn my imaginings into reality. An artist predicts the future because, unlike others, he knows the present. While working on the third novel, I lost heart and became nervous when in the presence of soldiers. I had decided to not write any more about this imaginary country that was called Ténèbre and, in the last pages, I destroyed it by an earthquake. Since this book was finished in September 1978, I have not written anything more. I lost all confidence in my literary aptitude and began to drink. When I met you, I said: “Without confidence, you are not able to work. In order to write a novel, it is necessary to throw yourself off the top of a building. At that moment, you are writing without knowing where you are going. Maybe the firemen will catch you, maybe not; but if your chief concern is security, you have to go down using the stairs. One is secure but one does not write a novel. When one claims to be living life, but takes the stairs, one does not truly live. The moment comes when you have to take a leap.” Your response was, “You are possessed by an old ‘I.’ When you wrote the book, it was another ‘I’ who wrote it, other characters who spoke. But these characters exist in your unconscious; they are part of you. And what do you do? You broke with them; you assassinated them. So, these beings are angry with you because you did not bring your novel where it was to go. In creativity, one must obey. When one is in the process of creating, it is necessary to give in, let the creation sprout like a mushroom. We must obey what sprouts inside of us, and you did not do that, you cut off your creativity.” I accepted your analysis, having always been convinced that it is the book that searches the writer, the same way the female seeks the male, and not the reverse. You recommended I:

FROM IMAGINATION TO POWER

Alejandro, isn’t Psychomagic too simple, a bit too short? Analysis often takes years; a number of therapies are spread out over long periods of time. .

You know, a labyrinth is no more than a tangle of straight lines. I ask myself if analysis and therapy do not sometimes have the tendency to introduce curves into straight lines. . And then, an act has a more definitive door than any conversation. However, I should make one thing clear: it is rare that I prescribe an act to a person without having beforehand studied his genealogy tree — his family, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and so forth.

So, each act we have reviewed is nothing but an episode in a longer process.

Yes, but a serious episode and decisive. If I walk with a nail in my shoes, my whole world, my sensibility, will be affected. Before trying to go farther, I have to refine my vision, to take out the nail. In the same way, when one suffers a trauma, all of our existence senses it. So it is important to remedy the trauma.

In addition, it seems to me that Psychomagic helps to solve certain very specific, precise problems. I see it more as an isolated intervention rather than, say, a global therapy.

Gilles, there is but one global healing: to find God. There is no other. Only the discovery of our interior God can heal us forever. The rest consists, for better or worse, of beating around the bush. No therapy can be partial.

What do you have to say on the subject of these methodical and, at the same time, insane conversations we’ve been having?

It is important to reaffirm the importance of the imagination. In a certain way, with you I’ve had an exercise in imaginary autobiography. Not in the sense of “imaginary,” since all of the reported facts are true, but in that the deep story of my life is of a constant effort to broaden the imagination, reduce the limitations, to apprehend its therapeutic and transforming potential. If I teach anything, it is the imagination.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, professor of the imagination. .

Exactly. I teach people to imagine. Most of the time we have no idea what the imagination can be, we cannot conceive of the extent of its range. Because, in addition to the intellectual imagination, we also have the emotional imagination, the sexual imagination, the physical imagination, the economic imagination, the mystic imagination, the scientific imagination. . On all levels, including what we call “rational,” the imagination is open. It is at home everywhere. So it is important to train it to approach reality not just from a one-and-only narrow perspective but from multiple angles. Ordinarily, we envision everything according to the very restricted paradigm of our beliefs, of our conditioning. From such a mysterious, vast, unpredictable reality, we cannot perceive more than what is filtered through our miniscule point of view. The active imagination is key to an expanded vision. It allows us to envision a life according to points of view other than our own, to think and sense things from different perspectives. This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe. I would like the readers of this book to at least accept the idea of the therapeutic power of the imagination, so that Psychomagic, at the end of the day, is no more than a modest application of this very real power.

Alejandro Jodorowsky only agreed to begin these Lessons for Mutants on condition that the results could prove useful to others. My response was that if it was useful for me, a skeptical and much damaged man, it would be for others. Accordingly, we decided to create this work, which compliments, ten years after its appearance, his mythical work Psicomagia [Psychomagic]. These interviews are, therefore, the fruit of an experience between someone willing to share knowledge and someone who wants to learn. More than confirming certainties, our conversations weave constant doubts together with kind responses.

Out of his personal circumstances and knowledge, Jodorowsky has opened roads and shortcuts in his search for happiness. Far from being a guru (he does not like to be depicted this way), our author is an evolved being who — precisely for this reason — laughs at himself. His paths are appropriate for a whole effervescent generation of mutants who make use of individual formulas of consciousness and self-actualization. To heal, to grow, Alejandro shows us that man has tools like meditation, art, dreams, certain sacred substances, magic, alchemy, language, humor, and the tarot, within his reach. The first part of Lessons for Mutants is dedicated to these techniques.

Throughout a hectic life, Jodorowsky has traveled a fantastic human voyage of thousands of years in a very short time. He has experienced many different cultures while at the same time playing an active role in avant-garde culture with his contributions to comics, film, and literature. This trip through the memory of humanity is a constant and imaginative challenge and a profound exercise of release whereby, above all else, it is necessary to know who we are, forgetting part of what we have learned. The author reveals these methods to us in the second part of these lessons.

Jodorowsky conceives these experiences of breaking-off and changing in a personal style, totally distrusting the church, “marionette” or agent of the soul. From freedom and for freedom, he uses a synthesis of experiences with therapeutic and necessary results to complete the human who has stopped fighting for pure survival and seeks inner development. At the margin of whatever revelation or sacred text, of all dogmatic or ideological traditions, Jodorowsky understands that reality must be perceived in the first person and achieved artistically. To this formidable search, to this crazy score, the third part of this interview is dedicated.

The ideas of the author about the distinct levels of consciousness and so many other questions connect with the perennial philosophy in its pure state but are far from the narrow frameworks of traditional religions. Although he speaks of God, Jodorowsky is neither theist nor atheist, spiritual nor religious, rather he is simply a person. For him, health is equivalent only to the morale; because our fulfillment cannot wait for the beyond, rather, it must carry itself out in this world, breaking the boundaries that impede it. Some of these ideas attest to a phenomenon called “religión a la carta,” or “religion by the book,” which recently came slinking into our society.

Alejandro is a visionary in so far as his level of consciousness leans out beyond the limits of time. He is a “luminous” being who hates the possibility of establishing a school, but who, for years, has dedicated his time to the surprising undertaking of civil sanctity. His intuitions about society, religion, and the destiny of humanity have been gathered in the fourth part of this interview, in the form of visions that include an exercise in futurology, where the reader will find many of the author’s ideas and impressions.

Through these interviews, Alejandro explains the therapeutic activity that he considers fundamental and that he carries out in many workshops around the world. In the chapter dedicated to the art of healing, he goes back to clarify some aspects already put forward in his Psicomagia. The last bit of this work is a hymn to life, which reflects the luminous and happy attitude of our character.

The transcription of Jodorowsky’s words has in no way been easy, but I have been as respectful as literarily possible — though my limitations are evident at not catching all the abundance of his oral discourse. He trusted in being able to pass on some of his intuitions to those who seek answers and experiences on the marvelous journey of life. I avoided interviewing Alejandro specifically about the techniques he uses, although here almost all of them are spoken of. For this reason it is, in the end, a work of impressions, a guide for everyone who desires to be transformed. This is not a manual for scholars but a testimony to the way he does things and lives things; it is a modest lesson in the form of a dialogue in which I represent a new generation of mutants.

I have to confess that I believe that in principle Alejandro agreed to carry out these interviews simply to help me, even though afterward he liked the results and considered them useful for others. I went to Paris with a certain busybody complex. Some days, I dedicated myself for precisely an hour a day to meditating at home. At the end of each interview, I could mentally translate his responses into examples that flowed like a waterfall of images. The state of unburdened consciousness led to a pleasant, telepathic drunkenness. Questions connected in sequence like chains of images. We finished by talking of the saints’ auras, without any motive. At the end of the second day, I confessed, “I don’t know if all this will be useful, because I don’t remember anything you said.” Jodorowsky had the kindness to answer my questions while in a trancelike state. During these divine hours I felt like a sculptor hammering an immense block of marble from which a face would appear, a strange portrait that at the same time would provide a mirror to others. “How do you see it?” he kept asking me, as if I were painting. During the days I went to his home, the dynamics were varied. My questions often quickly lowered the level of discourse, but at other times would catapult us into higher spheres. We traveled a lot together, and the inebriation caused by his presence would often last for hours. Of all the images I keep from those days, there is one that sometime visits me in dream: we are paintbrushes that paint our own lives, transforming them at every instant.

JAVIER ESTEBAN

KEYS TO THE SOUL

I

Asleep and awake are two secretly united faces of reality. Understanding dreams is a path to knowing and transforming ourselves. But, to what extent can we do that, keeping in mind that they are gifts that we don’t ask for?

Yes, we can. Throughout my life I have passed through various phases with respect to the dream. I come from a neurotic family; I worried; I had parents who hated one another — all this caused me to have horrible nightmares. I had to defeat these nightmares by confronting them, taking on my neuroses. It is true that since my youth I’ve used the gift of lucid dreaming, directing my dreams. At first, the lucid dreams would present themselves in the form of temptations. I would find myself aware that I was in a dream, and I wanted to obtain fame, become a millionaire, have sexual experiences. Finally, what happened is that I got trapped. Whenever I asked for specific things, I got lost in the dream and consequently lost lucidity. I had put myself into a dream that was again unmanageable. Later, in my dreams, the desire to be a magician began to appear: I played with the images, I turned into a guru, I wanted power. Again, I became trapped and lost lucidity.

Dreams keep changing, and you can do different things in them like a demiurge. But then you realize that when someone dreams, it is for a reason, and it is not healthy to interfere in the parade of images.

I’ve finally reached the point of simply being a witness to my dreams: I contemplate them and I rest. Actually, I don’t know really if I dream or not because in my dreams the character I am is just as I am in real life.

Do you blend waking and sleeping?

No, it’s not that. What I mean is, when you dream, normally you are not you, you have other personalities, you are capable of doing things that you don’t do in real life. In my dreams, however, I help people: I continue giving classes; I read the tarot; I give conferences. There are really no differences between what I do in my dreams and what I do while awake. This is at the margin of language or symbolic content. The other night, I was in an airplane in complete darkness, and the airplane broke into the light. What I have now are happy dreams; I don’t have nightmares anymore. I am not afraid, because I control these situations. I sleep without any tension. I accept the dreams just as they come. In a certain way — I do not say my ego because I am not referring exactly to my personality — my identity has solidified. It has coagulated. My personality in my unconscious is exactly like that in my real life.

What therapy do you recommend for overcoming nightmares?

I began with Freud, and it was very funny: for him, dreams are repressed desires, frustrated desires, that sort of thing. I was also frustrated with Jung: I dreamed and then I prolonged the dreams in half-sleep, continuing the story, interrogating the dream to see what it wanted to tell me. Then I continued with awake-dreams, developing the imagination. There are many magnificent therapies. In lucid dreams, we get close to what the Senoi tribes do: they work with their dreams during the day, carrying them out through a kind of theater. In other schools, they sculpt them, make them into figures, paint them. . This is how you introduce dreams into your real life, isn’t it?

But all of this is useful for when we are sick. Once you’ve cure yourself, you do not need to do anything. Simply live, simply dream. There is no repression.

Do dreams teach us the true nature of life?

Life teaches us the true nature of life. And the true nature of life is a mixture of dreams and life. Because all life is a dream! The dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca already said this. He had a very high level of consciousness for his time. When we live the now, this instant seems real to us, but an hour later it will be a memory, and the images of the memory have exactly the same quality as the images of a dream.

We could say that we are going to stage a dream and that everything, all of our comings and goings, will infiltrate the dream world and convert the dream. But what happens with dreams? Well, it’s not like that at all. We dream and our dreams infiltrate themselves into our real life. The dreams make themselves reality, just as reality converts itself into a dream. Everything you dream ends up being real.

You tell us we can access the departed who appear to us in our dreams and that they dwell in a place in our memory, that they can give us advice and help us. .

We have a collective mind and a collective unconscious that exists in some realm. There must be a region of the dead that meets us in the collective unconscious. This region is called “hell” in some cultures.

It is through your dreams that you became conscious of the existence of magic, right?

In lucid dreams, I can voluntarily change some things, but only up to a certain point. I cannot change the whole dream but only a part of it. With magic the same thing happens. You can produce changes in reality, but you cannot change all of reality.

II

As the basis of your therapy are art and poetry fundamental?

I believe that all human beings must dedicate themselves to writing poetry for half an hour every day, without worrying if the writing is good or bad, if it will be commercially successful or not. Poetry as a constant in life purifies the ego. Every day we should carry out a free act, a little thing that serves others, like giving a chocolate to a child, simple things. I have come to true depravity in searching for goodness. Sometimes I put cash in the pocket of a sleeping homeless person, so he thinks he has good luck. I invent miracles. Even if you don’t believe in miracles, you can do little things to help others.

This room is full of thank-you cards asking what I desire as compensation for the help I bestowed. My response is: nothing, because I help freely. I do all this based on time I can set aside for others.

What do you use to keep you company when you create?

For thirty years, I have always worked with background music: Celtic harps that have a hypnotic effect. If I am very inspired, I put perfume in the bottoms of my shoes or draw enneagrams (a nine-pointed geometric figure symbolizing the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) with a honey-soaked little paintbrush on the soles of my feet. And, in moments of creative drought, I dye my testicles red with vegetable dye.

You say art cures. In what way?

Art cures because we have to cure ourselves of not being ourselves, of not being in the present. There is a Hasidic phrase that says, “If you are not you, who? If this is not here, where? If it is not now, when?” If you are capable of figuring out the when, the here, and the who (the You), you are being yourself, and you have already cured yourself.

To create art is to know yourself?

Yes, but to know yourself is to know humanity and the universe. It is to pass from the singular to the plural.

Could you explain?

Think that the need for healing is produced by a lack of awareness. We become ill because we have cut our ties with the world. Illness is a lack of beauty, and beauty is the union. Illness is a lack of awareness, and awareness is union between oneself and the universe.

Which artists have fully achieved healing?

The most difficult thing in the world is to create sublime art. Very few people have achieved this. But I could cite René Daumal, who learned Sanskrit and was a student of Gurdjieff; he achieved it. Federico García Lorca is an opposite case: he could not achieve it, he did not know how to. When you read A Poet in New York, it makes you sad.

You have said that literature serves nothing if it does not heal. And if it only heals the author? Can art cure some and make others sick?

I remember some artists who said this world isn’t worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain. I, for example, confess that I cannot read Marcel Proust. He’s too sick for me, and his neurosis can contaminate me. Every day I see neurotic cases, why would I want to read others? Nowadays Franz Kafka is on the loose everywhere! I go to mail a letter, and I find myself with Kafka in the post office: an employee full of problems.

What writers and painters would you save? Which would be in your prized curative art gallery?

What a question! You’re working with the established notion that the art world is like a prizefight: we decide which is the champion painting, the champion book, the champion symphony, and so forth. But I do not see the world like that.

In art, I see structures. For example, in filmmaking, rather than asking what’s the best picture, I would ask by genre: what’s the best western or the best drama. I have my house full of westerns. In my library there are novellas by Silver Kane and other authors, along with comic books, books of oriental philosophy, of Sufism, Kabbalah, magic, alchemy, psychoanalysis. . I am a man of my time, and in my time there is the Internet. So one cannot and should not talk about personal work; we have entire masses of works by category, not by authors. The Internet has revolutionized all this. I had whole libraries. My human ideal would be an old dream: all the books of the history of humanity, all the painting in history, all the films, music, sculptures, everything.

And art that does not cure, you also include?

Though it does not cure — and this is another thing — it entertains. A healthy person can read Emil Cioran or Michel Houellebec and laugh a lot. However, I would not produce that kind of literature, because it is totally obsolete. But there it is. One can go from Kafka to Castaneda and continue to learn. In the same way that a person continues to evolve from one level of consciousness to another, art evolves from one level of consciousness to the next. It is collective and not solitary. I cannot say the best painter is Leonardo da Vinci. I will say he reached another level of consciousness, but as he was an individual, he could only reach to a certain level. If you pay attention, his machines lacked the motor because they lacked energy. These marvelous machines did not provide the essential, which is energy; they used primitive, limited forms of energy, based on pressure and water. Leonardo could not resolve this problem. His limitations were fixed in the humanity of that time, in its collective nature. Do you understand? If you ask me the classic question, “What book would you bring with you to a deserted island?” I would respond, “A computer with Internet access.” Obviously.

III

What do you think is the true aim of language? How do you interpret it or make it useful?

Language is before everything an activity of the body. It corresponds with the nature of the nervous system. From my point of view, we must be able to produce beautiful and poetic language. A healthy language. Mental illnesses, like physical illnesses, are reflected in the way we speak. There are demented words, like sick, tuberculosis, or cancerous: words that are not life-giving but violent and criminal. Illness and the insane language of illness retaliate and are destructive.

Besides, through language, we transmit illnesses, and we access inferior levels of consciousness. The levels of consciousness of language coincide with those of the human being. Just as the human body has been evolving, so has language. If we hold back our language, we use a form and a content that already does not correspond to us, that is outmoded. If we employ a sick vocabulary that is not ours, we undermine ourselves, little by little.

There is the use of the foul, the grotesque, the brusque. .

If you are referring to curse words, I will tell you that curse words are congenial revolutionary tidbits that are designed to break the familiar molds, social and all other kinds. We have the impression that we are totally free to utter curse words, however, using them reduces the level of consciousness. The curse word is not useful — or if it is, it is only at first — to free oneself. At first it seems revolutionary, but it does not drive us to change. It is like jargon. People go about distorting language through jargon, which, in principal, can be useful for establishing strong linguistic ties with the group, but persistent use of jargon swiftly lowers the level of consciousness. The only language that lifts the level of consciousness is the sublime language: that of art and poetry.

By what you’ve said, to create a new language it is necessary to quit seeing the world in a rigid way. What should we change in our language to change ourselves?

I am working on a book of definitions called Intelectualmente correcto [Intellectually Correct]. All of us think badly and, to change this, we need to exchange some concepts for others. I have begun by changing the following expressions:

THE TRAIL OF LIFE

I

Do you think we can escape our origin or that we are determined by it?

We have destinies from the past, without a doubt, but what is necessary is to be conscious of them without being subservient to them. We can choose each step of our existence. In this is our freedom, in not letting the past determine our present and in not repeating the past.

Is it possible to intuit, as some traditions maintain, these previous experiences or influences that weigh on our lives?

I cannot talk of past lives, except to say that before birth there was something — I do not know what — and that after death there will be something — I do not know what either. This is all I can say for sure, the rest I do not know. Now, although we can imagine past lives, it would not be possible to say for sure that they were true. There is no way to prove it.

Certain religious interpretations, to explain pain to us, point to those who are born blind who are paying for something committed in another life, maybe because they poked somebody’s eyes out.

Okay. Let’s accept it. But this person who poked out those eyes in another life, in an even earlier life poked out the eyes of someone who, in another incarnation, was an executioner. So in that way everyone is guilty and there are no victims — or everyone is a victim and no one is guilty.

So you do not think we should justify the inequalities of origin by supposed karmic debts.

Quite right, because besides being false, it would be anti-therapeutic. Things cannot be justified by destiny. We are marked by a family, by educational and sociocultural life. It is something that we have carried since we were born, but this does not mean to carry out a destiny. One sees the world differently if he speaks English, Spanish, or French. We are trained by a culture that formats our brains. We have to fight against this imposition in order to be ourselves.

Reading your work one gets the feeling that we are obligated to free ourselves from the conditions to which we were born.

We have no obligation. It would be good if we liberated ourselves, but we are not obligated.

To develop, do we need to unstick ourselves from what we came into this life with?

To develop in what way?

I mean spiritually.

Krishnamurti developed a lot spiritually, however some people committed suicide because of his theories. It doesn’t only have to do with developing spiritually; it is necessary to see what interests us. I do not believe in spirituality, I believe in health.

Okay: to heal is it necessary to remove ourselves from our origins?

Everything we carry — we are like worms — has to be tangled until it is converted into a butterfly. We should not strip ourselves of anything. What we have received is a treasure. It is not necessary to castrate ourselves or eliminate any part. It is necessary to inseminate and to transform what has been given to us.

Perhaps someone cannot be happy in her family or in her class, in her world, or with her upbringing, and she wants to continue with what she received?

If she does, let her continue as is. But everyone in the world has a cross. Mine is mine, yours is yours: I only can make you conscious of your cross and, apart from that, you free yourself of it or not. This depends on you.

Is it possible that, without mending the world and society, we can be okay with ourselves?

We cannot. Or better said, we could be islands of perfection in the middle of imperfection.

Haven’t we idealized rebellion against everything as a feature of absolute individualism?

I would not use the word “rebellion” to talk about this. If we want the world to change, I prefer to speak of “mutation.” If we want to transform reality, we begin with ourselves. We do not ask the world to change, and we do not fight against society. It has to be us ourselves who affirm our own values.

Religion and custom integrate us into a group that shapes our personality. Perhaps other traditions are better than the one that we were born into? Does it make sense to change religion?

No, it does not make sense. To go from one tradition to another does not have a true effect, because one god is equal to the other. It is another caricature, another limitation. It is necessary to rise above the limitation in order to be open to life. The age we are living in has to stop being religious so it can be mystical. There will be a moment when all human beings on the planet possess the same mystical feeling and leave religions aside. I do not believe either that any religion is better than another.

II

How do we take the “what will they say about us?”

There are two positions: one that asks “what will they say” and another that concerns itself with “what will I say about myself.” A barbarian psychology can live in the “what will they say,” but a person who has a higher level of consciousness would say, “This is what I want from myself, precisely because I am conscious.”

Now distinct levels of consciousness exist. The first is an animal level that thinks, “What I have, I have.” One can see these people on the street: mercenaries, thieves, assassins. Above this level is the infantile level in which everything is a superficial game; in this state there is no consciousness of infinity or eternity, of death or the universe. Then there is another level of adolescent consciousness where all the solutions of the world are in relationships, in a reduced cell of love; this is the level at which the majority of gossip magazines, television stories, and movies develop. This level serves to find happiness in relationships and all that they entail. But if we go further, we can access an adult level, and there “the other” appears. Even then, both the egoist adult and the adult with social and planetary consciousness exist. The first exploits the weaker or the less intelligent, creates injurious industries or captures political power. This one is harmful. The second understands that the other is much like himself and that he must worry about social and ecological catastrophes, that is to say, the world in which we all live. He knows responsibility.

But on top of all those, there exists a level of cosmic consciousness where the being lives in the whole universe, infinite space, eternal time, permanent impermanence. . At this level the big themes are found like “know thyself.” And even further beyond that exists another divine consciousness where we know this construct we have named God.

Do you think it is possible to peek into this divine level of consciousness?

Yes. And to arrive at the conclusion, to begin with, that we have to stop calling on the name of God. We have to stop thinking that God is going to fix everything and saying that if God made everything bad in this universe then we are here to do it, too, again. If there is a God, we are here to help him. This requires that we take possession of the world and of ourselves. We must do what we want to do with full consciousness and with full responsibility. In this level of divine consciousness, we find true art.

Without the development of the personality, is it possible to access higher levels of consciousness?

Sometimes, the development of consciousness coincides with the development of the personality, but not always. Each case is different. Once I went to see Vittorio Gassman. He was suffering a deep depression, although he was a well-known artist. Upon doing his genealogy tree, I saw that his mother wanted him to be an actor. He didn’t want that, and he paid with his pain. He got sick and suffered from depression. He was famous, but this vocation didn’t serve him at all. I recommended many things: I told him to go to his mother’s grave, to kill a rooster and to cover the tomb with blood, that he spread blood on the penis and penetrate his mother with fury. He told me that if he were someone other than Vittorio Gassman he would do it, but being who he was, he could not. Two years later, he died. I had not told this before, but it is a good example to show what one can achieve in obeying others, including having success; but if you are not happy, nothing works.

Do we obey other people’s predictions permanently, without being ourselves?

The brain has a tendency to guide itself by predictions. It’s important to take care not to fall into this.

You usually speak of people’s capacity to program even their own death. Are there those who are convinced that they are going to die at a certain age and accomplish it?

That’s how it is, yes. The brain programs itself, imitating at times the age of the death of a family member or some famous person.

III

Are we children disguised as adults?

We are the elderly disguised as children; we are the ancient ones. In our skin there are millions of cells, each with a complex memory.

It’s said that we should not stop ourselves from carrying out life’s movie. . but that is not so easy.

Many people effectively stop carrying out what you call “life’s movie.” The majority of people want to be like others, and this drives them to a death in life. It is necessary to find what distinguishes us from others in order to be something. To the extent that we try to be like others, we convert ourselves into zombies.

Often, young people yearn to live the life of another, to live through what others experience. .

When I began my studies of Psychomagic, I met different teachers. One of them was Oscar Ichazo, who told me one day, “You are going to imitate me for some time, because I have given you knowledge that you did not have: I have marked your virgin soul.” The soul imitates for a while what it has awakened to, and this lasts a short period if one is conscious and a long period if the person is naive.

To live a full life, do you think a reconciliation with parents is necessary?

For me, it was enriching to meet Gregorio “Goyo” Cárdenas Hernández, a serial criminal who killed seventeen women and buried them in his garden. For ten years he was in a mental hospital, and then he became an attorney and made a family. I first learned about him in the newspaper, El Heraldo. I met him drinking coffee. He was very courteous. I asked him how it all happened, and he told me he had already forgotten all of it because it had been another person who had done it.

He was sincere because I believe that we can live many lives in this same life, in the same person and in the same brain. Surrender exists. He paid for his crimes and redeemed himself. The value that Goyo Cárdenas later showed was already inside of him even when he was a criminal. He was an angel in a deviant personality. When the deviant personality dissolved, his angel appeared. I think the same thing occurs with the family: it hurts us, it is like a trap, it shortens our life, it bothers us psychically and socioculturally, it forces us into a limited level of consciousness, it robs us of our essential self, it inculcates ideas in us that are not our own, and at the moment when we find ourselves in the world, all of this collapses and we have to build a life from scratch. We forgive ourselves because no one is guilty. Generation after generation, each one is victim to the one before. We end up with many centuries of being victims, but in the end you understand that there is no reason for resentment.

I began to think that my parents were to blame for my birth. I thought that in giving me life they gave me death. I blamed them for many things, but then I understood the Buddhist phrase that said, “The truth is what is useful.” Then I began to wonder, and I told myself, “I was something before birth, and I chose my parents because I needed them as a school. The limitations they gave me are what made me, and I am what I am thanks to them.” There are marvelous fruits from twisted trees.

Do you believe it is necessary to “ kill the father,” as Freud asserts?

The symbolic act of the death of the father is absolutely necessary, but it is also necessary to do it in an intelligent way, with lucidity and without resentment. If you perceive your father in a violent way, it is because you are not killing him: you are asking him to love you because you need it. But if you are able to see him positively, without his pedestal and without your fear, you are no longer begging him to love you in order for you to exist. And this is when you kill him, when you make him fall. But once you’ve knocked him down, it is necessary to rebuild him and repay him, because fathers have essential value, even if they are monsters: they give us life, they leave their imprint on certain parts of our being, and they allow us to become who we are in a conscious way.

With the father, we must apply a maxim of operative magic, which is “Dissolve and Coagulate.” To be able to improve yourself, it is necessary to first dissolve yourself, to put everything in its place and observe it intellectually, physically, and sexually in order to see who you are. And then it is necessary to coagulate it, to remake it in your interior, as you want it to be. It is necessary to achieve an inner work and, once you make all of this better, recover the father by absorbing his values.

Is cruelty in some children and preadolescents a frustrated creation? Are they guilty for what they do?

There is no blame. What you call cruelty is really unconsciousness. A child is not cruel unless he is sick. The family psyche is reproduced in the child’s behavior, like dogs. He is ignorant and copies his environment. There are parents who act like gurus. When a child is racist, it is not the child who is racist, it is the parent who is. If a child kills another child, the parents are the criminals. The child, in this case, is possessed. We cannot speak of childish evil. Children are not cruel; that is a myth. Children are only unconscious and ignorant; they do not know. They reproduce the conduct of adults.

You have written that family wounds never completely heal.

True. I believe that the human being has animal channels but also vegetable channels. The animal has cells that heal and close his wounds. However, if you cut a branch, it is not going to grow again. A vegetable wound is forever, and the only thing we can do is cover it. This is why we find hollow trees; they produce mushrooms that nourish the trunk. Our heart behaves, in this sense, like a vegetable. If you make a wound, it never heals; there it remains. What could happen is that new experiences come, covering this wound.

I cannot console myself about the death of one of my sons, although many years have passed, and I continue hurting. While I have a happy life together with his memory, comfort does not exist. I have had the strength to create, along with this discomfort, other loves, other works, other satisfactions. I can live with the wounds.

What parts do friends and other traveling companions play in our lives?

I had two friends in childhood that I have reproduced throughout my life through other people and circumstances. Friends are, in this sense, like family: They are always there. They are generational. We are all traveling together in the same airplane; we are passengers on the same train. They are very important because we are gregarious beings and not wolf men. I consider friendship fundamental, and I mix in groups. To know whether or not a friendship will enrich us, it is necessary to know why we are cultivating it. To be friends means to create something together.

Is youth full of prejudices that are smoothed out with time?

One does not age and the curtain drops, at least not in my experience. The child always stays, the adolescent stays, the youth stays, the adult stays. . As one grows, she converts into a group of beings, and the personalities add up, because where there is continuity there is no separation.

Throughout life, prejudices are not fixed, but beliefs are. I remember that at thirty years old I did something fundamental: I took a notebook and told myself, “I am going to write down all the ideas I have in my mind. What do I believe in?” I wrote it, I did it to pick the ideas off, like fleas. And then I told myself, “These ideas are not me; they may end up being useful, but they are not me.”

A young person sometimes believes that whatever he thinks is him, just as one sometimes thinks his car is him or his shoes are him. But ideas are like shirts. They are not yourself. In youth, one can make a mistake, but as time goes by the errors dissolve and what is important stays, the essential being.

During the early teens, the first music or media idols appear. Are they necessary or limiting to our development?

They are necessary for some. I did not have idols, but I became very good friends with the poet Nicanor Parra, who was fundamental for our group and older than us. At times we need teachers or guides, although in my case the truth is that only art saved me. I was an artist. I had to make my name and my work and, therefore, I could not devote myself 100 percent to other people or other works. Although, yes, I sought teachers and visited teachers.

I am not referring only to those called spiritual teachers but to the media idols, to those that so many young people want to be like.

I never got there, thankfully. For some people they are necessary because we lack mythologies, and the brain responds to unconscious mythology. For this reason, sadly, Hollywood actors have replaced pagan gods. Football players or singers are also part of the phenomenon. They have their roles and in certain moments they are helpful, but they are not necessary nor do we have an obligation to hold on to them.

How should one teach a child or one of your own offspring how to understand life?

I would have to ask my family. I brought my son Cristóbal, at eight years old, to witness an operation with Pachita, and I encouraged him to put a finger in the wound, to see what one would look like with holes in the head, to know how to change a lung. . At this same age I took him to receive a massage from a guru. Cristóbal grew up with a group of shamans. I did everything I could do for him: I would need a whole book to tell it. I eliminated the word “father” so that this monolith would not exist. He never called me dad but Alejandro. I never imposed a particular style of dress. And I did that with all my kids. When we passed by a toy store and they trembled, I told them, “Go in and buy whatever you want.” They came back with only little toys. But once, my son Adan appeared with a life-size stuffed horse. The whole store looked at him, but I bought it for him. I gave them a very conscious upbringing, very correct. But children always commit errors, many errors. I gave one of them three lashes and later, when he was fifteen, I made him give them back to me. He had urinated in front of the couch. While I was hitting him, I told him, “This is a formal punishment, but I do not do it because I am angry.” He never forgave me. So, in a family ceremony, he gave me back the lashes.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

I

To what can we aspire in this life?

To many things. But, above all, a long life. For this, we need to work in a job that we like and always be peaceful people, to do what we like. We must be what we are and not what they want us to be. To love what we love without obligation, without neurotic knots that we cannot untie. To desire what we want and to create what we are capable of making.

To live with a certain prosperity, without wasting. But a prosperity for everyone, not a prosperity based on exploiting others. And, of course, it is necessary to become immortals and, for this, we have to live as if we were immortals, thinking that we have a thousand years more to do what we want but without forgetting that in ten seconds we can die.

In many schools, wisdom is obtained through pleasure, happiness, the prohibited; in others, through asceticism, penance, surrender, and sacrifice. Do they all go to the same place?

All are roads to finding oneself. Now, all these paths must be taken with the greatest dignity, because we are mortals. We are not eternal, and our present state is going to end. Life defeats us every moment. Even if we are Titans, we are defeated. Knowing this, we can work more calmly, with humility. It’s about attaining holiness, resolving to get to that. Happiness does not have to do with having things but being happy with life. One can lose the battle while yet in the womb, because we can become neurotic fetuses if the mother doesn’t want us. In this case, recovering the happiness in life is something magnificent that allows our union with the universe in its totality, with time and with space, with consciousness in its totality. It is a state of constant euphoric trance in the body, possible because we are little treasure chests, containing an immensity that, at the same time, is in the smallest of our cells.

One can arrive by many roads to this state of euphoria for living?

Yes, but not by whatever manner. I began through art. I did avant-garde theater, poetry, scandal, all of it. Then I practiced meditation. Hours meditating, time, everything contrary to what I had done; but always moved by a constant attention, by a constant desire of curiosity and of knowing without fear. This is audacity. It is the secret of life.

Beyond imagining — playing with the mind in order to not be prisoners of reality — the objective is to change ourselves and, more precisely, to cure ourselves?

You talk about the mind, but ever since I discovered the tarot, I talk about a minimum of four centers of the human being: intellectual, emotional, sexual, and physical. It is not only the mind that plays this juggling act; the emotional center, the sexual center, and the physical also act. It is necessary to know oneself and to observe. For example: The intellectual center wants to be and becomes in silence. The emotional center wants to love and arrives at loving through indifference. The sexual center wants to create and arrives at creating by learning to fail. The physical center wants to live and lives by learning to die.

If the life that surrounds us and the world that we live in are mental constructions, why can’t we exit them by our will, when we need to, to mark distance and to make a break in the road?

Yes, we can leave it all by will, but this demands bravery and strength on our part. Meditation is one of the possible ways.

At what point does our freedom consist of knowing and assuming that our destiny is already written?

I cannot say that the future is written. My rules tell me that when you ask me about a possible future you are already showing your limitations, thinking there is only one possible future. If I open my mind to this theme and accept that there is a future, I must recognize that there are infinite possible futures that I can choose, because at each moment a different possibility opens before me. I construct my future through my choices.

Then, we cannot see our destiny in a lineal or spatial way?

No, I see it like a fan or a matrix of possible futures. That is to say, we can construct our destiny but we cannot create our destiny. There are ten thousand paths, and all of them are in view. I can go with one of the ten thousand paths, but I cannot invent a ten thousand first.

Then what is freedom based on?

Inner freedom consists in being able to choose freely one of the ten thousand paths, using what we have called free will. And if you have a destiny because you project a genealogy tree into the future, then the future tends to repeat the past, and it is from this that we have to free ourselves. We have to have futures distinct from the past and seek to become ourselves.

Your ideas could be described as mutacionistas. Are we mutants?

We all are. There are many things that we do not understand because our bodies are still developing. Recently I spoke with a doctor who told me that the pineal gland was an atrophied gland. I replied to him that the human being is an animal in evolution and cannot have anything in him atrophied. The pineal gland could be — why not? — the seed of an organ that is developing and evolving into a fourth brain. He changed his scientific view a few hours before he was to present a paper at a scientific conference in Los Angeles. I explained to him that nothing is atrophied; in fact, you could say exactly the opposite, and that appears more logical to me. We are developing something new from this gland. . there are things we do not understand because we are like chimpanzees. .

What sense does it make that we cannot now understand something we are destined to discover?

We cannot imagine the eternal. We cannot conceive of it. And if we cannot understand the universe, we are ignorant and limited. You ask me about the sense of all this, but surely it is our descendants who will be able to understand it. We are here to produce descendants who can understand it. We are here to produce descendants who will use the same brain that we already have but be more evolved. If the reptilian brain evolved into our three human brains, I sincerely believe that we are creating a fourth brain — and it doesn’t have to be material.

In the Middle Ages they intuited this. They painted the fourth brain in the form of a halo because that’s how they saw it, as a golden circle around the head. What reason is there for painting a halo? Why would they invent a halo? Well, because the halo is real.

II

What advice could you give to a seeker of knowledge, to someone who is looking for himself?

I began with meditating. But before that I looked for people who had a more elevated consciousness than mine, though I did not go to pay homage nor become a disciple. I put myself in contact with those whom I thought were interesting. The error that I committed was to make friends with a teacher, because then you do not accept the exchange or the lesson. With friendship you unbalance the levels of consciousness between people. But by knowing these people, my level of consciousness rose, and I learned a lot until I arrived at what I considered valid. When you get to a level that you value as important, you can and should devote yourself to others in order that they learn with you.

From all your experiences with knowledge — psychoanalysis, shamanism, taking substances, meditation — what would stay with you?

The most resounding exercise to which I have dedicated myself for years is to suspend thought. To succeed at not letting even one word enter my brain.

Once I achieved that, even the thought that I was able to stop all thought left my head. This has been the most difficult.

Also, to practice meditation was for me very important, although my path has been more to do with artistic creation.

Do you advise against the rational paths like philosophy or the study of science?

I do not advise against; I believe that all these paths are also good. Philosophy made me pose questions for myself that later I had to resolve by way of other disciplines.

Are the higher levels of consciousness found in people or in groups?

It is difficult to belong to a group, because established groups create dependencies. If we speak with the common sense that characterizes us, we must speak of the large group of humanity, all of humankind. Fortunately, it’s been a while since I quit being picky about my clientele. Every Wednesday I meet those who want to come to a café, and I can read the tarot. At a certain age, you have to make yourself useful for others. When you have lived and life has given you an experience, whether good or bad, the moment arrives when you should pass on what you know.

Rather than turn into a dumb old person, you should go further every time. Aging does not exist, neither does mental decline. The memory can have less capacity to find a word or maybe you can feel less sexual desire, less virulence, but there is no reason for desire to have disappeared. If, during your life you have worked the emotions, when you mature you begin to know sublime feelings, which you did not have when you were young because nature did not let you. It takes forty years to find yourself. The true opening of the consciousness cannot be had before this age. From there, the journey begins.

You indicate that contemplation is the technique that perfects all these things. What is contemplation to you?

In meditation, you immobilize yourself and dedicate your attention to what happens inside you, as if you were seated at the edge of the river seeing things pass by. And contemplation is the same — but you’re swimming in the river. That is to say, you are seeing what happens to you, but you are in the depths of life, acting.

What does “to be possessed by the spirit of the teacher” mean?

Our brain is broad and infinite. In the same way that it produces the personality we have, it can produce others. That is to say, we learn to build our personality. Schizophrenics can have thirty personalities and even more. When you are going to see a teacher, you see another human being that has a higher level of consciousness than yours. What happens? You pursue this level of consciousness; your brain pursues it. So your brain grasps this level and reproduces it in your person, but because it’s the first time you see it in yourself, you identify it with the teacher, with her ego, with her character. And the brain, instead of acting as if it had your form, gives you the form of the other: it makes you feel like you have the body of another, the personality of another, the apparent individuality of another.

This produces an imitation, and I believe this is what you refer to when you say “to be possessed by the spirit of the teacher.” It is not that the teacher is inside you but that there is an imitation of a level of consciousness that you are considering superior to yours.

And the teacher who believes herself to be the chosen one?

Well, on the path of the evolution of consciousness there are traps. I explained this in my book Los Evangelios para sanar [Gospels for Healing]. In reality you are a path. Your brain is a path on which all gods walk. If on a path I see a god and I believe myself a god, I have fallen into the trap of the guru. In reality, we are the path where things are passing, we are not the passersby.

What are initiation tests?

In Castaneda’s words, challenges. Here’s a way to think about them. We observe some traumas: A woman is raped and this destroys her life. Another woman is raped, she bathes, she cleans herself, she cries, she recovers, she decides that she is never going to talk about that again, and she continues with her life. The same thing happens in war: some people stay hurt forever, yet others become stronger. The point is that traumas do not produce illnesses; traumas are the detonators. There is latent illness inside us that the trauma makes explode.

And as far as initiation tests, they consist of the following: You have a level of consciousness, and you are faced with an event. You have to react in a useful way and advance. The test is a challenge for you to evolve.

And sacrifice: is it a masochistic trap?

That’s right. Religions have confused us. In our culture, the sky is not on earth, it is not within your reach. You have to attain the beyond by suffering in life, and the church tells you that suffering will make you rich and powerful.

Why are we afraid when we get close to archetypes by way of dreams, the imagination, or hallucinogenic substances?

The masses, people in general, only change their level of consciousness when they are in serious trouble, like, for example, following a natural disaster or terrorism. The masses are afraid of archetypes because archetypes are contained in higher levels of consciousness, and this produces fear in people who do not want to change. Each time we confront archetypes, we are confronting the dissolution of identity.

III

Have we built an invisible skin that we call ego?

No, the skin is not the ego. We are habituated to think that it is like that, but it’s not true. Let’s look deeper: Imagine the lion out roaming his territory. When he senses that some prey has entered his territory, he pounces. Also, there are plants whose perception reaches thousands of kilometers, birds that manage formidable distances in flight, or organisms that allow themselves to be felt very far away. And man? Well, through telepathy the human being can go around the world. Man has no limits.

So, what would be the ego?

Many times one speaks of the ego without understanding it. In reality, we have our essential being and another acquired part that permits an identification or an identity. This last one is the ego, an acquired identity, which is at the service of the essence. The ego can degenerate into diverted personalities, schizophrenics, or paranoids because it is the ego that notices the traumas and blows of life.

You admit that, for years, you had a gigantic ego. What can a person do in our world without an ego?

The ego is deaf. Deaf and blind. The ego has been tamed. This is the core in the Hindu doctrine. The ego must bend to the essence. In social activities, the biggest egos develop, like in the university where a person talks and talks even though no one is paying attention and no one ever listens. With this type of person there is no dialogue, only a long monologue. Life requires us to enter into dialogue and to listen to others. The ego is necessary like the shell of an egg: it envelopes the essence. All this about “kill the ego” is the craziness of gurus who, of course, are huge egomaniacs. I remember Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) who, in spite of being an extremely intelligent person, made his followers put his face on their T-shirts. In each of his books there were fifteen or twenty photos of his body. The ego can convert itself into something delirious. This man spent his life fighting against the ego and, in so doing, did nothing but strengthen his own. He confronted the egos of others but never his own. I look at the gurus like clowns. They are necessary, but they are big paper dolls.

Are we slaves of our desires?

We are always desiring things: more money, more objects. The world is pure desire. We get it in our heads that we have to resist aging: thousands of commercials encourage us to thicken our lips, lift our tits, stretch our dicks, firm our butts. We desire and we desire whatever we see in the advertisements or on the street. Every time I connect to the Internet, I’m sure to get four propositions: lengthen my phallus, lose weight, buy prostitutes, and win a fortune without working. . or imaginary banks appear where you win millions. This is a serious problem with our society: it is full of desires to consume and to show off, but there is very little desire to be.

We should learn then, as you have told us so many times, to defeat desire?

The oriental schools pass on a very old wisdom that should be revised. They have greatly idealized the teachings of Buddha, and one must be careful. The legend of Buddha, if one looks at it well, is quite grim: a young rich kid abandons his wife and child to be carefree; he was someone who feared the most natural things in the world like death, old age, illness, poverty. . But, of course, that doctrine assumes that the liberation of desire grants salvation, that salvation cannot come through rebirth, because it believes only in the rebirth or the pilgrimage of the soul — now that’s a lot to suppose, and it could be untrue.

If I do not believe in reincarnation, Buddha fails me. For him, it is necessary to escape from this life in order to not be reincarnated again, and this is an error. It is not necessary to escape from anything. It is necessary to live life. I do not know if reincarnation exists — we cannot know that. We cannot establish doctrines in which I must believe, communicating things by saying let’s stop the wheel on reincarnation, karma, and so forth. They are suspicious beliefs. In no way do I use them. Well studied, they are toxins for everyone.

IV

I would like to ask you about death. .

What is death? Only a change, a mutation. We do not have death, but rather the change it assumes.

Where did you learn this?

(Laughter.) Death is a word, and I began to learn it with the tarot. Death is Arcana XIII, and it does not have a name. It is situated in the middle of the deck. I had realized that once I was fifteen years old, I disappeared. Then I was thirty years old, then forty years old, and I continued disappearing. Right now I am seventy-four, and I am another person, yet I continue, content. When I am ninety I will be happy, when I am one hundred years old I will continue to be content. When I am three hundred, I will be stupendous, when I am a million years old, I will be a party.

Do you believe something of us stays when we die?

They asked a Zen master, “What is after death?” And he said, “I do not know. I still have not yet died.” I am here. But I know that what I am continues.

The Chariot tarot is sunken into the earth. Where is it going? The earth moves it and displaces it. We advance with the universe. What do I care about “after”? It was never important to me how I would be at eighty years old or a hundred or a million or sixty million. What is important is to know who I am now, not where I am going.

When you begin little by little to lose your identity, to become a generic human, you stop seeing yourself being any certain age. Then you stop identifying with time in general. Later, you are no longer a clear native of a motherland nor a speaker of a certain language. You do not see yourself in your name, you do not confuse yourself with the things you own, you begin to stop the identification.

But where do we stand in this vision of ourselves?

You hold on tight to who you are. To the happiness of life. You are happier every day, and you do not need the rigid costume of the character or of the personality. You are fluid, like water. Lao-tzu says, “One must be like water and take the shape of the vase that holds it.” Go through life taking shapes and this is magnificent. There is a moment when you accept it, and you tell yourself, “What I am is disappearing.” And once you are conscious, you are there all the time. You feel in your heels an abyss of total emptiness, and you go on advancing, like a light. And this light that you are knows it is going to swallow the abyss. This hope exists that you dissolve with an infinite joy into the cosmic ocean, and you are you, but you always accept that you are giving way to your consciousness. The ultimate gift you give is your consciousness.

When you arrive at death, the best you can offer is a perfect and enlightened consciousness, a clear consciousness, and that you must create, because if not, as Gurdjieff said, you die like a dog without offering consciousness and without building a soul.

It is said that power is locked between the walls of the skull. But where would you place consciousness?

Outside of the body. The body is like the stone of a peach, however, the consciousness does not have limits and it is in constant expansion.

You suggest that by an effort of the imagination we can free ourselves from the obvious, in the same way listening to music and playing with the memory could transfer us to another place. However, it is not enough to play with a handful of images, we must change to improve, change the subjects we imagine, isn’t that right?

There is a kind of imagination that is almost industrial: this is delusion. One must not confuse the imagination with constant delusions. I can imagine myself as whatever I want to all the time without going into any depth at all: stories and stories and stories without any deeper meaning. Or we can, like Kafka, submerge ourselves to a certain level, then stand still. He never achieved happiness. He rooted himself in neurosis.

Strength is always necessary, but why is this constant effort of existence demanded of us?

In life it is necessary to always be alert but not tense. I observed that when you say “strength” you feel it like something unpleasant, but I do not believe it necessary to make things detestable when we could make them likable. When I speak of “strength” I speak of agreeable strength: to paint, to dance, to live, these are totally pleasant strengths. We should do what pleases us in life and try very hard at it.

Life is a test, a trial?

No. Life is an initiation school. Or as Castaneda said: a challenge. For the warrior, this is important.

Is it at all useful to theorize about life?

He who theorizes about life does so because he knows nothing about life. But he who knows life should communicate his experiences, teach what he has lived.

We return once more to the old and obstinate question: why does what exists exist?

A woman who was very sick from cancer called me from the hospital and asked me, “What is the purpose of life?” I thought. And I responded with what she hoped, “Life doesn’t make sense.” She sighed and said, “This is what I hoped to hear.” The next day, she died. I answered like that to console her because this woman could not be cured. Although I believe life does make sense, we do not have to know what that sense is. It is a mystery. The idea that all things have a purpose is very idealistic. Of course we have an end, but we do not know what it is. If this were not so, I would not be here. We have a purpose as humanity in the universe. We have a destiny, however we do not have to know it rationally. And it is necessary to accept this in the healthiest way possible. To convert our planet into a garden. Enrich it and enrich ourselves.

What does it mean to be yourself? Can we ever know who we are?

Knowing yourself really means that you are the universe. I do not have limits because I am united with the universe like an organism: time is my life, what happens is my life and is life. If I know myself, I am the actor and the spectator: the known and the knower at the same time. Up to a certain point I can go from actor to spectator, but there is a supreme moment in which the actor and the spectator melt together. This is not just knowledge; it is pure consciousness, a state of knowing.

What does it mean to be realized through the transpersonal? Hasn’t this word been overused?

It is not hot air; it is simply a useful construct. What we understand to be personal corresponds with the attitude of enclosing yourself in your own psychology and analyzing everything from your own perspective. The transpersonal means to accept that the other exists, and to keep that in mind when perceiving the world and figuring things out.

In this sense, the transpersonal transcends the boundaries. We would have to, on this path, get to the androgynous thought. If you were a common person, you would be thinking first as a Spaniard, then as a man, then as an earthling. The ideal is to think without nationality, without sexual definition, and without being deformed by the solar system.

Can we believe that one day we can fulfill ourselves?

This is a trap, because no one fulfills himself fully. What is fulfilling oneself? Advancing as one can. For example, today, all day, I have written for Los Technopadres, a series presented as a comic strip, which I love. I am happy because I like the scene I invented. I am euphoric because I am creating. Although it will be a story for children or for young people, it fascinates me. And each morning I write a poem of four or five lines — I do not have time for more. These are little things that I do and that I like:

VISIONS

I

What do you think of the intermediaries of the soul? Of those who have organized themselves in order to teach us the mysteries of life?

Ultimately, I have divided the world — although these divisions are arbitrary — into beings and paper dolls. The word “paper doll,” which has stuck to my tongue, helps me to distinguish all the mental constructs. There are, of course, useful paper dolls and useless paper dolls. And the usefulness of either varies according to the passage of time or a change in our particular circumstances. At a certain moment, a formerly useless paper doll can become useful.

The useful paper doll is one that leads us to necessary mutations. The monks, due to living in celibacy, are not worthy of faith. If everyone was a priest, the human race would end. In this sense, they are no good. It is not possible to carry God inside you or communicate to others from a life that goes against human nature.

When these monks organize themselves into sects, other problems arise.

I suppose they try to monopolize what they call truth?

Sects could be useful. The problem is, effectively, that their reality consists in taking control of God. They make God their private property. Then they declare that whoever does not participate in the sect is unfaithful, worthy of destruction. They are separators. They do not unite. I believe that in the future the temples will be multipurpose. There will be cathedrals where they celebrate all the cults with free access and absolute compatibility. Subsequently the names of the gods will be removed; there will be anonymous organizations. If you give a name to God, you are appropriating him.

Religion, the same as a Constitution, should be revised because as man changes, religion has to change. The sect uses prohibitions. What man does not know, he calls God: it is a form of superstition. As the brain evolves, blind beliefs and taboos crumble.

How does this affect what you call “ health”?

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

Therefore, you do not recommend any church?

No, not even temples of the Zen masters, which are now Spanish, American, Mexican. They are paper dolls imitating traditions, languages, and Japanese food.

But the sects own interesting techniques and knowledge.

Of course. But these techniques and knowledge can be acquired without all the circus. When Ejo Takata introduced me to the Zen rod, I gave it back saying, “I am not a Zen master. Don’t give me this. I am never going to be a master, nor am I going to hold anyone up; this is a great honor, but my way is another.”

What sense does it make that humanity has produced beings such as Jesus or Buddha?

When you say Jesus and Buddha, you are talking of beings that, for me, are imaginary. It is as if you said Don Quixote or Hamlet. The same. But it doesn’t matter that they are imaginary. What is important is the quality of the message, which is marvelous.

In a way, they are there; they can almost be touched.

They are there, mythical, but now we are speaking about human beings. We do not know if some human beings have received the revelation. We will never know if the saint is crazy or if he has hallucinations.

And of the apparitions or revelations, what is your opinion?

To see apparitions of the Virgin does not interest me. It does not prove anything to me. To see a little smiling transparent girl climb a tree is to me the same as seeing a gorilla climb a tree. It is as peculiar as that. It has no benefit whatsoever.

And what explanation do you give to these phenomena?

They take place because people yearn for them to exist. It’s like a collective hallucination. Jung said that flying saucers are a product of the collective unconscious. They are collective dreams.

Why do we have the feeling that religions are traps for the soul?

Religions become traps when they set up boundaries. Divinity has no name or nationality and is for everyone. Religion comes to segment mystical reality. Ultimately you feel the limits of each religion, and these become traps. On the other hand, for centuries sacred books have been interpreted in an aberrant way by monks for whom woman is the devil, and they end up infecting the holy texts with their off-the-track interpretations. Then the same occurs in schools, in politics, in society — and it ends up creating oppression. Religion, which should be the universal panacea, becomes a universal poison — all religions.

You studied the Kabbalah, which, besides having religious significance, is a language.

Yes, a language that produces a bunch of crazies: in Hebrew each letter has a numerical value, and each word that you read equals the value of the letters in the word added up to a definite number. So you have combinations, and you say, “The number 87 is moon (levanah, in Hebrew) but also the word carrion (nevelah) equals 87, then moon and carrion could be the same.” It is a crazy system; the Kabbalah makes you crazy. We are adults. We do not need to believe in fairy tales. We cannot say that a book was written by God. We cannot say that the Bible, the sacred book, is the divine word. We can say that it is a novel, a work of art. And languages are works of art. But all of them, not only Hebrew or Sanskrit. I can play with all languages in the same way.

What relationship have you had with Sufism?

In Sufism, when you know it, you discover great beauties. It is like the cream of Islam. It is a deep mysticism, but they are prisoners of the Qur’an.

Even though Shams-i-Tabriz or Jalaluddin Rumi were very free souls. .

I decided to heal, to be conscious of the illnesses that come with their books. Behind every illness there is a book, be it the Qu’ran, the gospels, the Old Testament, Buddhist sutras. . All books, if they are interpreted through fanaticism, produce illnesses. We must reinterpret all those texts and take them for what they are: works of art. The Bible, for example, is a marvelous novel.

All beliefs establish metaphors to explain life, but the explanation of what happens to us continues to be a mystery. This lack of understanding, at times, takes us on nonsensical journeys. Do you believe God is a gambler?

It is an interesting intellectual game to talk about God and to think of it as a being that plays, that has attributes, that gets bored, and that defies that boredom by rolling dice. When Moses Maimonides wrote his book The Guide of the Perplexed, it took him three volumes to try to define God — and he arrived at the conclusion that God is that of which nothing can be said. God is the unimaginable, the immeasurable. And I add that God is the unlovable, because how are you going to love what you do not know? I like the idea of the game, but I believe it is not he who is playing it. It is the human being who plays: it is humanity who plays. Johan Huizinga wrote a book called Homo Ludens, which is an analysis of man as a being who plays. Man is a being who plays and builds illusions in his likeness. So man has imagined a God who plays.

What do you have faith in?

When Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was asked if he believed in God, he said no. “How is it possible that such a great mystic does not believe in God?” they said. “I do not believe because I know it,” Ramakrishna replied. I do not believe in the concept of “faith”; I believe in knowledge.

Do you know?

There are things that I know, yes. The dumb know not, but believe they know.

What does the concept “civil saint” mean to you? Who can be this?

I am a person who has suggested to myself to do good, simply. It is not that I have succeeded, but I have suggested it. Besides, to earn my living or to have children and a wife, like we all can, I have suggested to myself to do good insofar as I exist in a civil society. The civil saint could be someone who imitates holiness from these positions. No one is really a saint but rather imitates holiness. The saint could be the perfect human being, but the actual human being is still in the process of evolution. Because of this, he is limited to only imitating holiness.

How can we imitate holiness?

By intuition. The saint hears what he should do. And this comes to us from the interior, from what we call the God within. There is a perception inside of us, something that says, “What is the best in this situation? How can I help my fellow man?”

Sacrifice does not exist to the civil saint; like everyone, he avoids the masochistic sacrifice of the saints and carries out a normal life, integrated in society. But, in addition, he is conscious of the world; he is conscious that his acts have to be healing for others and for himself.

Holiness is not something that belongs to religions, nor does it mean sexual repression. Holiness consists in having a cosmic and divine consciousness. When I spoke of civil holiness, they took me for a madman, but now they are practicing it. It was necessary to speak of civil holiness, and I did. Just as I say that for art to be art it has to cure. And many people have begun practicing it. When you discover an idea and you mention it, sometimes it spreads everywhere. When a flower opens, it is springtime everywhere.

II

Is making policy necessary to develop our consciousness?

Politicians have a social function. They are our employees; we pay them. We must realize that a president could be our one in charge; the police are dependent on us, like bank tellers and waitresses. Politicians are our servants, not our mistresses.

But one can have a political passion. .

I never had it, I always hated politics. I never mixed with these people because, for me, politics had to be metaphysical, mystical, an art. I recommend that politics end; it has become the cancer of society because now it does not mean anything. Actually, a president is not a big deal. The president embodies an old symbol, but behind him are the multinationals, the oil companies, and all that. We could live very well without them, without paper dolls and without politicians. People are learning this, because people see them staging puppet shows or being mimicked by comics and television, and they no longer let it confuse them.

At the same time, you say it is necessary to change the world.

It is necessary to change it, but not through politics. When I was in Latin America, very celebrated writers told me to join the party, to take part with the left because otherwise they would inform on me and I would never have literary success. They also told me that if I did not side with the left, I would be considered in favor of the right. “Join and you have literary success! It is what the rest of us have done! If not, you will have us as your enemies,” they clarified. I did not join them because I feel that art is not political. The political should turn itself into art, but not the artist into a politician.

What could be the utopia for the present age?

To begin with, I would want all of human order to make a partnership, beginning in schools. It is atrocious that the children leave the partnership and go to be educated by a professor, just a man or a woman. This negates partnership. Classes should by taught by couples of both sexes, and children should be educated by a man and a woman, the same way that it should be a Pope and a Popesse, a president and a presidenta, not necessarily husband and wife. This is what I would do as a first political measure to improve social life: all human activities would have to be carried out in complimentary pairs.

We live alienated by a world that is at the mercy of technology, the market, and money. Is this due to capitalism or is the problem within us?

If you look carefully, what defines man is not quantity but quality. Humanity has always been qualified by his valence. Another thing is the great multitude, which, at the core, directs the world — the politicians need their votes, and they have to deceive them to legitimize themselves. Our labor is something else; it is to create conscious people. Everything I desire, I desire for others. Work the consciousness, then share it, so that humanity does not sink into catastrophe, because then the multitude will dominate — and the masses have a limited level of consciousness. It is necessary to elevate the level of consciousness: the multitude does not represent the human being. In this sick society, people emerge who are like antibodies; they are called to expand the consciousness, but this is work that must be done through the schools, on the streets, through art, and with every word. For this reason I say that art, not politics, heals.

Entertainment that sedates serves nothing; well, maybe to be able to bear life, right? I amuse myself. Like a little dwarf, I entertain myself with American movies, which serve to dull the brain. But all of this pseudo-art does not change society. Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating. If you take any mediocre being of today, and you transfer him to the Middle Ages, he would be a genius. We are changing, we are mutating, but the masses do it much more slowly. Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken’s foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.

Although not all human beings have the same function, the collective consciousness is totally necessary. There are, as I said, different levels of consciousness, and this is the most important: the mutation of the level of consciousness. If we had another level of consciousness, humanity would be marvelous. The problem is that the man on the street has an animal, infantile, and romantic level of consciousness, which makes him continue to help those who do not suit him, whether of the political class, the military. .

In schools and on television they constantly praise war and power. Our history is the history of battles and impositions. It’s the shame of humanity. The military and the police are repressive elements that appear indispensable, but we really could do without them. I suggested in Chile that the military change its uniform to a tutu and learn before anything else to dance classical ballet and then study flower arranging and gardening and fertilize our Chilean desert and turn it into a garden.

III

The future is something that is already passing. How do you see the future of our species, this humanity of which you speak?

I am tired of pessimism; the human race always changes when it is in danger of death. When we start dying in the streets, we will put a stop to pollution and other atrocities. We will react out of necessity.

It’s never too late?

It’s never too late. At the same time as they are perfecting mobile telephones, cars, genetics, and armaments, they are also developing many other things that are good for humanity. The discovery of atomic energy resulted in benefits for medicine and science. The path genetics has taken appears to us now to be monstrous, but it is necessary because we are entering life. We must perfect cloning if we want to evolve and abandon our primate origins. In alchemy, one of the ideas of strength was the homunculus: a created human being. We have to be able to do it. The idea of the purification of the race ruined the desire for man to advance genetically, but we have to obtain a different body because this one does not respond to our spiritual desires.

But with the disappearance of cultures and species, the destruction of the Amazon. . the earth cannot return to what it was.

But we can re-create it with genetics. Thanks to genetics, we are going to recover the animals that we have exterminated. It is not necessary to go against science. I believe scientific advancement is very positive. As in nature: the more we progress through the bad, the more good we do.

Why do some fear the future?

Look, an animal is afraid because something can eat him at any moment. For this society to function and not spread anarchism, it has to work the fear. There are various terrors: economic terror (very current); sexual terror (AIDS); the terror of consciousness (when a society begins to think about the death penalty); emotional terror (the war of the sexes); and on and on. Terror is something complex: it makes us build defenses and maintain society without change.

How do you imagine the world in a few years? What mutations do you see possible?

I believe that in the future our driving force, our energy, is going to change. The changes of a society are changes in energy. We are all bound to fly! Not to fly like birds, but by discovering an antigravitational force. We cannot conceive a future without defeating gravity. Everything is going to change. A city is a place with roots, and the cities are going to change. We will live in flying shells. The sky will be populated, the land will be free of streets and roads, and we will not use gasoline. We are going to fly above a marvelous garden populated by all kinds of animals. We are going to live in freedom. We are going to change the human spirit; we are going to change everything!

Do you think we are directing ourselves toward a world without material limits, toward a spiritualization?

Yes, and it will be a gradual change. We will not have furniture; we will work with intelligent materials that will undo and recover their shapes; there will be portable robots and healing clothes, which will be able to tell us our body temperature and the state of our health in any given moment; we will have intelligent homes that will function on their own. All this is already evolving, but it has to be perfected. The use of fossil fuels will end: automobiles that run on hydrogen, methane, and compressed air already exist. Pollution will end. Money will evolve toward something immaterial. If we have a new free energy, we are all going to enjoy free time and long life. We are going to develop art and beauty. We will talk singing, maybe, like poets. Telepathy, little by little, will be established as a language. There will be an instantaneous and universal means of communication. Partnerships will improve a lot and will have consciousness. It will not be, as it is now, that some eat and others don’t; hunger will disappear. Common man will have to evolve to a new level. We are gorillas, primates. We are still forming, but we are going to fly.

Although there will be many fights and nationalist resistance to preserve the little things, at some point it will stop because it will be useless. How will it end? Thanks to the children. Those sons of nationalism in the future will be communicating with the whole world. Little by little all nationalities are going to intermingle. Languages are going to intermingle. A marvelous future awaits us, after passing through enormous but necessary plagues, so that we don’t overwhelm the planet and we don’t destroy other species. There will always be illnesses to balance the population. But we will heal ourselves with the mind.

Are nearly all the species that have accompanied us in evolution condemned to die?

No. We will re-create them. From the tiger’s skin hung on the wall, we will bring out tigers.

But, will they be real or virtual?

Real.

What should we think about genetic experiments?

Genetics is sacred. It is not necessary to oppose it.

Do you believe then that one day we will be able to create beauty, like the wing of a butterfly or a flower?

Of course. We can take a bone or something organic and create an animal: everything is in a cell.

Re-create but not create. .

Well, they will be able to mix animals and species. .

Therefore, you think genetic manipulation is a necessity?

It seems to me essential. Our conscience commits us to experimentation.

And cloning?

It is absolutely essential, and it is necessary to experiment thoroughly. There was a time when it did not advance due to religious prejudices, and now it is not advancing because of scientific, economic, and political prejudices. . We must continue!

There are those who think cloning can violate a person’s fundamental rights.

Why, if the person wants it?

I speak from the point of view of those who are born cloned. They can create a hundred copies of a human to be used as organ donors or slaves.

Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, and two thousand young people committed suicide. So there were those who said, “Why did he have to write it? One should not write such things.” Thus arose censorship, derived from suppositions of this kind. But, following the same reasoning, we should also burn the Bible, because it has caused more deaths than the atomic bomb, or all of the Buddhist texts because of self-immolation. Everything has a danger, always. But just because this danger exists, we are not going to prevent things from following their course. Just as danger exists in creating armies of zombies, the possibility exists of making another exceptional humanity, with long life: a mutation of humanity toward something infinitely better than what we are now. This is the path.

Nonetheless, if we analyze history, whenever there was an effort to make the species better, very grave phenomena were produced: Nazism, for example.

But in this case, the aim was racial selection with domination being the goal. It was not genetic, it was not work on the fetus or on the cells, or anything of this nature. Those were dreams of the age, motivated by the desire of a superior race to dominate other races. But what I am speaking about is a superior humanity, not a superior race. From that point of view, let genetics be admitted. You see how there are barriers that impede our moving toward the truth? We remain stuck in the idea that genetics carries the risk of another führer. Let’s change the concept: let’s create a superior humanity and accept genetics.

Do you think in the future we will have a virtual world, like they are drawing on the Internet?

No. The root of the virtual is the real. Because of this, the virtual world will always dissolve into the real.

Do you think that religion, as we understand it, will be a thing of the past?

Of course, a historical phenomenon, a fossil. There will be mystics, but the old beliefs will already be fossils. When I see movies with priests, I laugh a lot: priests are like a real carnival, rabbis are like a parade of madmen, the Tibetan lamas, the Hare Krishnas, all of them are dressed up like transvestites. A religion does not need a uniform.

Will there be new churches?

Churches I don’t know, but there will be great dance halls. All of these places will be converted into places for parties.

How do you think art will evolve?

We are seeing it now. With new means all-purpose art is born. That is to say, right now we are used to reading a poem, to admiring a sculpture or painting, to attending the theater. . In a little machine you will have it all: literature, music, voice, images. . you will have a third dimension — total art.

How will our sense of time evolve?

As we will live much longer, when we have three thousand years of life, it will be a pleasure to be old, because to be old is to be in the midst of the cosmos and the universe. We are going to feel the universe. It is a divine gift that life gives us. To be alive is an unimaginable gift. We have to get to work making this miracle better.

In the universe of your comics, extraterrestrial life is very present. Why is that?

It is present because it exists. For the same reason that there are metaphysical problems, politics, and everything. Why would someone not put all that in a comic? Genres are the worst! Comic theater, dramatic theater, the melodrama. . I do not believe in this.

There is not a planet or a planetary system: there is a cosmos, a universe that is present in each second.

Do you think there can be a more advanced civilization somewhere in the universe?

Of course, it is completely believable. Why should we think we are the only beings that exist? We have to look for the solution to the phenomenon of the consciousness in all of the universe conceived as a unit. Just as there is knowledge and life in one place, it could be in another. It could be a different form of life from ours, even one incomprehensible to us.

THE ART OF HEALING

According to you, the organism is a quagmire of unresolved problems.

Of course, because if you do not want to make yourself conscious of what you have, the body transforms it into an illness. All secrets tend to appear in the same way that all mysteries tend to manifest themselves. Nature wants you to be healthy. Nature wants you to become fulfilled, and when you repress yourself, you repress a part of yourself that ends up leaving somehow.

Where do addictions, that flagellate our societies, come from?

From shortages in infancy. People try to compensate this way. Alcoholism is generally produced from a shortage in mother’s milk. And heroin addiction is usually due to a lack of being, the absence of recognition; the drug fills the emptiness of not being loved.

Does madness exist or is it an invention of the police as Topor would say?

Yes, it exists. We need dream and reality. There is a moment in which individuality is erased; then the brain functions without control, and we go crazy. The brain is a universe in constant expansion and movement. We go along in a rational prison that sails within a crazy person.

What do you believe is the most widespread illness?

Emotional suffering. Civilization predisposes us to that.

You have attended many operations in which shamans cured people. What is real and what is exaggeration in these primitive treatments?

It is what I call the “sacred trap.” The shaman carries out theatrical acts and imitates powers; by imitating powers, he produces the effect because it opens the doors of this mysterious thing that we are.

You always doubted what you saw in these kinds of rituals, but then they took on another sense, more metaphorical, that could be integrated into your own therapies.

I quit not believing in anything. It is not that I doubted; it is that I did not want to believe in it. The positive step I took toward these practices was to eliminate belief or nonbelief; I took these two attitudes off the top. Scientists do not believe, but they believe in not believing. It is a mistake. It is necessary to not have prejudices about these acts, to experiment calmly and see the results.

The way of acting as a shaman is, in whatever case, metaphoric.

Of course, because the unconscious uses metaphors. If, for example, you give someone who has caused you a lot of pain a ball painted black, and you tell him, “Take this. It is your cancer, not mine. Keep it.” This is a metaphor.

But the sick, more or less, usually resist being healed.

It is not that he resists more or less, it is that he resists always, for one simple reason: the illness, in itself, is already a symbol of resistance. A resistance to the message of the unconscious. It is producing a prohibition and, when you resist it, you create an illness.

When I read the tarot, I fight as if I were in martial arts combat: a karate fight with the client, who resists being helped. The tarot is a martial art, which tries to give you life, but the client fights and resists.

You fight with the defenses available to your level of consciousness. To pass from one level of consciousness to another is a battle. People resist being cured because they have been marked by a genetic, sociocultural, familial training, which grants an identity. Sick people are asking for something; they want to be loved. To be able to help them, you have to fight to get them to accept that they are never going to obtain what was not given to them in childhood.

Paradoxically, and at the same time, the sick ask to be healed.

What the sick are really asking for is to be relieved of the pain not of the sickness. They ask for metaphysical aspirin. They want their symptoms to disappear but resist seeing the essence that produced the illness. They do not want to see because losing our identity is what we fear most.

It is like fear of death?

No. It is much more than the fear of death. The brain does not conceive of the fear of death, but it does conceive of the fear of losing identity, which is its equivalent. The person who loses his memory can say that he is a living dead man, that he has to begin a new life.

Without the underlying primitive milieu or superstition, what remains of the healing ceremonies carried out by the shamans?

It is not only a question of a primitive milieu. We are not primitives. When I was in India planning to shoot my film Tusk (1978), I looked for a teacher. I met with one who came out of the hotel and was really fat; he had been enriched and had become fat; he had been Westernized in a grotesque way. Another day I saw a parade of sadhus, holy men of India, protesting because the price of marijuana had risen: they were all drugged. The women sold their saris of silk and bought ones made of nylon. These primitive villages want to come here; this explains the invasion of shamans of all kinds who arrive in our cities. All who come to save the world want to enter our civilization. And what attracts them most is money. This is what attracts attention in the West. It is ridiculous that we, who have come out of the primitive mentality, have arrived at a rational mentality and return seeking the secrets in the primitive. We cannot go back. We must take this knowledge, apply it to our rational minds, and go even further still.

But there are those who go to the jungle in search of rituals, shamans, and references, which we here have forgotten.

The trendy neoshamanism is ridiculous. It is good to visit other villages to learn techniques that we have forgotten, but not to imitate them or to reproduce their superstitions and gods. That does not benefit us. It is absurd. We will never be Native Americans or Amazon Indians, although we propose this. The book by Antonin Artaud, The Tarahumaras, is pitiful in that it talks about this village with a tourist’s eye. It tends to idealize the ancients. They were not better than we are, although the village and the folklore have always preserved the remains of a deceased knowledge that, in any case, we cannot use. The traditionalist attitude is not useful to us.

Psychomagic consists of what?

Psychomagic consists in giving advice to solve problems by applying, in a nonsuperstitious way, the techniques of magic. The elements on which it relies are all classes of symbolic acts that can be proposed to a person.

The first thing we have to realize is that when a person has a problem it is necessary to introduce him to his problem, so that he is conscious of it. It is necessary to bring him to the border of his problem, not to immediately separate him from it but to get him to face his fears. Once these are overcome, the anxiety disappears and the person can rise. If someone is afraid of something, it is necessary to face this fear. This is not something new: it is necessary to make the person face his anxiety. From there, there are concrete methods to help. When a person has suffered all of his life, the only thing he can do is let himself die and be reborn. This one does metaphorically, for example, by changing a name and creating a new calling card.

Psychomagic depends on very simple, creative solutions that have no limits. The solutions are not aggressive things; they are benign things, never destructive. For example, if we bury something, we have to plant something. Creativity should not be viewed from a harmful side or as a possibility to do harm, you understand? Because creativity from the harmful side converts into destructibility. And destructibility doesn’t interest us.

Can someone apply Psychomagic herself or is a teacher needed?

Of course one can apply it herself. I do it continuously. I have appropriate and sacred fetishes and comical ones also. I have created a little altar, conditional reflections.

What characteristics does a person have to have in order to cure another?

It is not to cure another, it is to help another cure himself. He who wants to cure another is conceited. Not even the other cures. God cures. I believe that the motive power of all of this is goodwill. When a person develops in himself a feeling of goodwill, it informs the feelings of others and does what it can to take away the bad. One has to put himself in the other’s place to make it possible for the other to discover how to cure himself. To do this, the other must raise his level of consciousness and rearrange his vision of things. We all perceive life from a particular point of view, more or less variable and at a certain height. When we change this point of view, our lives change.

The therapist should put aside morality in order to cure?

She should be amoral, but not immoral. Immorality reveals an illness. For the therapist to be amoral means she does not judge. Like a doctor: if an assassin has a wound, the surgeon helps him and stitches the wound. The therapist should act in the same way. She has to put aside her prejudices and, even more, still act as a psychological therapist.

To cure, is a certain personal disinterest and distance essential?

We should specify what is understood by “disinterest.” It is good to not want anything from the person, but this also requires a certain cynicism and indifference. The therapist has an interest in curing the person, and it is precisely this interest that creates the disinterest. I speak only of those therapists who do not seek to gain money or swindle people, as some fortune-tellers do. There is another kind of interest, which manifests when the psychotherapist has a complex against the client and wants to convert himself into a support for the sick, to reinforce his own ego, or to exploit his narcissistic interest. Other times they give in to political or social interests. I knew a psychoanalyst who systematically destroyed couples because she hated men. There is also the desire to be loved. Or the simplest: to try to be a patient’s friend, but this one must also be put aside to be able to cure.

You usually say healing is everything but a surrealist game, but your psychomagic prescriptions include a lot of games and even humor.

There is some humor, but what happens is that when we do something we have never done, we are already on the road to healing. We must break the routines. As we speak of the unconscious language or of dreams, these acts can appear strange. This path is contrary to that taken by Freud with psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Psychoanalysis notes the dreams and interprets them in light of reason; it goes from the unconscious to the rational. I go in reverse. I take the rational and capsize it in the language of dreams, introducing dreams into the language of reality. Psychomagic acts build dreams into reality. If these things do not happen, it is necessary to make them happen. Reality seeks oneiric liberation, and we need to make something happen so that someone heals. Everything that is irrational either makes you laugh or frightens you. Laughter or fear: they are only reactions to get out of the ordinary.

The truth is that Psychomagic has become popular. How do you take that?

I find many psychomagic acts being carried out on the street that I have not prescribed. (Laughter.) It is true that people are using it a lot. At first I was very discreet. For years, I gave advice and wrote it down. Then Gilles Farcet came along, and we wrote a book about Psychomagic, which took him four years to finish while I continued working. When the book came out in France, it was a big success, and they translated it into Castilian and Italian. People began to seek me out, and then I could experiment. For one year, I received, each day, two people in my home in order to try to develop the rules of Psychomagic. I thought it was part of my creativity and that, before I died, I had to be able to teach the rules to my son Cristóbal, my wife Marianne, and then to a few therapists. I continued training people, but the process is very slow. It takes at least four or five years of experience and a lot of artistic activity.

The fundamental difference between this therapy and psychoanalysis is that psychoanalysis was created by people who came from the university and science, while I have created a technique that comes from art and theater. I say a scientist cannot be a therapist. Treatment is the work of artists and poets. If you are not that, you cannot cure.

It works completely with the body but keeping in mind the existence of the ghost body, on which you have done much investigation.

I began to study religions: Tantra, yoga, alchemy, Zen, Chinese medicine, the Kabbalah. I realized that each culture creates an imaginary biology that actually works. For example, I studied the Muladhara chakra, which is between the sex and the anus. It is like a four-petaled flower that has in its center an elephant with the trunk raised. At first, I thought, “I truly do not feel I have any flower between the penis and the anus.” But when I went to India, I decided to ride an elephant, to see what it was like. And so I knew why they said this about that chakra: when you ride an elephant, you feel the strength of nature. The elephant moves like a gyroscope, it does not lean to the right or to the left, it moves like a ship on a calm sea. It is as if you have the monumental strength of the earth between your legs. So, I realized, that these flowers and this elephant are metaphors that must be understood in their cultural sense; they are locations in the body, but they are imaginary.

I tell many people who want to learn do-in massage^*4 to not press the body with the thumb looking for mythical meridians. I teach them in an hour to push with the thumb on the person’s whole body, and the patient heals. Chakras and meridians are imaginary biology. The body is a whole. I was interested in imaginary biology because I realized that when you imagine your body, you are creating it. Castaneda has a strong imaginary biology, with the assembly point and all that, which comes from European esotericism, the aura and such. I also studied mutilated bodies, those with what’s called “ghost members.”

What advice would you give for losing the fears we suffer?

Each one is distinct, but I have always said it is necessary to manifest them in a psychomagic shape. You must first discover what you are afraid of; then you can overcome it. If a person is afraid of dying, I make her go to a funeral or I bury her symbolically. Whoever fears poverty, I send him to another city to beg for a day. I make the client live on the edge of what she fears, to face it.

Georg Groddeck said something I like a lot: “You are afraid of what you desire.” If a person is very afraid of being homosexual, I send him dressed as a transvestite to a gay bar. To defeat a fear, you must let it enter into your life as a concrete shape.

Will medicine in the future contemplate subjects like Psychomagic, theater, or psycho-shamanism?

Medicine in the future will have to integrate all of this, although it already is doing it. I have many students of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer who have created bio-psycho-genealogy, which is a delirium to me but, little by little, it becomes evident.

For two years, my friend Jean-Claude Lapraz, a doctor in phytotherapy, sent his patients for me to see if psychological problems existed. Between us, we came to an agreement in principle that said: “We do not assume that all illnesses are psychological, but we are going to observe what there is of psychology in the illnesses.” We studied psychic events in relation to the physical, and at the same time, we both did our work.

Do doctors today practice a little psycho-shamanism?

For the big majority of them, you are only a number and you have nothing to say! We must radically reform the state of medicine: from the hospitals to the habits. Nurses, doctors, they do not know how to treat patients; they think they have to treat the patient cruelly and impersonally, and this does not work. They treat machines.

What is fundamental to healing is that the person express herself and speak. You notice, when you heal someone, that it produces a change in a person who has been listened to. To heal, you have to know who the patient is and where the illness and character have developed. To know the patient, it is essential to develop a genealogy tree at least to the great-grandparents. But none of this is applied today in conventional medicine.

What is your opinion about suicide?

If you have a grave illness, incurable, suicide is a possible option. People have the right to end their lives. Life should not be prolonged agony. Current medicine prolongs pain, and this is awful.

How do you see the way our society looks at death?

It is an atrocity, how one is born and how one dies. It’s not a way to come into the world. We must bring birth and death back into the home.

UNDERSTANDING LIFE

Is all of life, perhaps, a miracle?

Life is rich. If you carefully observe a meadow, you realize that each plant is a different color of green, each ladybug is different from the other. Many of us know the anecdote of the man who photographed snowflakes and discovered that each one was different: thousands of millions of snowflakes, each one with its own shape. That is to say, everything is variety, difference. But, at the same time, everything communicates; we are united by secret threads. Life is a miraculous creation. All of reality is a pure union of mental and emotional threads.

We must tiptoe lightly upon the world without becoming victims of reality.

Our footfalls are important. The whole being reflects in the bottoms of the feet, where all the endings reach. Our step defines us. Loved ones, dogs and cats, for example, know our steps. But there are people who live very enclosed in the mind and are unconcerned with their steps, as if the earth were really dirty and one could stain his feet.

When I left Chile, I was twenty-three years old; when I went back, I was sixty-three. The streets were full of memories, of emotionalism; there was all of my adolescence, full of poetry. I walked on the sidewalks, caressing them with the soles of my shoes. Acts toward others should be as delicate as the steps we take on a land that is part of ourselves.

What does “ do not become a victim” of reality mean?

The person who does not control her territory does not control her existence. If someone is not conscious, she is taken over, not only outwardly but also with the thoughts that assault her. She is very vulnerable to desires and feelings. For example, you live calmly with your wife, then — catastrophe! Suddenly you lose control because you have fallen in love with another. You don’t have to fall victim to that reality; what you have to do is navigate in it, overcome the winds and sandstorms. Amid the storms at sea and the signs, you must move forward calmly and look toward the port you’re heading for.

In New York, when I was filming The Holy Mountain, I had problems of all sorts. I soaked six or seven T-shirts a night with my sweat. I went to see a Chinese sage that someone had recommended. He was a poet, a great master of tai chi, and a doctor. When he first saw me, he said, “What is your purpose in life?” I was disconcerted and did not answer. He continued, “If you do not tell me what is your purpose in life, I cannot heal you.” So I understood that if a ship crosses the sea without a purpose, it will arrive at no port. What prevents life from devouring us is having a purpose. The higher it is, the further it will carry us.

As a mystic, I have but one aim: to know God. Not the God talked about everywhere, but this incredible thing that moves the universe. Further still: to dissolve myself calmly into that. This is my purpose, and for that, I do not need to be a guru, or a visionary, or any sort of paper doll.

Should we act in life as if it were a big dream?

As if in a lucid dream, not like in a nightmare. And the more lucid a dream is, the less of a dream it is. To cross a river is to cross life: complete happiness in spite of complete suffering. I do not like wars at all. I have lived through many, beginning with the world war. I am not one who believes that the human being should be distressed.

But the fact is we live filled with anxiety.

Remember that Mary and Zacharias see an angel, and that, twice, the angel tells them to have no fear. When I was writing Gospels for Healing, this scene came into my head. I believe the angel took away their fear. The first step to entering into divine and cosmic consciousness is to lose the fear. Why? Because the essence of animals is to fear, and that limits us. Our body is afraid of becoming food. That is the first and the most basic. Movies like Alien and Jaws drive at this primitive depth: to be devoured or to not have anything to eat.

Fear, on the other hand, is useful. If children do not learn that fire burns, they will all die. Fear preserves life; without fear we may not live. Panic, however, is another thing. Anxiety is fear of the unknown. When you do not know that you are afraid, then you feel anguish. What is essential is not so much freeing yourself from fear as not letting yourself be dominated by panic.

It is said that love grows insofar as criticism decreases. How should we act toward the defects of others?

The enemy of love is to criticize another. If someone criticizes you, it is because they do not love you. It is necessary to accept people as they are. However, to criticize is one thing and objective judgment is another. To judge is bad, but to know what is happening with others is good. One must say to the other, “I am not criticizing you, because I love you. But I see your limits, and I would like to make you conscious of them. Then you can do what you want.” This is not criticism.

You usually say, “What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up.”

And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose. If I keep my knowledge, I lose it. I had a teacher, an alchemist, who was one hundred and ten years old, and he hung himself with a wire in his room. He had encyclopedic and monumental knowledge, but he doled it out in small phrases. . How did accumulating such knowledge serve him? He committed suicide!

One receives knowledge and gives it. When you give knowledge, you enrich yourself. If you do not give love, you are detracting from yourself. If I begin to help people, if I begin to heal people, I begin to heal. Do you understand? To be a therapist, you have to be a patient. The first thing to do to heal yourself is to heal others. The world is you and me. The world is not ours, it is what we are. I do not want to go about with dirty feet. Why do I have to walk on contaminated land or between trees that are dying? What we suffer, we are doing to ourselves: if we poison the atmosphere, we attack our lungs. If I ingest toxins like nicotine or alcohol, I am contaminating my blood; but since blood is part of everything — my blood is not my own — I am poisoning humanity.

I have one more saying: “I do not want anything for myself that I do not want for others.”

You have written that to transform oneself one must give and not ask, which is very different.

To transform oneself one must give, but to transform oneself one must also learn. One closes oneself off and does not admit love from another, the tenderness or the help of another. The real leap is learning to receive, which is as difficult as learning to give. And it is necessary to learn to ask for what one needs: justice is to give to oneself what one deserves. This is why the gospels say, “Knock and the door will be opened.” If I ask for a long life, it is because I have the right to ask for it. If I ask that we will use an energy other than oil, it is because I have the right to ask for it, just as I have the right to ask that the rivers be clean or that wars stop or that wealth does not accumulate only in some countries while misery exists in others! I have the right to ask for wealth to circulate all around the planet. We have to learn to ask for what is just and to not ask for what it is not necessary to ask.

And the people who do not ask. .?

A saint who asks for nothing is a saint who lives imprisoned in himself and who lets the world go by. It is an individual decision, but it is necessary to have someone to whom you transmit your wisdom. A moment ago, I mentioned my alchemist teacher, who possessed incredible wisdom and who revealed secrets to me in droplets. He had been a magician, a famous man. He had put all of his money in the bank and, by an economic error of inflation, he lost it, and he did not know how to live. And so he hung himself with a wire. He hung himself for not having shared with others. I had a deep crisis when I learned of this, and I interrogated myself as to this man’s end. I learned something: the wisdom that you do not give, you lose. At this man’s death, with the reaction it produced, I started my Mystical Cabaret, a place where, once a week, I could teach others everything I had learned during that week. At times, they were stealing ideas from me, but this does not matter. There are people who say they invented something that I invented. It doesn’t matter.

Once, this same centenarian teacher, who had the body of an adolescent, told me he had studied martial arts. “Me, too,” I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, “Attack me.” I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. “Beauty is the most dangerous weapon,” he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.

The human being’s most dangerous weapon is the imagination. Where does imagination come from?

Imagination is a game of constructing what we have. By diverse channels, we acquire things: words, emotions, desires, needs, feelings, perceptions. We organize all these things with our rational consciousness, the way we have learned to do. Although we may be primitives in the process of identifying and knowing our own possibilities, we organize them. In the brain, all of these parts accumulate and can mix and organize with different shapes, as in a game of Legos. In this process, we not only rely on what is given to us from the outside, acquired, but also on what we find, mysteriously, in our brains: that which we call unconscious. Using imagination is creating with these materials. When you read, you are imagining much more than you are reading. The imagination is a language richer than limited oral language. The imagination exceeds rational limits. Visual, tactile, olfactory, oral, auditory, emotional, sexual, and intellectual imaginations exist. An emotional imagination carries your feelings to the sublime or the criminal. A sexual imagination is like that of the Marquis de Sade; a material imagination is like that of Karl Marx, who saw the world through the economy. I call the imagination creativity — the foundation of life. If we suffer, it is because of a shortage of imagination, for lack of creativity.

After all, do we have to forgive life of something?

(Smiling.) Your question is sweet, because it makes life an object and you a subject outside of life, and more than that, a judge of life. We are not paper dolls outside of life! To forgive life, we would have to first forgive ourselves. And we would have to be guilty of something, and we are not. There is no fault. Nor does a criminal exist who bears all the guilt: all individual crime is a product of the family, the society, and history.

I was speaking in terms of resentment toward life.

One must lose resentment; it is big work to resolve fury and grudges. We are full of grudges. We are full of grudges and frustrations for love not obtained. Illness is a lack of love.

And against the lack of love?

Creativity.

We can learn to be creative?

Of course, and I will give you a course immediately.

When I speak of creativity, I am referring to a complete change in ourselves. If I never wanted to reflect aloud about this subject, it is because what you are going to hear is very strange. Without creativity, the world goes all wrong. I am sure that the majority of illnesses come from a lack of creativity, and the social problems we have in the world are due to this shortage. Misunderstood creativity provokes war and crimes.

To work with creativity, you must be a critic of yourself and all that you represent. When I look at a person, I can see the state of his body. I can also see his mental pressures, as if his spirit is withdrawn into himself. In others, I perceive the doubts they have about themselves, or rather I observe their upbringing like a heavy scab, that they were raised in rationality. Others dance all the time with the things of the past. When I look, I don’t do it with a critical eye but with a creative one. If I read the tarot to someone, I see the person completely, because I release any restrictions. This is only an example of creativity.

I want to explain what creativity is as a whole and why creativity is so rare. Creativity is so strange that with it one can become Christ, Buddha, the Virgin, or Athena. Creativity is related to religion and also to mythology. It has saved my life. For this reason, I am going to begin this course by recounting things of my past.

I will tell you that I was born in a working-class neighborhood, that my father had a store, and he was a shopkeeper. I talk about this in a book called La Danza de la Realidad [Reality Dance]. My world was very limited, and I thought that creativity was the only key I had. The truth is that I liked to study. I was a good student, but school bored me a little. Since my uncles, whom I hated, were graduates, I abandoned the university. So I said to myself: “The only key that can save my life is imagination.”

But how does one develop the imagination? In my case, it was not difficult. I had learned to read at five years old, and I spent a large part of my time between the covers of books: fairy tales, stories of all kinds. . I developed my imagination through reading. Visions formed through books are always intellectual visions, because they arise from words. But the imagination is much more than that. Creativity pushes words out.

One of the biggest enemies of creativity is morality. One must be amoral to develop the imagination. Morality imprisons the imaginary in us. One must be courageous and throw away this crutch.

HISTORY OF THE IMAGINARY

The human being, historically, began to live enclosed within himself. Later, he realized that he could stop allowing himself to be influenced by elements that were not part of himself, that were outside of his body. We put ourselves in nature, and it turns out that we are nature! In the beginning, however, the world proved foreign to us.

For example, let’s suppose I am a savage: I know that the world is not me, but I realize that there are trees, vegetation, flowers, moss. . By means of witchcraft, one day I incorporate a tree into my persona. I create a vegetable totem. I am united with the tree, with the totem. When one plants a tree, this tree is I; when the trunk is cut, I die. When I die, they deposit seeds in my mouth, and another marvelous tree grows. From my corpse, a tree emerges. Later I am a seed. Incorporating the trees, I begin to work the earth, because I identify with the plants. What is at the foundation of my imagination is the vegetable world, and this has been passed on to today in the use by phytotherapists of healing plants. To cure, it’s necessary to enter into the spirit of the plants, but the inverse is also true: it’s necessary to open a door so that the spirit of the plants can enter me. Until the spirit of the plants has permeated me, I will not be creative.

Where the spirit of the plants ends is the Om Mani Padme Hum, or the diamond in the lotus. Here, all of the Tibetan religion is concentrated. From the swamp comes the lotus in which the Buddha rises. All Egyptian or Buddhist religion settles on the incorporation of a plant. Because this opens to the sun and extends her perfume, God emerges. I am a plant that grows from the mud that grows from the unconscious; I grow from the conscious, from knowledge, and the Being of Light springs from me. All this has a remote origin. The plant that I incorporated into me has opened my doors. There is a Zen koan that says: “Opened door to the north, opened door to the south, opened door to the east, opened door to the west.” It is the reply to what is Buddha. You may not understand what this means, but at least you understand that something is opened. The person who is not an initiate in creativity devotes himself to the search, but it’s going to take a lot to open himself. To be creative, you must let loose of yourself. And, in this way, you enter Zen, because the essential currency of Zen is to let loose of what is tied up, to liberate yourself.

As humankind continued its advance, he began to incorporate the animal. Man absorbs animals: insects, frogs, tigers, lions, leopards, spiders. . in other words, the animal totem. From the animal totem, all the gods will be born: Apollo is a frog, for example. In many cultures they wear animal masks: leopards in Mexico, crocodiles in Africa. The zodiac is symbolized by animal figures, and even today the incorporation of the animal totem persists in our daily life: we use expressions like “to be predatory” or “make war like predators.” We have incorporated the animal in us.

This is how, from the beginning, human beings produced creativity. From each thing man incorporates, God emerges. With each incorporated dimension, our being grows. After incorporating the animal, man becomes a hunter; he can raise cows, sheep. . If he incorporates a tiger, he can hunt a tiger; if he introduces an elephant, he can dominate an elephant. That’s where the god Ganesh of India came from, the head of an elephant. To the Indian culture, the spider is Maya, the one that weaves the universe; and this universe is a dream, a dream woven in the form of a spider web. In the tarot, we see that the Arcana VIII is Justice, and Justice is a descendant of the spider. The number eight descends from the spider: eight legs, the symbol of the infinite and other references.

But we must go further. Human beings contemplate the movements of the moon, the movements of the sun; looking at the stars, man incorporates the rhythms of the cosmos. From there law is born, and royalty; all of the organization of society is born of the incorporation of the cosmic rhythms. For example, there was a king who on full moon nights made gifts to his village; when the moon disappeared, he was demoted, following the moon’s conduct. Man thinks in cycles. The inclusion of the heavenly body in social organization still persists. We are governed by a president who symbolizes the sun, and by the wife of the president who symbolizes the moon. The emperor is the solar symbol; the high priestess is the lunar symbol. The assimilation of cosmic rhythms is important for us. Illumination is attained with reference to these cycles. We say: “I am going to illuminate myself. I am going to become the sun.” And we shine like the sun. That is to say, that our supreme end is to convert ourselves into the sun (Amon-Ra), because the moon reflects the light of the sun. That means the I has to be like the moon, that humble, to reflect in its totality the light of the sun. When we gave the sun a masculine signification, our society began to degenerate. In Germany there are traces of an ancient civilization in which the moon was masculine and the sun feminine, the remnants of a matriarchal society in which converting oneself into the sun meant converting oneself into a woman. Today it would mean converting oneself into a man, unconsciously speaking. All of this is not to say that we should understand the sun as a paternal representation or anything like that. Deep down the sun is essentially androgynous.

So in the Enlightenment, man decides to be intellectual, purely intellectual. And the mechanic begins to produce machines: gas motors and tools that operate with manual energy, like watches. And man incorporates these machines. He imitates the conduct of these machines! He arrives at rational thought. Even today there are traces of this rationalism of the Enlightenment. When I go with a Frenchman to the cinema, he says: “But it is not logical. It is not possible.” If we are going to see Kubrick’s The Shining, when the protagonist is locked up then suddenly bursts out with an ax, we say: “That is not possible. It is not logical. Who opened the door for him?” Because it does not appear possible to us, it does not appear acceptable. Everything that is not logical is worthless to us! This example reveals the introduction of the machine into the imaginary world, because machines are absolutely and totally logical. They have a very clear purpose, therefore; man has to have a clear focus. Buddhism, by contrast, seeks illumination without purpose. We are marred by rationalism. To be rational is good, but to be only rational is a leprosy, an epidemic, a sickness. When sexuality took a rational turn by way of religion, for example, it produced a catastrophe. It created a rational morality, which has spread out into all of society and which is profoundly destructive. Incorporating the rational into sex creates a problem, which is precisely what has driven us to smashing rationality.

In reaction to this illness, Freud and the surrealists appeared. Surrealism was very important, because we began to identify ourselves with dreams; we revived the reign of the dream as a part of ourselves. The Greeks believed that dreams were of the gods, not of human creation. But to incorporate the dream, I am the dream creator.

One more example: Now, in the twenty-first century, we have computers. This supposes a complete change in our mentality, because in ten years we have taken on all the information systems. Now we can look at a house from all sides. You know, with this imagery, you can enter through the window, visit an apartment, and leave. We can look at a person’s brain; go through all of her veins and all of her body to get to what we want to look at. We are beginning to have a computer attitude. This is the mutation that we are suffering at the moment. We process data differently. What will come next? So I have given a brief history of the development of the imaginary.

What I want to explain is that, if I look at my shoes, which were made in the rational era, I see the vegetable, shoes as roots. I see the animal, shoes as leather, the material used to make them. And also I can glimpse where they take me, shoes as objects, and this is rational. Surrealist: I see that all of my childhood is there inside! And in the actual time period, shoes can be red, can be green, yellow; I can change their color, I can change their form; there are ten million shoes that I can have on my feet at the same time. I am free to leave my mental prison.

LEAVING OUR PRISONS

I begin this part of the course with the word “prison.” I hope this is a clue for you all. For me, this reflection has been very important. I live in reality. Here’s the story: I have been born in a limited body; I feel impotent. All of us have four elements: the intellect, the emotional, the sexual, and the physical body. We live in ideas, emotions, desires, and needs. These four elements are represented in Tibetan, Indian, and Hindu mandalas, in the World tarot card, and so forth. It is a division into four parts, with a fifth element in the center. This is the true path through all of the history of the art of humanity. In each of the four parts, we have dragons as guardians. Each tower is firmly protected. We recall the image of the lions that guard the door of the temple, or the gargoyles of Notre Dame. We have within ourselves some excellent guardians, which keep us restricted and well shielded. My intellect is locked, guarded; my emotions, shuttered; my sexuality and my needs, watched over. Everything is protected, and these very jailers that we have created are precisely what prevent us from being creative. For this reason, what I am saying is a little revolutionary, because to be creative one must defeat the guards and throw open the doors, even though one neither sees them nor identifies them. They are like the bad witch who had to be defeated in the stories of Hades; they are the ogres, the fear. . They are our babysitters. We have been shaped by the history of humanity, by the development of the planet, by society, by government, by the family. All of this lives inside us. Our guards are prehistoric. Little by little, they have become strong; they have been pigeonholed. We need to attack these guards in order to liberate ourselves. The problem is that attacking them makes us feel threatened, unprotected — it’s scary.

The final limitation to vanquish in order to be creative is our human waste. We are a body that expels decomposing matter. Urine, saliva, sperm, menses. . We are talking only about the body. A person who deeply guards his excretions cannot be creative. In Ayurvedic medicine there is a school that uses urine for medicinal purposes. In Mexico, I found a healer who treats with all types of animal excrement, and according to him each animal’s excrement has its own different medicinal capacity.

When creative people sometimes get blocked, I use Psychomagic and have them paint a square with their excrement. This block usually has its origin in infancy, in families that were very demanding about cleanliness and who prohibit their children from getting dirty or eating with their fingers. They’ve been prohibited from being free.

BE CREATIVE

If you want to be creative, you must practice the following exercise: stand over an absorbent surface, drink a liter or two of water, and then urinate making designs with the traces the water leaves. It is very important to remember that in order to be creative, we must allow the dirty child to exist within ourselves. In excretion, there cannot be limits. I became very good friends with the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who had been Max Ernst’s partner. I met her in Mexico. She told me that she had also been Buñuel’s lover but that he had suddenly abandoned her. So one day when she had her period, she used the blood to make handprints all over his apartment. It was her creative reaction, a psychomagic act in which she used the menstrual blood as an element of transformation. I have prescribed a lot of psychomagic acts like this one. In the magic of love, menstrual blood is very useful. Excretions, in general, are used in all kinds of spells. Magic functions, a lot of times, with excretions: the dribbles of toads, snakes, spiders. . All that we consider personal, like excretion, is used creatively.

If you want to be prolific, you cannot have any sexual limits, like what happened with the first great pioneer in this, the Marquis de Sade. This is why surrealism adopted him: because he could imagine all sorts of sexual relations. In his 120 Days of Sodom, Sade proves to be like a scientist investigating all the possibilities of sex without limits. You can go from cannibalism to sadistic crime, to incest — try anything. To be able to wake up the creativity, you must have a sexual imagination free of all morality, free of all religious imagery. You must free yourself. An artist needs to be able to imagine the greatest aberrations. We need to develop all the possibilities in our minds.

When someone has an imagination that is out of balance, he can assassinate a million Jewish people, like what happened with Hitler, or make an atomic bomb explode. In these cases, people are controlled by the dark side that lives inside us.

One of the most insurmountable guards that keeps watch over us is the superego. Having been molded by our parents, it permanently tells us: “This you do, this you do not do, this or that is prohibited.” You must incorporate the superego, dominate it, and destroy it.

A creative being cannot have any emotional limits. This means that we have to be conscious of the fact that we can kill or betray, be greedy, conceited, avaricious, or quick-tempered. . Emotionally I can and should imagine everything in me. I can be a saint, or I can be perhaps the best benefactor of humanity, while at the same time I can be the kind of person who poisons the water supply to eliminate life. In my emotional imagery, I must break all the limitations, defeat them.

We have now seen aspects that refer to creativity and to the mind. The first thing I must defeat is the empire of words. If I am drowning in words, I cannot be creative. This is what I have done internally: I have visualized all of the degeneracy of the world. I am not a degenerate, but when I am creating something, I must have all the elements at my disposal. When I see a person, I eliminate any limitations. That way, the person can tell me what is wrong, and it is not going to surprise me. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in therapeutic creativity is surprise. A therapist cannot be surprised; she must be prepared to hear anything. Nothing will ever surprise her because she has imagined everything. Now, wonderment is something very distinct from surprise.

I have said that words are the first limiting factor — the most essential — in creating our prisons. It is generally true in our society that “I am what I say.” This idea still persists, in spite of the fact that Freud, Lacan, and others, following surrealism, smashed the idea that one is what one says. Yet we tell ourselves things all day long. “Dimwitted” friendships involve meeting up to tell things, not do things. We tell ourselves things clucking like chickens. We educate ourselves by talking, not by doing things. This is the reason for the saying, “There is a lot of distance between talking and doing.” We spend our lives saying, “But you told me” or “Take back what you said, immediately.” It is very childish; it is the childishness of verbal education, where only words mean anything. And attempting to be creative in this state is useless. A world where there are only words is one where there is no creativity. Words become hysterical when the objective is the words themselves. Creativity grows outside of words. When the poet works essentially with words, then they explode. They are scattered and broken.

EXERCISES FOR THE IMAGINATION

We’ve just completed a short, more or less theoretical, introduction to the imagination. But, what do we do with all this material? Are we able to disabuse ourselves of these old ideas? This is the basis of our work.

The first thing to do to be creative is the following: We live within spatial limitations. The intellect is compressed by the skull, and when your eyes are closed, it’s dark. To close the eyes is to be in a prison. Each time I close my eyes, I enter into a dungeon. This impression of space comes from the concept of private property. Society has created private property, the right to a particular space that pertains to me and to no one else. We are accustomed to not occupying too much space, to being narrow-minded. In our families, we’re each assigned a particular place at the table. In school, I have my own bench; I cannot leave my place. This is what they teach us.

“Who are you to tell me this?”: people who express themselves this way do it because they do not have their own space. They think that we are nothing. We must then, apparently, be in an absurd space. We are not big. Beginning this exercise, we are not yet big. What we have to do is tell ourselves: “This blackness that I see is the blackness of the universe, so that each time I close my eyes, I enter cosmic space.” We must give up this idea! We must create the space! I felt limited, mentally, and I said to myself, “How can I be more intelligent or more perceptive?” Then I closed my eyes, and I imagined myself as a light, and I put the light as far as possible into this infinite universe where I could not reach. I began with a rectangular universe. That is to say, I projected myself forward. I advanced and advanced. Each time further, lost in the space. Then I went to the right, each time further, reaching infinity. And to the left, each time further, to no one knows where. And then backwards, into remoteness. I put myself in a universe that had an in front of and a behind, a right and a left. And then I went up, each time higher, as high as possible, and then down, each time deeper down, into the deep abyss. This says that forward space is infinite, backward space is infinite, space to the right is infinite, space to the left is infinite, the space above is infinite, and the space below is infinite. I like the infinite a lot. I do not have mental fear. And now do this exercise: uncross your legs, sit straight up, and guide yourself with a light or simply think of yourself going forward. You have to do it. Even if you do not feel capable of doing it, you must try to get there. We are going to close our eyes and begin again.

GROW

Another exercise: imagine that you are looking at me. Look at me. There is the rectangular look: to the right, to the left, up, down. But also there is another look. When I concentrate on the center of myself, little by little, I grow. My whole being grows like a sphere. To do this well, you have to be completely straight. You will see that this is the posture of meditation. I grow like a sphere. I cover the whole planet and then the whole universe. I grow; I fill the universe. I feel that I am a sphere that occupies the entire universe. This describes a guru. I receive you into my sphere. Do you want me to hug you? When I hug you, it is the whole universe that hugs you. I have occupied all possible space to the infinite. I can tell you that if you do this, you will become a master. Still, to be a complete master is much more than this.

Now the far-off comes to me: the right comes to me, the left comes to me, that from below comes to me, that from above comes to me. The sphere comes to me. Doing this exercise, I am I and each is his own. This summarizes all the oriental disciplines. I occupy the entire universe, and then the universe comes to me. That is everything. One does not have to meditate for twenty years. Start doing this exercise, practice until you get good at it. You must sit upright and think with all your might about what you have imagined, in order to recognize all this power in yourself. When I am like that, I am invincible. Nothing can knock me down. I am a Buddha of stone. Nothing can knock me down, because I have recognized infinite space inside me. And I have the possibility to go to infinity. You are going to go as far as possible, and then you will reclaim everything. You are going to become completely creative.

The being that I perceive is not exactly the being that I am, because I have a sense of myself. My parents told me that I was ugly; so I saw myself as they saw me. And at times I saw myself according to the looks of others. But I really do have a sense of myself. And the sense of my own self changes! When I am depressed, all my physical senses are distorted by the depression I have. But I can see myself in different ways. I am not obligated to see myself the same way all the time. I can change my perception of myself. That is what shamanic magic is.

EXPAND

Now let’s consider shamanism. What we just talked about proceeded from Buddhism. I grow like the entire universe, and then I gather inside myself. I am a mountain, but which mountain? What am I?

Now we are going to work with the senses. Imagine that you look at me. Look at me a little. I am big, without limits. I am in the space. Then all of this space is completely inside me. Great comprehension, great compassion. I am reality. All of this strength — because to create space is to create strength — enters into you. Like they say in Star Wars: “May the force be with you.” I am going to create strength; the strength is in me. And when the strength is inside someone, it is like a sword. It is possible to draw it out through the ten fingers. I concentrate on myself; my fingers project out into infinity. My fingers have indeterminate power. And I strengthen my heart. In this concentrated body, I have a heart that grows to infinity. Now I do not need to grow like a sphere. A part of me can grow. I gather into myself, and my heart fills the world. And now that I have a solid base, my heart returns to me. That way, my sexuality can fill the world, my mind can fill the world, my strength can fill the world. This means I can do with the feeling of my body whatever I want to. Understood? You can do whatever you want to.

This I have applied, for example, to an initial massage. If one can open a heart, why not open it with the hand? Thus I make the body concentrate, and then it begins to open. And people begin to cry. Because they were living in a limited space.

SHINE

As you see, feelings can change. The idea of living in a prison prevails. For exactly this reason, I can remove what I want to from myself; I can release all that is heavy. Anything that is not clear, I do not allow. Now protect a part of yourself. You must protect only a bit of your body and move away any depressing nits. When we feel like we cannot do anymore, we act like boxers: “I am not defeated!” Like a dog, I expel the fleas, I expel everything that slows me down; and I will do what I have to do, simply that. Because the guards bother us, we must expel them. And we continue. You must grow like a sphere, return to your state, and then, when you feel solid — because this state gives a feeling of great solidity — let it out through whatever part of your body. Without limits! Your torso, your heart, your intestines, whatever you want. Fortify what you want.

Now you are going to illuminate yourselves right away, you are going to feel yourself a Buddha; you are going to know what it is. This will serve you. You must not get depressed thinking that you are doing it wrong. You begin by doing it, and you do what you can. I take in one hand the strength, the energy, and I begin to accumulate all the energy of the universe. It is the complete universe coming to me. . The energy is going to arrive, and my energy is going to arrive. . That’s it! This is strength. It is letting yourself go. Once you do this exercise, you can accumulate strength in your hands and communicate it to whatever or whomever you want: to your work, to yourself. Imagine that you have it; imagine it here, create it here. Masculine, feminine, right, left, all collaborate together. Father, mother, the two hands. . Like a prayer! God help me! I am like this, praying, and when I am like this, the cosmic energy truly comes, it expands. I believe. I am the creator of my energy. Creativity exists in this.

At times there is a child inside us who has been punished. A child that is tormented because they have put him in a corner. They have annoyed him and put him on the defensive. This child rejects everything. And this child, who has been abused, abuses you, abuses the adult, abuses your strength, and does not let you be yourself. Enough already! We leave his whims aside. Right now we make him grow up. Let the young victim grow up, until it no longer bothers him. I leave myself, and I fill myself with strength. I am capable of filling myself with strength. All the energy we call space comes to me.

BE WEIGHTLESS

Another exercise: the noncreative person obeys the force of seriousness. We feel the seriousness inside us. The earth tells us all the time: “You are earth. You are going to end in me.” Every moment we’re feeling that we must fall. Everything points to our vanishing, we become depressed, and little by little, we fall. We cannot imagine that there is another force that can defeat the sorrow. It’s true. If I have a feeling of sorrow, I will feel heavy. But if I begin to expel the sorrow from me, if I remove all the weight from me, I will feel light. I can dominate this feeling. I am creative when I do what I want with it. I can feel very heavy, or I can be weightless! In the same way that my body is dark on the interior but can be full of clarity. This is to be illuminated. An illuminated being will feel that her body is weightless. It has just as much weight as she wants, and it has the light she wants: it is all controlled. I am no longer prisoner of anything, of any feeling. I can weigh millions of kilos or none. I control this feeling of darkness and of light. I control the feeling of hot and cold. This brings us to the yoga of the Himalayas, and you don’t have to go there or to be a yogi. You just have to do it. Remember Chinese kung fu, where the battles take place in the air? You can do this, feel that light. This also has to do with illumination. When we are illuminated, it means the shadows are gone. And when we go toward the light, it’s possible to come into a shadow. We are not prisoners of the light. We may arrive at lightness and then return to being heavy; we do not have to be prisoners of lightness either.

We work. Once this feeling is acquired, gather the force and fill the body with this force. You have power now. This is what the gurus do, with all kinds of conjuring tricks. Symbolically, it can be translated like this: “I can give energy incessantly.” Doing this gives infinite strength. The guru has worked with all of this and takes the imaginary side, which is unlimited. And people think he has produced a miracle, but each one of us can perform this miracle. It is simply working with the feeling we have of ourselves. Every minute I can change what I feel about myself. I can be big, I can be small. It is the feeling of myself that varies, that’s all. I can give and I can also take. Pick up the world’s energy and take it from yourself. All of this is the work of reaching infinity and returning.

THE GAME OF TIME AND SPACE

We are not limited by time. The Sufis say: “Before God, we must live as if we had one minute, before men as if we had a thousand years.” That is to say, one second is eternity, and what is important is to expand it.

In India there lives a woman who hugs everyone who comes to her, and these people receive an incredible illumination. This same thing can be achieved if you feel and you concentrate in space. Create the force, an infinite force. Strengthen your heart. Then let the infinite and the eternal enter you. I am the one who does the hugging, but there are millions and millions of beings in my spirit, millions of worlds, millions of activities in my arms. And all future time comes: I stand beside infinity, and I stand beside eternity. Being in the moment explodes our prison.

When you go in search of a guru, you are searching for what you yourself cannot do: you want someone else to do for you what you should do yourself, because you think you cannot do it alone. But the guru has not received this gift from the sky, he has made it himself, he has created it. He has worked to achieve it. You too can achieve it!

We cannot remain the little capricious child who says: “You have hurt me, you have hit me, for this I do nothing. I have nothing inside me, I am not creative.” ENOUGH! We let the child we have inside us grow up. This being is a millionaire being; I am a millionaire. Before me there was all this, and after me there is much more. Here are all the separated human beings. But I am able to perform a union. When I move, all human beings move. It is like a yoke that represents the feeling of space and of time. And it all moves — this is important. Instead of asking others to move me, I have to move me myself. This is I, this is time, this is space. It is a sacred yoke. I am united. This is what I call a point of traction. From this point, everything moves. I can consider myself a point of strength. What I do, everyone does. That is to say, it is important that I do so everyone can do. When we do this exercise, we do it in the middle of eternity, in the middle of the infinite; we are the point of traction of humanity. Of humanity past and humanity future. All of the dead follow us; all of the unborn follow us. All of this will seem very strange, but in reality it is Buddhist thought! It is what Buddha has felt, simply. Our brains are made like this. When you open your brain, in a natural way, you arrive at this.

These are not just words, they are exercises in creativity. We cannot be cowards or be afraid to truly enter into what human beings are. We are beings with all these capacities, but we’ve allowed ourselves to be limited. We are in this moment, here and now. I. But it is not like this! It is the Everything that is here and now. All of humanity is within me. I am everyone who has been and everyone who will be. I live in the middle of all of space. This is when we can understand the symbolic gesture where the palm of the hand faces forward: “I am here, and I stop the world.” An artist should think like this and consider these problems in making her work.

BLESS THE WORLD

Another exercise: I am in eternity, feeling myself in the middle of the infinite future and the infinite past. I open my hands and close my hands. I make a benediction. That is to say, I am in eternity, and I bless the world. This is all. You have to do it like this, because a creator is absolutely paranoid. God is created. And we don’t have to be afraid of taking ourselves for gods or goddesses. I bless you: I have a lot to give. I am strong. I possess everything that I need in order to bless the world. Enough with the inferiority complexes! With all of this you already have the means that the founders of sects usually deploy. They brainwash you so that you admire in them a superior power that you don’t imagine you have in yourself, but you can have it also. Just clean out all the darkness, because we are full of spider webs. Push that child inside, get him good and clean, make him grow up. Because we have a guard, the mind, that makes us react the same way all the time. But by doing this exercise, you are converted into a creator. No one can do anything to you, except kill you, and not even that, because there is eternal life. That is to say, you are invincible. And everything that exists you can have. If talent exists, I can have talent. Look now how I lift my hands to the infinite; they are going to infinity: I take life. In the same way that I can give energy, I can take it. All of creativity, I can have. All the money in the world, I can have. Everything another has. Beauty? I can have beauty. Energy? I can have energy. All of this is for me. I can take and I can give. It is easy to imagine. It is like a game.

But to take is also difficult, because we have limits on receiving. When they ask us, “Who are you to have this?” “Why you?” This is what my parents said when I left Chile to study with the mime Marcel Marceau. In my case the answer was: “Why not?” And I did it. I knocked on his door, and I worked with him. I challenged the prohibition. And that’s it. If you feel beautiful, you will be. You will be beautiful! You will be fascinating! You can fascinate people! But you don’t conceive of yourself as a fascinating being. You come here to learn to be fascinating, because you can be. People simply see you as you see yourself. If I consider myself inferior, others will see me as inferior. But if I see myself as a god or goddess — that is the way others will see me! Not everyone, but a lot of people, the necessary ones. For example, we observe famous musicians. The whole world believes they are geniuses because they have previously felt they were geniuses. Then, with time, the myth stops because others start to realize it isn’t so. It can work for a certain period of time, but then we must have the spirit to sustain this, “to feel beautiful.” If this interior feeling ceases and we haven’t truly incorporated it, everything undoes itself. Therefore, we must continue with patience, constancy, and perseverance. If we do not persevere, we are not creators. Creation is, before everything else, voluntary. Our creative action is an accumulation of strength and patience.

DISSOLVE THE I

We have already created the space. The space is the here; the time is the now. In the here and in the now am I. What remains is to attack the I. We have seen the prisons of time and space in which we live, prisoners of the I. And here is the most difficult part: to make the I jump. This is the most difficult of all. Because we identify so much with this I that we defend and because we anchor onto it, we do not want to change. We are stubborn, we are recalcitrant, we are impossible, we are a monster. Purely and simply, we are a monster that we do not want to let go of. We say: “This is the way I am.”

The Romans and the Greeks said that the I was in the stomach; from there ideas are born, and they then take refuge in the brain. Other civilizations have put the I in the chest or in the nose. The I is hard to find. We entered into the work of shamans: the dissolution of the I. Actually, we see ourselves morphing, to use the terms of modern digital technology; we can animate ourselves and turn one image into another. That is to say, we must work to accept all the different changes in I, which is very difficult. Actors do this when they interpret a character, but they do not go very far because the actor is always the I and the character he interprets. But here we wish to enrich the I. And it is very easy. But no one can tell you how. If I open myself to the personality of everything, everything will talk through me. I convert myself into you; I convert myself into another. But how? In what way? I let you enter me and I express you. In this moment, I convert myself absolutely into the creator, because everything talks through me.

I am going to give an example. There is Cristóbal, my son, sitting in a wooden chair. I convert myself into him: “I am here sitting like a receptor of light, knowing that in infinite time, eternally before me, I am going to shine; that the light is going to show; that I am connected with everything.” Creativity consists in absorbing the other and expressing it — and not only in another, also in things. I convert myself into a chair: “I am happy because I like having someone seated on me. I play my role by being straight, and I am not weary; thanks to me he is here. Furthermore, my wood is not dead. There is not even one termite in me. I’ve preserved myself well. I maintain my strength, even though I am old. I am going to last a long time. Maybe I am going to last longer than him. He will disappear and I will still be here. There is no need to throw me out. I will support him. With my four legs, I am the material base upon which he can sit.”

When I began to study pantomime, the first thing they taught us was that to make gestures there is no need to make gestures. The principal of pantomime is to remain neutral. Later they will make all the gestures they want. At the same time, the basis of the imagination is to not have an imagination; it is to arrive at breaking everything imaginary. Then you can do what you want. If you do not crush the imaginary, there will always be parasites. Things are always moving in our imaginary worlds. We must cut off the internal dialogue and bring order to the emotional chaos, the invasion of desires, the undisciplined body. We must learn to dominate all of this.

BE A DOT

You can do a very simple exercise: the simplest thing we can think about is a dot. Correct? Suppose we have a pencil or a pen, and we are going to draw a dot. We have to truly create a dot with all of our spirit, with all of our emotion, as if we are opening a dot in space. We make a dot. If it is possible to create the dot, we will do many things with it later. But we must truly concentrate on creating a dot. It is the first thing one does in karate. Karateists are capable of creating a dot, a point of mental and emotional concentration. We create an intense dot, as if this dot were all the energy of the universe: a dot of total energy. Everything should be there. We must use a lot of force to create a dot. We must do it with our whole being. All concentration is on the dot, a dot, a dot. . That is all! Well, can we make a good dot, a perfect dot, a concentrated dot? Bravo, it is a good effort. Now, we observe. I have a dot here in my forehead. My whole mind is a dot. I am concentrated on only one dot. I have an emotional dot, I have a dot here in my chest, and in my privates, all over. I can move the dot. I can put it in my mouth, here, there, in my eyes. . My will is a dot! That is all! Do this exercise. Work with the dot. Concentrate on the energy of the dot. Introduce the dot into your bodies. It is like the exercise with space. Here all directions are concentrated at a point, the dot. All thoughts, all feelings, all desires. Once we’ve learned to make a dot, we can carry out any movement we want to. Whatever discipline we want to practice — dance, theater, karate, martial arts — everything is in place. Because it is no more than this: I make a gesture, and my intention goes there. I do what I do. Everything is concentrated, all my attention goes there, all my concentration is clear, precise. At heart, karate consists of creating a concrete point where one can hit, and that way one can break a table. But to develop the point takes years.

FINE ARTS

Now we are going to sing, but in an imaginary way, without the voice. We will sing the most marvelous song. Sing the most beautiful song without sound! Imagine that you sing with a marvelous voice. Let’s go. This is creativity. You have to sing like birds. That’s how one learns. With concentration, with strength — do it! We’re not just acting here. . You can move, advance; don’t be quiet. Sing! Put all the intensity of a great singer into it. Put all your talent into singing. You like it, right? It’s wonderful. You can sing all you want in the most complete silence, with the mouth closed.

Okay, we’ve sung. Now we are going to create. Do what you can; I cannot give you what you do not do. As you sing, do it from deep within, with feeling, and everyone will do well, because you sing for the unconscious. Your unconscious is going to consider you singers if you sing like you know how to sing. The message goes to your unconscious, and it will be satisfied. You already know how to sing. Do you understand? Now, in my imagination, I can play the piano. You can use other instruments, but they are more difficult. We begin with the piano, using two hands, and then you can move to whatever instrument you want. Relax, play the invisible piano passionately and try to imagine that you are performing. Whatever you want, but play the piano. This exercise is wonderful. And when you tire of the piano, move to another instrument. And you will become your best. Go to the sublime with the music!

(An aside: Until now it was a child’s game. Children play like that. But now it is going to be your profession. Now, be the best that you can be! Not like a diversion. When you play, feel only the best of your soul, so that the best of your self does the playing. Give the music a limitless spirituality. Play that. I ask you for the best spiritual beauty, the sublime. You are the most beautiful. You can seduce all of humanity with your music. It’s no good to underestimate yourself; to the contrary, you must value yourself. This happens on its own. Begin, and then this happens. The concert could last all day. It’s best to do these exercises until you master them. Little by little, with practice, they begin to awaken your creative capacities, until you achieve the sublime.)

HAVE TALENT

Now I am going to propose a very simple exercise that will stimulate your talent. You do not have talent? Well, you’re going to have it right away. There is no need to doubt yourself. I have talent when I have power. And I have power when I have the right to life or death over others. From this moment on, I have power. God is all-powerful, because he can kill when he wants to. And because he can create me when he wants to. And if I am alive, it is because he pardoned me. Then the capacity to kill, to pardon, is going to create the talent. It is simple. I imagine that I am a cobra, that I have venom and that in front of me there is a monkey. I am in front of the monkey, concentrating, completely engrossed. I move, I look at it, I hypnotize it, and the monkey does what I want. It is an attitude of talent. I tell you the truth. I cause you to look at me. I cause you to be here. I have created you. There is no need for you to convert yourself into a cobra. Instead of always being a victim, the little rat that is always hypnotized, we pass to the other side. We are those who hypnotize others, okay? For this, we need to relax. Create a dot; make it rise. Then we balance ourselves because we are ready to jump, but we do not jump. We make like we are going to jump, but we do not jump. This is how we hypnotize the monkey. We do not bite it either. We only hypnotize it. You have to develop this capacity of the hypnotizing look. It is not to seduce; it is very different from seduction. With my mental concentration, I have the other in my power. Work this. This is talent. We are not attending a meeting of cobras, but a brotherhood of the wise who are like cobras, who respect one another because they know their knowledge is mortal.

Now try to go beyond your head to expel the force. Try to exceed the interior of your head: imagine that your eyes are thirty centimeters higher than the cranium and, feeling that you are a cobra, think about what we have below the belly button, two or three fingers lower, a point of concentration and that there is a force that exits from there toward the exterior, a force that can enter into others. In the belly. This is the Emperor tarot card. It is seated like that, and the force is there.

DRAW

Now we will do an applied creativity exercise. Now that you have all the mental tools necessary — concentration, strength, all that we have studied in this course — you are going to imagine that you have a canvas of any size that you like. You have a paintbrush that changes colors according to your desire. And you are going to make a painting, an imaginary painting. You can draw, you can make large marks, you can change the colors — whatever you like. Then, seated in groups and making gestures, describe the painting you have painted. Okay? Begin! While you paint, you can put on imaginary music to guide you. If you want to be creative, create! And if someone has creative potential, may he continue, go along until something appears. To your unconscious, it is as if you have made a painting, you know? To the unconscious, what one has done in the imagination is the same as what is carried out in reality. In the nervous system, when one imagines something, the same connections are activated. What happens is that normal people do not propose to do such things, because they do not believe it. Really, if you want to be creative, you need to just do it. If I paint ten or twenty paintings like this, imaginary ones, then I will be able to do a real painting; I will be mentally prepared to paint. You see?

SCULPT

And now, to finish with this series of exercises, make a sculpture. In space, the sculpture becomes. You can use whatever material: marble, gold, bronze, whatever you want. And create a figure, or if you want to go further, you can turn it into an abstract. Think about what sculpture you want to make. Be sculptors. We are going to be able to manipulate space creatively. It is important, because if you do not do this, you will have an undeveloped dimension. It is necessary to move around the object. Sculpture makes us abandon the fixed glance; it lets us develop our spirit as it spins around the created object. Once finished, we will describe it, because the commentaries are also important. Before starting to sculpt, really think about the material you are going to choose, it should be a material that you like. You can also color it. .

FASHION DESIGN

In this exercise, we will create clothes. You can make a suit individually or else in a group. If you do it in a group, each one should make three pieces for the others. Take a good look at the other person and observe what clothing could call attention to him. It is not a criticism. Be daring and infuse the shape with strength, like in a carnival. Create imaginary suits. And you will see that, just as you can paint and sculpt or play music, you can create fashion. Daring to do it is all it takes. If after this exercise, they put you in charge of a fashion show, you can do it! It has to do with seeing how the other is. You can change the clothes, change the appearance; you can fill, take away; you are the owner of the other’s look. You are his owner. We begin.

THE RAINBOW

We are going to become more creative with a fundamental exercise. What I am going to do is count from nine to zero to concentrate your attention. You must pay attention, really listen. The best way to concentrate, the most simple, is to imagine the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. As I am counting, I first submerge myself in the red; then I see the red converting itself into orange, the orange converts itself into yellow, the yellow turns into green, the green turns into blue, then dark blue, then violet. The purpose of this is to occupy the mind and to not think with words. Feel the arrival of each color. Nine. . eight. . each time more concentrated. Seven. . more concentrated. Six. . deeper, deeper. Five. . deeper, deeper. Four. . deeper. . Three. . deeper, the listening, the concentration, the receptivity. Two. . deeper. . Now we are going to use the unconscious. . one. . we are going to use the unconscious. .

YOUR SPACE

In your interior you have space, the territory that you love. There is a territory that is yours. It can be at the foot of the mountain, in the country, by the ocean; it can be fertile ground, sand; whatever you want. Let your terrain arrive; imagine the ideal place for you. Do you see it? What is there? Is there shade? What does it smell like? Are there little insects? Other animals? Whatever there is, let it arrive. And in your territory, be happy, happy: because finally you have a territory the size you want. Small, large, each one has his own. It is crucial that the unconscious give you your plot. The land that belongs to you. The slice of the planet that is yours. The landscape in which you live. Do not choose the landscape of others. Do not choose that of your parents. Choose yours alone. Take the joy of your plot and observe how the house emerges, the interior that is yours. It is your ideal house, where you want to live and develop yourself, accompanied or not, all your life. What is the house you want? What size? Made from what? What is it like? Think about what your ideal space is. Without limits. When you’re able to conceive this ideal house, walk around it, take a good look at it, go inside it and create everything: bathrooms, beds, the kitchen, the cups, the spoons — you are going to create all the objects in your ideal house and in all its rooms. Go for a walk and create your house once and for all! So you truly know what you want, without limits! There are no limits on money, there is not one prohibition, you do not have to be small or mediocre. Choose in your creativity what you really want, so that later you can carry it out in real life. Take your time. . Think about what activities you wish to do in your house. . the materials. . you are the Great Architect. Your own architect. Your own creator. . Take all the time you need, because it is fundamental for you to know your territory. Your house is your ego, it is your true I. Think also about how you are going to be dressed in your house. What clothing corresponds to you? How do you want to present yourself? In the kitchen, dream up everything you wish to eat. What is your ideal nourishment? And concentrate on the ideal company. With whom do you desire to be? If you want to be with anyone at all. There can be a reading room, a movie theater, music, books, animals — all that you desire. Without limits. Imagine your bed in this ideal house.

And this part of the exercise is also fundamental, essential, so do it well. You are in the bed, lying down, but your life has ended. You are dead. And from your corpse your new being comes out and is reborn. How do you want to be reborn? You are lying down, a being, a body that has stopped, and you get up with a new body. With what physique? What gender? What age? What would be your ideal I? Imagine yourself as an ideal I. The I that we have is not our ideal I. We have an ideal, although it is still far away. Give yourself permission to imagine it. All these exercises are designed to eliminate the lack of confidence, to enrich yourself. If you have a plot, if you have a house, if you have an ideal being, you have enriched yourself.

Now criticize yourself the way a person in your family would. Your mother, your father, your brother. Talk with their voice. Put yourself in the position of someone who opposes you. Because if until now you had not imagined any of this, it is because inside you there are forces working against what you imagine. What are these forces? Embody them. For example, talk as your mother would talk. Or your father. And criticize. All of the new medicine talks of territory, saying that a loss of territory creates illnesses. Because the brain, they say, acts like an animal that needs its territory. Even though I do not believe that this is absolute. Therefore, when we know what territory corresponds to us, we take a big step toward creativity. And the house is the development of our individual I. And if I invent the house that I want for me, I allow myself to exist as myself. Outside of parents. For this reason, to talk with your parents or create a new body is a move of creative freedom that you make. Creativity comes from an interior freedom, from an internal appreciation. I know that I have all of this in my interior, so I can put myself into action. The imagination works on very simple principles.

FREE YOURSELF FROM LANGUAGE

This will be a quick exercise in liberation from language. We are accustomed to always talking like normal beings. We are afraid of madness. However, the rivers that fall from the rooftops covered with doves will forever be white and dark, open to the tunnel of all delight. . Did you understand? No? Yes? This is how you should speak; you should allow yourself to talk in a completely outrageous language to try to explain a feeling. You must create a conversation, communicate with a language that is verbal, that is not conceptual. Ready? You can raise whatever Samson you want, preventing Delilah from cutting his hair and, atop the table, declare three or four stories that will be deliciously sweetened. Okay? And what you have done with words, you can do to invent words, like this: Fai faias naracola ke. Costrigunsun tostecki batcherome quelarranamanda droi pretcho apandep ketackka kieugal pathcu! Reabutchis Kara miop. This is liberating. You can do it. Free yourself from the language. When you start doing this, you are going to like it. In the beginning you are going to feel cut off, because the largest prison is the articulate language, the logical language. It is a surrealist exercise. But it breaks the normal language to allow creative freedom. Maybe some things that come out will be in bad taste, but it doesn’t matter. Idiotic things, childish things. But beautiful things will also come out, suddenly. Try to do it, and then we will get into techniques for the imagination.

TECHNIQUES FOR THE IMAGINATION

The imagination operates on very simple principles. Some creators have used it to exhaustion. The basis of the imagination has four elements, which are like mathematical elements: addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. These are the four elements of the imagination. First, there is addition and subtraction. Then division, next multiplication. And then, a mixture. And with these five things, you have the imaginations of crazy people. It is very simple. Using subtraction, you must take away from everything, in the imaginary, until everything becomes small. For example, one day you see someone pass by with a package, and in this package he carries his entire birthplace. You have an enormous imagination, because you have taken away from everything. You can miniaturize everything. In my left pocket, I can carry my mother; in my right pocket, I have my father. I make them talk, and then I look at them. This happened in the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, so re-create this game.

One subtracts, subtracts — and one has to fight with the spiders. These are, to me, easy elements for the imagination. And they are very useful! But we also have the giants: this could be addition. You can enlarge a pumpkin. The typical example could be the pumpkin that grows and grows and reaches the size of the planet, converting itself into a planet. And then it is so big it occupies the galaxy. Inside the pumpkin, there is all of history; all of humanity is born. Anything can be enlarged this way. It is simple. Make whatever you want grow, make art. In architecture, you take three boxes of cherries; you raise them to make a building. This is how architects work. This is addition.

The imagination can increase or reduce. The Japanese imagination has created the small dwarf trees, or bonsai; the Jivaros shrink heads; the atomic bomb is an expansion of a small bomb; and cinema makes, for example, a monkey grow into King Kong or Godzilla. In my case, I have a comic strip called Megalex, about a city that occupies the whole planet, although I was not the first to do this.

Also the expansion of force is possible (Superman). All of the superheroes increase themselves in some way: for example, Flash Gordon is the fastest. A character who crosses over everything just with a look, or he who hears everything: this happens in fairy tales, too. Or the person who has the loudest voice and makes the buildings fall. There is the man who can sleep with three hundred women in a night, and so forth.

Imagine this: A horse passes in the street, and you think that there is an invasion, that horses are everywhere, that they are multiplying, that it is an epidemic. Now there are so many horses that we have to flee, because we are invaded. And at this point we can add another element: mixture. The horses convert themselves into carnivores, and it is necessary to escape because they are devouring the humans. This is the imagination. That is to say, the imagination has used the mixture. (But we were still talking about addition and subtraction.)

A person becomes very weak, very weak, so much so that it is necessary to tie her up with thread, like a marionette: she is the president, and she has to make a speech like that. Another example: a person loses power and her bones turn into liquid, like water. We can imagine it.

There is a story in which a young woman has such long hair that her lover can climb up her braids. This could be addition to a gentlewoman. Expand. Reduce.

(Many of Ionesco’s works are very simple. In one of them there is a woman who serves a cup of tea, and then another, and another — thousands of cups of tea. In another, there are mushrooms that grow — until the entire house is full of them. In another, a dead body grows and grows and occupies the whole stage. And in The Chairs, there is a chair, then another chair — until the entire stage is full of chairs. This is to say, the author does not have to have much imagination, because he simply uses the make-things-grow trick. In all of his works, there is something that he multiplies. This becomes the norm!)

Another element of the imagination is where something begins to decrease. Fuel is scarce, water is scarce. Dune is a planet where there is no water. Here is an entire work about a planet that does not have water. An element has been split. And in splitting an element of nature, you make an imaginary world. I am showing you the processes of the imagination, formulas that you can apply anytime to your world and be able to create. Expand, reduce. You can do it.

A telephone call, ten telephone calls, all over the planet the telephones begin to ring, the buildings fall, and there is a catastrophe. Through multiplication. By magnification. Then, division steps in: There is a hand that walks alone, it jumps on your neck and strangles you. And it escapes as if it were a spider. This is division. You are walking on the street, and you see two legs that walk without a body. In a study by Jung of the stories of Native Americans, he talks about a hero who wanted to make love to the chief ’s daughter. So, he sent his phallus through the water and the phallus alone made love to the girl, leaving her pregnant. In this way, he managed to marry her.

Multiplication. Some Hindu goddesses have multiple arms. And each hand has an eye. Multiplication of the arms. Ganesh has four arms. There is also a Greek god with three heads. In the Odyssey, the cyclops has only one eye, on the forehead. That is reduction. In the case of the third eye, there is one eye more. That would be multiplication.

And then, with these four elements, one produces a mixture: the Egyptian sphinx. It has a human head, a lion’s body, an eagle’s wings, a cow’s tail. It is a monster. There are a number of examples in the paintings of El Bosco (Hieronymus Bosch), who often mixed elements. A centaur is a mixture of man and animal. You take an element of one and an element of another and join them. That is how monsters are created. An angel is a mixture of a human being and a bird with wings.

For a long time, I have been developing such mixtures. I imagined, for example, integrating the head of an elephant with a body that is a cloud, with four staircases for legs. This ability to mix elements presents interesting artistic possibilities, and the imagination uses them. These are techniques that we have at our disposal. Notice how we are always witnessing applications of this technique, in art, in publicity. If you master this technique, you can work in any advertising agency.

And there is another form of imagination, which is imaginary time. Time travel. On this trip, I can go into the past. But the problem is that, if I modify the past, I modify the “present” point from which I departed. This is called temporal paradox, and it has been developed extensively in science fiction. It is one of the great themes. If I go into the past and kill my mother, then I would not have been born, because she could not have had me. Time travel is a main theme in many films, popular films, like the Back to the Future series. In these, the imagination plays with time. But this has a very strong oedipal foundation, because if I go into the past, I can seduce my mother and make her my girlfriend, and in this case I could father myself with my mother. Or I can seduce my father in the past. This is one purpose of time travel imagery. Interfering with the past signifies interfering with our parents.

Then there is eschatology, which is the imagined end of the world. In what shape does the world end: fire, water, epidemic, or ascending into another dimension? There is a large part of the imaginary that has to do with the end of the world. This I am not recommending to you, although I do it intensely: I imagine various ways to die. I have imagined myself dying in a drowning suicide, being thrown from a building, being cut in two. I have projected myself a lot in suicides, in death, to free myself a bit from myself. I repeat to you that I do not recommend this to you. If you are distressed, do not do it. It is hard. Above all, imagine the death of loved ones. It is hard, because the possibility of a loved one disappearing always exists, and also we fear the possibility of our ceasing to exist.

To eliminate this, I have imagined a lot. I have turned myself into nothing: that is what happens when one enters darkness. I have made myself imagine the blackness, deep blackness that dissolves my I into emptiness. And then, the emergence toward existence and light.

THERAPEUTIC APPLICATIONS

We are going to work with feelings. Think about how you feel. What feeling do you have of yourself? Well, we live with feelings that sometimes are a little distressing. That is why I am going to show you how to work with feelings of distress. Does anyone here have a feeling?

“I feel as if I had a wall in my chest.” Listen hard, this is imagination. What is this wall like: made of stone, metal, cement? Concentrate, try to tell me what it’s like. Red bricks? Imagine that there are bricks at your disposal. It is a material that is yours; you can do what you want with this material. In the first place, it defends you: a wall can defend. Against what do you need to be defended? Look for the feeling. No need to think; just feel the feeling. This wall is completely useful. Now meditate on the red bricks. They are pretty. Think that they are pretty. Instill beauty into the bricks. Each time put more beauty into the wall, okay? It is yours; it pertains to you. You can do what you want with it. Build with it whatever you want. Make a walled-off place. But imagine it completely. Imagine what this place is like, with those bricks. See it as a friendly place. You can go inside. There, you have created a door. I have a solution: there is no need to eliminate the wall, only to open the door. And now, imagine the wall inside you, with a little door by which you can exit and enter. It is a part of you that preserves your individuality. This wall preserves your individuality because, for the moment, it is still weak. Okay? Now fortify your individuality. The red bricks are going to give you strength. If you make yourself strong, you will lose your fear. No one will be able to invade you. Do you understand? You must take the imaginary and incorporate it, work with the feeling. Because feelings that present themselves to us are like symbols, we can work directly with them.

A person told me that he feels that he has excrement in his heart, and I answered that the excrement is fertilizer, that he should think of adding earth to it and that anything can grow there. If the person can make something grow there, then the feeling changes.

“I feel like I have something on my shoulders, something that is crushing me.” Okay, someone feels like something is crushing her. Let it come. Do not defend yourself, okay? Change the feeling. Think that this comes from the interior and goes toward the exterior. Modify yourself. This emerges from your interior. Do you know what it is? Growing wings. So, let them grow. Push them! Push the wings that are going to allow you to go where you want to go. Create your wings and move your wings. Go where you like. Toward the earth, toward your territory, toward yourself, toward your fulfillment. This is how feeling works.

“I feel like there’s a ball of lead in my solar plexus.” Wonderful. Imagine that your body is an oven, an alchemist’s cauldron. Imagine: in another incarnation you are an alchemist. The ball of lead is the first material that is going to change you into gold. So, let this fall so it gets to the fire in the belly. The belly is the seat of the Great Work. Work, let the ball descend, instead of defending yourself, let it heat the fire of your sexuality, okay? Little by little, go about making it rise toward where it was, and as it is rising make it change colors, until it changes to golden, and gets to the center of your chest. And then, let it shine — project its rays to all sides. Make it rise. And this way you make gold. What will you do with the gold? Currency, money. It is the acceptance of money in your heart. The negation of money turns into a knot. Do you have problems with money? Yes? Well, now you are going to have to make your money. If, upon making this ball rise, that weight, you feel too materialistic, convert the money into love. Love is the only creativity that gives you this kind of currency. Through the use of creativity, the feeling of distress will go.

“I have an itch in my head, thorns that plunge into me.” We are not going to ask what the thorns are. Simply accept the feeling, but without asking yourself why or what it means, because it can be the critical thoughts that they threw at you when you were a child, things like that. You are going to think that this leaves your head, not that it enters into your head. But you still need to really work with this feeling. And what leaves from your head is going to change into roses, because roses have thorns. And when you imagine that you have roses coming out of your head, imagine that insects come to pollinate them. And with the pollen, you are going to pollinate other plants in the world. And then you can write poems; you can do what you want.

All of us have to stop with this game of “Look what you did to me” or “You don’t love me.” It is a lack of creativity. We should not delight ourselves in the feeling of not being loved. Precisely, if I have a feeling of not being loved, I must change this feeling and feel myself loved. And what can I do? Well, to begin with, stop asking. If I stop asking for love, I am in a position to give it. So we say: “You do not love me, but I adore you.” And instead of spending my life angering myself and annoying others and suffering, I will say “Enough,” and the problem ends. I love you. I am not going to live as a victim all of my life. No. I love you, and this stops. If you do not love me, it is your problem not mine. There is the cure. When we are creative, we are not centered on asking for something; on the contrary, we make it ourselves. We should put love there where there is not love, and we will find it. Because, if you use another like a mirror of your lack of capacity to love, it is because you have looked to someone who does not love you, and this is because you cannot love. You are incapable of loving, and your problem of not loving you deposit on another, you project it like a mirror. Love. And if you love, the other is going to love you, because you are going to project your love to him.

We begin by loving things: art, people, our work, everything. We dedicate ourselves to creating and to loving. Because the other attitude drove me to do nothing, to being foiled at every turn. Creativity, on the other hand, drives you toward what you do, what you should do. And what you do, you project. And if you project it, you receive it back. Everything you give to the world, the world gives to you. Everything you do not give to the world, the world does not give to you. You need to free yourself, using creativity, from the appeal. Instead of saying “I want to have talent,” we should say, “I have talent!” Why would I want to have talent, if I have it? I want to have success. But if I have success, everything I want, I have. So, I stop asking, and I start doing my work. That is it! If I want to play music, I play it. If I want to sing, I sing. If I want to write, I write. If I want to gain money, I gain it. Period.

Because at our side are always the barriers that prevent us from fulfilling ourselves. Father, mother, true? It is this damn mind-set that has said to us: be a victim, live like a victim, and make yourself a victim. Pester another. But this is already the subject of another less accelerated course.