The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The gentleman answered me amiably.

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

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

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

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

  A statue of the Black Virgin, an idol of the Roma people, is preserved in a small church in the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue region of France. Once a year during the summer thousands of Roma, coming from all corners of Europe, gather there to pay homage. The saint is paraded, sung to, and prayed to in an impressive public ceremony. After these celebrations, the nomadic people leave and the little church stands empty again. When I visited in the winter, the doors were unlocked. No priest was guarding the place. I approached the Black Virgin, who despite her great importance appeared abandoned. Impressed by her legend, I knelt before her. My first impulse was to ask for something, as all others do. But I held back. I approached her and started to massage her back. One might say that this is a subjective projection—that a piece of carved wood cannot have feelings—but through my hands I perceived the effort this idol made to bear the weight of so many requests. I stroked her back as if she were my mother, filled with a painful tenderness that was gradually transmuted into joy. When I felt that she was restored I joined my hands, which despite the cold winter were full of warmth, and prayed, “Teach me to transmit consciousness through my hands.” Her sweet voice resonated in my mind, “Give life to the stone.” I did not understand the meaning of this sentence. I attributed it to a folly of my imagination . . .

  Months later, during the holiday period, I was invited to give seminars on the Tarot in the south of France. The architect Anti Lovacs had a beautiful property on the slopes of the mountains in Tourrettes-sur-Loup with a sphere-shaped house in which I stayed for two months. On a long mountain road, from which one could see the valley extending to the coast, I found a rock that was almost oval in form and approximately six feet tall. Here was this mineral, simple, humble, anonymous, beautiful, a witness to the passage of millions of years. I understood the message I had received from the depths of my subconscious in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The Aztec solar calendar, with its symbolic system very similar to the Tarot, had placed its energy in my hands, entering through the intellectual portal. The Black Virgin, a powerful idol, had done the same, but had entered through the emotional portal. Now I had to face matter in its original state, without any human sculptors having intervened in its form. This was the body-to-body method. There was nothing significant about this stone other than itself. It was not part of a cathedral, a wailing wall, or the tomb of a demigod; it was itself, living with a rhythm infinitely slower than mine but also with a colossal capital of life. I remembered the five mottoes that appear on the engraving adorning the Rosarium philosophorum: Lapis noster habet spiritum, corpus et animam (Our stone has a spirit, a body, and a soul). And then Coquite . . . et quod quaeris invenies. The word coquite, being ambiguous—likely “sew”—I translated as “massage,” which gave me “Massage . . . and find what you seek.” Solve, coagula (Dissolve, coagulate) indicated to me that I should feel that I was dissolving the stone into its own consciousness, in order then to reintegrate it into its body again, this time as an illuminated material. Solvite corpora in aquas (Dissolve the bodies in water) told me that in the action of massaging the stone, I should dissolve both my body and the rock in an absolute communion, feeling the love of the mysterious alchemical elixir that dissolves everything, that transforms all things into unity. And finally: Wer unseren maysterlichen Steyn will bauwen / Der soll der naehren Anfang schauwen (He who wants to realize our perfect stone / should first contemplate the nearest beginning). In order to surpass the individual “I” it was necessary that I let myself be possessed by the impersonal “I,” the universal consciousness (the impersonal is closer to the truth than the personal), and thus, in a trance, reach the living heart of the stone. I decided to massage it for two hours every morning, from six to eight, before having breakfast with my students.

  The first day, in a morning mist that submerged us in an abstract space, I saw the rock as an immense egg, insensible to my presence. It seemed clear that whatever I did, no contact would ever be established between us. But I thought of the fable of the hunter who wants to shoot the moon. He tries for years. His arrows never reach it, but he becomes the best archer in the world . . . I realized that this was not a matter of making the stone a living thing, but of trying to do so. The alchemist must attempt the impossible. The truth is not at the end of the road, but is the sum of all the actions we perform to get there. I felt that I should be naked while performing the massage. Patiently, with water, soap, and a sponge, I washed the stone. Then, aided by lavender oil, I began to caress it. The sun had not yet shone its brightest rays. Although I never ceased fondling the stone, its surface remained cold, impenetrable . . . True to my decision, I continued my massages every morning. Slowly, I began to love it as one loves an animal. I learned to forget the idea of an exchange, to give with no hope of receiving. I learned to love the existence of this stone without preoccupying myself with the question of whether it was conscious of my existence. The more insensible its body was, the more profound my massages. I remembered the words of Antonio Porchia: “The stone that I take in my hands absorbs a bit of my blood, and palpitates.” Those two months passed by without my knowing it. On the last day, concentrating on massaging as always, I do not know why I raised my eyes but a black raven with a white spot on its chest was there, quietly perched on the rock. It locked eyes with me, squawked, and flew away.

  The workshops were coming to a close. A student confessed to having spied on me one morning, and requested a massage. I agreed. I asked her to undress, to lie on a table. I started to massage her without anything in mind. My hands moved by themselves. Accustomed to the apparent insensibility and hardness of the stone, they felt not only the skin and flesh but also the viscera and bones. This body appeared to me to be divided by horizontal barriers, and I dedicated myself to establishing vertical connections from head to toe. The next day, my student gathered up her savings and set off on a trip around the world.

  In the series of dreams in which the central character, the self, gives more importance to the realization of others than to its own realization, there was one dream that marked me deeply and that may have been the result of my experience massaging the rock:

  I am sitting, meditating before the gates of a temple. I know that they w
ill not let me into the temple because I am carrying a huge bag with me, seemingly full of garbage. I believe that this bag is part of me and that therefore I have the right to attend the ceremonies that are performed inside the temple accompanied by my burden. A group of men and women approach, each one sadly carrying a bag similar to mine. I rise, full of joy, and say, “If you have to see it to believe it, then take a look!” I open my bag and empty it out. A thick stream of black ink flows out of it, forming a puddle at my feet. The poor people follow my example and begin to empty out their bags, which are also full of thick black ink. We have created a dark lagoon . . .

  I remove a thin column from the facade of the temple with which I stir this goo. As the stone rod rotates, long stems emerge from the pool, rising up many meters. Enormous sunflowers open up at their ends. These flowers attract light, and soon the place is pervaded by a golden glow. The towers on the temple also open like flowers. The people’s joy is so intense that it infects me. I awake in a state of joyous excitement. Sunlight comes pouring in through the window of my bedroom.