The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  I have encountered this kind of certainty exhibited by Chico Molina, claiming something reason cannot accept is the truth, in almost all people who say they have had contact with higher planes. It was after this that I began to consider that lying, apart from its despicable quality, also has a mystical utility. In the Bible, in Genesis, Jacob cheats his brother Esau by persuading him to sell his birthright for a meal of lentil stew. He then takes advantage of his father’s blindness to impersonate his brother and get his blessing. Later, it became clear to me that lying, or “sacred trickery,” as I called it, is a technique used by all masters and shamans.

  Thanks to Marie Lefevre, in 1950 I had my first encounter with the optical language that is the Tarot. At what age had Marie arrived in Chile? She never wanted to tell us. When we knew her, she was over sixty years old. A small woman made up and dressed like Dracula’s daughter with her long gray hair dyed with a blue rinse, she lived in a basement with her lover Nene who was an unemployed and uneducated youth of eighteen years, but of an angelic beauty. After having heated metaphysical discussions at Café Iris, we poets would arrive drunk around three in the morning at her basement, knowing that a pot full of tasty soup would be waiting for us there, heating up on a slow fire. Nene, naked as usual, with a pink silk ribbon tied in the shape of a butterfly around his penis, slept soundly. She, who never slept, got up to serve us cups of the delicious soup made from all the leftovers that the nearby restaurant gave her in exchange for reading the Tarot to customers. Lefevre had drawn her own deck of seventy-eight cards. Instead of cups, swords, wands, and coins, she shuffled sopaipillas (coins), gourds of maté (cups), Shivalingams, male and female genitalia forming a unit (wands), and eyes above a triangle (swords). I remember some of her major arcana: she had a cowboy and a beautiful cowgirl in place of the Emperor and Empress. The Priestess was a Mapuche machi. The World was a map of Chile. Despite the ingenuousness of this deck, she gave readings of a surprising psychological accuracy, her very Chilean language contrasting with her strong French accent. I had removed money from my life without feeling poor, surviving on adventure, caught up in the present without ever thinking about tomorrow; for me, she predicted hundreds, thousands of trips all around the world. It was hard for me to believe her, and yet her prediction came true. To Carlos Faz, an exceptionally talented painter, she said, “Never travel by sea!” A year later on his way to America at a stop in Ecuador where the passengers were forbidden to disembark Carlos, drunk as usual, jumped from the ship toward the dock, misjudged the distance, fell into the water, and drowned. He was twenty-two. For me, this lady was an example of generosity, freedom, and subtlety. She did not tell Faz that he was going to drown, which would have become an order to commit suicide (the mind tends to fulfill predictions), but warned him of danger, leaving him the possibility of either confronting it or not. She also taught me that one can create miracles for others: somewhere in this world, there was a well-intentioned woman who would receive you at any hour with a humble smile on her lips, give you a bowl of soup, and read the cards for you, for free, just out of love for human beings.

  Another teacher who changed my worldview was Nicanor Parra. When I met him I was a teenager, he a grown man, a mathematics professor at the School of Engineering. As a revolutionary reaction against the emotional poetry of Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, García Lorca, and Vicente Huidobro, he had declared himself an anti-poet. For us young people, his emergence in the literary world was akin to that of a messiah. After my awkward encounter with him at Café Iris, my pathological shyness kept me from visiting him. Stella Díaz had to help me. Making what for her was an immense concession, she covered the flames of her hair with a beret. “Nica doesn’t want me to show up with my hair uncovered. He says that redheads drive the students mad.” And she took me into the territory of the great anti-poet. Parra was an unassuming man, and the admiration of young poets encouraged him. We met many times, also with Enrique Lihn present. We talked in a small bar near the National Library, over that wonderful drink that is sweet chicha. One day Nicanor handed me a large envelope full of typewritten sheets of paper of different sizes. “They’re various writings, a sort of literary journal. Can you organize them for me? I’ve reread them so many times that I can’t see their value. I labeled them ‘Notes on the edge of the abyss.’” To receive such a gesture of confidence from a consecrated poet was like a spiritual explosion for me. I spent many nights locked away, reverently reviewing these unpublished texts, sorting them by subject, eliminating repetitions. In a concise style—“I want a clinical-photographic art”—the poet described his inner life in prose. After fifteen days I returned the notes to him, copied onto regular size sheets of paper, in an order that seemed perfect to me. Parra never published them, nor did he ever speak of them again.

  With a university education far superior to that of his predecessors, who were all self-taught, Parra had specialized in the study of the Vienna Circle and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Galileo interested him just as much as Kafka, whose diary he admired above all else. He had his own interpretation of the famous phrase from the Tractatus, “What one cannot speak about, one must be silent about.” For him metaphysics, like religion, was forbidden territory; likewise the expression of personal feelings. “The poet should not exhibit himself: the strings must be pulled from outside.” Neruda and his followers presented themselves as great justices, great lovers, great humanists, with sublime anxieties and hopes—in short, as inflated romantic egos. Parra hid behind his intellect, then assumed one mask, then several. The poet was a professor with his tongue eaten away by cancer, a little man crushed by society, by women, a tragic clown; later he spoke through an ingenuous character who believed in Christ; then an old skeptic; and finally, he became a translator and took on the personality of Shakespeare. Lyricism was replaced by acerbic humor. “Knowledge and laughter become confounded.” Ultimately, he invented himself. As I write these lines, Parra must now be eighty-six years old, and like Castaneda—“the warrior leaves no footprints”—I am sure that no one can boast of knowing him intimately. The anti-poet has made his heart into an impenetrable fortress. The words of Jesus, “By their works ye shall know them,” cannot be applied to him.

  The memories I have of Nicanor Parra, over a bottle of chicha, date from half a century ago. At the age of twenty, I had his theories burned into my mind as if by a red-hot iron. But this concealment of the ego, this veiling of personal emotions, this impersonality of the creator, led me toward magic rather than distancing me from it. In magic, the same principles apply, but go further: the magician accepts the cutting of the ties that bind him to external influences, but knows how to receive, from the inside, the essential, impersonal being that has its origin beyond our solar system.

  Parra was present in one of my happy dreams in 1998: in the helicopter I am piloting circling around the mouth of an erupting volcano Nicanor, as a young man, gives a lesson in poetry to a group of elderly poets. “Do not describe your experiences; the poem should be experience. Do not show what you are, but what you are going to be. Do not show your feelings; create a new feeling with the poem. Do not reveal what you know, but what you suspect. Do not seek what you desire, but what you do not desire. So, now that you are a dream, stop dreaming.” Then I woke up.

  When I got to Paris, not having been able to establish the immediate contact I so much desired with André Breton and being always in search of metaphysical aspirin that would comfort me for being mortal, I found two teachers in books. One was Gurdjieff; I read everything he had written or dictated, as well as the works about him written by his disciples. The other was Gaston Bachelard, whose book La philosophie du non endeared me to philosophy and proposed new visions of reality that overwhelmed me. I gradually came to know excellent artists who, although they enriched me aesthetically, never suggested the idea of entering into the territory of magic or therapy. Quite the contrary, their quest was to escape from the Essential Being in order to exalt the power of the personal
“I.” I do not mean to imply that I despise this; unlike some extemporaneous gurus, I believe that the part of our spirit with which we often identify ourselves—the ego—should not be destroyed or neglected. When well-managed, the egotistic personality can become an admirable servant. It is for this reason that the Buddha is depicted meditating on a sleeping tiger, Jesus Christ riding a donkey, Isis stroking a cat. The gods have steeds, and these represent the ego. The personal “I” is admirable if it is surrendered to the cosmic will. If it disobeys the Law, it becomes a nefarious monster that devours consciousness.

  The Canadian sculptor Jean Benoit, a fervent surrealist, invited me to spend a few days of vacation in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a small town in southern France. Across from his house was that of André Breton, built of wood and carved stones. My friend laughed at my shyness and dragged me over to the home of the poet. His wife received us, saying she did not know where André was but that he would return soon and that we could wait while she was in the kitchen. I waited there with Benoit, who, joyously anticipating the future encounter and certain that it would be “electric,” began emptying a bottle of wine. I trembled from head to toe. The idea of seeing the mythological creator of surrealism in his private home caused me a nervous excitement, a mixture of panic and euphoria. After ten minutes I had an irresistible need to urinate. Benoit, enjoying the wine, made a vague gesture toward the stairs leading to another floor. “It’s on the left.” I climbed the stairs looking for the bathroom, feeling like an intruder but at the same time possessed by an extreme curiosity. On the second floor, I saw a small wooden door to the left. My pressing need to relieve myself caused me to open the door immediately. There I was, face to face with the master, sitting on the toilet, pants down below his knees, defecating. Breton, his face contorted and deep red, gave a tremendous yell as if his throat were being cut. His cry must have been heard not only throughout the house but also in the surrounding houses, because several dogs started barking. I slammed the door instantly and flew down the stairs, fled to the station, and got on a bus that was going to Paris. The scene had lasted only a few seconds, but I had committed sacrilege by seeing the exquisite poet shitting. Would it be forgiven someday? Doubting so, I decided to emigrate to Mexico.

  The National Institute of Fine Arts, led by the poet Salvador Novo, hired me to teach pantomime in its theater school. My arrival in Mexico’s capital aroused much enthusiasm, and I had hundreds of students. My goal was to move from pantomime into theater—why not talk?—and thence into film, for which I had to train capable actors. I set up a laboratory for the study of bodily expressions at a private site, freeing myself from the stereotypes of pantomime. I was surprised to see the arrival of a group of doctors, all disciples of Erich Fromm. This renowned psychiatrist and essayist, suffering from heart disease, lived very near the capital in the pleasant city of Cuernavaca, which at that time was not yet sullied by pollution, enjoying the mild climate, lush vegetation, and low altitude close to sea level. A group of Mexican psychiatrists and two Colombians, drawn to his radical humanism, had asked Fromm to accept them as disciples. I suppose that Fromm found them to be caught in the traps of intellect, and in keeping with his atheist mysticism—“God is not a thing, and therefore cannot be represented by a name or an image”—invited them to free themselves from all mental chains, all “idolatries,” and to lose their individual limits in order to surrender peacefully to a happy relationship with nature. Of course, the body was the nature that was nearest, and for this reason, having learned of my courses in bodily expression, he recommended them to all. These psychiatrists, extraordinarily well educated after many years of intensive study, were skillful at handling theories but awkward when moving their bodies. Stiff, tense, and inexpressive, they identified with words and did not control their gestures. The first thing I did was to have them visit different spaces to feel how their attitudes changed depending on the dimensions of the place and the location of their bodies. They saw that they felt better or worse in certain places than in others; they understood that communication is not only oral but also spatial; they learned that their brains functioned on the basis of a territory, real or imagined. They noticed how rigid their spines were and how unbalanced their gait. They took the work very seriously and made great progress. I was asked by Dr. Millán to accompany them to the Tlalpam Sanatorium to help them investigate the body language of mental patients. I did so. Pleased with the results, they finally decided to invite me to Cuernavaca to meet their teacher.

  Performing in a pantomime (Santiago de Chile, 1950). (Was I a precursor to Iggy Pop?)

  Fromm received us in a beautiful bungalow with bougainvillea-covered walls. He had white hair and gentle blue eyes, a voice free of aggression, often quoting the Torah to affirm his atheism, and wore white pants and a light blue jacket so brightly colored that it gave him the appearance of an orchestral musician in the style of Tommy Dorsey. This kind Jewish man seemed to bear no resemblance to the stern father image that he projected to his Mexican students. As his wife served an appetizer, Fromm asked me to describe the techniques of pantomime, especially those related to the expression of weight. “The man who has not realized his freedom, that is to say who has not cut his incestuous ties to his mother and the ties connecting him to his family and his homeland, experiences all these as a burden without knowing that he carries that weight,” he said to me. As our conversation continued, Fromm suggested that we go to lunch at a restaurant on one of the hills on the outskirts of Cuernavaca. “I will go by car with the mime,” he announced to his students. “My heart does not allow me to take the pleasure of that delightful climb. But I advise you to go on foot, in complete harmony with nature and one another. All love is based on knowledge of the other; all knowledge of the other is based on shared experience.” When we arrived at the restaurant Fromm asked for a jug of tamarind water and said to me with a blissful smile, “Let’s drink this healthy liquid in tranquillity. My collaborators, talking to each other and enjoying the beautiful scenery, will take at least an hour to get here.”

  The master was wrong: his disciples arrived in less than twenty minutes, perspiring, pale, and short of breath. One of them fell down half-conscious in a chair, another vomited, and the others ran to the cold drinks, imbibing them in large and desperate gulps. After a short time, ashamed, they confessed their mistake. They had started out completely calm on the road that led to the mountain restaurant. By common agreement, in order to better commune with Mother Nature, they had decided to march in silence. After a few minutes, they had noticed that the two Colombians, subtly speeding up their pace, were walking ten meters ahead. The rest of them hurried to catch up. A competition of long strides began, each one trying to prove that he was stronger than the other. This degenerated into a race. The last hundred meters were taken at a sprint, leaving them almost totally exhausted. Fromm burst into laughter, tinged with sadness and compassion. He said, “The beginning of freedom lies in the capacity of man to suffer. And man suffers if he is oppressed, physically or spiritually. Suffering moves him to act against his oppressor, seeking to end the oppression rather than seek a freedom of which he knows nothing. Your greatest oppressor, my friends, is the individual ‘I.’ No therapist can cure it on your behalf. Remember what Hindu medicine tells us: the physician prescribes, God heals . . . It seems essential that you continue meditating with the Zen monk.” I was surprised, a Zen monk in Mexico? I had not heard any news of it. I knew that Erich Fromm had invited Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki to Mexico and had published a book with him, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, but I was excited to hear of the existence of this monk, whose name was Ejo Takata. I had read every book on the topic that I could get my hands on, but direct contact with a Zen master bore more weight than a ton of printed pages.

  On the return bus trip, I asked them where I could find the monk. Some minutes of embarrassed silence passed before they answered me: “It’s a secret. Apart from us, no one knows he is here. We cannot communicate his address
. The only one who can give an answer is Dr. F., our treasurer.” Dr. F received me in his large office and said, “Ejo Takata works exclusively for us. We have built a small zendo on the outskirts of the city. If you wish to go there to meditate with us every day at six o’clock (except for Saturdays and Sundays, of course), you must first offer a donation, for example . . .” (and without finishing the sentence, he wrote a large sum on a piece of paper. It may not have been so large for him, but for me, it was equal to all my savings.) Without a second of doubt, I signed a check. He gave me a card with Ejo Takata’s address and a map showing how to get there.

  At six o’clock the next morning I walked on a path alongside a ravine, the bottom of which was filled with garbage and rats, and came to a modest one-story house surrounded by a garden. With my heart pounding fast, I gave a few timid knocks on the door. It was instantly opened by a Japanese man in monastic clothes: he had a shaven head, a face of indefinable age, a smile showing teeth mounted on steel frames, and small bright eyes. He gave a bow then embraced me with affection as if he had known me for years. He led me to the small meditation room and showed me a box of red cloth with a white circle in the center containing a Japanese word. He translated: “Happiness.” How could I have realized that in that moment, Ejo Takata had transmitted the essence of Zen to me? He searched my face and saw that I had not understood the message. He clicked his tongue a few times, tilting his head from one side to the other. In his Japanese accent he muttered, “Need much zazen.” He handed me a black cushion—a zafu—showed me how to place it under my buttocks and meditate on my knees, corrected the position of my hands and my spine, and sat to meditate in front of me, as still as a wax sculpture. Half an hour passed. My legs hurt atrociously. The psychiatrists began to arrive. Without apologizing for the delay they sat down and, with profound and extraordinary concentration, remained still for an hour and a half. Then, smiling, they made quick bows and left. My body was numb, and I could barely walk. For three months I suffered martyrdom, all my muscles and joints hurt, my legs fell asleep, and my neck sunk into my back, making me feel like a sick turtle. Ejo would give me hard blows on the shoulder blades with his wooden cane to make me regain energy. The doctors, by contrast, were always smiling and could spend hours without moving. Once I conquered the bodily aches, I had difficulties with my mind. Because sitting still was excruciatingly boring, I started imagining poems, stories, sensual images, solutions to all kinds of problems. But I realized that it was foolish to seek the Master’s admiration by imitating the appearance of a Buddha: I had to overcome my mental chaos. I realized that at every moment my mind was invaded by endless dialogues, monologues, judgments, and images that, by giving them names, I compared to other images. I called this “mental chatter.” I started trying not to let words into my mind. I struggled for three years until I was finally able to keep my mind empty of words whenever I wanted to. I was very glad of this victory. However, I realized that in order to keep language out of my mind I had to devote my attention to doing so, making a continuous effort. This is not the correct way to stop the internal dialogue. What I had to do was to stop identifying myself with my thoughts. They were mine, but they were not me. As I meditated, I let the words go through my mind like clouds blown by the wind. The phrases came, nobody would take control of them, they would leave. I arrived at the zendo one misty morning ready to start this new struggle. I found Ejo carrying his few possessions in a cloth sack.