And he who has only feet
Helps with his feet
In this great spiritual work.
I also remembered a Chinese story:
A tall mountain cast a shadow, preventing a village at its feet from receiving sunlight. The children grew up stunted. One morning, the villagers saw the oldest man walking down the street with a porcelain spoon in his hands.
“Where are you going?” they asked.
“I am going to the mountain,” he replied.
“What for?”
“To move it away from there.”
“With what?”
“With this spoon.” The villagers laughed.
“You’ll never be able to!”
The old man answered, “I know I never will. But someone has to start.”
I told myself, “If I want to be useful, I must do so in an honest way, using my true capabilities. I will not in any way act like a clairvoyant. First of all, I cannot read the future, and second, I think it’s useless to know it when we don’t know who we are here and now. I’ll content myself with the present and focus the reading on self-knowledge, based on the principle that we do not have a destiny predetermined by any gods. The path is being created as we walk along it, and every step offers a thousand possibilities. We are constantly choosing. But who is it that makes this choice? It depends on the personality with which we have been shaped in childhood. And so, what we call the future is a repetition of the past.”
I began my Tarot reading sessions at the same time that I was writing the comic The Incal for Moebius. The more I progressed with the readings, the more I noticed that all problems have their roots in the family tree. To examine a person’s difficulties is to enter into the psychological atmosphere of his or her family. I realized that we are marked by the psychomental universe of our families. We are marked by their characteristics, but also by their insane ideas, their negative feelings, their inhibited desires, and their destructive acts. The father and mother project all their phantoms onto the expected infant. They want to see him or her do what they themselves could not experience or accomplish. Thus, we assume a personality that is not our own, but comes from one or more members of our emotional environment. To be born into a family is, as it were, to be possessed.
The gestation of a human almost never takes place in a healthy manner because the fetus is influenced by the parents’ diseases and neuroses. After a certain time, just seeing a client move and hearing a few spoken phrases was enough for me to tell the manner in which he or she had been born. (Someone who feels compelled to do everything quickly was born in a few minutes, as if with urgency. Someone who, faced with a problem, waits until the last moment to resolve it, using outside help, was born with forceps. Someone who has trouble making decisions was born by caesarean section.) I realized that the way we are born, which is often not the correct way, alters the course of our entire lives. And these bad deliveries result from our parents’ emotional problems with their own parents. The damage is transmitted from generation to generation: the possessed become the possessors, projecting onto their children what was projected onto them, unless there is a gaining of consciousness that breaks the vicious circle. We must not be afraid to explore ourselves deeply in order to confront the ill-formed part of our being, the horror of nonachievement, and shatter the genealogical obstacle that rises up against us as a barrier and obstructs the ebb and flow of life. In this barrier we find the bitter psychological sediment of our fathers and mothers, our grandparents and great-grandparents. We must learn to stop identifying ourselves with the family tree and understand that it is not in the past: on the contrary, it is alive, present within every one of us. Every time we have a problem that seems to us to be individual, the whole family is involved. At the moment we become conscious, in one way or another, the family begins to evolve—not only the living members, but also the dead ones. The past is not set in stone. It changes according to our point of view. We have a different understanding of ancestors whom we consider heinously guilty of altering our mentality. After forgiving them, we should honor them, which is to say, know them, analyze them, dissolve them, reshape them, thank them, love them, and finally see the “Buddha” in each and every one of them. Everything that we have achieved spiritually could have been done by any one of our relatives. The responsibility is immense. Any fall drags down the whole family, including future children, for three or four generations. Children do not perceive time in the same way that adults do. What seems to an adult to last an hour, children experience as if it lasts for months, and it marks them for their whole lives. As adults, we tend to reproduce the abuses we suffered during childhood, either on other people or on ourselves. If I was tortured yesterday, then I keep on torturing myself today, becoming my own tormenter. There is a great deal of talk about sexual abuses suffered during childhood, but we tend to overlook intellectual abuses, which imbue the child’s mind with insane ideas like perverse prejudices and racism; emotional abuses that include deprivation of love, contempt, sarcasm, verbal aggression; material abuses like lack of space, abusive changes of territory, lack of clothing, and improper nourishment. There are also abuses of the being, which may include not being given the opportunity to develop one’s true personality, having one’s life planned out as a function of one’s family history; being forced into an alien destiny, not being seen for who one is, being made into a mirror of someone else, being desired to be someone else, being born a boy to parents who wanted a girl or vice versa; not being allowed to see what one wants to see; not being allowed to listen to certain things; not being allowed to express oneself; or being given an education consisting of the implantation of limits. As for sexual abuse, the list is long, as long as the list of accusations: “I married out of obligation because your mother was pregnant with you; you have been a burden to us; I left my career because of you; you are selfish to want to live your life; you have betrayed us; you let yourself surpass us and achieved what we could not.” Family history is full of incestuous relationships, repressed or not, as well as homosexual urges, sadomasochism, narcissism, and social neuroses, which are reproduced as a legacy from generation to generation. This can sometimes be seen in names. One client wrote, “You suggested that I clarify my unconscious incestuous urges with my brother. You were right. My brother’s name is Fernando, and the father of my children is also called Fernando. But this can also be found in my genealogy; my mother has a brother called Juan Carlos, and she married a Carlos. It was the same for my grandmother: her brother was named José and she married a José, and her father (my great-grandfather) was also called José.”
When did all this begin? I often see people burdened by problems dating back to the First World War because a great-grandfather returned from the front with lung disease caused by toxic gases, which caused him emotional disturbances, an inability to fulfill himself, moral devaluation. And when the father is weak or absent, the mother becomes dominant, invasive, and is no longer a mother. The absence of a father brings about that of the mother. The children grow up with a thirst for caresses, which translates into repressed anger that extends through several generations. The lack of touch is the greatest abuse suffered by a child. All this garbage affects us, even if it is not conscious. The relationships between our parents and our aunts and uncles trickle down onto us. For example, Jaime hated Benjamín, his younger brother. I was Jaime’s younger child. I became a screen onto which his brother was projected. This allowed him to vent his bottled-up hatred onto me. Even if we know nothing of rapes, abortions, suicides, shameful events, incarcerated relatives, venereal diseases, alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, or countless other secrets in our families, we still suffer from all of it, and sometimes we repeat it. A boy is named René, which means “reborn,” and feels himself invaded by a vampire-like personality, not knowing that he was born after another sibling died. A father gives his daughter the name of the woman who was his first love, and this dooms her to playing the role of his girl
friend for life. A mother gives her son the name of his maternal grandfather, and the son fruitlessly tries to be like that grandfather in order to satisfy his mother’s incestuous desires. Or, in a family with many daughters, one of them in desiring to give the father an heir to carry on his name will have a one-night stand with a strange man, a foreigner who will then return to his home country, leaving her pregnant. Symbolically this child is engendered by God; she is imitating the Virgin Mary. The Virgin was possessed by her father; he introduced himself completely into her womb, changed himself into his own son, then created a man-god pairing. Together forever, the two now reign in heaven, as if in a marriage. If a single mother gives birth to a son who, metaphorically, is the child of her father, and calls him Jesús or Emmanuel or Salvador, or in fact the name of any saint, then that child will live an anguished life, feeling obligated to be perfect. The sacred texts, when misinterpreted, play a nefarious role in this family catastrophe. Extremist religions create sexual frustrations, illnesses, suicides, wars, and unhappiness. Perverse interpretations of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Sutras have caused more deaths than the atomic bomb.
The tree, with all its limbs, behaves as an individual, a living being. I dubbed the study of its problems “psychogenealogy” (just as I called the study of the Tarot “tarology”; years later, “tarologists” and “psychogenealogists” became abundant). Some therapists who have conducted studies in genealogy have wanted to reduce it to mathematical formulas, but the tree cannot be contained in a rational cage; the subconscious is not scientific, it is artistic. The study of families must be performed in a different way. A geometric body, with the relationships between its parts completely known, cannot be modified. In an organic body whose relationships are mysterious, you can add or remove a part, but in its essence it will still be what it is. The internal relationships of the family tree are mysterious. To understand them it is necessary to enter the tree as if in a dream, so it should not be interpreted, it should be experienced.
In a seminar in France, working with the minor arcana of the Tarot.
The patient must make peace with her subconscious, not becoming independent of it but making it an ally. If we learn its language, we can put it to work for us. If the family within us, rooted in childhood memory, is the basis of our subconscious, then we must develop each relative as an archetype. We must ascribe our level of consciousness to it, exalt it, imagine it reaching its highest potential. Everything we give it, we are giving to ourselves. When we deny it, we deny ourselves. As for toxic people, we should transform them by saying, “This is what they did to me, this is what I felt, this is what the abuse causes in me today, this is the reparation I desire.” Then, still within ourselves, we must bring all the relatives and ancestors to their fulfillment. A Zen master once said, “Buddha nature is also in a dog.” This means that we must imagine the perfection of every person in our family. Does someone have a heart full of bitterness, a brain clouded by prejudice, deviant sexuality due to moral abuses? Like a shepherd with his sheep we must guide them to the good path, cleansing them of their poisonous needs, desires, emotions, and thoughts. A tree is judged by its fruits, so if the fruit is bitter the tree it came from, even if it is majestic, is considered bad. If the fruit is sweet, the crooked tree it comes from is considered good. Our family—past, present, and future—is the tree. We are the fruit that gives it its value.
As my clients increased in number, on some weekends I had to receive them in groups. To heal a family, I organized a dramatization of it. The person whose family was being studied would choose from among the participants, picking those who would represent her parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters. Then she would situate them, standing, seated on chairs, or lying down (for the chronically ill or dead), at various distances from each other, according to the logic of her family tree. Who was the hero of the family, the most powerful person? Which people were absent or despised? Which people were joined together and by what sort of ties? And so forth. Then the patient would situate herself. Where? At the center, on the edge, or removed from all of them? How did she feel there? Then, she had to confront each “actor.” Representing the family in this way, as a living sculpture, the seeker discovers that the people she has “randomly” chosen correspond in many aspects to the real people in her family and have important things to say to her. This produces a conversation that generally ends in intense embraces and tears.
These exercises leave us convinced that, having become conscious of these unhealthy relationships, we are now cured. However, once we return from the therapeutic situation into the real world, the painful symptoms are still there as always. Merely identifying a difficulty is not enough to overcome it! A gain in awareness, a theatrical confrontation, and an imagined forgiving end up being fruitless when not followed up by action in daily life. I concluded that I should induce people to act in the midst of what they conceived as their reality. But I was reluctant to do so. What right did I have to intrude in the lives of others, exerting an influence that could easily degenerate into a power grab, establishing dependencies? I was in a difficult position, considering that the people who came to see me were, in a way, asking me to become their father, mother, son, husband, wife . . . I decided to induce them to act in order for the gaining of consciousness to be effective. I did not call these people my patients, but my clients. I prescribed very specific actions, without assuming responsibility or taking on the role of their guide over their entire lives. Thus was born the psychomagical act, combining all the influences I had assimilated during the years described in the preceding chapters.
First, the person would agree to carry out the act exactly as I prescribed it, without one iota of change. To prevent distortions due to failures of memory, the client had to immediately write down the procedure to follow. Once the act was carried out they were to send me a letter that first described the instructions received, then related in full detail the way in which the act was carried out as well as the circumstances and incidents that occurred in the process. Lastly, the results should be described. Some people waited a year to send me the letter. Others argued, not wanting to do exactly what I recommended, bargaining and finding all manner of excuses to avoid following the instructions precisely.
As I observed with Pachita, when you change something, however minimally, and do not respect the indispensable conditions for the achievement of the act, the effects will be null or negative. Indeed, most of the problems we have, we want to have. We are attached to our problems. They form our identity. We define ourselves through them. It is no wonder, then, that some people try to distort the act and try to devise ways to sabotage it: getting free of problems involves radically changing our relationship with ourselves and with the past. People want to stop suffering, but are not willing to pay the price—namely, to change, to not keep living as a function of their beloved problems. For all these reasons, the responsibility of prescribing an act that must be carried out to the letter was immense. In the moment of prescribing it I had to cease identifying with myself so that I could go into a kind of trance, stop talking with my subconscious, and connect directly with the subconscious of my client. I concentrated on the mere act of giving, alleviating pain, prescribing actions that were similar to lucid dreams, without worrying about the personal benefit that would accrue to me. In order to be in a condition to heal someone, you must not expect anything from that person; you must enter all the aspects of his or her inner self without becoming involved or destabilized.
In The Book of Five Rings the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi recommends going to the ring early, before a fight, and acquiring a perfect knowledge of it. Likewise, familiarity with the client’s psychoaffective terrain seemed to me a fundamental requirement for the recommendation of any act, so before anything else I would ask them to tell me about their problem in as much detail as possible. Rather than trying to guess what the Tarot might be hiding from me, I would put the person through an in
tense interrogation. I would ask about his or her birth, parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents, siblings, sex life, relationship with money, social complexes, beliefs, love life, health, guilty feelings. (Often enough, this resembles a church confession.) Terrible secrets would emerge. One man confessed to me that as a child, at the end of the school year, he had waited on top of a wall for a hated teacher to pass and had thrown a large stone at his head. He thought that the teacher had died, but fled without checking. For thirty years, he felt like a murderer. Another time I met with a Belgian father. I perceived that he was gay. “Yes,” he confessed, “and I do it with ten men a day, in the saunas, every time I come to Paris. Do you know what my problem is? I’d like to do it with fourteen of them, like a friend of mine does!” From people who seemed normal, I heard the darkest and most outlandish secrets. One woman confessed to me that the father of her daughter was none other than her own father; a Swiss teenager, seduced by his mother, told me all the details. What most disturbed him was her jealousy, because she would not let him have any girlfriends. Because they did not perceive any criticism in me, people vented with confidence. If the therapist judges in the name of some morality, he does not cure. The attitude of the confessor must be amoral. Otherwise, the secrets never come to light. I am reminded of a Buddhist story.
Two monks are meditating in the midst of nature; several rabbits surround one monk, but none come near the other. The latter asks, “If we both meditate with equal intensity the same number of hours each day, why do the rabbits surround you and not me?”
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 33
