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.
THIRTEEN
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.