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.