In reaction to this illness, Freud and the surrealists appeared. Surrealism was very important, because we began to identify ourselves with dreams; we revived the reign of the dream as a part of ourselves. The Greeks believed that dreams were of the gods, not of human creation. But to incorporate the dream, I am the dream creator.
One more example: Now, in the twenty-first century, we have computers. This supposes a complete change in our mentality, because in ten years we have taken on all the information systems. Now we can look at a house from all sides. You know, with this imagery, you can enter through the window, visit an apartment, and leave. We can look at a person’s brain; go through all of her veins and all of her body to get to what we want to look at. We are beginning to have a computer attitude. This is the mutation that we are suffering at the moment. We process data differently. What will come next? So I have given a brief history of the development of the imaginary.
What I want to explain is that, if I look at my shoes, which were made in the rational era, I see the vegetable, shoes as roots. I see the animal, shoes as leather, the material used to make them. And also I can glimpse where they take me, shoes as objects, and this is rational. Surrealist: I see that all of my childhood is there inside! And in the actual time period, shoes can be red, can be green, yellow; I can change their color, I can change their form; there are ten million shoes that I can have on my feet at the same time. I am free to leave my mental prison.
LEAVING OUR PRISONS
I begin this part of the course with the word “prison.” I hope this is a clue for you all. For me, this reflection has been very important. I live in reality. Here’s the story: I have been born in a limited body; I feel impotent. All of us have four elements: the intellect, the emotional, the sexual, and the physical body. We live in ideas, emotions, desires, and needs. These four elements are represented in Tibetan, Indian, and Hindu mandalas, in the World tarot card, and so forth. It is a division into four parts, with a fifth element in the center. This is the true path through all of the history of the art of humanity. In each of the four parts, we have dragons as guardians. Each tower is firmly protected. We recall the image of the lions that guard the door of the temple, or the gargoyles of Notre Dame. We have within ourselves some excellent guardians, which keep us restricted and well shielded. My intellect is locked, guarded; my emotions, shuttered; my sexuality and my needs, watched over. Everything is protected, and these very jailers that we have created are precisely what prevent us from being creative. For this reason, what I am saying is a little revolutionary, because to be creative one must defeat the guards and throw open the doors, even though one neither sees them nor identifies them. They are like the bad witch who had to be defeated in the stories of Hades; they are the ogres, the fear. . They are our babysitters. We have been shaped by the history of humanity, by the development of the planet, by society, by government, by the family. All of this lives inside us. Our guards are prehistoric. Little by little, they have become strong; they have been pigeonholed. We need to attack these guards in order to liberate ourselves. The problem is that attacking them makes us feel threatened, unprotected — it’s scary.
The final limitation to vanquish in order to be creative is our human waste. We are a body that expels decomposing matter. Urine, saliva, sperm, menses. . We are talking only about the body. A person who deeply guards his excretions cannot be creative. In Ayurvedic medicine there is a school that uses urine for medicinal purposes. In Mexico, I found a healer who treats with all types of animal excrement, and according to him each animal’s excrement has its own different medicinal capacity.
When creative people sometimes get blocked, I use Psychomagic and have them paint a square with their excrement. This block usually has its origin in infancy, in families that were very demanding about cleanliness and who prohibit their children from getting dirty or eating with their fingers. They’ve been prohibited from being free.
BE CREATIVE
If you want to be creative, you must practice the following exercise: stand over an absorbent surface, drink a liter or two of water, and then urinate making designs with the traces the water leaves. It is very important to remember that in order to be creative, we must allow the dirty child to exist within ourselves. In excretion, there cannot be limits. I became very good friends with the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who had been Max Ernst’s partner. I met her in Mexico. She told me that she had also been Buñuel’s lover but that he had suddenly abandoned her. So one day when she had her period, she used the blood to make handprints all over his apartment. It was her creative reaction, a psychomagic act in which she used the menstrual blood as an element of transformation. I have prescribed a lot of psychomagic acts like this one. In the magic of love, menstrual blood is very useful. Excretions, in general, are used in all kinds of spells. Magic functions, a lot of times, with excretions: the dribbles of toads, snakes, spiders. . All that we consider personal, like excretion, is used creatively.
If you want to be prolific, you cannot have any sexual limits, like what happened with the first great pioneer in this, the Marquis de Sade. This is why surrealism adopted him: because he could imagine all sorts of sexual relations. In his 120 Days of Sodom, Sade proves to be like a scientist investigating all the possibilities of sex without limits. You can go from cannibalism to sadistic crime, to incest — try anything. To be able to wake up the creativity, you must have a sexual imagination free of all morality, free of all religious imagery. You must free yourself. An artist needs to be able to imagine the greatest aberrations. We need to develop all the possibilities in our minds.
When someone has an imagination that is out of balance, he can assassinate a million Jewish people, like what happened with Hitler, or make an atomic bomb explode. In these cases, people are controlled by the dark side that lives inside us.
One of the most insurmountable guards that keeps watch over us is the superego. Having been molded by our parents, it permanently tells us: “This you do, this you do not do, this or that is prohibited.” You must incorporate the superego, dominate it, and destroy it.
A creative being cannot have any emotional limits. This means that we have to be conscious of the fact that we can kill or betray, be greedy, conceited, avaricious, or quick-tempered. . Emotionally I can and should imagine everything in me. I can be a saint, or I can be perhaps the best benefactor of humanity, while at the same time I can be the kind of person who poisons the water supply to eliminate life. In my emotional imagery, I must break all the limitations, defeat them.
We have now seen aspects that refer to creativity and to the mind. The first thing I must defeat is the empire of words. If I am drowning in words, I cannot be creative. This is what I have done internally: I have visualized all of the degeneracy of the world. I am not a degenerate, but when I am creating something, I must have all the elements at my disposal. When I see a person, I eliminate any limitations. That way, the person can tell me what is wrong, and it is not going to surprise me. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in therapeutic creativity is surprise. A therapist cannot be surprised; she must be prepared to hear anything. Nothing will ever surprise her because she has imagined everything. Now, wonderment is something very distinct from surprise.
I have said that words are the first limiting factor — the most essential — in creating our prisons. It is generally true in our society that “I am what I say.” This idea still persists, in spite of the fact that Freud, Lacan, and others, following surrealism, smashed the idea that one is what one says. Yet we tell ourselves things all day long. “Dimwitted” friendships involve meeting up to tell things, not do things. We tell ourselves things clucking like chickens. We educate ourselves by talking, not by doing things. This is the reason for the saying, “There is a lot of distance between talking and doing.” We spend our lives saying, “But you told me” or “Take back what you said, immediately.” It is very childish; it is the childishness of verbal education, where only words mean anything. And attempting to be creative in this state is useless. A world where there are only words is one where there is no creativity. Words become hysterical when the objective is the words themselves. Creativity grows outside of words. When the poet works essentially with words, then they explode. They are scattered and broken.