YOUR SPACE
In your interior you have space, the territory that you love. There is a territory that is yours. It can be at the foot of the mountain, in the country, by the ocean; it can be fertile ground, sand; whatever you want. Let your terrain arrive; imagine the ideal place for you. Do you see it? What is there? Is there shade? What does it smell like? Are there little insects? Other animals? Whatever there is, let it arrive. And in your territory, be happy, happy: because finally you have a territory the size you want. Small, large, each one has his own. It is crucial that the unconscious give you your plot. The land that belongs to you. The slice of the planet that is yours. The landscape in which you live. Do not choose the landscape of others. Do not choose that of your parents. Choose yours alone. Take the joy of your plot and observe how the house emerges, the interior that is yours. It is your ideal house, where you want to live and develop yourself, accompanied or not, all your life. What is the house you want? What size? Made from what? What is it like? Think about what your ideal space is. Without limits. When you’re able to conceive this ideal house, walk around it, take a good look at it, go inside it and create everything: bathrooms, beds, the kitchen, the cups, the spoons — you are going to create all the objects in your ideal house and in all its rooms. Go for a walk and create your house once and for all! So you truly know what you want, without limits! There are no limits on money, there is not one prohibition, you do not have to be small or mediocre. Choose in your creativity what you really want, so that later you can carry it out in real life. Take your time. . Think about what activities you wish to do in your house. . the materials. . you are the Great Architect. Your own architect. Your own creator. . Take all the time you need, because it is fundamental for you to know your territory. Your house is your ego, it is your true I. Think also about how you are going to be dressed in your house. What clothing corresponds to you? How do you want to present yourself? In the kitchen, dream up everything you wish to eat. What is your ideal nourishment? And concentrate on the ideal company. With whom do you desire to be? If you want to be with anyone at all. There can be a reading room, a movie theater, music, books, animals — all that you desire. Without limits. Imagine your bed in this ideal house.
And this part of the exercise is also fundamental, essential, so do it well. You are in the bed, lying down, but your life has ended. You are dead. And from your corpse your new being comes out and is reborn. How do you want to be reborn? You are lying down, a being, a body that has stopped, and you get up with a new body. With what physique? What gender? What age? What would be your ideal I? Imagine yourself as an ideal I. The I that we have is not our ideal I. We have an ideal, although it is still far away. Give yourself permission to imagine it. All these exercises are designed to eliminate the lack of confidence, to enrich yourself. If you have a plot, if you have a house, if you have an ideal being, you have enriched yourself.
Now criticize yourself the way a person in your family would. Your mother, your father, your brother. Talk with their voice. Put yourself in the position of someone who opposes you. Because if until now you had not imagined any of this, it is because inside you there are forces working against what you imagine. What are these forces? Embody them. For example, talk as your mother would talk. Or your father. And criticize. All of the new medicine talks of territory, saying that a loss of territory creates illnesses. Because the brain, they say, acts like an animal that needs its territory. Even though I do not believe that this is absolute. Therefore, when we know what territory corresponds to us, we take a big step toward creativity. And the house is the development of our individual I. And if I invent the house that I want for me, I allow myself to exist as myself. Outside of parents. For this reason, to talk with your parents or create a new body is a move of creative freedom that you make. Creativity comes from an interior freedom, from an internal appreciation. I know that I have all of this in my interior, so I can put myself into action. The imagination works on very simple principles.
FREE YOURSELF FROM LANGUAGE
This will be a quick exercise in liberation from language. We are accustomed to always talking like normal beings. We are afraid of madness. However, the rivers that fall from the rooftops covered with doves will forever be white and dark, open to the tunnel of all delight. . Did you understand? No? Yes? This is how you should speak; you should allow yourself to talk in a completely outrageous language to try to explain a feeling. You must create a conversation, communicate with a language that is verbal, that is not conceptual. Ready? You can raise whatever Samson you want, preventing Delilah from cutting his hair and, atop the table, declare three or four stories that will be deliciously sweetened. Okay? And what you have done with words, you can do to invent words, like this: Fai faias naracola ke. Costrigunsun tostecki batcherome quelarranamanda droi pretcho apandep ketackka kieugal pathcu! Reabutchis Kara miop. This is liberating. You can do it. Free yourself from the language. When you start doing this, you are going to like it. In the beginning you are going to feel cut off, because the largest prison is the articulate language, the logical language. It is a surrealist exercise. But it breaks the normal language to allow creative freedom. Maybe some things that come out will be in bad taste, but it doesn’t matter. Idiotic things, childish things. But beautiful things will also come out, suddenly. Try to do it, and then we will get into techniques for the imagination.
SIXTEEN
TECHNIQUES FOR THE IMAGINATION
The imagination operates on very simple principles. Some creators have used it to exhaustion. The basis of the imagination has four elements, which are like mathematical elements: addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. These are the four elements of the imagination. First, there is addition and subtraction. Then division, next multiplication. And then, a mixture. And with these five things, you have the imaginations of crazy people. It is very simple. Using subtraction, you must take away from everything, in the imaginary, until everything becomes small. For example, one day you see someone pass by with a package, and in this package he carries his entire birthplace. You have an enormous imagination, because you have taken away from everything. You can miniaturize everything. In my left pocket, I can carry my mother; in my right pocket, I have my father. I make them talk, and then I look at them. This happened in the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, so re-create this game.
One subtracts, subtracts — and one has to fight with the spiders. These are, to me, easy elements for the imagination. And they are very useful! But we also have the giants: this could be addition. You can enlarge a pumpkin. The typical example could be the pumpkin that grows and grows and reaches the size of the planet, converting itself into a planet. And then it is so big it occupies the galaxy. Inside the pumpkin, there is all of history; all of humanity is born. Anything can be enlarged this way. It is simple. Make whatever you want grow, make art. In architecture, you take three boxes of cherries; you raise them to make a building. This is how architects work. This is addition.
The imagination can increase or reduce. The Japanese imagination has created the small dwarf trees, or bonsai; the Jivaros shrink heads; the atomic bomb is an expansion of a small bomb; and cinema makes, for example, a monkey grow into King Kong or Godzilla. In my case, I have a comic strip called Megalex, about a city that occupies the whole planet, although I was not the first to do this.
Also the expansion of force is possible (Superman). All of the superheroes increase themselves in some way: for example, Flash Gordon is the fastest. A character who crosses over everything just with a look, or he who hears everything: this happens in fairy tales, too. Or the person who has the loudest voice and makes the buildings fall. There is the man who can sleep with three hundred women in a night, and so forth.