I had set up a round table in the living room of my house to dine with the gods and converse with them as equals. The first to arrive, despite his not being a deity, was Confucius, an imposing and enigmatic Chinese man, tranquil and immutable. As soon as we sat down, a young Hindu man with blue skin appeared wearing brilliant clothes and jewelry, elegant and powerfuclass="underline" he was Maitreya. Then, right in front of me sat Jesus Christ, a giant three meters high, so powerful that I began to get nervous. Another being emerged behind him: Moses, even taller, even stronger, with a severity that truly terrified me. I felt that behind the prophet, the incommensurable figure of Jehovah began to take shape. The room filled with such incomprehensible energy that I panicked. How did I, so weak and ignorant, dare to try to converse with these gods as equals? I tried to wake up. Confucius slowly disintegrated. As Moses and Jehovah dissolved into a grim shadow that started to fill the room, imprisoned in the dream world I begged Maitreya and Jesus for forgiveness. They smiled and amalgamated into one being, a gentleman in a leisure suit, like a wise grandfather. Smiling, he offered me a cup of tea. The dark liquid glowed. I awoke with my hair standing on end.
Encounters with divine archetypes are very dangerous if we do not prepare for them in advance. I would not exclude cardiac arrest from the list of possible dangers. I searched in alchemical texts to prepare myself for such a risky encounter. One treatise, the Rosarium philosophorum, written in Latin in the first half of the fourteenth century, inspired me with its enigmatic passages. “The contemplation of the authentic thing that perfects all things is the contemplation by the elect of the pure substance of mercury.” Before attempting to unite the individual self to the universal force, it is necessary to contemplate, feel, and identify with that source, to accept it as one’s essence, to disappear in its infinite extent. This force must act in our intellect as a dissolving agent. When the kind god in my dream offered me some tea, it was to tell me that I am the sugar cube that is to be dissolved in the hot liquid: love. “The work, very natural and perfect, consists of engendering a being similar to what one is oneself.” I understood that for the majority of the time we are not ourselves; we live manipulating ourselves like puppets, presenting a limited caricature to others. We must create the being that resembles who we really are in ourselves like a model, discovering the pattern, the designs and order that it carries like a seed. A tree, in its formation, endeavors to grow in order to become the plant pattern that guides it. The engendering of the similar is not a doubling but a transformation: in order for the natural work to be realized, the self must transform itself into the impersonal pattern “I,” the highest level of perfection. Thus we become the guides of ourselves. “Euclid has advised us not to carry out any operation if the sun and mercury are not united.” The individual I and the impersonal I, the intellect and the subconscious, must act together at all times. It is for this reason that Maitreya and Jesus became one in my dream.
In Paris, I had the opportunity to meet the alchemist Eugène Canseliet, who published the works of the mysterious Fulcanelli. I remember him telling me, “The athanor is the body. The heart is the flask. The blood is the light. The flesh is the shadow. The blood comes from the heart, which is active, and goes to the flesh, which is passive. The heart is the sun, the body the moon. The positive is in the center. The negative is around the center. The two form unity.” If we think that the universe has a creative center then the individual, who is a miniuniverse, should also have one. After reaching the age of fifty I decided to attempt the highest encounter through lucid dreaming: to see my inner god.
I am at a family dinner with my wife and children. We are eating on the terrace, around a rectangular table. It is nighttime, and the stars are sparkling in the sky. Cristina, the servant who took care of me so well during my childhood, serves us a roast goat kid on a cross-shaped plate.
“I’m dreaming.”
I put my hands out flat in the air, support myself on them, and levitate. I speak from above to my loved ones.
“I am leaving this world.”
They smile knowingly and begin to disappear. A profound grief fills me. This piercing sadness forces me to stay, but Cristina appears waving a pair of pruning shears, with which she snips at the air. “Go! If you rise you are an angel; if you sink you are a demon!”
Relieved, free, I begin to ascend. I see myself floating in the cosmos. The stars shine brighter than ever. I want to exit the cosmic dimension to enter the dimension where my consciousness reigns. Suddenly, all the stars disappear: I find myself in a space that appears to extend into the infinite. This dark void is intermittently traversed with the rhythm of a human heartbeat by circular waves of light, like the ripples that occur in a lake when a stone falls on calm waters. I see the center in the distance. It is a mass of light, like a sun without flames, vibrating, beating, producing iridescent undulations. Its colossal size compared to me, smaller than an atom, fills me with dread. I want to wake up, but I restrain myself.
“This is a dream. Nothing can happen to me.”
“You’re wrong, if the experience is too intense it could cause your death in real life; you might never awaken!”
“Dare to try it! Remember what Ejo Takata said: ‘Intellectual, learn to die!’”
I decide to take the risk, fly speedily toward this tremendous being of light, and throw myself into it. At the moment of sinking into this matter I experience the immeasurable vastness of its power, for the glare is so dense that I can feel it in my skin.
In order to make myself better understood at this point, I should recall a crucial moment that the actors and I experienced during the filming of The Holy Mountain. We had already lost our link to reality after two months of preparation due to having been locked in a house without going outside, sleeping only four hours a night while doing initiatory exercises the rest of the time, plus four months of intense film shooting and traveling all over Mexico. The cinematographic world had taken its place. Possessed by the character of the Master, a sort of hybrid of Gurdjieff and the magician Merlin, I had become a tyrant. I wanted the actors to become enlightened at all costs; we were not making a movie we were filming a sacred experience. And who were these comedians who, also entrapped by illusion, consented to be my disciples? One was a transsexual I had met in a bar in New York; another was a soap opera hunk; then there was my wife, with her neurosis of failure; an American admirer of Hitler; a dishonest millionaire who had been expelled from the stock exchange; a gay man who believed he could converse with birds in Sanskrit; a lesbian dancer; a cabaret comedian; and an African-American woman who, ashamed of her slave ancestors, claimed to be Native American. I was inspired by alchemy in hiring this bunch: the first state of matter is the mud, the magma, the “nigredo.” From this, through successive purifications the philosopher’s stone is born, which transforms base metals into gold.