When I finished writing the script for The Holy Mountain and gave myself the role of the alchemist, a Gurdjieff-style master, I realized that I knew perfectly well the motives of the student, but lacked the miraculous, superhuman experiences that I assumed the gurus had. In this dance of reality, while I was preparing the music and sets for the film, a New Yorker contacted me, wanting to be my secretary. Because his exaggerated insistence bothered me, I hung up the phone in the middle of one of his imperative sentences. He got on a plane and came to visit me the next day. Upon seeing him, so fanatical and brutal, I realized that I had found Axon, the military tyrant who cuts off testicles in my film. When I told him that I did not want to hire him as a technician, but as an actor, he told me, “That’s what I wanted, but since I’ve never acted, I asked for a position as an assistant. But if I have come here and succeeded in joining the cast, it’s because I developed my psychic abilities with just a month and a half of study in Arica Training, founded by a Bolivian master, Óscar Ichazo, who knows all the secrets of Gurdjieff.” I asked him what this teaching had consisted of, and he said, “Óscar says it does not hold any new ideas. What he proposes is a mixture of different techniques, Taoist, Sufi, Kabbalistic, alchemical, and others, which allow one to obtain enlightenment in forty days. If you’re looking for a guru, he’s the one. He currently has 240,000 students.” In fact, contact with a Hindu or East Asian guru — the sort of holy men for which ads abounded in The Village Voice—would not have suited my needs. My character was a Western alchemist. I was won over by the fact that Ichazo was South American and had named his technique after a Chilean port city, Arica, where my father had built a mattress factory. Axon told me that Ichazo had brought a group of fifty-seven American truth seekers, including Lilly and Claudio Naranjo, into the Tarapacá desert to teach them a method that would allow them to levitate in ten months.
I traveled to New York, obtained an interview with Ichazo, and suggested that he come to Mexico to initiate me (three days would suffice) and bring two of his assistants to initiate my actors (this would take six weeks of continuous work for twenty hours a day). We reached an agreement: first class travel for him and his Chilean secretary, a haughty aristocratic lady, two connected apartments in a five-star hotel, plus $17,000.
Óscar Ichazo and his companion landed in Mexico. As soon as they arrived at the hotel she asked me, “Where’s the weed?” Very surprised, I told her that since I did not smoke, I had not thought about that. The lady, furious, began to shout, “It’s stupid and unforgivable to have us come to Mexico without at least a kilo of herb waiting for us! Go now and get some, or you won’t get anything from the Master!” The lady’s despotic tone filled me with rage. I would have liked to take the wind out of her sails, but I held back because I believed the meeting with Ichazo to be essential for the success of my film. In less than an hour, my assistants arrived with a kilo of top-quality marijuana, wrapped in sheets of newspaper. The Chilean calmed down. So did I. A Tibetan sacred text says, “Do not be concerned with the defects of the master: if you need to cross a river, it does not matter if the boat that takes you to the other side is badly painted.” Ejo Takata, for example, smoked cigarette after cigarette, but that did not stop him from showing me the heart of Zen.
We scheduled the private meeting with Ichazo for the following day at six o’clock in the afternoon at my house. There, on the third floor, I had a large study with the walls lined with books and the window looking out onto Río de Janeiro Plaza. The previous night when we dined together the master had told me where his powers came from:
“I was born in 1931 in Bolivia. The son of a Bolivian soldier, I was educated in La Paz, at a Jesuit school. One night when I was six years old I was in bed reading a fairy tale when I was seized by a strange attack, like epilepsy. I passed out immediately and left my body in the astral state. I saw myself dead, lying on the bed. Thus dematerialized, I learned the mysteries of the hereafter. When I returned to my child’s body, I had the mind of an adult, of one who knows truth. When the priest who was my teacher described hell I thought, ‘I’ve been to hell and it was not like that.’ I abandoned my children’s stories and started reading, fully understanding all kinds of scientific, philosophical, and sacred books like the Bhagavad-Gîta, the Tao Te Ching, the Zohar, the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, and many others. I was also interested in the writings of Gurdjieff and his disciples. When I was nine years old I was already taking classes in hatha yoga, hypnotism, and martial arts with a real samurai. At age thirteen some Bolivian healers initiated me in their magical rites, giving me ayahuasca to drink. At nineteen, I met an old man who was interested in my great spiritual development. In 1950 he invited me to Buenos Aires, where I got in touch with a group of old sages, many of whom were eighty or older. They had come from all over the world, especially from Europe and the Orient, to exchange their spiritual techniques. I arranged to work for them, cleaning the rooms, doing the shopping, cooking, and serving them in everything they needed. That way, they could devote themselves unhindered to discussing techniques, yoga, Hindu and Tibetan tantra, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, alchemy, and so forth. I would get up at four in the morning to prepare their breakfast, and would discreetly remain among them. Little by little, they got used to my presence and began to use me as a guinea pig to test the effectiveness of their knowledge, such as a particular kind of meditation or a recitation of mantras. After two years, possessing all of the techniques, I knew more than any of them. Proud of my synthesis, they gave me valuable contacts with Eastern brotherhoods. They opened the doors of the most secret sites to me, places very difficult to enter, almost impossible. I started traveling. Everywhere I went, I was received not as a student but as a master. I visited India, Tibet (places where I corroborated my knowledge of tantra), Japan (where I solved all the koans), Hong Kong (where the secrets of the I Ching were revealed to me), Iran (where the Sufis showed me the true meaning of the enneagon and the secret name of God). I returned to La Paz to live with my father and digest this knowledge. After meditating for a year, I fell into a divine coma that lasted seven days. Ecstasy kept me motionless, as if dead. Thus I knew how the universe was created, the mathematical relationships between things, the sickness of the current civilization, and how to cure it. When I was able to move again, I knew I was enlightened. I realized that instead of helping myself, I must try to help God.
Óscar Ichazo. Photo: Peter Schlessinger.
Ichazo told me all this with the same conviction with which Chico Molina claimed to have seen a magic mirror at work. It was the same conviction with which Carlos Castaneda had told me that, while walking with Don Juan along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, he had become distracted looking at a passing woman and stopped listening to the old man, who had then given him a slap that sent him fifty kilometers away in less than a second. It was the same conviction with which Ichazo later told me that he had been by Jesus’s side at the moment when he “suffered” his transfiguration. Did he want to tell me that he could travel through time or that he had memories of previous incarnations? The latter possibility is consistent with the fact that Ichazo claimed to possess a prodigious memory: he claimed to remember all his experiences with total clarity starting at one year of age.
At six o’clock that evening, Ichazo knocked on the door of my house. As if he had been there many times, he went ahead of me up the stairs to the third floor and sat in the comfortable chair that I had bought for him that very morning. He smiled with satisfaction at smelling the new leather.