These operations, due to their extremely unusual nature, produce a state of attention so intense that therapists, patients, and observers enter a psychological dimension in which their sensations of time and space change, as was the case with Pachita. They are entirely “there,” in the “moment.” The actions and reactions are intertwined in a perfect form, and because all are a product of this intense moment, there is no possibility of error. The world is concentrated on the operation. One can compare this to moments that occur in a traditional bullfight. In that deadly ceremony, at a given moment the bullfighter and the bull enter the ring, they merge, they join, the charge and the deception become a single thing, and this dance becomes a magnet that irresistibly attracts the attention of the public. The healer’s hands are rooted in the world. It is not an individual who operates; it is all of humanity. It is not the bullfighter that makes passes; it is the very audience. In one case, life is given, in the other, death. The essence of that similarity must be discovered.
Fundamentally, every illness is a lack of consciousness saturated with fear. This unconsciousness is rooted in a prohibition imposed without prior conviction, which the victims must accept without understanding. It requires the child to be what she is not. If she disobeys, she is punished. The greatest punishment is not being loved.
The psychoshaman, like the primitive healer, should operate by circumventing not only the patient’s defenses but also his or her fears. Purely rational education prohibits us from using the body to its full extent, making the skin the limit of our being, making us believe that it is normal to live in a reduced space. This education strips sex of its creative power, giving us the illusion that we live only for a short time, denying our eternal essence. By means of a devaluing philosophy, sublime sentiments are extirpated from our emotional center. We are instilled with a fear of change, and we maintain an infantile level of consciousness in which we venerate toxic security and detest healthy uncertainty. By all means possible, supported by political, moral, and religious doctrines, we are made ignorant of our mental power.
If reality is like a dream, we must act in it without suffering from it, as we do in lucid dreams, knowing that the world is what we think it is. Our thoughts attract their equivalents. The truth is what is useful, not only for us but also for others. All the systems that are necessary in a given moment will later become arbitrary. We have the freedom to change systems. Society is the result of what it believes itself to be and what we believe it is. We can begin to change the world by changing our thoughts.
The skin is not our barrier: there are no limits. The only definite limits are those that we need, momentarily, in order to individualize ourselves while at the same time knowing that everything is connected. Separation is a useful illusion, as when the healer places a loop of rope around the patient’s neck in order to tell him to take responsibility for his disease and not propagate it. Miraculous healing is possible, but depends on the patient’s faith. The psychoshaman must subtly guide the patient to believe in what he or she believes in. If the therapist does not believe, no healing is possible.
Life is a source of health, but this energy comes forth only where we concentrate our attention. This attention must be not only mental but also emotional, sexual, and corporeal. The power does not lie in the past or in the future, which are the seats of illness. Health is found here and now. Toxic habits can be abandoned instantaneously if we cease to identify ourselves with the past. The power of the “now” grows with the sensory attention. The patient must be led to explore the present moment, to become aware of colors, lines, volumes, sizes, shadows, spaces between objects. One should feel every part of one’s body in order then to unite the parts into a whole; breathing should become pleasure, and one should capture its warmth and energy flowing in and out and understand that to love is to be happy with what one is and with what others are. Love grows to the extent that criticism decreases. Everything is alive, awake, and responding. Everything gains power if the patient bestows it. A mother using a phytotherapeutic treatment to heal her baby, in which she had to give him water to drink with forty drops of a mixture of essential oils added, found that the disease continued. I told her, “What is happening is that you do not believe in this medicine. Since your religion is Catholicism, say the Lord’s Prayer every time you give him the drops to drink.” She did this, and the boy was quickly cured. If we do not give spiritual power to medicine, it does not act.
Here, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of imagination. In a certain way, I have undertaken an exercise of imaginary autobiography in this book. This was not in the “fictional” sense, since all the characters, places, and events are real, but by virtue of the fact that the profound history of my life is a constant effort to expand the imagination and widen its boundaries in order to grasp its therapeutic and transformative potential. Along with intellectual imagination are emotional imagination, sexual imagination, physical imagination, sensory imagination, and economic, mystical, scientific, and poetic imaginations. It acts in all areas of our lives, even those considered “rational.” It is for this reason that one cannot tackle reality without developing the imagination from multiple angles. Normally, we visualize everything according to the narrow limits of our conditioned beliefs. We perceive nothing more of the mysterious reality, so vast and unpredictable, than what is filtered through our limited point of view. Active imagination is the key to a broad vision: it permits us to focus on life from angles that are not our own, imagining other levels of consciousness that are higher than ours. If I were a mountain, or the planet, or the universe, what would I say? What would a great teacher say? And what if God spoke through my mouth, what would the message be? And what if I were Death? The Death that revealed a dog to me that deposited a white stone at my feet, that separated me from my illusory “I,” that made me flee Chile, that drove me to search with desperation for a meaning in life — that Death has changed from a dreadful enemy to my amiable companion.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, age 72. Photo: Roger Farin.
To conclude this book, I would like to return to my youth, sitting once again on the branch of a tree next to my poet friend, and, as on that memorable occasion, deduce from the many things that we do not know what precious little we do know:
I do not know where I’m going, but I know who I am going with.
I do not know where I am, but I know that I am in myself.