Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Understand that I have the magical power to make whatever I want appear before my eyes. So, I feel the desire to conduct an erotic experience. I create three women-creatures, half-panther and half-human, crouching or on all-fours. I kiss one on the mouth, and her long lips seem like the vulva’s labia. I try to put my index finger in their sex, under the tail. I possess one while the others scratch me agreeably, and I try to reach orgasm. But inevitably I quit being lucid, and the dream absorbs me and, finally, it turns into a nightmare. I wake up with palpitations. .

Where do these experiences reside in the initiation dimension?

In the special feature of which, at the moment that I began making love with those women animals, the desire overtook me, making me lose lucidity, and the dream escaped my control. I forgot I was dreaming. The same thing happened to me with wealth. When I quit being fascinated by money, my dream quit being lucid. Each time I tried to satisfy my human passions, the script absorbed me and I lost lucidity. It was a big lesson: I finally understood that, in life as in dreams, in order to remain lucid it is necessary to distance oneself, to not identify oneself with the action. It is an old spiritual principle that the lucid dream made me remember. Desire and fear are, as all traditions affirm, the two faces of our identity.

Justifiably, the dream also showed me how to behave in the face of my fears. There was a period in which I often had the same nightmare: I found myself in a desert when a psychic entity surged from the horizon like an immense cloud of negativity with the intent to destroy me. I woke up screaming, soaked in sweat. One day, I got fed up and I decided to offer myself in a sacrifice to this entity. Stronger than the dream, in a state of lucid terror, I told myself, “Okay, I’m going to stop wanting to wake up. You don’t have to do anything but come and destroy me.” The entity approached and suddenly disappeared. I woke up for a few seconds to return to a light, very pleasurable, and refreshing sleep. So I understood that we ourselves nourish our own terrors. What scares us loses all power over us when we loosen our grip. It is one of the classic events of lucid dreaming. I, thus, made several attempts to control my fear of the final passage while crossing my own death.

Can you give me other examples of this process?

Well, it suffices to consult my notebook. Listen:

I have a strong desire to urinate. I feel the accumulation of liquid in my bladder. In a white bathtub, I piss a huge jet of blood. I know it is serious, but I don’t worry. I tell myself, “The liquid is red because I make too much effort. I cannot stop urinating; to change this, I can relax and, with my will, transform the red into yellow.” At no moment did I let myself be beat by the anxiety. Little by little, I transform the color. Then the nightmare dominates me again, and again I urinate blood. I take back control of my dream, without losing my cool, and the jet definitely turns amber.

Another dream:

I am at a café, in a public plaza. I sit in a corner among the other clients. Suddenly, in the middle of the terrace, a bearded man, crazy and aggressive, takes out a gun. With a burst of frightening laughter, he points the gun at a colleague’s temple. Indignant, I rise and tell him he should prove himself with greater delicacy. I remind him that my friend previously attempted suicide by firing a bullet into his head and risks being traumatized by this detestable joke. The madman looks at me and takes aim while murmuring in a sadistic tone, “Fine. Now what?” He waits for me to start to tremble, but I am not afraid. The madman walks around me. I do not move. I know he will not shoot, and I tell him, “You won’t do it.”

“And why not?” he asks.

“Because I am too little for your delusions of grandeur.”

Indeed I know this madman, obsessed by his own spirit, cannot truly be interested enough in me to seek to annihilate me. I wake up happy. This, which could have been a nightmare, did not scare me.

Another dream in which I tame my monster:

I walk upon unknown territory and reach a hole like the mouth of a huge sewer. A horrible, giant monster about twenty meters high springs up. I immediately subdue my distaste, because I know this hideous creature is part of me, an obscure energy of my spirit. I decide not to destroy it but to transform it. So it covers itself with white feathers, turns luminous, deploys six wings, and rises. Turned into a very beautiful angelic entity, he proposes to take me along with him into the cosmos. I overcome the temptation. The angel is the luminous energy of my spirit that I must absorb. I arrange for him to cover me as I sweat from all of the pores in my skin. Now it is I who has turned into a being of light and energy. I rise calmly. I wake up full of joy.

Now, listen to this very poetic dream where I see myself entering, eyes big and open, the kingdom of the dead:

I am in the anteroom of death. Seated in front of me on a bench is the singer Carlos Gardel, deceased for forty years. I say hello and he says, “Go ahead, have courage, decide to die.” We pass into another room where a door going directly to death is found. A gloomy doorman touches everyone present and decides who will go through the last door and who will not. Before us, two adolescents arrive. After they are frisked, the doorman forces them back, and they go, sorry to still have to live. Gardel is declared dead; it is now my turn. The doorman touches me and declares me deceased. Carlos Gardel hesitates, he is afraid, and I tell him, “What does it matter! Good! Now we are going to truly know what is behind this door!” Firmly decided, I push him so that he passes into this dimension with me. Upon passing through the door, the singer disappears into an explosion of light. Having barely crossed the border of death, I find myself in a green landscape. I am in the company of very agreeable people. I throw blank paper envelopes into the air. They fall down again full of sweets and precious objects. I can perform miracles as I dominate this dimension, and I know that the tossed envelopes will always fall back down full. I offer the gifts to the people who accompany me, and I wake up feeling very content.

Finally, a last dream among many others where I find myself once again confronted by monsters:

I must cross the dark underground on a dirt floor. A stranger waits to let me pass. I divine in the shadows the presence of an animal. I know that it acts like a black panther and that the unknown is the trainer. He signals me to cross directly, without fear. I follow his instructions, but the panther jumps on me, throws me to the ground, and, with his claws, first immobilizes my head. It nibbles at my cranium without hurting me, the way a cat does playing with a mouse. I see the decomposed face of the trainer who watches me at the mercy of his big cat; he feels powerless. The animal never frightens me. Without moving, I let it caress my hair with its mouth. I know I must abandon myself, become one with her, accept the situation with love, dissolve into the panther. I begin to vibrate with love, and I become one with her. At this instant, the panther disappears. I get up, cross the underground, and go on my way. I wake up full of joy.

If I understand right, you have applied what you’ve learned in your dreams to the course of your daily life, and you have afterward integrated these lessons into the practice of Pyschomagic.

Exactly. I have forced myself from day to day to be faithful to what has been given to me to understand in the dream. For what good is it to receive the lessons without applying them to the core of daily troubles? A lesson doesn’t become operative, does not acquire its transformative force, until it’s applied.