Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

You usually say, “What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up.”

And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose. If I keep my knowledge, I lose it. I had a teacher, an alchemist, who was one hundred and ten years old, and he hung himself with a wire in his room. He had encyclopedic and monumental knowledge, but he doled it out in small phrases. . How did accumulating such knowledge serve him? He committed suicide!

One receives knowledge and gives it. When you give knowledge, you enrich yourself. If you do not give love, you are detracting from yourself. If I begin to help people, if I begin to heal people, I begin to heal. Do you understand? To be a therapist, you have to be a patient. The first thing to do to heal yourself is to heal others. The world is you and me. The world is not ours, it is what we are. I do not want to go about with dirty feet. Why do I have to walk on contaminated land or between trees that are dying? What we suffer, we are doing to ourselves: if we poison the atmosphere, we attack our lungs. If I ingest toxins like nicotine or alcohol, I am contaminating my blood; but since blood is part of everything — my blood is not my own — I am poisoning humanity.

I have one more saying: “I do not want anything for myself that I do not want for others.”

You have written that to transform oneself one must give and not ask, which is very different.

To transform oneself one must give, but to transform oneself one must also learn. One closes oneself off and does not admit love from another, the tenderness or the help of another. The real leap is learning to receive, which is as difficult as learning to give. And it is necessary to learn to ask for what one needs: justice is to give to oneself what one deserves. This is why the gospels say, “Knock and the door will be opened.” If I ask for a long life, it is because I have the right to ask for it. If I ask that we will use an energy other than oil, it is because I have the right to ask for it, just as I have the right to ask that the rivers be clean or that wars stop or that wealth does not accumulate only in some countries while misery exists in others! I have the right to ask for wealth to circulate all around the planet. We have to learn to ask for what is just and to not ask for what it is not necessary to ask.

And the people who do not ask. .?

A saint who asks for nothing is a saint who lives imprisoned in himself and who lets the world go by. It is an individual decision, but it is necessary to have someone to whom you transmit your wisdom. A moment ago, I mentioned my alchemist teacher, who possessed incredible wisdom and who revealed secrets to me in droplets. He had been a magician, a famous man. He had put all of his money in the bank and, by an economic error of inflation, he lost it, and he did not know how to live. And so he hung himself with a wire. He hung himself for not having shared with others. I had a deep crisis when I learned of this, and I interrogated myself as to this man’s end. I learned something: the wisdom that you do not give, you lose. At this man’s death, with the reaction it produced, I started my Mystical Cabaret, a place where, once a week, I could teach others everything I had learned during that week. At times, they were stealing ideas from me, but this does not matter. There are people who say they invented something that I invented. It doesn’t matter.

Once, this same centenarian teacher, who had the body of an adolescent, told me he had studied martial arts. “Me, too,” I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, “Attack me.” I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. “Beauty is the most dangerous weapon,” he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.

The human being’s most dangerous weapon is the imagination. Where does imagination come from?

Imagination is a game of constructing what we have. By diverse channels, we acquire things: words, emotions, desires, needs, feelings, perceptions. We organize all these things with our rational consciousness, the way we have learned to do. Although we may be primitives in the process of identifying and knowing our own possibilities, we organize them. In the brain, all of these parts accumulate and can mix and organize with different shapes, as in a game of Legos. In this process, we not only rely on what is given to us from the outside, acquired, but also on what we find, mysteriously, in our brains: that which we call unconscious. Using imagination is creating with these materials. When you read, you are imagining much more than you are reading. The imagination is a language richer than limited oral language. The imagination exceeds rational limits. Visual, tactile, olfactory, oral, auditory, emotional, sexual, and intellectual imaginations exist. An emotional imagination carries your feelings to the sublime or the criminal. A sexual imagination is like that of the Marquis de Sade; a material imagination is like that of Karl Marx, who saw the world through the economy. I call the imagination creativity — the foundation of life. If we suffer, it is because of a shortage of imagination, for lack of creativity.

After all, do we have to forgive life of something?

( Smiling .) Your question is sweet, because it makes life an object and you a subject outside of life, and more than that, a judge of life. We are not paper dolls outside of life! To forgive life, we would have to first forgive ourselves. And we would have to be guilty of something, and we are not. There is no fault. Nor does a criminal exist who bears all the guilt: all individual crime is a product of the family, the society, and history.

I was speaking in terms of resentment toward life.

One must lose resentment; it is big work to resolve fury and grudges. We are full of grudges. We are full of grudges and frustrations for love not obtained. Illness is a lack of love.

And against the lack of love?

Creativity.

We can learn to be creative?

Of course, and I will give you a course immediately.

When I speak of creativity, I am referring to a complete change in ourselves. If I never wanted to reflect aloud about this subject, it is because what you are going to hear is very strange. Without creativity, the world goes all wrong. I am sure that the majority of illnesses come from a lack of creativity, and the social problems we have in the world are due to this shortage. Misunderstood creativity provokes war and crimes.

To work with creativity, you must be a critic of yourself and all that you represent. When I look at a person, I can see the state of his body. I can also see his mental pressures, as if his spirit is withdrawn into himself. In others, I perceive the doubts they have about themselves, or rather I observe their upbringing like a heavy scab, that they were raised in rationality. Others dance all the time with the things of the past. When I look, I don’t do it with a critical eye but with a creative one. If I read the tarot to someone, I see the person completely, because I release any restrictions. This is only an example of creativity.

I want to explain what creativity is as a whole and why creativity is so rare. Creativity is so strange that with it one can become Christ, Buddha, the Virgin, or Athena. Creativity is related to religion and also to mythology. It has saved my life. For this reason, I am going to begin this course by recounting things of my past.