Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Creator of El Topo

Humming a lullaby and with infinite patience, she scraped my entire body, including my scalp, teeth, tongue, palate, ears, nails, penis, testicles, and anus. She was so sure and precise in her actions that I never felt the slightest tickle, even on the soles of my feet. She dug the knife in with confidence at just the right depth to dissolve the grains. It was painless, neither too soft nor too hard. Her hands seemed like those of a master sculptor who removes only what is unnecessary in order to reveal the work of art already contained in the material.

It was night when I returned home. I had only a mango for dinner, and I was so full of energy that I did not fall asleep until dawn. I arose at eight o’clock the next morning, feeling not the slightest lack of sleep.

For the next nine days, doña Magdalena repeated the scraping, digging a little deeper each time with the dull point of the knife. My opacity was disappearing; I began to feel more and more transparent. I saw the city and its inhabitants in a different way. I had ceased to criticize, ceased to feel my own guilt. Like a huge breath of wind, the joy of life had swept away my habitual anguish.

Every time I visited her, Magdalena’s personality — and even her physical appearance — changed like the clouds. I was incapable of grasping her mind. Once, I heard her say: “I am an empty chair.” With her hands, she infused me with the sublime, injecting her humble wisdom into my heart. I thought of certain insects who place their larvae in the body of others so that they can feed on their blood and emerge later into splendid offspring. After a total of ten scrapings, she cleaned my ears with a little stick, anointed them with perfume, and finally rubbed honey in them.

“Now I can really speak to you, for your ears are softened to hear my words. Concentrate yourself. Realize how you treat yourself: like a machine or a donkey to be punished. We allow our body to see, hear, feel, and savor things — but its touch stirs up unwholesome associations. Even when we are naked, we are wearing gloves. Civilization has turned our hands into tools, weapons, fingers made to push buttons. Like clever animals, we serve words, but our words serve only concepts. They have ceased to communicate soul. My son, you do not have two hands; you have two guilt-ridden pairs of pliers. Whenever you touch, you steal. You must relearn to feel your hands. Let me see you open them. . spread out your fingers, stretch out your palms fully. You see? You can’t do it completely. You have trouble letting go of what you think is yours. You are lugging around an invisible corpse: your security, your fears of possessing nothing, of losing what you think is necessary. You content yourself with a handful of coins, not realizing that all the money on the planet belongs to you.

“Open your hands so wide that you feel they are losing their limits, that they contain the whole earth, the infinite sky, the eternal universe. . Don’t try to hold on to anything, to possess anything. Accept giving away everything and receiving everything. See how your hands breathe in and out, following the rhythm of your lungs. Feel the ebb and flow of your blood, let your hands participate in the beating of your heart, let them nourish themselves from the warmth of life. It is a life without end, for its essence is pure, imperishable love. . Now close your fingers. Feel the noble, transcendent force in your wrists. They are like two warriors, ready to the end against death, and then unfold your hands like two sacred flowers, opening their palms from which springs the perfume of a new life. . I beg you, my son: Recover your memory! Now feel your hands growing smaller. . smaller and smaller. . more. . They are becoming very tiny, the hands of a baby, a fetus. Feel the sensations of a fetus in your tiny hands. Feel the divine fluid around you in your mother’s belly, feel the innocence, the immense tenderness that resides in every cell of your body, the recognition of the mystery that formed it, the pleasure of energy that once more is offering the gift of matter to the world, the soul coming into the midst of your flesh. . Become the mother of your hands, promise them the world, teach them to go beyond density, help them understand the secret poetry of space. Create sculptures in the air. Visualize the forms you are creating little by little so that your touch is not alone in knowing these forms.

“Now let yourself grow up. Let memory return; remember that from these hands your first caresses were born. At that time, you had no sensual experience; everything was new. You groped to discover what distance meant, you knew no separation, you knew that you could touch the stars with your hands. In those hands, you now carry your entire past. Feel them — they are still claws, hooves, even tentacles. Go deeper, all the way back to when they were earth, stone, metal, primordial energy. Now come back, grope in the direction of the future, feel your fingers growing longer, becoming transparent, becoming wings, luminous waves, angelic singing. .

“Do you now understand the power that you can transmit? If you can get rid of those mental gloves, your hands will radiate a golden aura.”

Then Magdalena opened her own hands in front of my face. I saw that they were indeed surrounded by a golden aura. She pressed them against my heart. I began to weep. I realized that what I was receiving did not come from her. With this apparently simple yet magical gesture, she was transmitting a knowledge that my heart had lacked ever since my parents conceived me: the knowledge of divine love.

“You don’t yet have a frame — you are like a man without a skeleton. How can you caress without bones?”

She had me lie on the small bed and began to palpate me. I felt as if her fingers were digging into my flesh and taking hold of my bones. I had always preferred to forget this essential part of my body, because of my fear of death. She worked upon all my bones, pressing into the most hidden corners, tracing forms, making me feel their medullar strength. Never again would I move in my old ways. Until then, my movements had always been superficial, centered in the flesh. Now my movements had a solid base full of life. In the whiteness of my bones, I no longer saw death, something to be swallowed by the earth, but a concentration of time — I had a skeleton. It was like other skeletons yet different, for it was now impregnated with a personal soul.

“You know how to ask; you have done so since you were born. Open your arms, stretch out your hands, and open your mouth to the sky, waiting for manna to fall into it from heaven. My son, you forget that the earth teaches us to turn as the galaxy, the universe turns. If you lack an axis for turning, you become a festering swamp, a morass of hopes that never rise up, like a vine that has no wall to climb upon and grow. Your bones develop by being used as an axis for turning. Both leaning and moving in all directions have their origins in rotation.”

Her hands working like pliers, Magdalena grasped and moved one bone after another with endless patience — the fibula, the humerus, the cubitus, the femur, the patella, the tibia. . Slowly and relentlessly, she made them all turn outward, as if opening a coffin that had been closed for ages. At first, I was tense and felt a number of minor pains. Then I began to feel as if I had been freed from a shell that began in my bones and reached all the way up into my mind.

“Without realizing it, your arms, legs, and spine have turned inward upon themselves from fear of others. This goes all the way back to fetal memories. Your skeleton has learned to react as a porcupine reacts, rolling up into itself at the least sign of danger. But the clock cannot be turned backward — you cannot again become a fetal ball, separated from the world. Your bones know that someday they will float in the cosmos. Your skeleton, attracted to the future, has the capability of opening as a flower that you have kept closed like a bud. Enough of walking with a black wall in your back, carrying the darkness of the world in your neck! Turn your head and let your eyes shine into the unknown. . more, do it again. . to the left now, like that, until you forget you even have a neck. . now to the right. . You see, you don’t move forward when you drag darkness behind you. Your body has no front, no back, no sides. . It is a shining sphere.”