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

Suddenly, losing control of my rage, I seized a chair and smashed it into a mirror. Walking heedlessly over the broken glass, trying to hide the limp from my injured foot, I dressed, lashing out at her with insults. “You insolent, didactic charlatan! You’ve read a handful of books on psychoanalysis and think you can pass yourself off as a master! Daughter of Gurdjieff? Don’t make me laugh!” I was still hurling these insults as I opened the door, a shoe still in my hand, and I was so furious that my voice rose to a scream at the last phrase.

At that precise instant a blind tourist passed in the hallway with a guide dog. Startled by my scream, the dog sensed aggression and began to bark loudly. The blind man was frightened and began to call for the hotel police. I jumped from the corridor back into the room and closed the door.

Reyna D’Assia received me with hilarious laughter. “You see? You can’t escape so easily. A blind man’s dog stopped you. In English, dog spelled backward is god . The god of the blind, the ignorant like you, obliges you to listen to me.

“Now open your ears: We always fall into a rage for reasons other than what we believe. You think mistakenly that I have offended you. The truth is that during these hours in this room, you have received something from me that you have never before received in your life. It has brought to the surface all the hatred you feel for your mother. You are reacting as a psychological barbarian might react. You have aspired to a relation between man and woman that is as simple as that between animals, never imagining that love between a man and a woman is also the expression of a neurosis of two genealogical trees.

“You must understand this: The only true couple is not a symbiosis, but a collaboration between two free, conscious beings. Cease to beg for love! I am not your solution, still less your crutch. The purpose of our meeting is not to share the sublime pleasure of an existence that is neither mine nor yours. An alchemical text says: ‘From one substance, two are made and from these two, one is made that bears no resemblance to the first substance.’

“You and I shall establish a meeting of soul and soul so that this androgynous energy expands into the eternal and infinite present. It is marvelous to meet someone who exists at your own level of consciousness! This has not yet happened for you. Your intellect is like a wild horse that you have never tamed. It does as it pleases, dominating you, directing you under the influence of insane ideas implanted in it by your ancestors ever since your birth. Instead of being the slave of its desires, you must teach it to obey and develop it into a machine without limits.”

“Your theories are just words,” I retorted. “You brag about this power, but it’s impossible for you to demonstrate it to me!”

“It is possible, and I will demonstrate it! Psychological barbarians such as yourself find it entirely natural to spend hours training their body in sport, yet it never occurs to them to train their mind. My blessed father rarely had the time to come see me himself, but he appointed one of his major disciples, Alfred Orage, to take charge of my education until I was thirteen. This remarkable man taught me psychological exercises that permitted me to realize what you shall now hear and see.”

Then, like a monkey entranced by a cobra, I watched a fascinating spectacle. Standing on her left leg, Reyna D’Assia traced a figure eight in the air continuously with her right leg. Meanwhile, her left hand continuously traced a square and her right hand a triangle. All the while, she recited a seemingly chaotic succession of numbers. In continuous movement, Reyna paused only briefly in her reciting, explaining the different exercises. They were so complicated that I could not remember all of them, though I do remember a few. I heard her recite, very fast and seemingly nonsensically, the multiplication tables from 2 to 22. For example, 8 × 1 = 8; 8 × 2 = 7; 8 × 3 = 6; 8 × 4 = 5. . 8 × 12 = 6; and thus onto 8 × 100 = 8. It sounded to me like a computer gone haywire.

“Listen carefully: 2 × 8 = 16. If I add the 1 and the 6, I get 7, you understand? No? Another example: 8 × 12 = 96 and 9 + 6 = 15 and 1 + 5 = 6. Therefore, 8 × 12 = 6. How much is 7 × 7?” Without giving me time to think, she replied, “7 × 7 = 4.”

I was feeling dizzy. Relentlessly, Reyna continued the exercise and then complicated it even more. While continuing to recite the table in ascending order, she interspersed it with an alternating descending order:

“8 × 1 = 8; 8 × 100 = 8; 8 × 2 = 7; 8 × 99 = 9; 8 × 3 = 6; 8 × 98 = 1. .”

As she continued her reciting and movements, I did manage to verify one part with a laborious mental calculation. Multiplying 8 by 98, I obtained 784. 7 + 8 + 4 = 19; 1 + 9 = 10; 1 + 0 = 1. Indeed, 8 × 98 = 1. .

For an interminable hour, Reyna held me spellbound with further mental juggling. Some of it was absurd, such as mixing two tables together: 7 × 1 = 12; 12 × 1 = 7. . 7 × 2 = 24; 12 × 2 = 14; 7 × 3 =36; 12 × 3 =21; 7 × 80 = 960; 12 × 80 = 560. . And she went on like this to 7 × 100 = 1,200 and 12 × 100 = 700. As if this was not enough, she once more interspersed it with alternating ascending and descending tables: 7 × 2 = 1,188; 12 × 99 = 14. . 7 × 3 = 1,176; 12 × 98 = 21. . 7 × 4 = 1,164; 12 × 97 = 28. .

A feeling of terror began to grow in me as this woman began to dance as a sinister machine — with very complex and sinuous movements that had not the slightest hint of seduction — to a music that did not exist for me. The more complicated the dance became, the more insanely complicated her numerical exercises became.

In her trance, she shouted, “Number 1 is Tom, number 2 is Dick, number 3 is Harry!” And then she counted: “Tom, Dick, Harry, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Tom-0, Tom-Tom, Tom-Dick, Tom-Harry, Tom-4. .” and so on, substituting, for example, 5-Harry-Tom for the number 531. . Then, to complicate things further, she yelled, “Now I’m changing! Tom = 2, Dick = 5, Harry = 7!” This meant: 1, Tom, 3, 4, Dick, 6, Harry, 8, 9, 10, 11, 1-Tom, 13, 14, 1-Dick, 16, 1-Harry. . and on and on.

I felt as if my brain and my entire body would explode from all these complications. When I could stand it no more, I leaped up, grabbed her, and halted her gyrations.

“Get hold of yourself, you lunatic! Your problem is that you’ve never been trained to develop your soul; you’ve been taught to be only a kind of circus performer. It is like the story of the juggler who presented himself to the king. After twenty years of training, he had achieved the feat of juggling a hundred chickpeas at once without letting a single one fall. As a reward, the king gave him a barrel full of chickpeas.”

“So! I see that you do not understand the importance of these exercises. You are an artist established in the habit of pulling from your navel all sorts of garbage — which then are qualified as works of art. Yet they are only the expressions of a pack of contradictory egos that you call I . Your mind creates one thing, your emotional center wants something else, your sexual center demands still another thing, your body is going its own way, and meanwhile, that which should be your soul is an egg that no one is hatching. You are a chariot pulled by four horses straining in different directions, and the coachman has fallen asleep at the reins. Of course, the inner jewel is still there, but veiled by a cloud of contradictory thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions. There is no real will, no unitary goal — only a chaos of changing objects under which is buried an unchanging subject. You cannot hear the beating of your heart in a city roaring with traffic. .”

“What arrogant presumption!” I retorted. “How do you know I have not attained inner unity? Every morning, I meditate for two hours with a Zen master.”