Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

Next, I focused on my bones, felt them one by one. How forgotten was this humble structure! I had lugged it around as a symbol of death, not realizing its vital power. I recreated my skeleton, giving it a strong and flexible material like that of a steel sword, bones almost weightless, with a core of molten lava, like those on which the eagle soars. Suddenly, I realized that I had created the skeleton of a dancer — the skeleton of my maternal grandfather. Without the intervention of my own will I then felt long, powerful muscles and indestructible entrails forming around this luminous structure, with abundant golden hair falling around its shoulders like a liquid halo. I realized that during my gestation Sara had unceasingly desired to recreate her father, the legendary dancer turned into a burning torch. Those wishes had infiltrated my cells, a mandate contrary to the natural order of things, causing me to be born giving forth cries of dissatisfaction. I was myself — what a sin! — and not the seven-foot-tall giant, the practically weightless solar Hercules. In order to be loved, I would have had to make myself into that myth. The flaming dead man was my ideal of perfection. I wanted to undo all of that and imagine another ideal body for myself. And yet, for all that I tried, I could not get rid of it. I recognized that I carried that model embedded in my genes, that every cell in my body aspired to be him. To keep struggling to change the effigy would be to deceive myself. Perhaps for centuries, from generation to generation, nature had been striving to produce that entity. Why not obey her? And if this meant that in a metaphorical manner, I would become my mother’s father, then what of it? She had dreamed of being the daughter of a strong yet sensitive man, an artist. Once, shedding many tears, Sara had told me that when her father, Alejandro Prullansky, was dancing down the street engulfed in a rose of flame he had shouted out poems instead of screaming, until he crumbled to ashes.

Feeling myself living in this graceful imaginary body, I now became capable of movements that I had never known before. Space, which had previously seemed to me a terrifying abyss, enveloped me like a soft coat and showed me where to go; it became a protective carpet and ceiling, stretched to the horizon like an enormous harp, standing before me offering views through infinite windows. For the first time, I felt at ease in the world. The sensation of divergence disappeared. Countless invisible threads tied me to the center of the Earth, to the land, to the sky. With the whole planet licking the soles of my feet, I was moved to dance, to jump higher and higher, to go beyond the stars, into the depths of the sky.

What I am relating may seem absurd. What could be the use of such self-deception? My answer is that as a young man struggling to escape the weight of depression during that time, imagining myself to be strong and weightless offered me a lifeline that saved me from suffocating in the trap that was my family and allowed me to undertake liberating work. But, without any guide, where was I to start? Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: “The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the ‘ordinary tumult,’ will hear the Master say: ‘Watch out, there is a wall.’ ‘But is this wall temporary?’ asks the restless soul, ‘can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?’ ‘I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself.’”

Who had written these lines, brought to me on a piece of paper that flitted down the street like a dirty butterfly? Was someone trying to tell me that my own being, which I myself despised, was worthy of attention from magical chance? And that I was not a vacant entity, that inside me there existed the power to cross or demolish the wall, because it was I myself who had built it? By saying, “Watch out, there is a wall!” the Master had stated that the disciple was not seeing due to distraction. Perhaps I was confusing the wall with reality, mistaking my mental limits for the natural boundaries of the world. Here is how I saw myself: since childhood I had been robbed of my freedom, my mind enclosed by a fence that prevented expansion. I closed my eyes. I saw myself submerged in a black sphere. This was the wall. As soon as I shut my eyelids, I found myself compressed within a dark skull. And because I felt blind, the possibility of existing escaped me. To lose sight of the outside world was to lose myself. The solitude became even greater when I plugged my ears with my fingers. Blocked off from light and sound, my wretched condition, my lack of sensation, my nothingness, manifested with implacable cruelty. In fact, I told myself, this blackness is impalpable. And if it is impalpable, then it does not have to be a thick barrier; it can be an infinite space. That’s it! When I close my eyes, I will imagine that my consciousness is floating at the center of the cosmos.

I began to feel that I was moving forward. I traveled and traveled for a considerable time, farther and farther, extending without end. Gradually, in the infinite blackness, points of light began to shine. Now I was moving through a starry firmament. After enjoying the vastness that was presented to me, I undertook the same experience in reverse, as if I had eyes in the back of my head, then to the left and right, as if I had eyes in my temples. Then I descended into a well of infinite circumference, never reaching the bottom. The farther I went the more I lost the sensation of falling, and at last the descent reversed and turned into an ascent. Farther and farther, always farther; I returned to my center and made the sphere grow in all directions at once. The space around me was constantly expanding. Then I began to contract it. Forward, backward, left, right, up, down, all directions were concentrated on me. I nourished myself with stars, becoming more and more intense. I had eliminated distance. I was a point of light. Ah, such concentration! Attention, attention, attention is all that I was! My mind turned me into a transparent receptacle in which words arranged into sentences without beginning or end — impersonal herds with no use besides their beauty — paraded like windswept clouds.

I allowed the sensation of my body’s presence to manifest itself. I concentrated my attention on all the different parts of the organism. I took stock of what I was feeling. Every organ, every limb, every region of the body had something to say. At first there were complaints, accusations of me abandoning them, not trusting them, but then came euphoric declarations of love. I discovered that my arms, my legs, my ears, skin, muscles, bones, lungs, intestines, the whole body was filled with an immense joy of living. I sank into my brain and entered the pineal gland. I imagined it as a diamond reigning on a throne amid reverent convolutions. I then navigated into the bloodstream. The heat of this thick liquid seemed to come from a distant past. I gave myself over to the ebb and flow, the coming and going from the center to the periphery and from the periphery to the center, as from the explosive central point of creation to the confines of the universe, an incommensurable rose opening and closing for all eternity.

Thanks to these exercises I was able to expand my limited mental space. Whenever an idea appeared, locked in a chain of words, I exploded it into a thousand echoes that transformed themselves like clouds. I never again thought linearly but in complex structures, labyrinths, where the effect sometimes came before the cause. The outer surface of my skull became the interior, and consciousness, like the pulp of a peach around its pit, became an exterior inextricably joined to the sky.