Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

Suddenly, without any movement of the legs announcing it, the spider let out a long thread and made as if to drop down on me. I gave a cry of fear and dodged it, my armchair tipped over, and I fell backward onto the floor. I grabbed my shoes, put them on my hands like gloves, and with a single clap crushed the innocent creature. I felt sorry, not for it but for myself. Thanks to the derelict state my room had fallen into I was able to realize that in spite of these imaginative pleasures I did not feel any better emotionally. The images I created might be jewels, but the chest they were kept in, which is to say myself, was worthless. I was using my imagination in a limited form. I had dedicated myself to creating mental representations. This technique certainly opened up dreamlike paths, showed the way to sublime ideals, and provided elements for making works of art, but it did not change the incomplete manner in which I perceived myself. My body still appeared to me as a ghastly enemy, no more or less than a nest inhabited by death, and I was afraid to use it to its fullest extent. My sex organs were filling themselves with shame in order to dissimulate the fear of creating. My heart was immersing itself in malice and indifference to the world in order to avoid developing sublime feelings. My mind was invoking human weakness in order to ignore its power to change the world. Anything infinite, however well I could imagine it, gave me visceral dread. My animal side wanted a small space, a lair, a short amount of time, “I’ll only last as long as my body,” an opaque consciousness, relegating me to a life in the shadows avoiding responsibilities, an unvarying life bolstered by rigid habits in which change was considered a hidden aspect of death. I decided to free myself from these images, this mental celebration that concealed an avoidance of my organic nature, and to investigate a form of creation by means of my sensations. I thought, “When I hear sad news, I have no desire to move; I feel heavy, dense. By contrast, when the news is good, I want to dance; I feel light, agile. The facts that I know from words or visual images do not change my body, but they do change my perception of it. It must be possible to transform my perception of myself by my own will!”

I began an intense series of exercises. At night, once the insults and occasional blows between my father and mother had ceased, once my sister had stopped playing Chopin exercises on her white piano and the silence spread like balsam over a wound, I sat naked in my wooden chair and began to relax my muscles in order to concentrate and meditate. Unfortunately, several times during each night, trains passed directly below my window with deafening whistles. This noise, like a lance, left a bloody gash at the center of my spirit. I struggled for several weeks not to defend myself, to let the sound traverse my consciousness without retaining it, to pay it no attention and continue with my exercise. When I achieved this, I was able to immerse myself in my meditations without any apprehension. I conquered the flies, which were even more of a nuisance than the trains, in the same manner. Even though I closed the curtains and plunged myself into darkness, those insects never ceased buzzing and circulating, irritating my skin as they walked on it. Added to this, the apartment where we lived had no heating or air conditioning, and the heat and cold were intolerable at times. All these difficulties sharpened my capacity for concentration.

If I wanted to develop my sensory imagination, before anything else I had to liberate it from the tyranny of weight. The planet, always present in my body through its force of attraction, was telling me, “You are mine, from me you came and to me you will return.” I felt that what was heaviest was darkness. I filled myself with it, a dense material, painful, overwhelming. I filled my feet with its blackness, then my legs, and the rest of my body. Having become a skin that was filled with tar, I breathed in as deeply as I could and exhaled the magma from my feet, replacing it with light. I emptied my legs, my arms, my torso, my head; I was a hide filled with glowing energy. I felt lighter and lighter. It seemed to me as if I would jump twenty meters when I took a step. The absence of the sensation of weight filled me with joy, with a desire to live, and made me breathe in deeply. My spirit was no longer invaded by psychological garbage, by gloomy serpents of shadow. I wanted to get dressed and go out for a walk. So I did. It was four in the morning. This working class neighborhood, with its dark streetlights (thieves had stolen the bulbs), was almost completely obscured in darkness. I walked along feeling as luminous as the moon, occasionally taking little jumps. Suddenly I saw three evil-looking men approaching. Prudently, I changed my course. Seeing my defensive movement, they fanned out. One pulled a club, the other a knife, and the third a pistol. I set out running toward San Pablo Street, the central artery of the neighborhood, where trains passed and a bar might still be open. “Stop, dickhead!” they shouted. I let out a cry of distress, sounding like a pig squealing in the slaughterhouse. Not a single window opened! Not a door! There was I, who had just recently been weightless, galloping along, feeling heavier than an elephant under the indifferent sky, the fecal footprint of fear growing in my pants. Feeling the pain of shattered dignity, I set all my hopes on getting to the main street. But it was dark! They were ten meters behind me. Giving up, vanquished, trembling, I stopped and waited for the bandits. They came at me and knocked me to the ground with a punch in the stomach. With agonized calm, I begged them not to kill me, to take everything from me, because I was a poet. They searched my pockets, finding a crumpled banknote and my school papers. After examining the papers meticulously, they returned them to me, along with the money, then saluted and explained that they were police and had mistaken me for a thief. “Young man, next time don’t run away, because that makes you look suspicious!” With my body and soul aching, I walked on to San Pablo. There, just around the corner at a café a group of people were playing cards under the light of a gas lamp. A few more steps and I would have been safe! If they really had been muggers, they could have slit my throat like a cow’s and left me there, a few steps from salvation. At that moment, I swore that I would always sustain my efforts until I had no drop of energy left and that I would never abandon a task I began until I finished it.

I continued my work after I returned to my room. I had met terror face-to-face, a paralyzing sensation of oppression that turned me into an animal. In that realm, where beings devour each other, fear is the essential element of survival. To ascend from animal to human is to escape fear. Fear of what? Animals have no concept of death because they perceive themselves only as matter. Their essential fear is that of losing the corporeal form. I felt the threats to my body that were present like never before. Flesh was bound to age, sicken, die; it had to be nourished and protected. Along with the fear of losing my body came the need to have a lair. Being descended from the Jews, who had been nomads for centuries, I had no homeland, no roots, no burrow. How could I rid myself of this anguish? Should I imitate Buddha, renouncing earthly life, disassociating myself from my body as well as my “ego,” returning to the impersonality of the original energy, liberating myself from the chain of reincarnation? Thanks to the atheism that Jaime had inculcated in me this seemed like a fairytale, a coward’s way out. “The sword that cuts everything will not cut you when you become the sword.” Thinking thus, I decided to become that which caused my terror.