Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

In my preceding exercises I had begun by imagining myself filled with black magma, which was then expelled so that light could inhabit me. But the mythological dragon, being immortal, cannot be conquered by killing but only by seduction. Thus one must accept being its food. I returned to imagining my feet full of that nefarious tar. Then, instead of identifying with my feet, I made myself one with the black stuff. I was the threat; I was the bringer of death; I was the nothing with its carnivorous cravings. I moved up through my legs, filled my pelvis, my trunk, my arms, my head, and erased all traces of morality, becoming a thick evil. With a phenomenal effort, I abandoned my attachment to my human form and turned loose. Leaving the carnal vessel I grew out in all directions like a voracious mass and began to overtake the building, the city, the country, the planet, the galaxy, finally filling the universe and continuing my infinite expansion. Stars lived within me, space monsters, demons, ambiguous entities, insidious ghosts, demented murderers, rats, vipers, venomous insects. Then I imagined the inverse: the infinite menace, the mortal shadow, began to invade space from all points and inundated the cosmos, advancing toward me. It swallowed galaxies, our solar system, the planet, the South American continent, Chile, Santiago, the neighborhood of Matucana, my house, my room, and finally concentrated itself on my body. While I occupied the universe, the universe also accumulated beneath my skin. I felt invincible, I was the evil, and there was nothing that could frighten me, least of all my father.

At that late hour of the night, naked as I was, I began slowly walking around the apartment. I walked crouching forward like a hungry beast. My eyes adjusted to the darkness very quickly, and my sense of hearing became sharper, I could hear the slightest creak, and from far off I could hear the deep breathing of Jaime, Sara, and Raquel. Also, my olfactory sense perceived the different smells that filled the house like never before: the sweet scent of damp sheets, the rancid floorboards, the sulfur in the air, the salty smell of the walls. I went into my sister’s room. Because the windows were kept closed for fear of thieves, the heat made it necessary for her to sleep naked, with her legs spread. I put my nose a few inches from her crotch and smelled it. Both my pleasure and my disgust were such that the blackness of my heart seemed to transform itself into a tarantula. I imagined myself violating her, then ripping open her belly with my fangs to devour her guts. I savored the sight of this forbidden orifice for a long moment, then slipped into the master bedroom. There was my mother, leaning against my father’s back. They were sleeping so deeply that they seemed like wax statues. I was invaded by a gigantic anger. I felt sure that I could rip open their jugulars with a single bite. Sara deserved my hatred because her foolish passivity made her complicit with Jaime. Without lifting a finger, she allowed my father to enjoy terrifying me. It was he who had taken pains to make me into a coward because he felt obliged to assert his dubious manhood and needed to overcome his problems with his gay brother. He who had taken me to the beach and made me stick my legs into pools where he knew octopuses lived, distracting me and keeping me there until one of those viscous animals wrapped its tentacles around my ankle. He who let me scream for a little while, then came to me laughing, pulled the suckers off my skin, bashed the animal against the rocks, then stuck his hand under the root of the tentacles and lifted the monster’s hood under my nose, turning it inside out. “They’re harmless. Don’t scream like a little girl; learn to be brave!” But how can a five-year-old child be brave when an adult forces him to hold onto his back, arms around his neck, as he runs into the raging ocean waves? There, clinging to my father like a limpet, I shut my eyes, wrinkled my nose, clenched my jaw, and endured the ordeal as he, roaring like a lion, threw himself under the giant waves again and again, riding them just as they broke. Despite my young age, I knew that if I let go I would die by drowning. The cold water of the Pacific Ocean seemed to turn my body into ice. My fingers were getting stiff. The force of the waves would tear me off Jaime’s powerful back. I began to scream. Jaime, furious, deposited me back on the beach while spitting the word “coward!” over and over again, not noticing that my lips were blue with cold. “Stop shaking, sissy! You have to learn to overcome fear!”

Well, now I had won. The guilty couple was there, defenseless, at the mercy of my hatred. I took a flowerpot full of moist soil in which worms had grown instead of the carnation seeds Sara had planted and with feline delicacy crawled onto the bed. Crouching, I emptied it out between their intertwined legs. I saw the masses of worms squirming very near to their crotches; the demon who protects the denizens of the night ensured that they did not awaken. I returned to my room, happy like never before, and fell asleep knowing that reality would no longer be the same. Neither Jaime nor Sara ever commented on the incident. Why? The event was so strange, so impossible, that their minds erased it like a bad dream.

Little by little, I understood that the being I perceived myself to be was not exactly the being I was. Moreover, the consciousness I perceived was not exactly my true consciousness but a distortion of it, brought about by my family and my education in school. I saw myself as my parents and teachers saw me. I saw with the eyes of others. My child’s brain, like a piece of wax, had been sculpted into the shape of the judgment of others. I concentrated on my hooked nose. I thought of the memories it contained — contempt, ridicule, name-calling, Pinocchio, Big Nose, Tuna Fish, Vulture, Wandering Jew — and then, the contemptuous stares of Jaime and Raquel, so proud of their straight noses. And finally, the indifference of my mother, who had erased me from her soul after they cut off my blond locks and left only some short dark hair. “Yes, I feel ugly, horrible, this enormous, monstrous bony nose that is not mine, I do not want it, it has invaded me, it is a vampire stuck to my face.” Once I had precisely delineated this feeling of disgust, I began to change it. The hooked nose that had been imposed on me must be conquered. I softened its boundaries, made it a ductile and malleable mass, perfumed it, filled it with love, light, and goodness, and finally I gave it sublime beauty. Little by little, I expanded this beauty across my face, my hair, my head, and then, like luminous water, over my entire body, washing away the cruel looks and revealing the beauty I deserved. I turned on the radio and heard a piece by Berlioz. Letting the accusations of ugliness fall away like tattered rags I began dancing, allowing my body to make graceful, delicate, beautiful movements. I felt that this beauty of form was inundating my soul. Something was opening up in my consciousness, and I realized that this assumed beauty was like a flower, spreading its perfume all over the world.

I did the same thing again, with more strength. My father’s gaze had trapped me in a corset of weakness. I chose my testicles as a starting point and filled them with an energy that spread through my body. Once I was completely full of this energy I tried to send it out through my fingers and toes, and with those twenty rays to transfix the world, reshaping its negativity to make it positive; but I encountered locks. In my soul there were prohibitions against being myself, requiring that I retain my conditioning, forcing me to live by the norms I had received through an ossified tradition. “You must not eat pork, you must not marry a Catholic, marriage is for life, money is earned through suffering, if you are not perfect you are worthless, you must be and act like everyone else, if you do not get your diploma you will fail in life. ” Family guardians appeared at my least attempt to transgress these crazy ideas, brandishing swords to castrate me. “How dare you? What do you take yourself for? Who are you to change the rules? If you do this, you’ll die of hunger! We are ashamed of you! You’re mad; come to your senses! Everyone will reject and despise you; you are destroying yourself! You’ll lose our love!” I felt like a dog covered with fleas. I realized my parents had abused me on all levels. On the intellectual level they had blocked off paths leading to the infinite with scathing, aggressive, sarcastic words, portraying themselves as clairvoyant, omnipotent, forcing me to see the world through their colored lenses. They had abused me emotionally with their cruelty, making me feel that they preferred my sister, creating a sordid trio of dependency, jealousy, and love-hate with her. They had bargained with me: “for us to love you, you have to do this or that, you have to be so and so, you have to buy the affection we give you at a high price.” They had abused me sexually, my mother because she hid all manifestations of passion beneath a veil of shame, passing herself off as a saint, and my father because he seduced his customers in front of me, hiding scurrilous insinuations beneath a mask of mirth. They had abused me on the material plane: I do not remember my mother ever cooking a meal, which was always done by a servant. I do not remember any cuddling, ever being taken out for a walk, ever having my birthday celebrated, ever being given a toy, ever being given a nice room. I slept on old stitched-up sheets, had plain curtains in my room dyed a hideous shade of burgundy, never had a nice ceiling light in my room, my bookshelves were made of old boards propped up on bricks, and I was always enrolled in horrible public schools. And what’s more every Saturday, when the other boys were relaxing or going to parties, I had to “pay” for what my parents gave me by staying in the shop, protecting the goods from the greed of thieves. And now I, this abused child, was abusing myself, trying every instant to reproduce the things that had traumatized me. Because they made fun of me, I sought out friends who despised me. Because they did not love me, I was forced to enter into relationships with people who could never love me. Because they ridiculed creativity, they made me doubt my values, sinking me into depression. By not giving me material things they made me pathologically shy, preventing me from going into a store to buy what I needed. I had made myself into my own bitter prisoner. “I have been despised, I have been punished, so now I do nothing, I am worth nothing, I do not have the right to exist.” Unable to feel at peace, I was being persecuted by a horde of ancient furies. I began to shake myself as if to throw this old pain, this infantile anger, these grudges, these chains, away from my body. Enough! This is not me, this depression is not mine, they have not won, they will not stop me from doing what I want to do! Off, invading fleas! My inner universe belongs to me, I am taking possession of it, I am occupying it, exterminating what is superfluous! I opened myself to mental energies; I received them from the depths of the Earth and projected them into the sky; at the same time I received them from immeasurable space and projected them toward the center of the planet. I was a receiving and transmitting channel! I did the same with emotional, sexual, and physical energy: I plunged them into the bottomless void. Every idea, every feeling, every desire, every need touched my soul saying, “You are me!” These were usurping entities. The empty being, capable of containing the universe, did not know what it was and yet was living, loving, creating.