Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

Óscar Ichazo. Photo: Peter Schlessinger.

Ichazo told me all this with the same conviction with which Chico Molina claimed to have seen a magic mirror at work. It was the same conviction with which Carlos Castaneda had told me that, while walking with Don Juan along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, he had become distracted looking at a passing woman and stopped listening to the old man, who had then given him a slap that sent him fifty kilometers away in less than a second. It was the same conviction with which Ichazo later told me that he had been by Jesus’s side at the moment when he “suffered” his transfiguration. Did he want to tell me that he could travel through time or that he had memories of previous incarnations? The latter possibility is consistent with the fact that Ichazo claimed to possess a prodigious memory: he claimed to remember all his experiences with total clarity starting at one year of age.

At six o’clock that evening, Ichazo knocked on the door of my house. As if he had been there many times, he went ahead of me up the stairs to the third floor and sat in the comfortable chair that I had bought for him that very morning. He smiled with satisfaction at smelling the new leather.

“Bravo. this furniture has no past. It’s like me. I am the root of a new tradition. Forget all the Christs, forget all the Buddhas; personal fulfillment does not exist. Now, I myself will teach you how to tame the ego. I’ll show you the path to return to the impersonal power that breathes us, the force that exists beyond the level of our conscious mind.” And without more ado, from his pocket he pulled a packet of caramel sweets, a tube of vitamin C tablets, a lighter, a joint, and a mysterious little piece of paper. He asked me to bring him a glass of water. He opened the slip of paper; it contained an orange powder. He poured it into the water.

“It’s pure LSD. Drink it.”

Although it was fashionable, I had never wanted to undertake psychedelic experiences. In my interviews, I stated that I did not need them because my films gave me such powerful images. I gulped and, overcoming my fear, drank the brew. We waited in heavy silence. An hour passed. There was no effect. He lit the joint.

“Smoke it. It will speed the process.”

We shared the joint. A few minutes later I started to have my first hallucinations. I was overcome with a childlike joy. Through the large window of the study I saw the Río de Janeiro Plaza, with its trees and its bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David, change appearance as if it were a collection of paintings by artists I liked — Bonnard, Seurat, Van Gogh, Picasso, and so on. Suddenly I heard a cracking that seemed to split the house in two, and I exclaimed, “This isn’t any use, it’s like watching a Walt Disney movie. Also, I’ve lost control of my movements. If someone attacked me now, I couldn’t defend myself.”

“Stop criticizing and have confidence in me. Enough paranoia. Wherever you go, you can come back from there. Also know that in the state you’re in, you can handle yourself perfectly well in everyday reality.”

At that moment, the phone rang. “Answer it,” he ordered. As if descending from another galaxy, I approached the phone and took it off the hook. It was one of my actors asking for certain information. Without any great difficulty, I answered his questions.

“See?” Ichazo said, satisfied. “Now that your fears have calmed down, let’s see if your images are as childish as you say.”

He told me to go to the bathroom and observe my face in the mirror. So I did. I saw myself a thousand different ways, in continuous change. One after another of my personalities appeared: the ambitious, the egotistical, the lazy, the choleric, the murderer, the saint, the vain genius, the abandoned child, the indolent, the melancholy, the resentful, the usurping jester, the fake madman, the coward, the proud, the envious, the complex-ridden Jew, the erotomaniac, the jealous, and many others. My flesh cracked, my features swelled, my skin was covered with sores. I saw my mind and matter rot. I was disgusted with myself. I started to vomit. Ichazo gave me candy, then a vitamin C pill. A wave of warmth, carried by my blood, inundated my body. I felt better.

“If you have ever felt compassion, true compassion for someone, remember it.”

I began to cry like a three-year-old child. I held Pepe, my gray cat, in my arms, dying: my father had poisoned him. His glassy eyes and dangling tongue broke my heart. I would have given my life to save him.

“Make that emotion grow, compassion for all animals, for the world, for humanity. There. Now look at yourself in the mirror again, but with mercy. That being with so many dark sides is your poor ego, dying. If you can now reach this high level of consciousness, it is thanks to it, its incessant suffering in search of unity. Its monstrousness engendered you; its defects were the roots that have nourished your essence. Have compassion for it; give your hand to your ego. The butterfly is not disgusted with the caterpillar that gave birth to it.”

I pressed my face to the silver surface, absorbed my image through my skin. When I drew back, the mirror reflected everything in the room except for me. Despite realizing that this invisibility was a hallucination, I knew I would never again live criticizing every one of my steps. The harsh inner judge had melted away. For the first time, I felt at peace with myself.

“Don’t just stand there!” Ichazo exclaimed. “Keep going!” He made me take out all the photographs and play programs that I kept in my desk drawers and scatter them on the floor. “Those were your plays, your couple of films, your actors, your friends, yourself, wrapped up in the comedy of fame. In the state you’re in now, how do you see it all?”

I saw everything with an extraterrestrial mind, without desires, without ties; the anguish of separation was present in every detail, the truth could be felt, but it was far away, like an irreparable mystery, a painful hope. There, where life was suffering, ignorance became pride, and the “I” was in a prison without doors or windows.

“Do you understand? You’ve lived searching in the distance for what was inside you, for what was you.” I lay down on those pictures, those newspaper clippings that mentioned me, those programs and recordings, as if they were all an old skin that I was shedding from my body. Óscar said, “There are three centers in the human animal: the intellectual, the emotional, and the vital. My teachers called them the Path, the Oth, and the Kath. As long as the ego is false and the consciousness distorted, they sleep without performing their task of relating us to the immediate world, surpassing the obstacles that are illusory but deadly. Let’s wake them up!”

First, I had to concentrate on a point in my belly about four inches below my navel. I perceived an immense force there.

“Don’t observe it from the outside. Don’t define what you feel. Enter the Kath, become this center.” Ichazo’s voice sounded distant. I dissolved into — how can I describe it? — a dimension of inexhaustible energy, like an opening in a rock where a torrential stream flows out. “You can send this energy, in the form of invisible tentacles, as far away as you want. You can use it to enter other people’s bodies and give them life or death.” He gestured to the people outside walking across the plaza. “Launch the Kath. Penetrate them.”

I gave a push and felt as if a stream of energy was coming from my belly, invisible and long, which would tie itself to the bodies of the pedestrians. I immediately felt united to them; I understood their minds, grasped their emotions, and knew — or imagined? — much of their past. After following them for a hundred meters they became friends for whom I felt an immense pity, such was the pain that filled them.