Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

Two monks are meditating in the midst of nature; several rabbits surround one monk, but none come near the other. The latter asks, “If we both meditate with equal intensity the same number of hours each day, why do the rabbits surround you and not me?”

“Very simple,” replies the other, “Because I do not eat rabbit, and you do.”

A participant in one of my courses could not bear for her chest to be touched. As soon as a man, even one with whom she wanted to have sexual relations, made a move to touch her breasts, she would start screaming. This situation caused her much suffering, and she longed to be free from this senseless panic. I suggested that she bare her chest. She did so, revealing a nice pair of breasts. I asked, “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“I would like to touch you in a particular way, not like the caress of a desiring man eager to enjoy your body, nor like the touch of a doctor who examines you coldly. I would like to touch you with my spirit. Do you think my spirit could establish an intimate contact with your breasts that does not have anything sexual about it?”

“Maybe. ”

I raised my hands, three meters away, and said gently, “Look at my hands. I’m going to approach slowly, millimeter by millimeter. As soon as you feel assaulted or uncomfortable, tell me to stop and I will stop approaching.”

I then brought my hands closer, extremely slowly. When I was ten centimeters from her breasts, she asked me to stop. I obeyed, and after a long while, slowly, very slowly, I started moving closer, watching for her reaction. Reassured by the quality of the attention I was paying to her and perceiving that I acted with delicacy and detachment, she did not protest. Finally my hands rested on her breasts without her feeling any discomfort, which caused her great amazement. Applying what I had learned from the man who fed the sparrows, I took another participant by the shoulder and, without letting go of him, had him touch her breasts as well. This caused her no suffering. But when I let go of the man, she started screaming. This story is an example of the detachment that, in my view, is indispensable for those who really want to help others. I was able to touch and feel the breasts of a woman standing before me while situating myself far away from my sexual center, without thinking of getting pleasure. In that moment I was not a man, but a being. The important thing is to place oneself in an inner state that excludes any temptation to take advantage of the other person, any temptation to abuse the fascination one exerts over the other in order to assert one’s power to dominate his or her will. If these things happen, the helping relationship loses its essence and becomes a masquerade.

For a magical act to have good results the popular charlatan must, by obligation, present himself as a superior being who knows all mysteries. The patient, in a superstitious manner, accepts his advice without understanding how or why it affects his or her subconscious. By contrast, the psychomagician presents himself only as a technical expert, as an instructor, and devotes himself to explaining to the patient the symbolic meaning and purpose of every act. The client knows what he or she is doing. All superstition has been eliminated. However, as soon as one begins to perform the prescribed acts, reality begins dancing in a new way. Unexpected things happen that aid in the accomplishment of something that seems impossible. For example, with an elementary school teacher who had been badly abused in childhood and was afflicted by chronic sadness I advised, among other things, learning to balance on a tightrope as circus performers do. “Impossible!” he said. “I live in a small village in the south of France. Where will I find someone to teach me that?” I insisted that he do what I proposed. Upon returning to school, one of his students told him that he was learning to balance on a tightrope from a retired circus performer who lived just a few kilometers away!

On another occasion, with a patient who had suicidal tendencies and felt that his blood was impure because he was the product of incest, I advised that he go to a slaughterhouse with two large thermoses, buy cow’s blood to fill them with, go home, and shower in the blood until all his skin was entirely covered in order to make his subconscious think that his blood had been replaced. Then, without washing off the blood, he should get dressed and go walking in the streets, proudly facing the stares of passersby. He also said, “Impossible.” However, when he went to the dentist, he found a copy of The Incal in the waiting room. He asked the dentist if he had read it. The dentist said no, one of his patients had left it there, a man who owned a slaughterhouse and admired my work. My client got the man’s address, went to him with some autographed copies of my works, and the slaughterhouse owner, very pleased, gave him all the liters of cow’s blood he needed.

One day I received a visit from a Swiss woman whose father had died in Peru when she was eight years old. Her mother had made all traces of the man disappear, burning letters and photos, so that my client remained an eight-year-old child on the emotional plane. I prescribed an act: she should go to Peru and visit the places where her father had lived, until she found tangible proof of his existence. When she returned to Europe she should bury the mementos in her garden and plant a fruit tree there, then go to her mother’s house and slap her. It should be explained here that her mother was an angry and virile woman who had mistreated and insulted her. The woman went to Peru, found the rooming house where her father had lived, and through that synchronicity that I call the dance of reality, found letters and photos. The father had entrusted them to the landlady, confident that one day his daughter would go to look for them. When she read those letters and saw those pictures, she no longer saw her father as a faceless ghost and finally knew that he had been a being of flesh and blood. By burying the documents in her garden, she also buried the eight-year-old child. Then she went to see her mother with the intention of giving her the prescribed slap. But she was surprised to find that for the first time her mother was waiting for her at the train station and, also, for the first time, had prepared a meal for her. Seeing her so kind, she felt very disturbed at having to slap her because, for once, her mother had given her no pretext for doing so. But she knew that the act was an inescapable psychomagical contract that must be respected. Over dessert, my client slapped her mother for no apparent reason, taking her by surprise, and feared a brutal reaction from her. But her mother only asked, “Why did you do that?” Faced with such equanimity, the daughter finally found words to express every complaint she had of her. The mother replied, “You’ve given me one slap. well, you should give me many more!”

A literary critic around fifty years old, married to a philosophy professor her same age but who was a perennial adolescent, called me from Barcelona because she had discovered that her husband had a twentythree-year-old lover. “We are intellectual, serious, mature people who shun emotional scandals. But I have fallen into a huge depression from holding back my anger. And he doesn’t want to give up either her or me. What should I do?”

“I am going to ask you to analyze your life as if it were a dream. Why did you dream that your fifty-year-old husband had a twentythree-year-old lover?”

“Oh, I remember when I was exactly twenty-three. I had an affair with a fifty-year-old man! It lasted three years. Then I left him for a younger man.”

“See? You are experiencing something that is like a recurring dream. In a certain way, you dream yourself into the place of the deceived wife and you realize how, when you were young, you made your lover’s wife suffer. If your affair didn’t last, it is very possible that your philosopher’s adventure will also only last another year, since you’ve found out that it’s already been going on for two years. Then he will come back and cry in your arms.”