Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

5. The client, a vegetarian pacifist, admits to having such rage against his mother that he wants to kill her.

Response:How can you realize your desire without killing an animal? Buy two watermelons to symbolize your mother’s breasts and destroy them with your fists. Put the pieces of watermelon in a flesh-colored sack that you will make yourself. At midnight, throw the sack into the Seine and leave without looking back.

6. A young man who is professionally disoriented says he does not know what profession he should go into. When questioned, he confesses that he studied law and political science at a good school but failed to get his diploma.

Response:Fabricate a diploma identical to what you would have received, but thirty centimeters larger in width and length. Frame it, hang it on the wall of your bedroom, and put a boxing champion’s cup under it. Then go find the job you want.

7. A thirty-year-old woman doubts herself. She is greedy, materially and emotionally.

Response:If you live insecurely asking for things, it is because your parents, blinded by their own projections, did not see you as you truly were. Buy two nice red apples. Keep one in your bag and carry the other in your hand. Take the metro and observe the passengers. If a person, man, woman, or child, awakens in you the desire to give them the apple, do so. Keep riding the metro until you get that urge, even if it takes several days. When you have given someone the apple, leave the subway and walk along the street savoring the other apple, which you have kept in your bag. Thus you will understand that to give is to receive.

8. A thirty-year-old man cannot achieve success as a musician. As a child he studied piano, but his father, a garage mechanic, made fun of his hobby, considering it gay. He has a sister who lives symbiotically with their mother, both of them hating men. The two worlds, masculine and feminine, are separated by an abyss in their home.

Response: You must take on your feminine sensibility in order to express yourself artistically. Cover your body with auto grease and play the piano naked, dirty like your father. Of course you will get grease on the keys. Furiously play all the melodies that you fancy then clean the keys. After this massage the piano as if it were a woman, for exactly one hour. Stick a picture of your mother on the sole of your left foot, one of your sister on your right foot, and start playing again. You will see the anger converted into creative pleasure. To thank me, bring me a white rose.

9. A fifty-year-old man cannot bear the process of divorce from his wife. Three months earlier, after living with him for eight years, his wife expressed her deep desire to become pregnant. He rejected the proposition outright. She thought it over, then suggested divorce, which he accepted calmly. But after three months he suddenly repented and proposed to his wife that they have the desired child. She was inflexible and told him she would have it with someone else. The Tarot reveals that this man has a twin brother. When asked how his relationship is with this brother, he stammers a bit and answers laconically, “Okay.”

Response: Call your wife and tell her you do not want one child, but two. That being a twin, you could not imagine having an only child, and that was the reason why you refused to get her pregnant when she asked for “a” child. This will require you to consider: would you really want to be a father of two children? If you want that, call her. She is very likely to accept.

10. A brunette woman with large black eyes, about forty years old, has a very conflicted relationship with a coworker in the office where she works. He refuses to resolve the conflict, despite the pacifying efforts she makes.

Response:We see in the Tarot that your relationship with your older brother was disastrous. You project this original conflict, which is very much part of you, onto your colleague. You need him to hate you, to reproduce your childhood love/hate relationship. He, in turn, must project his sister onto you. You must destabilize his view. If you see yourself differently, you will not be the object of his rage. You must go to the office as soon as possible with a different appearance: a new haircut, dyed blond, with contact lenses that make your eyes light, and a different style of clothing.

11. A woman who has moved to a new house does not feel good in her new territory; it seems alien to her. What should she do?

Response:Put your urine in a bowl, fill a dropper with it, and put a drop in every corner of the new house.

12. A forty-year-old therapist is in a passionate but troubled relationship with a woman who feels a great aggressiveness toward men due to her having seen her father kill her mother with a hunting rifle that had been given to him by his grandfather. How to calm this hatred of men that she constantly projects onto him?

Response:Go to see your partner carrying a hunting rifle loaded with blanks and ask her to shoot at your chest. Keep a plastic bag filled with artificial blood hidden there. When she fires, break the bag to spill the blood. Before this, you will have told her that the bullets are blanks, but will have kept the blood effect secret. You’ll see, she will burst into tears and embrace you. From that time on the relationship will improve.

13. A twenty-year-old woman consults the Tarot to see how relations are going with her lover. It seems that nothing is wrong; he has agreed to marry her and have children. But she suffers from not knowing what she wants, what she likes, what she truly feels. The Tarot reveals the strong influence of her mother, who she feels is like a vampire. How can she tell if it is really she who is seeing and thinking, or if it is her mother taking over her mind?

Response:Enlarge a picture of your mother’s face to actual size. Cut holes in the eyes and make it into a Venetian-style mask on a stick. When you find yourself in a situation where you want to dissociate your view from that of your mother, put the mask over your face and become aware that you see and feel like her. Then take the mask off and observe how you see and how you feel things as yourself.

14. A thirty-year-old woman is still suffering as an adult from her father’s rejection of her as a child. This attitude was the result of her younger brother’s dying three weeks after being born. The father, who wanted to pass on his name, considered it unfair that his son died and not his daughter.

Response: When your brother died, he must have weighed about three kilos. Buy a calf ’s head and, if necessary, some meat and bone to make it up to three kilos. Put this in a waterproof, airtight bag and then into a black backpack, which you will wear on your back for three full days (symbolizing the three weeks for which the boy lived). Then go to your father’s house, without him knowing, and bury your burden in the garden. Afterward, offer your father a sausage, watch him eat a few slices, and ask him to give you a box of chocolates.

15. A well-dressed lady, sixty years old, cannot get over her deep resentment toward a doctor who misdiagnosed her with Alzheimer’s disease and kept her in anguish for two years. During those years, her relationships with her children completely deteriorated. The Tarot reveals that she projects her own paralyzing parents onto this doctor who predicted the paralysis of her mental functions.

Response: You must protest in a childish manner. Put some of your excrement in a cookie tin and mail it to the doctor. The box must be wrapped as a Christmas gift.

16. A young man with a childlike face, voice, and gestures says he has “existential suffering.” According to him, the reason he cannot leave childhood and become a man is his mother, who conceived him out of wedlock with a stranger.