Jodorowsky, Alejandro - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Certain religious interpretations, to explain pain to us, point to those who are born blind who are paying for something committed in another life, maybe because they poked somebody’s eyes out.

Okay. Let’s accept it. But this person who poked out those eyes in another life, in an even earlier life poked out the eyes of someone who, in another incarnation, was an executioner. So in that way everyone is guilty and there are no victims—or everyone is a victim and no one is guilty.

So you do not think we should justify the inequalities of origin by supposed karmic debts.

Quite right, because besides being false, it would be anti-therapeutic. Things cannot be justified by destiny. We are marked by a family, by educational and sociocultural life. It is something that we have carried since we were born, but this does not mean to carry out a destiny. One sees the world differently if he speaks English, Spanish, or French. We are trained by a culture that formats our brains. We have to fight against this imposition in order to be ourselves.

Reading your work one gets the feeling that we are obligated to free ourselves from the conditions to which we were born.

We have no obligation. It would be good if we liberated ourselves, but we are not obligated.

To develop, do we need to unstick ourselves from what we came into this life with?

To develop in what way?

I mean spiritually.

Krishnamurti developed a lot spiritually, however some people committed suicide because of his theories. It doesn’t only have to do with developing spiritually; it is necessary to see what interests us. I do not believe in spirituality, I believe in health.

Okay: to heal is it necessary to remove ourselves from our origins?

Everything we carry—we are like worms—has to be tangled until it is converted into a butterfly. We should not strip ourselves of anything. What we have received is a treasure. It is not necessary to castrate ourselves or eliminate any part. It is necessary to inseminate and to transform what has been given to us.

Perhaps someone cannot be happy in her family or in her class, in her world, or with her upbringing, and she wants to continue with what she received?

If she does, let her continue as is. But everyone in the world has a cross. Mine is mine, yours is yours: I only can make you conscious of your cross and, apart from that, you free yourself of it or not. This depends on you.

Is it possible that, without mending the world and society, we can be okay with ourselves?

We cannot. Or better said, we could be islands of perfection in the middle of imperfection.

Haven’t we idealized rebellion against everything as a feature of absolute individualism?

I would not use the word “rebellion” to talk about this. If we want the world to change, I prefer to speak of “mutation.” If we want to transform reality, we begin with ourselves. We do not ask the world to change, and we do not fight against society. It has to be us ourselves who affirm our own values.

Religion and custom integrate us into a group that shapes our personality. Perhaps other traditions are better than the one that we were born into? Does it make sense to change religion?

No, it does not make sense. To go from one tradition to another does not have a true effect, because one god is equal to the other. It is another caricature, another limitation. It is necessary to rise above the limitation in order to be open to life. The age we are living in has to stop being religious so it can be mystical. There will be a moment when all human beings on the planet possess the same mystical feeling and leave religions aside. I do not believe either that any religion is better than another.

II

How do we take the “what will they say about us?”

There are two positions: one that asks “what will they say” and another that concerns itself with “what will I say about myself.” A barbarian psychology can live in the “what will they say,” but a person who has a higher level of consciousness would say, “This is what I want from myself, precisely because I am conscious.”

Now distinct levels of consciousness exist. The first is an animal level that thinks, “What I have, I have.” One can see these people on the street: mercenaries, thieves, assassins. Above this level is the infantile level in which everything is a superficial game; in this state there is no consciousness of infinity or eternity, of death or the universe. Then there is another level of adolescent consciousness where all the solutions of the world are in relationships, in a reduced cell of love; this is the level at which the majority of gossip magazines, television stories, and movies develop. This level serves to find happiness in relationships and all that they entail. But if we go further, we can access an adult level, and there “the other” appears. Even then, both the egoist adult and the adult with social and planetary consciousness exist. The first exploits the weaker or the less intelligent, creates injurious industries or captures political power. This one is harmful. The second understands that the other is much like himself and that he must worry about social and ecological catastrophes, that is to say, the world in which we all live. He knows responsibility.

But on top of all those, there exists a level of cosmic consciousness where the being lives in the whole universe, infinite space, eternal time, permanent impermanence . . . At this level the big themes are found like “know thyself.” And even further beyond that exists another divine consciousness where we know this construct we have named God.

Do you think it is possible to peek into this divine level of consciousness?

Yes. And to arrive at the conclusion, to begin with, that we have to stop calling on the name of God. We have to stop thinking that God is going to fix everything and saying that if God made everything bad in this universe then we are here to do it, too, again. If there is a God, we are here to help him. This requires that we take possession of the world and of ourselves. We must do what we want to do with full consciousness and with full responsibility. In this level of divine consciousness, we find true art.

Without the development of the personality, is it possible to access higher levels of consciousness?

Sometimes, the development of consciousness coincides with the development of the personality, but not always. Each case is different. Once I went to see Vittorio Gassman. He was suffering a deep depression, although he was a well-known artist. Upon doing his genealogy tree, I saw that his mother wanted him to be an actor. He didn’t want that, and he paid with his pain. He got sick and suffered from depression. He was famous, but this vocation didn’t serve him at all. I recommended many things: I told him to go to his mother’s grave, to kill a rooster and to cover the tomb with blood, that he spread blood on the penis and penetrate his mother with fury. He told me that if he were someone other than Vittorio Gassman he would do it, but being who he was, he could not. Two years later, he died. I had not told this before, but it is a good example to show what one can achieve in obeying others, including having success; but if you are not happy, nothing works.

Do we obey other people’s predictions permanently, without being ourselves?

The brain has a tendency to guide itself by predictions. It’s important to take care not to fall into this.