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

You usually speak of people’s capacity to program even their own death. Are there those who are convinced that they are going to die at a certain age and accomplish it?

That’s how it is, yes. The brain programs itself, imitating at times the age of the death of a family member or some famous person.

III

Are we children disguised as adults?

We are the elderly disguised as children; we are the ancient ones. In our skin there are millions of cells, each with a complex memory.

It’s said that we should not stop ourselves from carrying out life’s movie . . . but that is not so easy.

Many people effectively stop carrying out what you call “life’s movie.” The majority of people want to be like others, and this drives them to a death in life. It is necessary to find what distinguishes us from others in order to be something. To the extent that we try to be like others, we convert ourselves into zombies.

Often, young people yearn to live the life of another, to live through what others experience . . .

When I began my studies of Psychomagic, I met different teachers. One of them was Oscar Ichazo, who told me one day, “You are going to imitate me for some time, because I have given you knowledge that you did not have: I have marked your virgin soul.” The soul imitates for a while what it has awakened to, and this lasts a short period if one is conscious and a long period if the person is naive.

To live a full life, do you think a reconciliation with parents is necessary?

For me, it was enriching to meet Gregorio “Goyo” Cárdenas Hernández, a serial criminal who killed seventeen women and buried them in his garden. For ten years he was in a mental hospital, and then he became an attorney and made a family. I first learned about him in the newspaper, El Heraldo. I met him drinking coffee. He was very courteous. I asked him how it all happened, and he told me he had already forgotten all of it because it had been another person who had done it.

He was sincere because I believe that we can live many lives in this same life, in the same person and in the same brain. Surrender exists. He paid for his crimes and redeemed himself. The value that Goyo Cárdenas later showed was already inside of him even when he was a criminal. He was an angel in a deviant personality. When the deviant personality dissolved, his angel appeared. I think the same thing occurs with the family: it hurts us, it is like a trap, it shortens our life, it bothers us psychically and socioculturally, it forces us into a limited level of consciousness, it robs us of our essential self, it inculcates ideas in us that are not our own, and at the moment when we find ourselves in the world, all of this collapses and we have to build a life from scratch. We forgive ourselves because no one is guilty. Generation after generation, each one is victim to the one before. We end up with many centuries of being victims, but in the end you understand that there is no reason for resentment.

I began to think that my parents were to blame for my birth. I thought that in giving me life they gave me death. I blamed them for many things, but then I understood the Buddhist phrase that said, “The truth is what is useful.” Then I began to wonder, and I told myself, “I was something before birth, and I chose my parents because I needed them as a school. The limitations they gave me are what made me, and I am what I am thanks to them.” There are marvelous fruits from twisted trees.

Do you believe it is necessary to “ kill the father,” as Freud asserts?

The symbolic act of the death of the father is absolutely necessary, but it is also necessary to do it in an intelligent way, with lucidity and without resentment. If you perceive your father in a violent way, it is because you are not killing him: you are asking him to love you because you need it. But if you are able to see him positively, without his pedestal and without your fear, you are no longer begging him to love you in order for you to exist. And this is when you kill him, when you make him fall. But once you’ve knocked him down, it is necessary to rebuild him and repay him, because fathers have essential value, even if they are monsters: they give us life, they leave their imprint on certain parts of our being, and they allow us to become who we are in a conscious way.

With the father, we must apply a maxim of operative magic, which is “Dissolve and Coagulate.” To be able to improve yourself, it is necessary to first dissolve yourself, to put everything in its place and observe it intellectually, physically, and sexually in order to see who you are. And then it is necessary to coagulate it, to remake it in your interior, as you want it to be. It is necessary to achieve an inner work and, once you make all of this better, recover the father by absorbing his values.

Is cruelty in some children and preadolescents a frustrated creation? Are they guilty for what they do?

There is no blame. What you call cruelty is really unconsciousness. A child is not cruel unless he is sick. The family psyche is reproduced in the child’s behavior, like dogs. He is ignorant and copies his environment. There are parents who act like gurus. When a child is racist, it is not the child who is racist, it is the parent who is. If a child kills another child, the parents are the criminals. The child, in this case, is possessed. We cannot speak of childish evil. Children are not cruel; that is a myth. Children are only unconscious and ignorant; they do not know. They reproduce the conduct of adults.

You have written that family wounds never completely heal.

True. I believe that the human being has animal channels but also vegetable channels. The animal has cells that heal and close his wounds. However, if you cut a branch, it is not going to grow again. A vegetable wound is forever, and the only thing we can do is cover it. This is why we find hollow trees; they produce mushrooms that nourish the trunk. Our heart behaves, in this sense, like a vegetable. If you make a wound, it never heals; there it remains. What could happen is that new experiences come, covering this wound.

I cannot console myself about the death of one of my sons, although many years have passed, and I continue hurting. While I have a happy life together with his memory, comfort does not exist. I have had the strength to create, along with this discomfort, other loves, other works, other satisfactions. I can live with the wounds.

What parts do friends and other traveling companions play in our lives?

I had two friends in childhood that I have reproduced throughout my life through other people and circumstances. Friends are, in this sense, like family: They are always there. They are generational. We are all traveling together in the same airplane; we are passengers on the same train. They are very important because we are gregarious beings and not wolf men. I consider friendship fundamental, and I mix in groups. To know whether or not a friendship will enrich us, it is necessary to know why we are cultivating it. To be friends means to create something together.

Is youth full of prejudices that are smoothed out with time?

One does not age and the curtain drops, at least not in my experience. The child always stays, the adolescent stays, the youth stays, the adult stays . . . As one grows, she converts into a group of beings, and the personalities add up, because where there is continuity there is no separation.

Throughout life, prejudices are not fixed, but beliefs are. I remember that at thirty years old I did something fundamental: I took a notebook and told myself, “I am going to write down all the ideas I have in my mind. What do I believe in?” I wrote it, I did it to pick the ideas off, like fleas. And then I told myself, “These ideas are not me; they may end up being useful, but they are not me.”