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

A young person sometimes believes that whatever he thinks is him, just as one sometimes thinks his car is him or his shoes are him. But ideas are like shirts. They are not yourself. In youth, one can make a mistake, but as time goes by the errors dissolve and what is important stays, the essential being.

During the early teens, the first music or media idols appear. Are they necessary or limiting to our development?

They are necessary for some. I did not have idols, but I became very good friends with the poet Nicanor Parra, who was fundamental for our group and older than us. At times we need teachers or guides, although in my case the truth is that only art saved me. I was an artist. I had to make my name and my work and, therefore, I could not devote myself 100 percent to other people or other works. Although, yes, I sought teachers and visited teachers.

I am not referring only to those called spiritual teachers but to the media idols, to those that so many young people want to be like.

I never got there, thankfully. For some people they are necessary because we lack mythologies, and the brain responds to unconscious mythology. For this reason, sadly, Hollywood actors have replaced pagan gods. Football players or singers are also part of the phenomenon. They have their roles and in certain moments they are helpful, but they are not necessary nor do we have an obligation to hold on to them.

How should one teach a child or one of your own offspring how to understand life?

I would have to ask my family. I brought my son Cristóbal, at eight years old, to witness an operation with Pachita, and I encouraged him to put a finger in the wound, to see what one would look like with holes in the head, to know how to change a lung . . . At this same age I took him to receive a massage from a guru. Cristóbal grew up with a group of shamans. I did everything I could do for him: I would need a whole book to tell it. I eliminated the word “father” so that this monolith would not exist. He never called me dad but Alejandro. I never imposed a particular style of dress. And I did that with all my kids. When we passed by a toy store and they trembled, I told them, “Go in and buy whatever you want.” They came back with only little toys. But once, my son Adan appeared with a life-size stuffed horse. The whole store looked at him, but I bought it for him. I gave them a very conscious upbringing, very correct. But children always commit errors, many errors. I gave one of them three lashes and later, when he was fifteen, I made him give them back to me. He had urinated in front of the couch. While I was hitting him, I told him, “This is a formal punishment, but I do not do it because I am angry.” He never forgave me. So, in a family ceremony, he gave me back the lashes.

ELEVEN

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

I

To what can we aspire in this life?

To many things. But, above all, a long life. For this, we need to work in a job that we like and always be peaceful people, to do what we like. We must be what we are and not what they want us to be. To love what we love without obligation, without neurotic knots that we cannot untie. To desire what we want and to create what we are capable of making.

To live with a certain prosperity, without wasting. But a prosperity for everyone, not a prosperity based on exploiting others. And, of course, it is necessary to become immortals and, for this, we have to live as if we were immortals, thinking that we have a thousand years more to do what we want but without forgetting that in ten seconds we can die.

In many schools, wisdom is obtained through pleasure, happiness, the prohibited; in others, through asceticism, penance, surrender, and sacrifice. Do they all go to the same place?

All are roads to finding oneself. Now, all these paths must be taken with the greatest dignity, because we are mortals. We are not eternal, and our present state is going to end. Life defeats us every moment. Even if we are Titans, we are defeated. Knowing this, we can work more calmly, with humility. It’s about attaining holiness, resolving to get to that. Happiness does not have to do with having things but being happy with life. One can lose the battle while yet in the womb, because we can become neurotic fetuses if the mother doesn’t want us. In this case, recovering the happiness in life is something magnificent that allows our union with the universe in its totality, with time and with space, with consciousness in its totality. It is a state of constant euphoric trance in the body, possible because we are little treasure chests, containing an immensity that, at the same time, is in the smallest of our cells.

One can arrive by many roads to this state of euphoria for living?

Yes, but not by whatever manner. I began through art. I did avant-garde theater, poetry, scandal, all of it. Then I practiced meditation. Hours meditating, time, everything contrary to what I had done; but always moved by a constant attention, by a constant desire of curiosity and of knowing without fear. This is audacity. It is the secret of life.

Beyond imagining—playing with the mind in order to not be prisoners of reality—the objective is to change ourselves and, more precisely, to cure ourselves?

You talk about the mind, but ever since I discovered the tarot, I talk about a minimum of four centers of the human being: intellectual, emotional, sexual, and physical. It is not only the mind that plays this juggling act; the emotional center, the sexual center, and the physical also act. It is necessary to know oneself and to observe. For example: The intellectual center wants to be and becomes in silence. The emotional center wants to love and arrives at loving through indifference. The sexual center wants to create and arrives at creating by learning to fail. The physical center wants to live and lives by learning to die.

If the life that surrounds us and the world that we live in are mental constructions, why can’t we exit them by our will, when we need to, to mark distance and to make a break in the road?

Yes, we can leave it all by will, but this demands bravery and strength on our part. Meditation is one of the possible ways.

At what point does our freedom consist of knowing and assuming that our destiny is already written?

I cannot say that the future is written. My rules tell me that when you ask me about a possible future you are already showing your limitations, thinking there is only one possible future. If I open my mind to this theme and accept that there is a future, I must recognize that there are infinite possible futures that I can choose, because at each moment a different possibility opens before me. I construct my future through my choices.

Then, we cannot see our destiny in a lineal or spatial way?

No, I see it like a fan or a matrix of possible futures. That is to say, we can construct our destiny but we cannot create our destiny. There are ten thousand paths, and all of them are in view. I can go with one of the ten thousand paths, but I cannot invent a ten thousand first.

Then what is freedom based on?

Inner freedom consists in being able to choose freely one of the ten thousand paths, using what we have called free will. And if you have a destiny because you project a genealogy tree into the future, then the future tends to repeat the past, and it is from this that we have to free ourselves. We have to have futures distinct from the past and seek to become ourselves.