The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (46 page)

A person can be freed from a problem by breaking a record. To a woman who suffered from being twenty kilos overweight I recommended going into a butcher shop, buying twenty kilos of meat and bones, loading the package on her shoulders and walking twenty kilometers, ending up at a river where she would throw the package in. To a bank teller who had lost his will to live, I recommended traversing all of Italy, from one end to the other, on roller skates. To an old lady, an inconsolable widow, I advised going hang gliding accompanied by an instructor.

The problem of perfectionism can be cured by showing yourself as more imperfect than you are to whoever demands the perfection. A very young client, a student in film school, suffered because she demanded too much of herself. “As a child, I was never happy with what I did. This desire for perfection paralyzes me.” I advised her to make a short film, as short as possible. It should be badly directed, with poor cinematography, bad interpretation, and a stupid storyline told in absurd form. Then she should gather her family, show them this horror, and demand to be applauded and praised by all.

A man consulted me because he had made up his mind that no woman would love him if he were not perfect. He had a girlfriend whom he decided not to marry because of this. Despite all her demonstrations of affection, he believed that she was faking it because “how can it be possible for her to love such an imperfect man?” I advised him to study with a jeweler and learn to make rings, after which he should try to make the ugliest wedding ring in the world: if she consented to wear it on her finger, he would finally feel loved because his imperfection would be accepted.

If one is lacking a quality that one wants, one can imitate it. This reminds me of the story of a man who was desperate because his stubborn donkey refused to drink. Neither prayers nor blows could convince it. If this went on, the animal would die of thirst. His good neighbor offered to help him. The neighbor brought his own donkey, stood it next to the nondrinker, and gave it a bucketful of water, which the animal drank up with pleasure. Seeing this, the stubborn donkey, in the spirit of imitation, also began to drink. A young woman who had stopped having periods several years earlier due to emotional problems asked me what she should do. I advised her to buy artificial blood (such as is used in films), to inject it into her vagina once a month for three or four days, to use the appropriate hygiene products, and to continue imitating periods in this manner. Soon her real menstruation would return. This same phenomenon often occurs when a woman who cannot have children adopts a child. Thanks to the “imitation” of motherhood, to her surprise, she soon becomes pregnant.

For depressed people—besides asking, “If laws did not exist and anything was allowed, who would you kill and how?” and allowing them to commit their crimes in a metaphorical fashion—it is also very useful to recommend trying something that they have never done or that they have not even imagined doing. For example, taking a balloon ride and throwing seven kilos of seeds down onto the earth, painting a self-portrait with menstrual blood, or going to Mass dressed as a parrot. Or, for someone very masculine, taking Arabian-style belly dancing classes. Or offering a flower to the first bald man you see on the street and asking for permission to kiss his bare head. Or dressing up as a poor person and going out to beg. For a woman who had never played during childhood because she had weak, childish parents who made it necessary for her to act as an adult and take care of them, I advised going to the Dauville casino, buying five thousand francs worth of chips, and playing to lose.

“And if I win?”

“Keep playing, days, weeks, months, years, until you end up losing it all.”

Sometimes very simple advice leads to a good result. I drew one woman out of depression by advising her to go to a tea shop and eat an éclair (a pastry with a phallic shape) with coffee-cream filling every morning before breakfast for twenty-eight days in a row.

The film
The Wizard of Oz
provided inspiration for advice I gave to clients with social neuroses
.
The Tin Man wants to have feelings, so the psychomagician places a heart-shaped watch on his chest. The Scarecrow wants to be intelligent, so the psychomagician gives him a university diploma. The Cowardly Lion wants to be brave, so the psychomagician gives him a medal. The subconscious takes the symbols for realities! In traditional Chinese culture if one burns fake bills on the graves of one’s ancestors, one feels that one has made an important sacrifice. A voodoo priest who spits out clouds of rum that evaporate feels that his spirit is ascending to the gods with them. For a doctor whose brother was a tennis champion and who could not get enough patients because he felt anonymous, I recommended placing a photograph of himself with his brother in his waiting room. But using a clever trick, he should switch the heads so that the tennis champion’s head was on his body and his head was on his brother’s body.

In some cases, the archetype that causes the client’s frustration is the mother, backed up by the grandmother and great-grandmother. This coalition is the most powerful of all and can only be overcome by an archetype of divine character. The only one that is psychologically stronger than the mother is the Virgin Mary (assuming the client is Catholic, of course). Often, motivated simply by the desire to help, I have used places that are exalted in popular culture and, at the risk of being branded sacrilegious, elements of sacred ceremonies. An example is a woman from a Protestant background, one of eight siblings, who wanted to start a family but an irrational fear prevented her from marrying. I explained to her that when a family tree has mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers burdened by a large number of children, there is a fear of semen as a diabolical substance that causes unwanted pregnancies as punishment for pleasure. I proposed an act that would make her lose her fear of sperm, giving it its true dimension: a divine substance. “First, make love with your boyfriend, asking him to ejaculate into a glass at the bottom of which there will be a host. After that, fill the glass with melted wax and put in a wick. After the wax has hardened, bring the candle to the crypt dedicated to the Virgin at Lourdes, and place it at her feet. Then light the wick, kneel, and pray nine Our Fathers, one for your father and eight for your eight siblings.”

As my students increased in number, I took on broader problems. Santiago Pando, one of the directors of the advertising campaign for President Fox of Mexico, had attended my seminars in Guadalajara and had applied the principles of psychomagic in his successful campaign. Pando asked me, “If we consider that our country has suffered for seventy-five years from a disease called PRI,
^*9
could you propose psychomagical advice to cure it?” I suggested, first of all, to celebrate collectively at the national level: at the moment when power was handed over, the new president would shout, “Mexico is rising!” and millions of helium-filled balloons (made of biodegradable material), in the three colors of the country’s flag, would be released into the sky.

Secondly, an Internet site called Virtual Mexico would be launched where all citizens would collaborate, ideally to convert Mexico into Eden. The virtual country would serve as a model for the real country.

I considered it of vital importance to change the appearance of the currency. The bills, which had become symbols of corruption and exploitation, imbued with the suffering of the people, had to recover their dignity and become positive talismans. I advised them to print bills with images from popular faith, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, Saint Simon, Santa Muerte, Saint Paschal Baylon, and María Sabina.

I also suggested covering the entire Pyramid of the Sun with a thin layer of gold leaf and covering the entire Pyramid of the Moon with silver leaf. At the top of the masculine (gold) pyramid, a silver-plated statue of the goddess Coatlicue should be placed. At the top of the female (silver) pyramid, there should be a gold-plated Aztec solar calendar. This phenomenal act would attract millions of tourists. With the money raised, the lake that had been so absurdly dried up, turning the region into a dusty valley, could be restored.

NINE

From Psychomagic to Psychoshamanism

Psychomagic is about saving time, accelerating the gaining of awareness. Just as a disease can announce itself suddenly, healing can also arrive in an instant. A sudden illness is called unfortunate, while a sudden healing is called a miracle. However, both take part in the same essence: they are forms of the language of the subconscious. Thanks to rapid detection through tarology, a deep understanding gained by studying the repeating patterns in the family tree, and psychomagical actions, we can come closer to the inner peace that is a product of the discovery of our true identity, which allows us to live with joy and die without anguish, knowing that we have not squandered our time in this dream called “reality.” However, valuable as these interventions are, if the client does not put in as much effort as the therapist, no mental mutation will be achieved; all the work will do nothing more than calm the symptoms, seeming to eliminate the pain but leaving unhealed the wound that invades the entire individual with its distressing shadow. The client, at the same time that he or she is seeking help, rejects it. The therapeutic act is a strange fight: we struggle mightily to help someone who puts up all possible barriers and tries to steer the healing toward failure. In a way, the healer is the hope of salvation for the sick person, but at the same time an enemy. He who suffers, fearing that the source of his ill health will be revealed to him, wants to be put to sleep, wants to be made insensible to pain, but wants in no way to change, in no way to be shown that his problems are the protesting of a soul locked in the cell of a false identity. Many clients have come to see me because, despite having achieved what they wanted to achieve—success in love, in material life, in social events—for no apparent reason, they want to die. Some triumphant people die in senseless accidents; others, apparently healthy, succumb to chronic diseases. Astute businessmen are ruined every day. Tranquil beings, surrounded by loving families, commit suicide. Why? When a mother, consciously or not, wants to get rid of the fetus for some powerful reason (because the couple has economic or emotional problems, because the father has fled or died, because the woman became pregnant by accident, because ancestors have died in childbirth, or for many other anxiety-related reasons), then this desire for elimination, for death, is embedded in the intrauterine memory of the new being and acts as an order during his or her earthly life. Without realizing it rationally, the individual feels that she is an intruder who has no right to live. Even if the woman becomes the best of mothers after the birth, the damage is already done. Her son or daughter, even if everything that others consider happiness is at his or her disposal, will have to battle against incessant desires to die.

Moreover, even if the mother joyously accepts the pregnancy, she may not want a real child but an imaginary one who will carry out the family’s plans, even if those plans have nothing to do with the child’s true nature. The offspring is expected to be equal to his progenitor, or to achieve something that the adult could not achieve, or else the mother—whose father, having unresolved homosexual desires, has made her into a failed man, forcing her to suppress her femininity and develop masculine characteristics—dreams of giving birth to a perfect boy whose phallus she will take control of, satisfying her father’s wish. In such cases, it is common for the mother to be single, so that her child is given the surname of the maternal grandfather, metaphorically carrying out the father-daughter incest. Because humans are warm-blooded mammals, in the depths of their animal nature they carry the need to be protected, nurtured, and sheltered from cold by the bodies of their fathers and mothers. If this contact is lacking, the offspring is doomed to perish. A human being’s greatest fear is to be unloved by his or her mother, father, or both. If this happens, the soul is marked by a wound that never stops festering. The brain, having not found its true, bright center that would keep it in continuous ecstasy, lives in anguish. Unable to find true pleasure, which is nothing other than being oneself rather than being an imposed mask, it seeks out the less painful situations. I had a French friend who when asked, “Hello, how are you?” would reply with a smirk, “Not too bad.” Between two evils, the brain chooses the lesser one. Since the greatest evil is not being loved, the individual does not recognize this lack of love, and rather than enduring the atrocious pain of becoming conscious of it, prefers to be depressed, to create a disease, to be ruined, to fail. Because of these unbearable symptoms, the client starts therapy. If the healer wants to heal the wound at its core, a wide range of defenses must be deployed.

A great Italian theater and film actor came to consult me, accompanied by his wife. He had suffered depression in a cyclical form for many years. He was a handsome old man, very tall, robust, with an impressive voice. However, despite his radiant personality, I realized that in his heart he was still a docile child. His wife, a small brunette with a tremendous personality, exercised a virile authority over him. Exploring the actor’s family tree, I saw that his mother, due to the absence of the father, had developed an extremely possessive character, making him into her faithful servant. The famous man did not like acting at all; it was not his vocation. However, wanting to please his mother, who insisted that he must succeed on the stage and screen, he had dedicated most of his life to this. And, of course, becoming an internationally renowned star, racking up one triumph after another without taking any pleasure in it because this was the maternal ideal and not his own, he suffered from one depression after another. He felt that he was not himself, but an individual living a foreign destiny. His wife, who admired him greatly, was in a way a copy of his mother, now deceased. I proposed a psycho-magical act: the obedient child should rebel against both his mother and his wife. To assert his independence, he should go to visit his mother’s grave, carrying a rooster. Standing on the slab, he should slit the animal’s throat, let the blood fall on his penis and testicles, and with his crotch thus bloodied, he should return home and have intercourse with his wife, without any prior foreplay, with intense movements, while shouting to release his anger, which up until then had been repressed.

The man was not surprised or frightened. He simply said, “I’m sorry, Alejandro, I cannot do that. I’m . . .” (He pronounced his famous name with emphasis and a touch of desperation). “If I were an unknown person, I would probably do it.”

How could I explain what he at all costs did not want to see? If his mother had made him into this famous person against his will it was because she had never loved him; she had only loved herself, or perhaps her own father. The act that would have overthrown his dependency, and perhaps would have prolonged his life (he died a couple of years after this consultation), could not be carried out because he was a prisoner of an image of himself, all the more painful because he knew it was false, but yet respected it, as a turtle respects its shell, because it had completely replaced his essence. Without it he would have felt empty, nonexistent. This defensive system caused any attempt at real healing to fail.

The human brain reacts like an animal, defending its territory, which it identifies with its life. The brain delineates this space with its urine and feces. Parents, siblings, spouses, co-workers, and above all, the body are all part of this space. The one who is in charge has limitations that correspond to his or her level of consciousness. The higher the level of consciousness, the greater the freedom, but to reach this level—where the territory is not just a few square meters or a small group of people, but the entire planet and all of humanity, and indeed the entire universe and all living beings—it is first necessary to heal the wound and get rid of the fetal conditioning, then the family conditioning, and finally the social conditioning. In order to reach this mutation in which he abandons the orders he has been given and lives in gratitude for the miracle of being alive, the client must be made aware of his defensive mechanisms. These are mechanisms that all animals use to escape their predatory enemies. They know how to shut themselves off and how to play dead. They roll up, they cover themselves with chitinous shells, they bury themselves in the mud, and they shut down their breathing and heartbeat. The human being does the same thing: she becomes paralyzed, encloses herself in a repetitive system of gestures, desires, emotions, and thoughts, and vegetates within these narrow limits, rejecting all new information, mired in an endless repetition of the past. To avoid sinking into the depths, she lives floating in a net of superficial sensations, anesthetized most of the time. Animals know how to camouflage themselves, to make themselves similar to the environment in which they live. The chameleon changes color, some insects look like tree leaves, and certain mammals have skin that resembles the terrain that they inhabit. Likewise, a great many human beings, discarding their natural uniqueness, make themselves the same as the world that surrounds them. They forbid themselves the slightest trace of originality, they eat what everyone else eats, they dress according to the latest fad, they speak with accents and idioms that indicate that they indubitably belong to some social group, and they form part of the masses that march along all brandishing the same red book, making the same salute with an outstretched arm, or wearing the same uniform. They depend entirely on appearances, relegating their true being to the darkness of their dreams. When animals feel attacked, they can fight back. The fear of knowing oneself, coupled with the fear of being deprived of what one believes oneself to possess, including one’s way of life—which would involve a painful encounter with the essential wound—can turn humans into murderers. In other animal species, before attack the primary defense is flight. According to the ancient Chinese treatise the
Thirty-Six Stratagems,
“Flight is supreme politics. To keep one’s forces intact, avoiding confrontation, is not defeat.” These people do not want to know anything of themselves, they abandon treatment halfway through, they constantly justify themselves, they struggle to always be right and to prove that others are wrong, they succumb to vices, and they develop infatuations and obsessions; sometimes, they move to a foreign country in order to not confront their problems, using distance as a painkiller. Flight is sometimes accompanied by self- mutilation: the lizard escapes by detaching its tail. My friend G. K., a great French science-fiction writer, was disappointed in love at the height of his literary success: the woman of his dreams married somebody else. G. K. decided to stop writing forever. In a metaphorical sense, he was castrated. Van Gogh cut off his ear. Rimbaud expelled poetry from his life. Some people turn away from their loved ones or their favorite things, others mutilate themselves through cosmetic surgery, squandering their fortunes . . .

In a consultation, the defenses begin as soon as the Tarot reading starts. “I already knew that.” In saying this, the client believes he is denying importance to something that he knows but keeps in his subconscious regions. As soon as the reading is over, the client forgets what he saw clearly, in the same way that we forget our dreams when we wake up in the morning. Sometimes, although he speaks clearly and distinctly, he seems not to hear; this is psychological deafness. If he is shown a painful point in the structure of his family tree, he will appear not to see it; this is psychological blindness. If you propose an act, he will haggle as much as he can. Sometimes it seems too difficult, sometimes too long, too expensive, or he will ask to change the details or be afraid of the others’ reactions: “If I do this my father might die, my mother will go mad.” Once he does decide to carry out the psychomagical act, he will put it off. He might wait for years. Or he may declare that during the time of waiting, he has been cured: he no longer needs a solution because there is no problem! Suddenly, a word offends him or a revelation brings on an attack of vomiting, crying, or shaking, requiring the therapist to calm him, thus diverting the therapy from its objective. If asked to provide useful information, he will start telling interminable anecdotes, or will speak much faster than usual, as if fleeing from his own words, or else will lie, or will be stubbornly silent about important memories, or will appear to be collaborating but will make mistakes with dates and names. Finally, trying by all means possible to be the therapist’s friend, he will fall in love with the latter, making sexual advances, offering gifts, invitations to dinner, and will end up disappointed, feeling betrayed, and speaking ill of the therapy.

Ejo Takata said, “For a chicken to be born, the hen should peck at the eggshell from the outside, while the chick pecks at it from within.” However, in many cases, however well-intentioned the client may be, his unconscious defenses are so great that he cannot collaborate on his healing. No word, no advice, can break through the barriers of his false identity, no attempt at bringing awareness can separate him from his childlike point of view, and his negative feelings dominate him, driving him away from the path that could lead to self-discovery. When this happens, in order to release the client from his problems, we must treat him as a patient.

For the primitive healer death is always a disease, an injury, caused by envy of others. The patient is invaded by a foreign entity, and instead of being cured she must be liberated, expelling what has been sent from her soul and body. To this end, as we have seen, the charlatans of the city turn to cleansing rituals or the imitation of surgery. In these cases of powerlessness (in which the person creates a tumor, a persistent physical pain, a paralysis, or a depression in order to avoid confronting the cause of her suffering, which might be a family secret, incest, social shame, embarrassing diseases, etc.), no success will be achieved through oral language, analysis, the recommendation of an act, or the gaining of awareness. The only possibility for relief is to eliminate the symptom. However, most of the symptoms are manifested by the body, which is the dumping ground for unresolved problems, so the therapist comes in to expel the problems, treating the patient as “possessed.” In the Gospels, we are told that the first thing Jesus Christ did after spending forty days fasting in the desert was to enter a temple and with loud cries expel the demons from a possessed person . . .