Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

A SYNTHESIS OF EXPERIENCES by Interviewer Javier Esteban

Alejandro Jodorowsky only agreed to begin these Lessons for Mutants on condition that the results could prove useful to others. My response was that if it was useful for me, a skeptical and much damaged man, it would be for others. Accordingly, we decided to create this work, which compliments, ten years after its appearance, his mythical work Psicomagia [Psychomagic]. These interviews are, therefore, the fruit of an experience between someone willing to share knowledge and someone who wants to learn. More than confirming certainties, our conversations weave constant doubts together with kind responses.

Out of his personal circumstances and knowledge, Jodorowsky has opened roads and shortcuts in his search for happiness. Far from being a guru (he does not like to be depicted this way), our author is an evolved being who — precisely for this reason — laughs at himself. His paths are appropriate for a whole effervescent generation of mutants who make use of individual formulas of consciousness and self-actualization. To heal, to grow, Alejandro shows us that man has tools like meditation, art, dreams, certain sacred substances, magic, alchemy, language, humor, and the tarot, within his reach. The first part of Lessons for Mutants is dedicated to these techniques.

Throughout a hectic life, Jodorowsky has traveled a fantastic human voyage of thousands of years in a very short time. He has experienced many different cultures while at the same time playing an active role in avant-garde culture with his contributions to comics, film, and literature. This trip through the memory of humanity is a constant and imaginative challenge and a profound exercise of release whereby, above all else, it is necessary to know who we are, forgetting part of what we have learned. The author reveals these methods to us in the second part of these lessons.

Jodorowsky conceives these experiences of breaking-off and changing in a personal style, totally distrusting the church, “marionette” or agent of the soul. From freedom and for freedom, he uses a synthesis of experiences with therapeutic and necessary results to complete the human who has stopped fighting for pure survival and seeks inner development. At the margin of whatever revelation or sacred text, of all dogmatic or ideological traditions, Jodorowsky understands that reality must be perceived in the first person and achieved artistically. To this formidable search, to this crazy score, the third part of this interview is dedicated.

The ideas of the author about the distinct levels of consciousness and so many other questions connect with the perennial philosophy in its pure state but are far from the narrow frameworks of traditional religions. Although he speaks of God, Jodorowsky is neither theist nor atheist, spiritual nor religious, rather he is simply a person. For him, health is equivalent only to the morale; because our fulfillment cannot wait for the beyond, rather, it must carry itself out in this world, breaking the boundaries that impede it. Some of these ideas attest to a phenomenon called “religión a la carta,” or “religion by the book,” which recently came slinking into our society.

Alejandro is a visionary in so far as his level of consciousness leans out beyond the limits of time. He is a “luminous” being who hates the possibility of establishing a school, but who, for years, has dedicated his time to the surprising undertaking of civil sanctity. His intuitions about society, religion, and the destiny of humanity have been gathered in the fourth part of this interview, in the form of visions that include an exercise in futurology, where the reader will find many of the author’s ideas and impressions.

Through these interviews, Alejandro explains the therapeutic activity that he considers fundamental and that he carries out in many workshops around the world. In the chapter dedicated to the art of healing, he goes back to clarify some aspects already put forward in his Psicomagia. The last bit of this work is a hymn to life, which reflects the luminous and happy attitude of our character.

The transcription of Jodorowsky’s words has in no way been easy, but I have been as respectful as literarily possible — though my limitations are evident at not catching all the abundance of his oral discourse. He trusted in being able to pass on some of his intuitions to those who seek answers and experiences on the marvelous journey of life. I avoided interviewing Alejandro specifically about the techniques he uses, although here almost all of them are spoken of. For this reason it is, in the end, a work of impressions, a guide for everyone who desires to be transformed. This is not a manual for scholars but a testimony to the way he does things and lives things; it is a modest lesson in the form of a dialogue in which I represent a new generation of mutants.

I have to confess that I believe that in principle Alejandro agreed to carry out these interviews simply to help me, even though afterward he liked the results and considered them useful for others. I went to Paris with a certain busybody complex. Some days, I dedicated myself for precisely an hour a day to meditating at home. At the end of each interview, I could mentally translate his responses into examples that flowed like a waterfall of images. The state of unburdened consciousness led to a pleasant, telepathic drunkenness. Questions connected in sequence like chains of images. We finished by talking of the saints’ auras, without any motive. At the end of the second day, I confessed, “I don’t know if all this will be useful, because I don’t remember anything you said.” Jodorowsky had the kindness to answer my questions while in a trancelike state. During these divine hours I felt like a sculptor hammering an immense block of marble from which a face would appear, a strange portrait that at the same time would provide a mirror to others. “How do you see it?” he kept asking me, as if I were painting. During the days I went to his home, the dynamics were varied. My questions often quickly lowered the level of discourse, but at other times would catapult us into higher spheres. We traveled a lot together, and the inebriation caused by his presence would often last for hours. Of all the images I keep from those days, there is one that sometime visits me in dream: we are paintbrushes that paint our own lives, transforming them at every instant.

JAVIER ESTEBAN

PARIS — BARCELONA, MARCH — JULY 2003

NINE

KEYS TO THE SOUL

I

Asleep and awake are two secretly united faces of reality. Understanding dreams is a path to knowing and transforming ourselves. But, to what extent can we do that, keeping in mind that they are gifts that we don’t ask for?

Yes, we can. Throughout my life I have passed through various phases with respect to the dream. I come from a neurotic family; I worried; I had parents who hated one another — all this caused me to have horrible nightmares. I had to defeat these nightmares by confronting them, taking on my neuroses. It is true that since my youth I’ve used the gift of lucid dreaming, directing my dreams. At first, the lucid dreams would present themselves in the form of temptations. I would find myself aware that I was in a dream, and I wanted to obtain fame, become a millionaire, have sexual experiences. Finally, what happened is that I got trapped. Whenever I asked for specific things, I got lost in the dream and consequently lost lucidity. I had put myself into a dream that was again unmanageable. Later, in my dreams, the desire to be a magician began to appear: I played with the images, I turned into a guru, I wanted power. Again, I became trapped and lost lucidity.

Dreams keep changing, and you can do different things in them like a demiurge. But then you realize that when someone dreams, it is for a reason, and it is not healthy to interfere in the parade of images.

I’ve finally reached the point of simply being a witness to my dreams: I contemplate them and I rest. Actually, I don’t know really if I dream or not because in my dreams the character I am is just as I am in real life.

Do you blend waking and sleeping?

No, it’s not that. What I mean is, when you dream, normally you are not you, you have other personalities, you are capable of doing things that you don’t do in real life. In my dreams, however, I help people: I continue giving classes; I read the tarot; I give conferences. There are really no differences between what I do in my dreams and what I do while awake. This is at the margin of language or symbolic content. The other night, I was in an airplane in complete darkness, and the airplane broke into the light. What I have now are happy dreams; I don’t have nightmares anymore. I am not afraid, because I control these situations. I sleep without any tension. I accept the dreams just as they come. In a certain way — I do not say my ego because I am not referring exactly to my personality — my identity has solidified. It has coagulated. My personality in my unconscious is exactly like that in my real life.

What therapy do you recommend for overcoming nightmares?

I began with Freud, and it was very funny: for him, dreams are repressed desires, frustrated desires, that sort of thing. I was also frustrated with Jung: I dreamed and then I prolonged the dreams in half-sleep, continuing the story, interrogating the dream to see what it wanted to tell me. Then I continued with awake-dreams, developing the imagination. There are many magnificent therapies. In lucid dreams, we get close to what the Senoi tribes do: they work with their dreams during the day, carrying them out through a kind of theater. In other schools, they sculpt them, make them into figures, paint them. . This is how you introduce dreams into your real life, isn’t it?

But all of this is useful for when we are sick. Once you’ve cure yourself, you do not need to do anything. Simply live, simply dream. There is no repression.

Do dreams teach us the true nature of life?

Life teaches us the true nature of life. And the true nature of life is a mixture of dreams and life. Because all life is a dream! The dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca already said this. He had a very high level of consciousness for his time. When we live the now, this instant seems real to us, but an hour later it will be a memory, and the images of the memory have exactly the same quality as the images of a dream.

We could say that we are going to stage a dream and that everything, all of our comings and goings, will infiltrate the dream world and convert the dream. But what happens with dreams? Well, it’s not like that at all. We dream and our dreams infiltrate themselves into our real life. The dreams make themselves reality, just as reality converts itself into a dream. Everything you dream ends up being real.

You tell us we can access the departed who appear to us in our dreams and that they dwell in a place in our memory, that they can give us advice and help us. .

We have a collective mind and a collective unconscious that exists in some realm. There must be a region of the dead that meets us in the collective unconscious. This region is called “hell” in some cultures.

It is through your dreams that you became conscious of the existence of magic, right?

In lucid dreams, I can voluntarily change some things, but only up to a certain point. I cannot change the whole dream but only a part of it. With magic the same thing happens. You can produce changes in reality, but you cannot change all of reality.

II

As the basis of your therapy are art and poetry fundamental?

I believe that all human beings must dedicate themselves to writing poetry for half an hour every day, without worrying if the writing is good or bad, if it will be commercially successful or not. Poetry as a constant in life purifies the ego. Every day we should carry out a free act, a little thing that serves others, like giving a chocolate to a child, simple things. I have come to true depravity in searching for goodness. Sometimes I put cash in the pocket of a sleeping homeless person, so he thinks he has good luck. I invent miracles. Even if you don’t believe in miracles, you can do little things to help others.

This room is full of thank-you cards asking what I desire as compensation for the help I bestowed. My response is: nothing, because I help freely. I do all this based on time I can set aside for others.

What do you use to keep you company when you create?

For thirty years, I have always worked with background music: Celtic harps that have a hypnotic effect. If I am very inspired, I put perfume in the bottoms of my shoes or draw enneagrams (a nine-pointed geometric figure symbolizing the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) with a honey-soaked little paintbrush on the soles of my feet. And, in moments of creative drought, I dye my testicles red with vegetable dye.

You say art cures. In what way?

Art cures because we have to cure ourselves of not being ourselves, of not being in the present. There is a Hasidic phrase that says, “If you are not you, who? If this is not here, where? If it is not now, when?” If you are capable of figuring out the when, the here, and the who (the You), you are being yourself, and you have already cured yourself.

To create art is to know yourself?

Yes, but to know yourself is to know humanity and the universe. It is to pass from the singular to the plural.

Could you explain?

Think that the need for healing is produced by a lack of awareness. We become ill because we have cut our ties with the world. Illness is a lack of beauty, and beauty is the union. Illness is a lack of awareness, and awareness is union between oneself and the universe.

Which artists have fully achieved healing?

The most difficult thing in the world is to create sublime art. Very few people have achieved this. But I could cite René Daumal, who learned Sanskrit and was a student of Gurdjieff; he achieved it. Federico García Lorca is an opposite case: he could not achieve it, he did not know how to. When you read A Poet in New York, it makes you sad.

You have said that literature serves nothing if it does not heal. And if it only heals the author? Can art cure some and make others sick?

I remember some artists who said this world isn’t worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain. I, for example, confess that I cannot read Marcel Proust. He’s too sick for me, and his neurosis can contaminate me. Every day I see neurotic cases, why would I want to read others? Nowadays Franz Kafka is on the loose everywhere! I go to mail a letter, and I find myself with Kafka in the post office: an employee full of problems.

What writers and painters would you save? Which would be in your prized curative art gallery?

What a question! You’re working with the established notion that the art world is like a prizefight: we decide which is the champion painting, the champion book, the champion symphony, and so forth. But I do not see the world like that.

In art, I see structures. For example, in filmmaking, rather than asking what’s the best picture, I would ask by genre: what’s the best western or the best drama. I have my house full of westerns. In my library there are novellas by Silver Kane and other authors, along with comic books, books of oriental philosophy, of Sufism, Kabbalah, magic, alchemy, psychoanalysis. . I am a man of my time, and in my time there is the Internet. So one cannot and should not talk about personal work; we have entire masses of works by category, not by authors. The Internet has revolutionized all this. I had whole libraries. My human ideal would be an old dream: all the books of the history of humanity, all the painting in history, all the films, music, sculptures, everything.

And art that does not cure, you also include?

Though it does not cure — and this is another thing — it entertains. A healthy person can read Emil Cioran or Michel Houellebec and laugh a lot. However, I would not produce that kind of literature, because it is totally obsolete. But there it is. One can go from Kafka to Castaneda and continue to learn. In the same way that a person continues to evolve from one level of consciousness to another, art evolves from one level of consciousness to the next. It is collective and not solitary. I cannot say the best painter is Leonardo da Vinci. I will say he reached another level of consciousness, but as he was an individual, he could only reach to a certain level. If you pay attention, his machines lacked the motor because they lacked energy. These marvelous machines did not provide the essential, which is energy; they used primitive, limited forms of energy, based on pressure and water. Leonardo could not resolve this problem. His limitations were fixed in the humanity of that time, in its collective nature. Do you understand? If you ask me the classic question, “What book would you bring with you to a deserted island?” I would respond, “A computer with Internet access.” Obviously.

III

What do you think is the true aim of language? How do you interpret it or make it useful?

Language is before everything an activity of the body. It corresponds with the nature of the nervous system. From my point of view, we must be able to produce beautiful and poetic language. A healthy language. Mental illnesses, like physical illnesses, are reflected in the way we speak. There are demented words, like sick, tuberculosis, or cancerous: words that are not life-giving but violent and criminal. Illness and the insane language of illness retaliate and are destructive.

Besides, through language, we transmit illnesses, and we access inferior levels of consciousness. The levels of consciousness of language coincide with those of the human being. Just as the human body has been evolving, so has language. If we hold back our language, we use a form and a content that already does not correspond to us, that is outmoded. If we employ a sick vocabulary that is not ours, we undermine ourselves, little by little.

There is the use of the foul, the grotesque, the brusque. .

If you are referring to curse words, I will tell you that curse words are congenial revolutionary tidbits that are designed to break the familiar molds, social and all other kinds. We have the impression that we are totally free to utter curse words, however, using them reduces the level of consciousness. The curse word is not useful — or if it is, it is only at first — to free oneself. At first it seems revolutionary, but it does not drive us to change. It is like jargon. People go about distorting language through jargon, which, in principal, can be useful for establishing strong linguistic ties with the group, but persistent use of jargon swiftly lowers the level of consciousness. The only language that lifts the level of consciousness is the sublime language: that of art and poetry.

By what you’ve said, to create a new language it is necessary to quit seeing the world in a rigid way. What should we change in our language to change ourselves?

I am working on a book of definitions called Intelectualmente correcto [Intellectually Correct]. All of us think badly and, to change this, we need to exchange some concepts for others. I have begun by changing the following expressions:

Instead of never, very few times

Instead of always, often

Instead of thief, someone who took something that belongs to someone else

Instead of infinite, unknown expanse

Instead of eternal, incomprehensible time

Instead of you are my teacher, you show me how to learn from myself

Instead of I want to do, I am being ineffective

Instead of I want to be, I reject what I am

Instead of give me, allow me to take

Instead of imitate me, I do not respect you

Instead of my wife, the being with whom I share my life

Instead of my work, what I have been given to do

Instead of you are like this, I perceive you this way

Instead of mine, what I have now

Instead of to die, to change form

As I write this book, I am listening to people speak on the street. I am creating paths through language. Also I am contributing definitions that break with the commonly accepted ones. All of these are defined by their own negation:

Happiness is to be each day less anxious

Decision is to be each day less confused

Bravery is to be each day less cowardly

Intelligence is to be each time less dumb

In this way I can understand things differently. I consider it important for me to work with language this way because, for simple lack of understanding, we’re moving toward a catastrophe. We are thinking poorly. As such, in our language we should replace:

I begin with I continue

Beautiful day with today I feel good

To fail with change activity

I know with I believe

I am to blame with I am responsible

What is the mechanism through which the fine arts can advance our level of consciousness?

The explanation finds itself in its own definition: fine art and artistic creation. Beauty is the maximum limit we can access through language. We cannot reach the truth, but we can get close to it through beauty. In language there is no truth. Beauty is what initiates call “the flash of truth.” It is the maximum a human being can reach.

Ugliness would correspond, on the other hand, with a lower level of consciousness?

To say beauty we talk about ugliness, to say light we speak of darkness. They are opposites. To cite one, we are already talking about the other. If we have to define ugliness, I would tell you that many times I looked for a concept contrary to beauty. With this system of opposites we spoke of good and bad, of beautiful and ugly. I went through all of that and, in the end, I rested on two conceptual tools: useful and useless. Useful is all that helps us to reach higher levels of consciousness; useless is all that lowers our level of consciousness, anything that reverberates through our nervous system provoking depression and self-destruction. Attacking our own health drives us toward destroying others. However, the higher level of consciousness drives us toward a euphoria with life and toward the desire for immortality, eternity, and infinity. Immortality is probably reached — since death is a solitary phenomenon — in a collective way: by exalting and defending humanity. The human race, as a collective, can be infinite. Death is solitary, and knowing this helps us to understand the world. The negation of death is the negation of the individual.

IV

To deal with life, is intoxication necessary?

Getting drunk produces a great emotional happiness, but alcoholism is horrible. It can happen that we drink sporadically as an escape or diversion, but it is not necessary. I think intelligent people have to open the doors of perception, but it is not necessary to do it like Timothy Leary, who turned his whole life into an intoxication; he became an addict and died drugged without ever knowing himself.

It is one thing to break free of your own limitations, but avoiding yourself is another thing. I do not recommend that anyone avoid himself. I do not make apologies for this escapist intoxication. Neither do I recommend marijuana, because it is a strong Prozac, a tranquilizer; it is not good to be sedated all day.

And take mushrooms at least once?

The experience produced brings you nearer to the metaphysical and to the mystical. When one smokes marijuana for the first time, it also opens the senses: it teaches us to eat well, to breathe well, to feel music well. But once or twice is enough to learn! Otherwise we end up creating an army of sensual fools and loafers who believe themselves to be geniuses. In a similar way, alcoholism ends up turning people violent, and this serves very little.

Would you have become the way you are without having used hallucinogenic substances?

I have not become anything. What have I become? (He stands and turns himself around.) To where have I arrived? One does not arrive. In my case, I needed to take them at a certain moment, forty years ago, when I was going to make The Holy Mountain and had to play a master. I needed to understand the mind of a sage. I did not have this mentality, and I was aware of my limitations. So I hired a guru, Oscar Ichazo, who was one of the creators of the Enneagram of Personality and Claudio Naranjo’s teacher. I paid him seventeen thousand dollars to give me LSD and to guide me. It was a pure acid, a powder he dissolved in orange juice. One hour later, he gave me a marijuana cigarette. The first trip lasted eight hours. After some time, we took more. There were two sessions in which I learned a lot, and I broke my own boundaries. I believe these experiments should not be made in a festive spirit, nor in the company of people who have not attained a higher level of consciousness. It can happen that, during the experience, these people appear to be demons.

This is the explanation for why I took these kinds of drugs. The consequence is that it opened my mind and served me by demonstrating how far I could go. Gurdjieff said drugs are useful for that: You are in the cellar of a building, and the drug makes you rise quickly to the terrace. You are in the underground garage, and you jump fifty flights. You see the whole horizon, the whole city, and when you return, you realize that to go up again, you have to climb each floor on your own, without drugs.

Like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, but being able to investigate beyond. .

Yes. But, in this case, climbing with your own strength, without LSD. It has to do with being able to see it all without the drugs — which one can do. Otherwise it serves nothing.

In the West, we lack a point of reference or a culture of using these substances. For example, mushrooms here are consumed in the most brutal ways, at parties, without reference or finalization. María Sabina García, the shaman, provided them for you.

She sent them to me by way of Francisco Fierro, who was her assistant. He knew how much I had to take, how to vomit, what to do during the experience, and all that. This experience can become a very wise ritual if you don’t try to make it a religious experience. Because it is you who has to make the trip, without controlling it from the outside or imposing archetypes, among other things, because your archetypes are inside you and your trip is yours.

Many people practice syncretic worship with ayahuasca, just as with other drugs.

There is no reason to mix ayahuasca (a South American psychoactive plant) with holiness and things of this nature, as with other drugs. Ayahuasca must be taken calmly, without rites, and guided by someone who knows it, as with all psychedelic drugs.

Do you mean to say that these substances must be taken with someone who knows them, but who does not project any religious meaning or his own interests or personal story onto others?

Exactly. With someone who has developed her spirit and who acts as a guide, but without imposing any particular concepts on you during the experience. Who, when you are anxious, shows you the way to exit. I was talking with Oscar Ichazo and, suddenly, the telephone rang. I was in the middle of the trip, and he said to me, “Answer.”

“But how?” I asked him.

“You can be in both worlds,” he answered.

I answered the telephone, I spoke normally, and then I continued with the trip. This is the mark of a good guide.

I could, and each person can, be in two worlds: the one called real and the other. That is an important lesson that only a master can give. This is only one example of what we can learn by tripping.

Or could it be that the substance opens the way to knowledge?

For me it was a huge step. I recommend doing it at least one time and always with a guide. I saw that my wife, Marianne, had spiritual limitations — even though she was young, spoke six languages, was a university graduate — precisely because she had received a French rationalist upbringing. She wanted to continue the path of the tarot, and I told her she could not remain in this prison of the rational, that she needed a psychedelic experience. So I went with her to Holland. I rented a room with a window opening to the sky, and at two or three in the morning I had her eat some mushrooms so that the effect would last until sunrise. I guided her. I marked the path, and it resulted in being a decisive experience in her life. If I had taken advantage of the fact that she was on a trip and seduced her, she would have lost all the benefit of that experience.

Even marijuana should be taken as an initiation, like alcohol at a bacchanalia. The ceremonial banquets formed part of this culture that we have lost.

What strange mechanism of the conscious can make these substances break our boundaries?

We are used to living in a linear world, in a cubic and rational architecture, and because of this, we are obligated in a given moment to break boundaries. Many times we cannot do it, precisely because we are prisoners to our minds. For this reason, we need an experience in which our mechanisms of perception leap, with the goal of knowing other worlds.

The shamans were primitive people, but now it is we who want to take mushrooms at our leisure, not with their rites. I am not going to take anything with a shaman of yore. For what? So that taking ayahuasca gets me to sing to the Virgin Mary or to the snake? What does all that matter to me? Some followers of gestalt therapy put on Wagner to take ketamine. No, thanks!

When you take substances, you should be out in nature, waiting for the light of day to arrive, with as little outside interference as possible. It’s enough to be with a teacher who tells you to go here or there. And one or two trips is sufficient for the brain to open well enough to last for the rest of your life.

It really has nothing to do with drugs. An experience with mushrooms is not like consuming drugs. I had some mushroom powder, and I decided to give it to some loved ones because I thought it was better that I gave it to them than that some imbecile gave it to them with the excuse to show them a party and to be dumb.

I imagine that these substances are sacred for you.

Now wait a minute — let’s not fall into the trap of the “sacred” concept. Everything can be sacred to a saint, even dog excrement. And nothing is “sacred” to a normal person even if it may be “useful.” It is true that these experiences have different functions and results according to the level of consciousness of the user. Psychedelic substances were, in the first place, taken by shamans, who had a level of consciousness superior to that of the tribe. My thesis is that they should be recommended only for people who have a high level of consciousness. There are people with an almost beastlike level of consciousness who can lose control or accentuate unhealthy tendencies with these substances. One must be very careful, not only about who provides the drug but also about whom one takes them with. I have a phrase to sum this up, “I do not know where I go, but I know with whom I go.” One should not take this path with people who are incapable of understanding the experience, because they will try to slither in and interrupt your trip. Give drugs to soldiers, and you will turn them into assassins. Give drugs to a saint, and you can make magnificent works. Take special care with this. We must not think, as some would hope, that to toss LSD in the water supplies will make society better. This would be a danger to the public.

For example, ayahuasca has fallen into the hands of people with a romantic-infantile mentality who have converted it into a religion. Grave error. Low levels of consciousness will, in a systematic way, squander these energies. But it is clear that at the right moment, when it is agreed to within a rational social framework, like we’ve been given, it is necessary that the people in positions of responsibility have an experience of knowing that there is something out there beyond the rational.

But will there be people who do not need them?

Of course. At this moment, I do not need them. It is like being in a dream, and I am already there. What do I gain with seeing hallucinations and things that I know? The experience is beautiful, agreed, but what am I going to find there? It is useful when you feel you have a limitation and you take it to help you better yourself. The person with a low level of consciousness is afraid to discover his limitations; it angers him, and he cries for knowing it. The person with a higher level of consciousness, the only thing he desires is that the trips show him where his limits are so he can defeat them, and he appreciates them deeply because he can be better. The people with low levels of consciousness look for someone else to affirm their value, but people with higher levels of consciousness, what they seek is someone to point out their defects so they can become better.

V

Could you explain to us what the tarot really is?

The tarot is a metaphysical machine. An organism of images and forms that is very difficult to summarize, one of humanity’s first optical languages. The tarot has twenty-two Major Arcana. If with the Spanish alphabet one can write Don Quixote, imagine what you can do with twenty-two cards, to which it is necessary to add another fifty-six Minor Arcana.

The tarot responds to some rules of optical projection. It is like a mirror that permits you to develop yourself by seeing more and more of yourself. I use it for others and also for myself, to gaze into this mirror and be able to understand ourselves. If, for example, I ask it, “What is prayer?” it responds. “What is love?” it explains it to me. “Who am I?” and there you appear. The tarot shows us the client’s unconscious, and if it can help, it helps. It serves to heal.

You can use the tarot for everything except reading the future.

When people are interested in the future, and they ask me, for example, “Am I going to find a mate?” I tell them, “This I am not going to tell you because it would influence you. What I am going to explain to you is why you have not yet found a mate.” They want to know, “Am I going to have money?” and what I show them is why they do not have money. “I do not know whether to live in Madrid or Barcelona,” another tells me and, well, the important thing is to know why you can’t decide. I reduce everything to the present.

Actually, I don’t believe in the future. It is something I do not even want to touch, because the brain has a tendency to obey predictions. To the person who has a bit of faith in you, if you say he is going to break his leg, he breaks it.

At times, what happens is that this big magic machine, the tarot, when it falls into the hands of pseudo-tarot readers, is reduced to an instrument for reading the future. They convert it into an object. It is a crime that they do not know that the tarot is a sacred work of art.

You have said that in order to read the tarot it is necessary to distance yourself from the client, to not interfere at all in that person’s life.

Yes and no. To read the tarot, it is necessary to identify totally with the client, but without interfering in that person’s affairs. It is necessary to respect him, without expecting to influence or use him.

I have always read for free — except for some months in the beginning when I had to make a living — not because I was generous, but because the tarot is something useful for others. If I charge, I distort it, and in this way, I cannot know it in depth. To read the tarot is to do good, and it is to make art.

In other words, what you do with the tarot is “consult the client.”

Yes. It is like a Geiger counter. It tells you what’s up, what’s happening, how a person is doing. It is told to the client himself. And at times, when a doubt or a choice exists, it responds. The tarot clarifies; it shows the will of the client and helps to uncover what is inside of him.

How can we understand what the tarot tells us?

At the beginning, trying to develop telepathy, I tried to predict. Then I dedicated myself simply to reading it, which did not impede my trying to see how the client was doing, how was his health, what were his passions, sexually or intellectually. I accept the client with his limitations. I feel his voice, I notice how his breath smells, and at times, I touch him. I capture all I can before pulling a card: I see how he mixes them, how he moves, how he acts, how he speaks to me.

VI

Throughout the history of humanity, the metaphor of personal transformation has taken different forms. One of these has been magic. Is magic possible without superstition?

Magic is not superstition; magic is the nature of the world. The world is not logical or rational, it is magic. Everything is closely related. For this reason, I called my book Reality Dance, because all events are aligned, united; time is not linear, the effects are sometimes produced before the causes; there are mysteries. Seventy percent of the world cannot understand it, like the chimpanzee does not understand 90 percent of the world. We have a lot to learn. Reality is miraculous, it is magic. It obeys nonscientific principles. Reality is not scientific.

And when we do not understand the nature of the world, we create superstitions?

Exactly, and we believe in things that are not real because we need them.

Does magic work in reality or in our way of seeing the world?

In magic, if you are conscious, you can see the metaphors, the analogies; for it to rain, the shaman makes noise with his fingers on the earth. If you have evolved, you realize, at a certain level, that this works because the analogy is useful. The unconscious accepts the metaphors. When you know the laws of the unconscious, you realize that magic drives these laws. Magic works on the unconscious.

I speak of the unconscious of reality, not of our little unconscious. To be mysterious, reality shows that a personal unconscious exists, as well as a familial one, one of the group, one of the planet, one of the universe. That is reality. The world is as much manifested as it is not manifested. The world is as much what it is as what it is not. The world is as much the possibilities that appear to us, as it is the infinite possibilities that hide from us.

Everyone is an immortal consciousness, an exact reproduction of the universe. Your unconscious is a particle and at the same time the totality of the cosmos. And say what they will with respect to your limited body, you are the complete consciousness. Let them tell you what they will about your ephemeral flesh; if you achieve integrating yourself into the divine consciousness, you are immortal. However, to achieve this, it is necessary to have enough humility to erase yourself personally and accept being only a channel. But if you present yourself as an all-powerful being who knows everything, you will be a fraud. For all that I tried to be more than what I am, I am not more than what I am. It is necessary to be conscious of what we are. The greatest power of your life is to be able to help, and the greatest blessing man has is to be able to live in peace. There are mysteries, but one does not dominate them. I have known little telepathic miracles that each day are a little bigger. But I do not arrive at things found in legends: “a teacher looks at someone and knows his name and birth date.” I don’t get to this, but I get to other things. Telepathy exists, I know.

How would you define black magic as opposed to white magic?

Black magic is a sick magic that tries to profit from the nature of the world. It is a useless magic because it is directed toward destruction. It exists only for those who believe in it. Opening that door can be very dangerous.

How can you explain the existence of a white magic and a black magic?

The spirit has deep roots, long branches. You can melt infinitely into the negative, into the darkness, or you can rise toward the light. It is a question of choice. But I do not want to speak about black magic because, like I said, it is a sick thing.

The technique, isn’t it actually applied magic?

We do not know what it is. We know it works. Just as we do not know what energy moves the universe. Still we ignore it. We can intuit how the world works, and this we call by many names, including God. What we are not able to understand, we call magic. But, in reality, it is a use of magic. We are talking of a use of magic, but we do not know exactly what it is. We do not control it. We cannot yet.

What are the laws of magic?

There are four: to love, to dare, to be capable, and to be quiet. “To be quiet” I understand as “to obey.” Strength at rest is the greatest strength. For this reason, at times, I tell this initiation story that relates how the strongest man in the Chinese Empire makes his demonstration of strength by taking a butterfly from a little box and saying, “I am so strong that I can take a butterfly by the wings without hurting it.” This is to be quiet.

It is necessary to manifest knowledge only when it asks us to, and if it does not, be quiet. One is giving; the other is forcing others to receive.

And how do you define “to love,” “to dare,” “to be capable,” “to be quiet”?

“To love”: If you do not love, you do not advance. There are those who do not want to cure themselves. The gospels tell us of when Jesus asked the paralytic if he wanted to walk, because if you do not want it, not even a god can cure you.

“To dare”: To cure yourself you must be willing to face the changes that the cure is going to produce. For forty years the paralytic was an invalid, so to be cured, for him, meant to not have money — he would not be able to beg anymore. When you are sick, you are really calling to others to cure you; you are asking for tenderness. Sickness is a request comedy. The sick person is screaming to be loved. It is necessary to dare to be cured, to enter into a new individuality in which you “unknow” the way. The cure produces a change and, in a certain way, a new personality.

“To be capable” means that once you are doing something, you enter into the fight, and you do not have to be your own enemy. To be capable, it is necessary to be one and to not be the other, to not fight against yourself, because that will produce a big neurosis and a failure for you.

“To be quiet” means that when you try to broadcast what you won, you lose, because now you’ve become an exhibitionist. This is the problem that some gurus have: they show their saintliness, and they lose it through the same act. The true master is invisible: no flowers, no necklaces, no rings, no photos, no school, no disciples. But to the true master, all of humanity is the disciple. In an unguided way, the true master lets wellness slip in and subtly introduces knowledge that can raise another’s level of consciousness. To be a master, neither school nor ambition is needed. A master obeys a superior universal will.

What does an alchemist do?

First we should define what an alchemist is: one who seeks the philosopher’s stone, who changes base metals into gold, who seeks a universal solvent, and finally who has the elixir for lasting life. The philosopher’s stone: the alchemist wants to develop inner values as much as possible, to grow as a human being, and thanks to this, to raise the level of consciousness and climb to other dimensions.

The elixir for lasting life is a person who accepts life and lives everything as it is without self-annihilation.

The universal solvent is a person who has developed divine love in his heart. Love is what dissolves all resistances.

VII

Why does laughing cure us?

In a certain way because to laugh is to dislodge what hurts or tortures us. Laughter distances us from our inner conflicts and unties the knots. It helps momentarily. It opens the levees and portions out happiness for a few moments. It works as well as a sneeze: quick and liberating.

That’s also how jokes work.

But there are many kinds of jokes. There are aggressive jokes and racist or sexual jokes, which are sick. People display a great deal of sickness with these kinds of jokes, which liberate them from the anxiety of being filled with these negative things. But certain jokes have a metaphysical, philosophical, or human content, and these are profound jokes. Humor was always used in the mystic schools. The Sufis told a story about the idiot sage Mullah Nasrudin, the Roshis Zen have something similar, and there is a whole series of jokes about rabbis. In the initiates’ training, the joke is as important an element as the sacred texts.

It seems incredible, but that’s how it is. Similarly, we have to understand folk tales, fairy tales, and legends, which are also valuable.

Although our culture denigrates them.

Yes, because our culture degrades everything that has deep meaning, for example, the tea ceremony. Tea was an essential element in oriental cultures, especially in China and Japan, like coffee in Sufism. However, now we drink tea at all hours, when in reality, it’s a sacred tool like marijuana is. When I went to Holland and asked how to take mushrooms, they answered, “Put them in pizza.” People eat them without any reverence. Everything sacred has been lost.

Recently, they sold at public auction the last art objects that André Breton left in his inheritance, and the curious thing is that the best treasures he had were his rocks. Breton dedicated himself to picking up beautiful pebbles. That, for him, was the best artwork that existed. Logically, they have no commercial value. Poetry doesn’t sell either. That is the marvel of true art, that no one has yet found a way to commercialize it. Man, when he achieves an adequate level of consciousness, feels the sacred in everything around him, and the world takes on this essence. The plants, the rocks, the joke: they are sacred; these things are consecrated. I knew a shaman who cured laryngitis with an infusion of cow dung.

Do you remember some special joke?

Each day I have a favorite joke. The one from yesterday had to do with a man who wins the lottery and they ask him if he is happy with the millions and he answers, “I am not happy because I bought two tickets, one gave me millions, but the other gave me nothing.” Instead of seeing the happiness in life, this man was anchored to the negative.

It is necessary to laugh at the absurdity of the world and to not believe anything. . but not even in ourselves or in our own mutations?

Of course. There are different kinds of humor. Black humor, which creates distance from the world. Normal humor, which is to laugh at the world. Panic humor, which is to laugh heartily at oneself and be happy about life. It is not helpful to laugh at, like vulgar humor does, but to laugh with, like surrealist humor. Or panic humor, which is simply to laugh: to be happy in the middle of chaos and destruction. The Chinese showed their agreement with this idea by inventing the game of dying: a master died doing a handstand, cackling. This is to understand existence.

TEN

THE TRAIL OF LIFE

I

Do you think we can escape our origin or that we are determined by it?

We have destinies from the past, without a doubt, but what is necessary is to be conscious of them without being subservient to them. We can choose each step of our existence. In this is our freedom, in not letting the past determine our present and in not repeating the past.

Is it possible to intuit, as some traditions maintain, these previous experiences or influences that weigh on our lives?

I cannot talk of past lives, except to say that before birth there was something — I do not know what — and that after death there will be something — I do not know what either. This is all I can say for sure, the rest I do not know. Now, although we can imagine past lives, it would not be possible to say for sure that they were true. There is no way to prove it.

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.

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.”

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.

Your ideas could be described as mutacionistas. Are we mutants?

We all are. There are many things that we do not understand because our bodies are still developing. Recently I spoke with a doctor who told me that the pineal gland was an atrophied gland. I replied to him that the human being is an animal in evolution and cannot have anything in him atrophied. The pineal gland could be — why not? — the seed of an organ that is developing and evolving into a fourth brain. He changed his scientific view a few hours before he was to present a paper at a scientific conference in Los Angeles. I explained to him that nothing is atrophied; in fact, you could say exactly the opposite, and that appears more logical to me. We are developing something new from this gland. . there are things we do not understand because we are like chimpanzees. .

What sense does it make that we cannot now understand something we are destined to discover?

We cannot imagine the eternal. We cannot conceive of it. And if we cannot understand the universe, we are ignorant and limited. You ask me about the sense of all this, but surely it is our descendants who will be able to understand it. We are here to produce descendants who can understand it. We are here to produce descendants who will use the same brain that we already have but be more evolved. If the reptilian brain evolved into our three human brains, I sincerely believe that we are creating a fourth brain — and it doesn’t have to be material.

In the Middle Ages they intuited this. They painted the fourth brain in the form of a halo because that’s how they saw it, as a golden circle around the head. What reason is there for painting a halo? Why would they invent a halo? Well, because the halo is real.

II

What advice could you give to a seeker of knowledge, to someone who is looking for himself?

I began with meditating. But before that I looked for people who had a more elevated consciousness than mine, though I did not go to pay homage nor become a disciple. I put myself in contact with those whom I thought were interesting. The error that I committed was to make friends with a teacher, because then you do not accept the exchange or the lesson. With friendship you unbalance the levels of consciousness between people. But by knowing these people, my level of consciousness rose, and I learned a lot until I arrived at what I considered valid. When you get to a level that you value as important, you can and should devote yourself to others in order that they learn with you.

From all your experiences with knowledge — psychoanalysis, shamanism, taking substances, meditation — what would stay with you?

The most resounding exercise to which I have dedicated myself for years is to suspend thought. To succeed at not letting even one word enter my brain.

Once I achieved that, even the thought that I was able to stop all thought left my head. This has been the most difficult.

Also, to practice meditation was for me very important, although my path has been more to do with artistic creation.

Do you advise against the rational paths like philosophy or the study of science?

I do not advise against; I believe that all these paths are also good. Philosophy made me pose questions for myself that later I had to resolve by way of other disciplines.

Are the higher levels of consciousness found in people or in groups?

It is difficult to belong to a group, because established groups create dependencies. If we speak with the common sense that characterizes us, we must speak of the large group of humanity, all of humankind. Fortunately, it’s been a while since I quit being picky about my clientele. Every Wednesday I meet those who want to come to a café, and I can read the tarot. At a certain age, you have to make yourself useful for others. When you have lived and life has given you an experience, whether good or bad, the moment arrives when you should pass on what you know.

Rather than turn into a dumb old person, you should go further every time. Aging does not exist, neither does mental decline. The memory can have less capacity to find a word or maybe you can feel less sexual desire, less virulence, but there is no reason for desire to have disappeared. If, during your life you have worked the emotions, when you mature you begin to know sublime feelings, which you did not have when you were young because nature did not let you. It takes forty years to find yourself. The true opening of the consciousness cannot be had before this age. From there, the journey begins.

You indicate that contemplation is the technique that perfects all these things. What is contemplation to you?

In meditation, you immobilize yourself and dedicate your attention to what happens inside you, as if you were seated at the edge of the river seeing things pass by. And contemplation is the same — but you’re swimming in the river. That is to say, you are seeing what happens to you, but you are in the depths of life, acting.

What does “to be possessed by the spirit of the teacher” mean?

Our brain is broad and infinite. In the same way that it produces the personality we have, it can produce others. That is to say, we learn to build our personality. Schizophrenics can have thirty personalities and even more. When you are going to see a teacher, you see another human being that has a higher level of consciousness than yours. What happens? You pursue this level of consciousness; your brain pursues it. So your brain grasps this level and reproduces it in your person, but because it’s the first time you see it in yourself, you identify it with the teacher, with her ego, with her character. And the brain, instead of acting as if it had your form, gives you the form of the other: it makes you feel like you have the body of another, the personality of another, the apparent individuality of another.

This produces an imitation, and I believe this is what you refer to when you say “to be possessed by the spirit of the teacher.” It is not that the teacher is inside you but that there is an imitation of a level of consciousness that you are considering superior to yours.

And the teacher who believes herself to be the chosen one?

Well, on the path of the evolution of consciousness there are traps. I explained this in my book Los Evangelios para sanar [Gospels for Healing]. In reality you are a path. Your brain is a path on which all gods walk. If on a path I see a god and I believe myself a god, I have fallen into the trap of the guru. In reality, we are the path where things are passing, we are not the passersby.

What are initiation tests?

In Castaneda’s words, challenges. Here’s a way to think about them. We observe some traumas: A woman is raped and this destroys her life. Another woman is raped, she bathes, she cleans herself, she cries, she recovers, she decides that she is never going to talk about that again, and she continues with her life. The same thing happens in war: some people stay hurt forever, yet others become stronger. The point is that traumas do not produce illnesses; traumas are the detonators. There is latent illness inside us that the trauma makes explode.

And as far as initiation tests, they consist of the following: You have a level of consciousness, and you are faced with an event. You have to react in a useful way and advance. The test is a challenge for you to evolve.

And sacrifice: is it a masochistic trap?

That’s right. Religions have confused us. In our culture, the sky is not on earth, it is not within your reach. You have to attain the beyond by suffering in life, and the church tells you that suffering will make you rich and powerful.

Why are we afraid when we get close to archetypes by way of dreams, the imagination, or hallucinogenic substances?

The masses, people in general, only change their level of consciousness when they are in serious trouble, like, for example, following a natural disaster or terrorism. The masses are afraid of archetypes because archetypes are contained in higher levels of consciousness, and this produces fear in people who do not want to change. Each time we confront archetypes, we are confronting the dissolution of identity.

III

Have we built an invisible skin that we call ego?

No, the skin is not the ego. We are habituated to think that it is like that, but it’s not true. Let’s look deeper: Imagine the lion out roaming his territory. When he senses that some prey has entered his territory, he pounces. Also, there are plants whose perception reaches thousands of kilometers, birds that manage formidable distances in flight, or organisms that allow themselves to be felt very far away. And man? Well, through telepathy the human being can go around the world. Man has no limits.

So, what would be the ego?

Many times one speaks of the ego without understanding it. In reality, we have our essential being and another acquired part that permits an identification or an identity. This last one is the ego, an acquired identity, which is at the service of the essence. The ego can degenerate into diverted personalities, schizophrenics, or paranoids because it is the ego that notices the traumas and blows of life.

You admit that, for years, you had a gigantic ego. What can a person do in our world without an ego?

The ego is deaf. Deaf and blind. The ego has been tamed. This is the core in the Hindu doctrine. The ego must bend to the essence. In social activities, the biggest egos develop, like in the university where a person talks and talks even though no one is paying attention and no one ever listens. With this type of person there is no dialogue, only a long monologue. Life requires us to enter into dialogue and to listen to others. The ego is necessary like the shell of an egg: it envelopes the essence. All this about “kill the ego” is the craziness of gurus who, of course, are huge egomaniacs. I remember Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) who, in spite of being an extremely intelligent person, made his followers put his face on their T-shirts. In each of his books there were fifteen or twenty photos of his body. The ego can convert itself into something delirious. This man spent his life fighting against the ego and, in so doing, did nothing but strengthen his own. He confronted the egos of others but never his own. I look at the gurus like clowns. They are necessary, but they are big paper dolls.

Are we slaves of our desires?

We are always desiring things: more money, more objects. The world is pure desire. We get it in our heads that we have to resist aging: thousands of commercials encourage us to thicken our lips, lift our tits, stretch our dicks, firm our butts. We desire and we desire whatever we see in the advertisements or on the street. Every time I connect to the Internet, I’m sure to get four propositions: lengthen my phallus, lose weight, buy prostitutes, and win a fortune without working. . or imaginary banks appear where you win millions. This is a serious problem with our society: it is full of desires to consume and to show off, but there is very little desire to be.

We should learn then, as you have told us so many times, to defeat desire?

The oriental schools pass on a very old wisdom that should be revised. They have greatly idealized the teachings of Buddha, and one must be careful. The legend of Buddha, if one looks at it well, is quite grim: a young rich kid abandons his wife and child to be carefree; he was someone who feared the most natural things in the world like death, old age, illness, poverty. . But, of course, that doctrine assumes that the liberation of desire grants salvation, that salvation cannot come through rebirth, because it believes only in the rebirth or the pilgrimage of the soul — now that’s a lot to suppose, and it could be untrue.

If I do not believe in reincarnation, Buddha fails me. For him, it is necessary to escape from this life in order to not be reincarnated again, and this is an error. It is not necessary to escape from anything. It is necessary to live life. I do not know if reincarnation exists — we cannot know that. We cannot establish doctrines in which I must believe, communicating things by saying let’s stop the wheel on reincarnation, karma, and so forth. They are suspicious beliefs. In no way do I use them. Well studied, they are toxins for everyone.

IV

I would like to ask you about death. .

What is death? Only a change, a mutation. We do not have death, but rather the change it assumes.

Where did you learn this?

(Laughter.) Death is a word, and I began to learn it with the tarot. Death is Arcana XIII, and it does not have a name. It is situated in the middle of the deck. I had realized that once I was fifteen years old, I disappeared. Then I was thirty years old, then forty years old, and I continued disappearing. Right now I am seventy-four, and I am another person, yet I continue, content. When I am ninety I will be happy, when I am one hundred years old I will continue to be content. When I am three hundred, I will be stupendous, when I am a million years old, I will be a party.

Do you believe something of us stays when we die?

They asked a Zen master, “What is after death?” And he said, “I do not know. I still have not yet died.” I am here. But I know that what I am continues.

The Chariot tarot is sunken into the earth. Where is it going? The earth moves it and displaces it. We advance with the universe. What do I care about “after”? It was never important to me how I would be at eighty years old or a hundred or a million or sixty million. What is important is to know who I am now, not where I am going.

When you begin little by little to lose your identity, to become a generic human, you stop seeing yourself being any certain age. Then you stop identifying with time in general. Later, you are no longer a clear native of a motherland nor a speaker of a certain language. You do not see yourself in your name, you do not confuse yourself with the things you own, you begin to stop the identification.

But where do we stand in this vision of ourselves?

You hold on tight to who you are. To the happiness of life. You are happier every day, and you do not need the rigid costume of the character or of the personality. You are fluid, like water. Lao-tzu says, “One must be like water and take the shape of the vase that holds it.” Go through life taking shapes and this is magnificent. There is a moment when you accept it, and you tell yourself, “What I am is disappearing.” And once you are conscious, you are there all the time. You feel in your heels an abyss of total emptiness, and you go on advancing, like a light. And this light that you are knows it is going to swallow the abyss. This hope exists that you dissolve with an infinite joy into the cosmic ocean, and you are you, but you always accept that you are giving way to your consciousness. The ultimate gift you give is your consciousness.

When you arrive at death, the best you can offer is a perfect and enlightened consciousness, a clear consciousness, and that you must create, because if not, as Gurdjieff said, you die like a dog without offering consciousness and without building a soul.

It is said that power is locked between the walls of the skull. But where would you place consciousness?

Outside of the body. The body is like the stone of a peach, however, the consciousness does not have limits and it is in constant expansion.

You suggest that by an effort of the imagination we can free ourselves from the obvious, in the same way listening to music and playing with the memory could transfer us to another place. However, it is not enough to play with a handful of images, we must change to improve, change the subjects we imagine, isn’t that right?

There is a kind of imagination that is almost industrial: this is delusion. One must not confuse the imagination with constant delusions. I can imagine myself as whatever I want to all the time without going into any depth at all: stories and stories and stories without any deeper meaning. Or we can, like Kafka, submerge ourselves to a certain level, then stand still. He never achieved happiness. He rooted himself in neurosis.

Strength is always necessary, but why is this constant effort of existence demanded of us?

In life it is necessary to always be alert but not tense. I observed that when you say “strength” you feel it like something unpleasant, but I do not believe it necessary to make things detestable when we could make them likable. When I speak of “strength” I speak of agreeable strength: to paint, to dance, to live, these are totally pleasant strengths. We should do what pleases us in life and try very hard at it.

Life is a test, a trial?

No. Life is an initiation school. Or as Castaneda said: a challenge. For the warrior, this is important.

Is it at all useful to theorize about life?

He who theorizes about life does so because he knows nothing about life. But he who knows life should communicate his experiences, teach what he has lived.

We return once more to the old and obstinate question: why does what exists exist?

A woman who was very sick from cancer called me from the hospital and asked me, “What is the purpose of life?” I thought. And I responded with what she hoped, “Life doesn’t make sense.” She sighed and said, “This is what I hoped to hear.” The next day, she died. I answered like that to console her because this woman could not be cured. Although I believe life does make sense, we do not have to know what that sense is. It is a mystery. The idea that all things have a purpose is very idealistic. Of course we have an end, but we do not know what it is. If this were not so, I would not be here. We have a purpose as humanity in the universe. We have a destiny, however we do not have to know it rationally. And it is necessary to accept this in the healthiest way possible. To convert our planet into a garden. Enrich it and enrich ourselves.

What does it mean to be yourself? Can we ever know who we are?

Knowing yourself really means that you are the universe. I do not have limits because I am united with the universe like an organism: time is my life, what happens is my life and is life. If I know myself, I am the actor and the spectator: the known and the knower at the same time. Up to a certain point I can go from actor to spectator, but there is a supreme moment in which the actor and the spectator melt together. This is not just knowledge; it is pure consciousness, a state of knowing.

What does it mean to be realized through the transpersonal? Hasn’t this word been overused?

It is not hot air; it is simply a useful construct. What we understand to be personal corresponds with the attitude of enclosing yourself in your own psychology and analyzing everything from your own perspective. The transpersonal means to accept that the other exists, and to keep that in mind when perceiving the world and figuring things out.

In this sense, the transpersonal transcends the boundaries. We would have to, on this path, get to the androgynous thought. If you were a common person, you would be thinking first as a Spaniard, then as a man, then as an earthling. The ideal is to think without nationality, without sexual definition, and without being deformed by the solar system.

Can we believe that one day we can fulfill ourselves?

This is a trap, because no one fulfills himself fully. What is fulfilling oneself? Advancing as one can. For example, today, all day, I have written for Los Technopadres, a series presented as a comic strip, which I love. I am happy because I like the scene I invented. I am euphoric because I am creating. Although it will be a story for children or for young people, it fascinates me. And each morning I write a poem of four or five lines — I do not have time for more. These are little things that I do and that I like:

Abandoned room

ownerless home

emptiness lies in wait

under my words.

Like a blind man

who would find

a treasure in the garbage

I let winter pass.

Do not thank me.

What I have given you

was given to me

for only you.

I do not want you to love me,

I want you to love:

flames are ownerless.

Hearing that, I have the impression that our happiness comes from looking at the world in a certain way.

It is not a question of perception. It’s about being yourself. When you advance, you perceive yourself in your totality. It does not have to do with defining reality. If we say, “I would like to know,” we are projecting the illusion of having an I and, further, that we can know it. I don’t have anything to do with that. Since classic antiquity, we’ve honored the expression “Know thyself,” but it is really confusing. People think that it is similar to going looking for something. But when we say “know thyself,” this “thyself ” is really the universe. The universe knows itself. “Know me,” says the universe. In the voice of God, know yourself means: know me. But be careful with this: do not think, “You are me, and I am you.” In truth, “You are not me, but I am you.”

The greatest teachers say we have to learn to die in peace. But to do that, is all of this journey necessary?

Yes, of course. The purpose of life is to learn to die in peace, “play dying,” say the Chinese. But to die is to enter into a process, like when childhood slowly passes into puberty: the hair, the hormones. . You live as a change. You move forward in life, and old age begins, which is another period. The hair begins to turn white, the teeth yellow. If you fight against old age, you age with anxiety. If you fight against puberty, you traumatize yourself. At a given moment, we all enter into a process of death, which we can and should live exactly as all the earlier changes.

Death is nothing more than a state. No one is dead! No one dies! We all enter into a process of death, and it is marvelous to accept it with the same tranquility as when we enter into puberty or into maturity.

TWELVE

VISIONS

I

What do you think of the intermediaries of the soul? Of those who have organized themselves in order to teach us the mysteries of life?

Ultimately, I have divided the world — although these divisions are arbitrary — into beings and paper dolls. The word “paper doll,” which has stuck to my tongue, helps me to distinguish all the mental constructs. There are, of course, useful paper dolls and useless paper dolls. And the usefulness of either varies according to the passage of time or a change in our particular circumstances. At a certain moment, a formerly useless paper doll can become useful.

The useful paper doll is one that leads us to necessary mutations. The monks, due to living in celibacy, are not worthy of faith. If everyone was a priest, the human race would end. In this sense, they are no good. It is not possible to carry God inside you or communicate to others from a life that goes against human nature.

When these monks organize themselves into sects, other problems arise.

I suppose they try to monopolize what they call truth?

Sects could be useful. The problem is, effectively, that their reality consists in taking control of God. They make God their private property. Then they declare that whoever does not participate in the sect is unfaithful, worthy of destruction. They are separators. They do not unite. I believe that in the future the temples will be multipurpose. There will be cathedrals where they celebrate all the cults with free access and absolute compatibility. Subsequently the names of the gods will be removed; there will be anonymous organizations. If you give a name to God, you are appropriating him.

Religion, the same as a Constitution, should be revised because as man changes, religion has to change. The sect uses prohibitions. What man does not know, he calls God: it is a form of superstition. As the brain evolves, blind beliefs and taboos crumble.

How does this affect what you call “ health”?

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

Therefore, you do not recommend any church?

No, not even temples of the Zen masters, which are now Spanish, American, Mexican. They are paper dolls imitating traditions, languages, and Japanese food.

But the sects own interesting techniques and knowledge.

Of course. But these techniques and knowledge can be acquired without all the circus. When Ejo Takata introduced me to the Zen rod, I gave it back saying, “I am not a Zen master. Don’t give me this. I am never going to be a master, nor am I going to hold anyone up; this is a great honor, but my way is another.”

What sense does it make that humanity has produced beings such as Jesus or Buddha?

When you say Jesus and Buddha, you are talking of beings that, for me, are imaginary. It is as if you said Don Quixote or Hamlet. The same. But it doesn’t matter that they are imaginary. What is important is the quality of the message, which is marvelous.

In a way, they are there; they can almost be touched.

They are there, mythical, but now we are speaking about human beings. We do not know if some human beings have received the revelation. We will never know if the saint is crazy or if he has hallucinations.

And of the apparitions or revelations, what is your opinion?

To see apparitions of the Virgin does not interest me. It does not prove anything to me. To see a little smiling transparent girl climb a tree is to me the same as seeing a gorilla climb a tree. It is as peculiar as that. It has no benefit whatsoever.

And what explanation do you give to these phenomena?

They take place because people yearn for them to exist. It’s like a collective hallucination. Jung said that flying saucers are a product of the collective unconscious. They are collective dreams.

Why do we have the feeling that religions are traps for the soul?

Religions become traps when they set up boundaries. Divinity has no name or nationality and is for everyone. Religion comes to segment mystical reality. Ultimately you feel the limits of each religion, and these become traps. On the other hand, for centuries sacred books have been interpreted in an aberrant way by monks for whom woman is the devil, and they end up infecting the holy texts with their off-the-track interpretations. Then the same occurs in schools, in politics, in society — and it ends up creating oppression. Religion, which should be the universal panacea, becomes a universal poison — all religions.

You studied the Kabbalah, which, besides having religious significance, is a language.

Yes, a language that produces a bunch of crazies: in Hebrew each letter has a numerical value, and each word that you read equals the value of the letters in the word added up to a definite number. So you have combinations, and you say, “The number 87 is moon (levanah, in Hebrew) but also the word carrion (nevelah) equals 87, then moon and carrion could be the same.” It is a crazy system; the Kabbalah makes you crazy. We are adults. We do not need to believe in fairy tales. We cannot say that a book was written by God. We cannot say that the Bible, the sacred book, is the divine word. We can say that it is a novel, a work of art. And languages are works of art. But all of them, not only Hebrew or Sanskrit. I can play with all languages in the same way.

What relationship have you had with Sufism?

In Sufism, when you know it, you discover great beauties. It is like the cream of Islam. It is a deep mysticism, but they are prisoners of the Qur’an.

Even though Shams-i-Tabriz or Jalaluddin Rumi were very free souls. .

I decided to heal, to be conscious of the illnesses that come with their books. Behind every illness there is a book, be it the Qu’ran, the gospels, the Old Testament, Buddhist sutras. . All books, if they are interpreted through fanaticism, produce illnesses. We must reinterpret all those texts and take them for what they are: works of art. The Bible, for example, is a marvelous novel.

All beliefs establish metaphors to explain life, but the explanation of what happens to us continues to be a mystery. This lack of understanding, at times, takes us on nonsensical journeys. Do you believe God is a gambler?

It is an interesting intellectual game to talk about God and to think of it as a being that plays, that has attributes, that gets bored, and that defies that boredom by rolling dice. When Moses Maimonides wrote his book The Guide of the Perplexed, it took him three volumes to try to define God — and he arrived at the conclusion that God is that of which nothing can be said. God is the unimaginable, the immeasurable. And I add that God is the unlovable, because how are you going to love what you do not know? I like the idea of the game, but I believe it is not he who is playing it. It is the human being who plays: it is humanity who plays. Johan Huizinga wrote a book called Homo Ludens, which is an analysis of man as a being who plays. Man is a being who plays and builds illusions in his likeness. So man has imagined a God who plays.

What do you have faith in?

When Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was asked if he believed in God, he said no. “How is it possible that such a great mystic does not believe in God?” they said. “I do not believe because I know it,” Ramakrishna replied. I do not believe in the concept of “faith”; I believe in knowledge.

Do you know?

There are things that I know, yes. The dumb know not, but believe they know.

What does the concept “civil saint” mean to you? Who can be this?

I am a person who has suggested to myself to do good, simply. It is not that I have succeeded, but I have suggested it. Besides, to earn my living or to have children and a wife, like we all can, I have suggested to myself to do good insofar as I exist in a civil society. The civil saint could be someone who imitates holiness from these positions. No one is really a saint but rather imitates holiness. The saint could be the perfect human being, but the actual human being is still in the process of evolution. Because of this, he is limited to only imitating holiness.

How can we imitate holiness?

By intuition. The saint hears what he should do. And this comes to us from the interior, from what we call the God within. There is a perception inside of us, something that says, “What is the best in this situation? How can I help my fellow man?”

Sacrifice does not exist to the civil saint; like everyone, he avoids the masochistic sacrifice of the saints and carries out a normal life, integrated in society. But, in addition, he is conscious of the world; he is conscious that his acts have to be healing for others and for himself.

Holiness is not something that belongs to religions, nor does it mean sexual repression. Holiness consists in having a cosmic and divine consciousness. When I spoke of civil holiness, they took me for a madman, but now they are practicing it. It was necessary to speak of civil holiness, and I did. Just as I say that for art to be art it has to cure. And many people have begun practicing it. When you discover an idea and you mention it, sometimes it spreads everywhere. When a flower opens, it is springtime everywhere.

II

Is making policy necessary to develop our consciousness?

Politicians have a social function. They are our employees; we pay them. We must realize that a president could be our one in charge; the police are dependent on us, like bank tellers and waitresses. Politicians are our servants, not our mistresses.

But one can have a political passion. .

I never had it, I always hated politics. I never mixed with these people because, for me, politics had to be metaphysical, mystical, an art. I recommend that politics end; it has become the cancer of society because now it does not mean anything. Actually, a president is not a big deal. The president embodies an old symbol, but behind him are the multinationals, the oil companies, and all that. We could live very well without them, without paper dolls and without politicians. People are learning this, because people see them staging puppet shows or being mimicked by comics and television, and they no longer let it confuse them.

At the same time, you say it is necessary to change the world.

It is necessary to change it, but not through politics. When I was in Latin America, very celebrated writers told me to join the party, to take part with the left because otherwise they would inform on me and I would never have literary success. They also told me that if I did not side with the left, I would be considered in favor of the right. “Join and you have literary success! It is what the rest of us have done! If not, you will have us as your enemies,” they clarified. I did not join them because I feel that art is not political. The political should turn itself into art, but not the artist into a politician.

What could be the utopia for the present age?

To begin with, I would want all of human order to make a partnership, beginning in schools. It is atrocious that the children leave the partnership and go to be educated by a professor, just a man or a woman. This negates partnership. Classes should by taught by couples of both sexes, and children should be educated by a man and a woman, the same way that it should be a Pope and a Popesse, a president and a presidenta, not necessarily husband and wife. This is what I would do as a first political measure to improve social life: all human activities would have to be carried out in complimentary pairs.

We live alienated by a world that is at the mercy of technology, the market, and money. Is this due to capitalism or is the problem within us?

If you look carefully, what defines man is not quantity but quality. Humanity has always been qualified by his valence. Another thing is the great multitude, which, at the core, directs the world — the politicians need their votes, and they have to deceive them to legitimize themselves. Our labor is something else; it is to create conscious people. Everything I desire, I desire for others. Work the consciousness, then share it, so that humanity does not sink into catastrophe, because then the multitude will dominate — and the masses have a limited level of consciousness. It is necessary to elevate the level of consciousness: the multitude does not represent the human being. In this sick society, people emerge who are like antibodies; they are called to expand the consciousness, but this is work that must be done through the schools, on the streets, through art, and with every word. For this reason I say that art, not politics, heals.

Entertainment that sedates serves nothing; well, maybe to be able to bear life, right? I amuse myself. Like a little dwarf, I entertain myself with American movies, which serve to dull the brain. But all of this pseudo-art does not change society. Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating. If you take any mediocre being of today, and you transfer him to the Middle Ages, he would be a genius. We are changing, we are mutating, but the masses do it much more slowly. Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken’s foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.

Although not all human beings have the same function, the collective consciousness is totally necessary. There are, as I said, different levels of consciousness, and this is the most important: the mutation of the level of consciousness. If we had another level of consciousness, humanity would be marvelous. The problem is that the man on the street has an animal, infantile, and romantic level of consciousness, which makes him continue to help those who do not suit him, whether of the political class, the military. .

In schools and on television they constantly praise war and power. Our history is the history of battles and impositions. It’s the shame of humanity. The military and the police are repressive elements that appear indispensable, but we really could do without them. I suggested in Chile that the military change its uniform to a tutu and learn before anything else to dance classical ballet and then study flower arranging and gardening and fertilize our Chilean desert and turn it into a garden.

III

The future is something that is already passing. How do you see the future of our species, this humanity of which you speak?

I am tired of pessimism; the human race always changes when it is in danger of death. When we start dying in the streets, we will put a stop to pollution and other atrocities. We will react out of necessity.

It’s never too late?

It’s never too late. At the same time as they are perfecting mobile telephones, cars, genetics, and armaments, they are also developing many other things that are good for humanity. The discovery of atomic energy resulted in benefits for medicine and science. The path genetics has taken appears to us now to be monstrous, but it is necessary because we are entering life. We must perfect cloning if we want to evolve and abandon our primate origins. In alchemy, one of the ideas of strength was the homunculus: a created human being. We have to be able to do it. The idea of the purification of the race ruined the desire for man to advance genetically, but we have to obtain a different body because this one does not respond to our spiritual desires.

But with the disappearance of cultures and species, the destruction of the Amazon. . the earth cannot return to what it was.

But we can re-create it with genetics. Thanks to genetics, we are going to recover the animals that we have exterminated. It is not necessary to go against science. I believe scientific advancement is very positive. As in nature: the more we progress through the bad, the more good we do.

Why do some fear the future?

Look, an animal is afraid because something can eat him at any moment. For this society to function and not spread anarchism, it has to work the fear. There are various terrors: economic terror (very current); sexual terror (AIDS); the terror of consciousness (when a society begins to think about the death penalty); emotional terror (the war of the sexes); and on and on. Terror is something complex: it makes us build defenses and maintain society without change.

How do you imagine the world in a few years? What mutations do you see possible?

I believe that in the future our driving force, our energy, is going to change. The changes of a society are changes in energy. We are all bound to fly! Not to fly like birds, but by discovering an antigravitational force. We cannot conceive a future without defeating gravity. Everything is going to change. A city is a place with roots, and the cities are going to change. We will live in flying shells. The sky will be populated, the land will be free of streets and roads, and we will not use gasoline. We are going to fly above a marvelous garden populated by all kinds of animals. We are going to live in freedom. We are going to change the human spirit; we are going to change everything!

Do you think we are directing ourselves toward a world without material limits, toward a spiritualization?

Yes, and it will be a gradual change. We will not have furniture; we will work with intelligent materials that will undo and recover their shapes; there will be portable robots and healing clothes, which will be able to tell us our body temperature and the state of our health in any given moment; we will have intelligent homes that will function on their own. All this is already evolving, but it has to be perfected. The use of fossil fuels will end: automobiles that run on hydrogen, methane, and compressed air already exist. Pollution will end. Money will evolve toward something immaterial. If we have a new free energy, we are all going to enjoy free time and long life. We are going to develop art and beauty. We will talk singing, maybe, like poets. Telepathy, little by little, will be established as a language. There will be an instantaneous and universal means of communication. Partnerships will improve a lot and will have consciousness. It will not be, as it is now, that some eat and others don’t; hunger will disappear. Common man will have to evolve to a new level. We are gorillas, primates. We are still forming, but we are going to fly.

Although there will be many fights and nationalist resistance to preserve the little things, at some point it will stop because it will be useless. How will it end? Thanks to the children. Those sons of nationalism in the future will be communicating with the whole world. Little by little all nationalities are going to intermingle. Languages are going to intermingle. A marvelous future awaits us, after passing through enormous but necessary plagues, so that we don’t overwhelm the planet and we don’t destroy other species. There will always be illnesses to balance the population. But we will heal ourselves with the mind.

Are nearly all the species that have accompanied us in evolution condemned to die?

No. We will re-create them. From the tiger’s skin hung on the wall, we will bring out tigers.

But, will they be real or virtual?

Real.

What should we think about genetic experiments?

Genetics is sacred. It is not necessary to oppose it.

Do you believe then that one day we will be able to create beauty, like the wing of a butterfly or a flower?

Of course. We can take a bone or something organic and create an animal: everything is in a cell.

Re-create but not create. .

Well, they will be able to mix animals and species. .

Therefore, you think genetic manipulation is a necessity?

It seems to me essential. Our conscience commits us to experimentation.

And cloning?

It is absolutely essential, and it is necessary to experiment thoroughly. There was a time when it did not advance due to religious prejudices, and now it is not advancing because of scientific, economic, and political prejudices. . We must continue!

There are those who think cloning can violate a person’s fundamental rights.

Why, if the person wants it?

I speak from the point of view of those who are born cloned. They can create a hundred copies of a human to be used as organ donors or slaves.

Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, and two thousand young people committed suicide. So there were those who said, “Why did he have to write it? One should not write such things.” Thus arose censorship, derived from suppositions of this kind. But, following the same reasoning, we should also burn the Bible, because it has caused more deaths than the atomic bomb, or all of the Buddhist texts because of self-immolation. Everything has a danger, always. But just because this danger exists, we are not going to prevent things from following their course. Just as danger exists in creating armies of zombies, the possibility exists of making another exceptional humanity, with long life: a mutation of humanity toward something infinitely better than what we are now. This is the path.

Nonetheless, if we analyze history, whenever there was an effort to make the species better, very grave phenomena were produced: Nazism, for example.

But in this case, the aim was racial selection with domination being the goal. It was not genetic, it was not work on the fetus or on the cells, or anything of this nature. Those were dreams of the age, motivated by the desire of a superior race to dominate other races. But what I am speaking about is a superior humanity, not a superior race. From that point of view, let genetics be admitted. You see how there are barriers that impede our moving toward the truth? We remain stuck in the idea that genetics carries the risk of another führer. Let’s change the concept: let’s create a superior humanity and accept genetics.

Do you think in the future we will have a virtual world, like they are drawing on the Internet?

No. The root of the virtual is the real. Because of this, the virtual world will always dissolve into the real.

Do you think that religion, as we understand it, will be a thing of the past?

Of course, a historical phenomenon, a fossil. There will be mystics, but the old beliefs will already be fossils. When I see movies with priests, I laugh a lot: priests are like a real carnival, rabbis are like a parade of madmen, the Tibetan lamas, the Hare Krishnas, all of them are dressed up like transvestites. A religion does not need a uniform.

Will there be new churches?

Churches I don’t know, but there will be great dance halls. All of these places will be converted into places for parties.

How do you think art will evolve?

We are seeing it now. With new means all-purpose art is born. That is to say, right now we are used to reading a poem, to admiring a sculpture or painting, to attending the theater. . In a little machine you will have it all: literature, music, voice, images. . you will have a third dimension — total art.

How will our sense of time evolve?

As we will live much longer, when we have three thousand years of life, it will be a pleasure to be old, because to be old is to be in the midst of the cosmos and the universe. We are going to feel the universe. It is a divine gift that life gives us. To be alive is an unimaginable gift. We have to get to work making this miracle better.

In the universe of your comics, extraterrestrial life is very present. Why is that?

It is present because it exists. For the same reason that there are metaphysical problems, politics, and everything. Why would someone not put all that in a comic? Genres are the worst! Comic theater, dramatic theater, the melodrama. . I do not believe in this.

There is not a planet or a planetary system: there is a cosmos, a universe that is present in each second.

Do you think there can be a more advanced civilization somewhere in the universe?

Of course, it is completely believable. Why should we think we are the only beings that exist? We have to look for the solution to the phenomenon of the consciousness in all of the universe conceived as a unit. Just as there is knowledge and life in one place, it could be in another. It could be a different form of life from ours, even one incomprehensible to us.

THIRTEEN

THE ART OF HEALING

According to you, the organism is a quagmire of unresolved problems.

Of course, because if you do not want to make yourself conscious of what you have, the body transforms it into an illness. All secrets tend to appear in the same way that all mysteries tend to manifest themselves. Nature wants you to be healthy. Nature wants you to become fulfilled, and when you repress yourself, you repress a part of yourself that ends up leaving somehow.

Where do addictions, that flagellate our societies, come from?

From shortages in infancy. People try to compensate this way. Alcoholism is generally produced from a shortage in mother’s milk. And heroin addiction is usually due to a lack of being, the absence of recognition; the drug fills the emptiness of not being loved.

Does madness exist or is it an invention of the police as Topor would say?

Yes, it exists. We need dream and reality. There is a moment in which individuality is erased; then the brain functions without control, and we go crazy. The brain is a universe in constant expansion and movement. We go along in a rational prison that sails within a crazy person.

What do you believe is the most widespread illness?

Emotional suffering. Civilization predisposes us to that.

You have attended many operations in which shamans cured people. What is real and what is exaggeration in these primitive treatments?

It is what I call the “sacred trap.” The shaman carries out theatrical acts and imitates powers; by imitating powers, he produces the effect because it opens the doors of this mysterious thing that we are.

You always doubted what you saw in these kinds of rituals, but then they took on another sense, more metaphorical, that could be integrated into your own therapies.

I quit not believing in anything. It is not that I doubted; it is that I did not want to believe in it. The positive step I took toward these practices was to eliminate belief or nonbelief; I took these two attitudes off the top. Scientists do not believe, but they believe in not believing. It is a mistake. It is necessary to not have prejudices about these acts, to experiment calmly and see the results.

The way of acting as a shaman is, in whatever case, metaphoric.

Of course, because the unconscious uses metaphors. If, for example, you give someone who has caused you a lot of pain a ball painted black, and you tell him, “Take this. It is your cancer, not mine. Keep it.” This is a metaphor.

But the sick, more or less, usually resist being healed.

It is not that he resists more or less, it is that he resists always, for one simple reason: the illness, in itself, is already a symbol of resistance. A resistance to the message of the unconscious. It is producing a prohibition and, when you resist it, you create an illness.

When I read the tarot, I fight as if I were in martial arts combat: a karate fight with the client, who resists being helped. The tarot is a martial art, which tries to give you life, but the client fights and resists.

You fight with the defenses available to your level of consciousness. To pass from one level of consciousness to another is a battle. People resist being cured because they have been marked by a genetic, sociocultural, familial training, which grants an identity. Sick people are asking for something; they want to be loved. To be able to help them, you have to fight to get them to accept that they are never going to obtain what was not given to them in childhood.

Paradoxically, and at the same time, the sick ask to be healed.

What the sick are really asking for is to be relieved of the pain not of the sickness. They ask for metaphysical aspirin. They want their symptoms to disappear but resist seeing the essence that produced the illness. They do not want to see because losing our identity is what we fear most.

It is like fear of death?

No. It is much more than the fear of death. The brain does not conceive of the fear of death, but it does conceive of the fear of losing identity, which is its equivalent. The person who loses his memory can say that he is a living dead man, that he has to begin a new life.

Without the underlying primitive milieu or superstition, what remains of the healing ceremonies carried out by the shamans?

It is not only a question of a primitive milieu. We are not primitives. When I was in India planning to shoot my film Tusk (1978), I looked for a teacher. I met with one who came out of the hotel and was really fat; he had been enriched and had become fat; he had been Westernized in a grotesque way. Another day I saw a parade of sadhus, holy men of India, protesting because the price of marijuana had risen: they were all drugged. The women sold their saris of silk and bought ones made of nylon. These primitive villages want to come here; this explains the invasion of shamans of all kinds who arrive in our cities. All who come to save the world want to enter our civilization. And what attracts them most is money. This is what attracts attention in the West. It is ridiculous that we, who have come out of the primitive mentality, have arrived at a rational mentality and return seeking the secrets in the primitive. We cannot go back. We must take this knowledge, apply it to our rational minds, and go even further still.

But there are those who go to the jungle in search of rituals, shamans, and references, which we here have forgotten.

The trendy neoshamanism is ridiculous. It is good to visit other villages to learn techniques that we have forgotten, but not to imitate them or to reproduce their superstitions and gods. That does not benefit us. It is absurd. We will never be Native Americans or Amazon Indians, although we propose this. The book by Antonin Artaud, The Tarahumaras, is pitiful in that it talks about this village with a tourist’s eye. It tends to idealize the ancients. They were not better than we are, although the village and the folklore have always preserved the remains of a deceased knowledge that, in any case, we cannot use. The traditionalist attitude is not useful to us.

Psychomagic consists of what?

Psychomagic consists in giving advice to solve problems by applying, in a nonsuperstitious way, the techniques of magic. The elements on which it relies are all classes of symbolic acts that can be proposed to a person.

The first thing we have to realize is that when a person has a problem it is necessary to introduce him to his problem, so that he is conscious of it. It is necessary to bring him to the border of his problem, not to immediately separate him from it but to get him to face his fears. Once these are overcome, the anxiety disappears and the person can rise. If someone is afraid of something, it is necessary to face this fear. This is not something new: it is necessary to make the person face his anxiety. From there, there are concrete methods to help. When a person has suffered all of his life, the only thing he can do is let himself die and be reborn. This one does metaphorically, for example, by changing a name and creating a new calling card.

Psychomagic depends on very simple, creative solutions that have no limits. The solutions are not aggressive things; they are benign things, never destructive. For example, if we bury something, we have to plant something. Creativity should not be viewed from a harmful side or as a possibility to do harm, you understand? Because creativity from the harmful side converts into destructibility. And destructibility doesn’t interest us.

Can someone apply Psychomagic herself or is a teacher needed?

Of course one can apply it herself. I do it continuously. I have appropriate and sacred fetishes and comical ones also. I have created a little altar, conditional reflections.

What characteristics does a person have to have in order to cure another?

It is not to cure another, it is to help another cure himself. He who wants to cure another is conceited. Not even the other cures. God cures. I believe that the motive power of all of this is goodwill. When a person develops in himself a feeling of goodwill, it informs the feelings of others and does what it can to take away the bad. One has to put himself in the other’s place to make it possible for the other to discover how to cure himself. To do this, the other must raise his level of consciousness and rearrange his vision of things. We all perceive life from a particular point of view, more or less variable and at a certain height. When we change this point of view, our lives change.

The therapist should put aside morality in order to cure?

She should be amoral, but not immoral. Immorality reveals an illness. For the therapist to be amoral means she does not judge. Like a doctor: if an assassin has a wound, the surgeon helps him and stitches the wound. The therapist should act in the same way. She has to put aside her prejudices and, even more, still act as a psychological therapist.

To cure, is a certain personal disinterest and distance essential?

We should specify what is understood by “disinterest.” It is good to not want anything from the person, but this also requires a certain cynicism and indifference. The therapist has an interest in curing the person, and it is precisely this interest that creates the disinterest. I speak only of those therapists who do not seek to gain money or swindle people, as some fortune-tellers do. There is another kind of interest, which manifests when the psychotherapist has a complex against the client and wants to convert himself into a support for the sick, to reinforce his own ego, or to exploit his narcissistic interest. Other times they give in to political or social interests. I knew a psychoanalyst who systematically destroyed couples because she hated men. There is also the desire to be loved. Or the simplest: to try to be a patient’s friend, but this one must also be put aside to be able to cure.

You usually say healing is everything but a surrealist game, but your psychomagic prescriptions include a lot of games and even humor.

There is some humor, but what happens is that when we do something we have never done, we are already on the road to healing. We must break the routines. As we speak of the unconscious language or of dreams, these acts can appear strange. This path is contrary to that taken by Freud with psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Psychoanalysis notes the dreams and interprets them in light of reason; it goes from the unconscious to the rational. I go in reverse. I take the rational and capsize it in the language of dreams, introducing dreams into the language of reality. Psychomagic acts build dreams into reality. If these things do not happen, it is necessary to make them happen. Reality seeks oneiric liberation, and we need to make something happen so that someone heals. Everything that is irrational either makes you laugh or frightens you. Laughter or fear: they are only reactions to get out of the ordinary.

The truth is that Psychomagic has become popular. How do you take that?

I find many psychomagic acts being carried out on the street that I have not prescribed. (Laughter.) It is true that people are using it a lot. At first I was very discreet. For years, I gave advice and wrote it down. Then Gilles Farcet came along, and we wrote a book about Psychomagic, which took him four years to finish while I continued working. When the book came out in France, it was a big success, and they translated it into Castilian and Italian. People began to seek me out, and then I could experiment. For one year, I received, each day, two people in my home in order to try to develop the rules of Psychomagic. I thought it was part of my creativity and that, before I died, I had to be able to teach the rules to my son Cristóbal, my wife Marianne, and then to a few therapists. I continued training people, but the process is very slow. It takes at least four or five years of experience and a lot of artistic activity.

The fundamental difference between this therapy and psychoanalysis is that psychoanalysis was created by people who came from the university and science, while I have created a technique that comes from art and theater. I say a scientist cannot be a therapist. Treatment is the work of artists and poets. If you are not that, you cannot cure.

It works completely with the body but keeping in mind the existence of the ghost body, on which you have done much investigation.

I began to study religions: Tantra, yoga, alchemy, Zen, Chinese medicine, the Kabbalah. I realized that each culture creates an imaginary biology that actually works. For example, I studied the Muladhara chakra, which is between the sex and the anus. It is like a four-petaled flower that has in its center an elephant with the trunk raised. At first, I thought, “I truly do not feel I have any flower between the penis and the anus.” But when I went to India, I decided to ride an elephant, to see what it was like. And so I knew why they said this about that chakra: when you ride an elephant, you feel the strength of nature. The elephant moves like a gyroscope, it does not lean to the right or to the left, it moves like a ship on a calm sea. It is as if you have the monumental strength of the earth between your legs. So, I realized, that these flowers and this elephant are metaphors that must be understood in their cultural sense; they are locations in the body, but they are imaginary.

I tell many people who want to learn do-in massage^*4 to not press the body with the thumb looking for mythical meridians. I teach them in an hour to push with the thumb on the person’s whole body, and the patient heals. Chakras and meridians are imaginary biology. The body is a whole. I was interested in imaginary biology because I realized that when you imagine your body, you are creating it. Castaneda has a strong imaginary biology, with the assembly point and all that, which comes from European esotericism, the aura and such. I also studied mutilated bodies, those with what’s called “ghost members.”

What advice would you give for losing the fears we suffer?

Each one is distinct, but I have always said it is necessary to manifest them in a psychomagic shape. You must first discover what you are afraid of; then you can overcome it. If a person is afraid of dying, I make her go to a funeral or I bury her symbolically. Whoever fears poverty, I send him to another city to beg for a day. I make the client live on the edge of what she fears, to face it.

Georg Groddeck said something I like a lot: “You are afraid of what you desire.” If a person is very afraid of being homosexual, I send him dressed as a transvestite to a gay bar. To defeat a fear, you must let it enter into your life as a concrete shape.

Will medicine in the future contemplate subjects like Psychomagic, theater, or psycho-shamanism?

Medicine in the future will have to integrate all of this, although it already is doing it. I have many students of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer who have created bio-psycho-genealogy, which is a delirium to me but, little by little, it becomes evident.

For two years, my friend Jean-Claude Lapraz, a doctor in phytotherapy, sent his patients for me to see if psychological problems existed. Between us, we came to an agreement in principle that said: “We do not assume that all illnesses are psychological, but we are going to observe what there is of psychology in the illnesses.” We studied psychic events in relation to the physical, and at the same time, we both did our work.

Do doctors today practice a little psycho-shamanism?

For the big majority of them, you are only a number and you have nothing to say! We must radically reform the state of medicine: from the hospitals to the habits. Nurses, doctors, they do not know how to treat patients; they think they have to treat the patient cruelly and impersonally, and this does not work. They treat machines.

What is fundamental to healing is that the person express herself and speak. You notice, when you heal someone, that it produces a change in a person who has been listened to. To heal, you have to know who the patient is and where the illness and character have developed. To know the patient, it is essential to develop a genealogy tree at least to the great-grandparents. But none of this is applied today in conventional medicine.

What is your opinion about suicide?

If you have a grave illness, incurable, suicide is a possible option. People have the right to end their lives. Life should not be prolonged agony. Current medicine prolongs pain, and this is awful.

How do you see the way our society looks at death?

It is an atrocity, how one is born and how one dies. It’s not a way to come into the world. We must bring birth and death back into the home.

FOURTEEN

UNDERSTANDING LIFE

Is all of life, perhaps, a miracle?

Life is rich. If you carefully observe a meadow, you realize that each plant is a different color of green, each ladybug is different from the other. Many of us know the anecdote of the man who photographed snowflakes and discovered that each one was different: thousands of millions of snowflakes, each one with its own shape. That is to say, everything is variety, difference. But, at the same time, everything communicates; we are united by secret threads. Life is a miraculous creation. All of reality is a pure union of mental and emotional threads.

We must tiptoe lightly upon the world without becoming victims of reality.

Our footfalls are important. The whole being reflects in the bottoms of the feet, where all the endings reach. Our step defines us. Loved ones, dogs and cats, for example, know our steps. But there are people who live very enclosed in the mind and are unconcerned with their steps, as if the earth were really dirty and one could stain his feet.

When I left Chile, I was twenty-three years old; when I went back, I was sixty-three. The streets were full of memories, of emotionalism; there was all of my adolescence, full of poetry. I walked on the sidewalks, caressing them with the soles of my shoes. Acts toward others should be as delicate as the steps we take on a land that is part of ourselves.

What does “ do not become a victim” of reality mean?

The person who does not control her territory does not control her existence. If someone is not conscious, she is taken over, not only outwardly but also with the thoughts that assault her. She is very vulnerable to desires and feelings. For example, you live calmly with your wife, then — catastrophe! Suddenly you lose control because you have fallen in love with another. You don’t have to fall victim to that reality; what you have to do is navigate in it, overcome the winds and sandstorms. Amid the storms at sea and the signs, you must move forward calmly and look toward the port you’re heading for.

In New York, when I was filming The Holy Mountain, I had problems of all sorts. I soaked six or seven T-shirts a night with my sweat. I went to see a Chinese sage that someone had recommended. He was a poet, a great master of tai chi, and a doctor. When he first saw me, he said, “What is your purpose in life?” I was disconcerted and did not answer. He continued, “If you do not tell me what is your purpose in life, I cannot heal you.” So I understood that if a ship crosses the sea without a purpose, it will arrive at no port. What prevents life from devouring us is having a purpose. The higher it is, the further it will carry us.

As a mystic, I have but one aim: to know God. Not the God talked about everywhere, but this incredible thing that moves the universe. Further still: to dissolve myself calmly into that. This is my purpose, and for that, I do not need to be a guru, or a visionary, or any sort of paper doll.

Should we act in life as if it were a big dream?

As if in a lucid dream, not like in a nightmare. And the more lucid a dream is, the less of a dream it is. To cross a river is to cross life: complete happiness in spite of complete suffering. I do not like wars at all. I have lived through many, beginning with the world war. I am not one who believes that the human being should be distressed.

But the fact is we live filled with anxiety.

Remember that Mary and Zacharias see an angel, and that, twice, the angel tells them to have no fear. When I was writing Gospels for Healing, this scene came into my head. I believe the angel took away their fear. The first step to entering into divine and cosmic consciousness is to lose the fear. Why? Because the essence of animals is to fear, and that limits us. Our body is afraid of becoming food. That is the first and the most basic. Movies like Alien and Jaws drive at this primitive depth: to be devoured or to not have anything to eat.

Fear, on the other hand, is useful. If children do not learn that fire burns, they will all die. Fear preserves life; without fear we may not live. Panic, however, is another thing. Anxiety is fear of the unknown. When you do not know that you are afraid, then you feel anguish. What is essential is not so much freeing yourself from fear as not letting yourself be dominated by panic.

It is said that love grows insofar as criticism decreases. How should we act toward the defects of others?

The enemy of love is to criticize another. If someone criticizes you, it is because they do not love you. It is necessary to accept people as they are. However, to criticize is one thing and objective judgment is another. To judge is bad, but to know what is happening with others is good. One must say to the other, “I am not criticizing you, because I love you. But I see your limits, and I would like to make you conscious of them. Then you can do what you want.” This is not criticism.

You usually say, “What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up.”

And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose. If I keep my knowledge, I lose it. I had a teacher, an alchemist, who was one hundred and ten years old, and he hung himself with a wire in his room. He had encyclopedic and monumental knowledge, but he doled it out in small phrases. . How did accumulating such knowledge serve him? He committed suicide!

One receives knowledge and gives it. When you give knowledge, you enrich yourself. If you do not give love, you are detracting from yourself. If I begin to help people, if I begin to heal people, I begin to heal. Do you understand? To be a therapist, you have to be a patient. The first thing to do to heal yourself is to heal others. The world is you and me. The world is not ours, it is what we are. I do not want to go about with dirty feet. Why do I have to walk on contaminated land or between trees that are dying? What we suffer, we are doing to ourselves: if we poison the atmosphere, we attack our lungs. If I ingest toxins like nicotine or alcohol, I am contaminating my blood; but since blood is part of everything — my blood is not my own — I am poisoning humanity.

I have one more saying: “I do not want anything for myself that I do not want for others.”

You have written that to transform oneself one must give and not ask, which is very different.

To transform oneself one must give, but to transform oneself one must also learn. One closes oneself off and does not admit love from another, the tenderness or the help of another. The real leap is learning to receive, which is as difficult as learning to give. And it is necessary to learn to ask for what one needs: justice is to give to oneself what one deserves. This is why the gospels say, “Knock and the door will be opened.” If I ask for a long life, it is because I have the right to ask for it. If I ask that we will use an energy other than oil, it is because I have the right to ask for it, just as I have the right to ask that the rivers be clean or that wars stop or that wealth does not accumulate only in some countries while misery exists in others! I have the right to ask for wealth to circulate all around the planet. We have to learn to ask for what is just and to not ask for what it is not necessary to ask.

And the people who do not ask. .?

A saint who asks for nothing is a saint who lives imprisoned in himself and who lets the world go by. It is an individual decision, but it is necessary to have someone to whom you transmit your wisdom. A moment ago, I mentioned my alchemist teacher, who possessed incredible wisdom and who revealed secrets to me in droplets. He had been a magician, a famous man. He had put all of his money in the bank and, by an economic error of inflation, he lost it, and he did not know how to live. And so he hung himself with a wire. He hung himself for not having shared with others. I had a deep crisis when I learned of this, and I interrogated myself as to this man’s end. I learned something: the wisdom that you do not give, you lose. At this man’s death, with the reaction it produced, I started my Mystical Cabaret, a place where, once a week, I could teach others everything I had learned during that week. At times, they were stealing ideas from me, but this does not matter. There are people who say they invented something that I invented. It doesn’t matter.

Once, this same centenarian teacher, who had the body of an adolescent, told me he had studied martial arts. “Me, too,” I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, “Attack me.” I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. “Beauty is the most dangerous weapon,” he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.

The human being’s most dangerous weapon is the imagination. Where does imagination come from?

Imagination is a game of constructing what we have. By diverse channels, we acquire things: words, emotions, desires, needs, feelings, perceptions. We organize all these things with our rational consciousness, the way we have learned to do. Although we may be primitives in the process of identifying and knowing our own possibilities, we organize them. In the brain, all of these parts accumulate and can mix and organize with different shapes, as in a game of Legos. In this process, we not only rely on what is given to us from the outside, acquired, but also on what we find, mysteriously, in our brains: that which we call unconscious. Using imagination is creating with these materials. When you read, you are imagining much more than you are reading. The imagination is a language richer than limited oral language. The imagination exceeds rational limits. Visual, tactile, olfactory, oral, auditory, emotional, sexual, and intellectual imaginations exist. An emotional imagination carries your feelings to the sublime or the criminal. A sexual imagination is like that of the Marquis de Sade; a material imagination is like that of Karl Marx, who saw the world through the economy. I call the imagination creativity — the foundation of life. If we suffer, it is because of a shortage of imagination, for lack of creativity.

After all, do we have to forgive life of something?

(Smiling.) Your question is sweet, because it makes life an object and you a subject outside of life, and more than that, a judge of life. We are not paper dolls outside of life! To forgive life, we would have to first forgive ourselves. And we would have to be guilty of something, and we are not. There is no fault. Nor does a criminal exist who bears all the guilt: all individual crime is a product of the family, the society, and history.

I was speaking in terms of resentment toward life.

One must lose resentment; it is big work to resolve fury and grudges. We are full of grudges. We are full of grudges and frustrations for love not obtained. Illness is a lack of love.

And against the lack of love?

Creativity.

We can learn to be creative?

Of course, and I will give you a course immediately.