Prologue
Jodorowsky introduces how his study of Mexican folk healers led to the development of Psychomagic, a therapeutic approach that uses symbolic acts instead of verbal analysis to heal psychological wounds.
- Folk healers in Mexico use creative, seemingly irrational methods that work because they speak to the unconscious
- Mexico City’s Sonora market sells magic products and has healers who practice ‘cleansing’ rituals
- Professional doctors despise these practices as unscientific, treating patients only as bodies
- Folk healers develop personal techniques like ‘café au lait laxatives, rusty screw infusions, mashed potato sanitary napkins’
- The ‘sacred trap’ concept explains how extraordinary healing requires belief in the possibility of miracles
- Healers use tricks during first meetings to convince clients that material reality obeys the spirit
- Once the client’s belief is engaged, interior transformation allows them to ‘capture the world by way of intuition rather than reason’
- The question becomes whether healing can occur without faith through voluntary unconscious cooperation
- Objects form part of the unconscious language and can imprison or heal people
- A medical student’s epileptic seizure stopped when Jodorowsky removed his wedding ring
- Six-month-old Adan recovered from bronchitis when his mother said ‘Our Father’ while administering drops
- The unconscious accepts symbolic language directly and naively, like a child
- Psychomagic differs from primitive magic by requiring the patient’s understanding rather than superstitious belief
- The psychomagician makes the transition from witch doctor to adviser
- Patients should know the reason for each action they perform
- Using psychomagic prescriptions, the patient becomes his own healer
A Portrait of the Artist in Panic Character by Interviewer Gilles Farcet
Farcet describes Jodorowsky as a ‘walking psychomagic act’ whose multifaceted career spans theater, film, comics, and healing, characterized by his ability to transform reality through imagination and his role as a ‘sacred trickster.’
- Jodorowsky embodies a ‘panic character’ who breaks through conventional reality’s limitations
- Created ‘panic movement’ in theater with Arrabal and Topor
- Made cult films like ‘El Topo’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’ studied by unpaid Americans
- Works as unconventional tarot reader whose ‘dazzling intuitions have left more than one person speechless’
- His approach to reality demonstrates the ’technique employed by Alejandro in order to undermine the resistances of the universe’
- Always arranges things regardless of initial chaos or trauma to organizers
- Changes reality ‘as easily as if it were a glove’
- When introduced as wrong speaker at conference, successfully performed as ‘Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen’ anyway
- Demonstrates striking intuitive abilities that suggest omniscient powers
- Delivers hidden truths to people he meets for the first time
- Told Claude Salzmann his contradictory lip structure revealed two conflicting natures needing reconciliation
- Summed up situations without people formulating questions or drawing tarot cards
- Balances the roles of ’transcendental charlatan’ and compassionate healer
- Describes himself as a ‘sacred trickster’ with elements of ‘old-fashioned tooth puller and snake oil peddler’
- Operates with ‘rare compassionate energy’ as ‘a bodhisattva à la South American salsa’
- Remains fundamentally disinterested and lucid about his talents and limitations
The Poetic Act
Jodorowsky’s creative journey began with Chilean poets who lived poetically, leading him and friends to perform ‘poetic acts’ that challenged conventional reality through irrational but meaningful gestures.
- Chile in the 1950s was a uniquely poetic country where five poets created archetypal influences
- Pablo Neruda was politically active, exuberant, and ’even drunks on a full-blown alcoholic binge recited Neruda’s verse’
- Vicente Huidobro brought aesthetic elegance from French literary salons
- Gabriela Mistral represented moral requirement and universal motherhood as a school teacher
- Pablo de Rokha was ‘a boxer of poetry’ who imported cultural provocation
- Nicanor Parra introduced humor and antipoetry, creating intellectual figure
- The five poets formed an alchemical mandala with Neruda as water, Parra air, de Rokha fire, Mistral earth, and Huidobro as quintessence
- These poets were alive fighters who ‘spent their days fighting, exchanging insults’
- They had begun ’leaving literature to participate in acts of everyday life’
- Young poets wanted to go beyond predecessors who had only anticipated their quest
- Discovering Marinetti’s phrase ‘Poetry is an act’ led to three years of performing poetic acts
- Walked in straight lines through Santiago, climbing over trees and through houses without deviation
- Urinated in front of the university rector’s office to physically express being fed up
- Created imaginary city within real city through inauguration ceremonies at monuments
- Put beautiful shell in bus conductor’s hand when he came to take tickets
- Poetic acts should be beautiful, aesthetic, without justification, and ultimately positive rather than destructive
- Japanese haiku lesson taught that it’s better to ‘add wings’ to a pepper than ’take away wings’ from butterfly
- Acts must always be constructive: ’the poetic act must always be positive’
- Instead of emptying father’s drawers, should have filled them with socks to make his dream reality
- Error is permitted if committed only once as part of sincere search for knowledge
The Theatrical Act
Jodorowsky evolved from poetic acts to revolutionary theater, rejecting realistic drama for metaphysical expression, ultimately creating ’ephemeral panic’ performances that could only be presented once and involved the audience as participants.
- Rejection of realistic theater in favor of metaphysical and unconscious dimensions
- Realistic theater ‘restores the most obvious aspects as well as the most hollow and the crudest’
- Reality ‘is not rational, no matter how much we want to believe that it is to reassure ourselves’
- Human behavior is motivated by unconscious forces with rational explanations added later
- Development of ’ephemeral panic’ - theatrical events that could only be performed once
- Introduced perishable elements: smoke, fruits, jelly, live animals
- Theater should return to ’the instantaneous, the fugitive, the only moment forever’
- Eliminated traditional separation between actors and spectators
- Chose unusual venues: School of Fine Arts, psychiatric ward, sanatorium, cemetery
- Happenings revealed that many people carry unexpressed acts inside them
- Painter Manuel Felguérez executed a chicken publicly and made abstract painting with guts and blood
- Young woman danced naked to African rhythms while bearded man covered her with shaving cream
- Architectural student destroyed mannequin filled with sausage casings and crystal balls
- The ‘Sacramental Melodrama’ in Paris represented the culmination of panic theater
- Performed May 24, 1965, at Second Festival of Free Expression
- Involved ritual sacrifice, blood, transformation, and symbolic death/rebirth
- Jodorowsky cut geese throats, was covered with twenty pounds of steak, whipped, and symbolically crucified
- Ended with audience fighting over relics and return at 2 AM for bird release ceremony
The Oneiric Act
Through decades of lucid dreaming practice, Jodorowsky learned to consciously direct dream content, ultimately progressing from controlling dreams to simply witnessing them, and applying dream logic to interpret and transform waking reality.
- Lucid dreaming evolved through different phases from control to witness consciousness
- First lucid dream at seventeen involved panic about crossing theater exit door fearing death
- Early phase sought material desires: elephants in Africa, wealth, sexual experiences
- Discovered that asking for specific things caused loss of lucidity and dream control
- Final phase involves simply witnessing dreams where dream character acts exactly like waking self
- Dream work requires facing fears and inner monsters to achieve transformation
- Recurring nightmare of destructive psychic entity ended when he offered himself in sacrifice
- Terrifying experiences like feeling brain operated on led to awakening rather than escape
- Confronting death in dreams revealed ’the brain doesn’t know death’ - consciousness continues in different body
- Dream of being possessed by god produced ‘cataclysmic explosion’ of consciousness
- Therapeutic dreams can repair emotional wounds and fulfill missing childhood needs
- Dreamed of embracing never-met paternal grandmother, feeling completion of family archetype
- Hugged and rocked father in dream, then immediately did same with son Axel in reality
- Mexican healer Pachita appeared in dream to heal stomach pain by sucking neck and levitating
- Dreams fulfill ’never truly satisfied childhood desire’ for emotional connection with father figures
- Reality functions like a lucid dream where conscious intention can influence outcomes
- Student Guy’s squatter problem resolved when he reconciled with estranged brother through psychomagic
- Taking photo to father’s grave triggered mother to ‘find’ previously ‘destroyed’ photo after 15 days
- Life circumstances align when one acts symbolically: ‘Reality is a dream on which we must work’
The Magic Act
Jodorowsky’s encounter with Mexican sorcery, particularly the healer Pachita, taught him that symbolic language directly affects the unconscious, leading him to develop Psychomagic as a non-superstitious application of magical principles.
- Mexico is ‘an absolutely oneiric country where the unconscious flourishes’ with widespread magical practices
- Every neighborhood has witches or folk healers who perform ‘cleansing’ with herbs and holy water
- Sonora market sells exclusively magic products: colored candles, devil-shaped fish, blessed soaps
- Intellectuals and politicians regularly consult sorcerers alongside peasants
- Some practitioners use up to 3000 different herbs or work exclusively with animal excrement
- Meeting Pachita required elaborate protection rituals demonstrating the power of symbolic identity
- Dressed in completely new clothes chosen by three friends to avoid personal taste
- Created false identity card with different name, birth date, and photo
- Carried pork wrapped in silver paper as reminder to stay alert in special situation
- Despite never attending cinema, Pachita knew he was director of ‘El Topo’ film
- Pachita’s operations demonstrated symbolic surgery that produced real healing effects
- Seemed to sink finger almost entirely into blind man’s eye during treatment
- Appeared to open patient’s chest with hands, allowing Jodorowsky to feel ‘flesh wriggle’
- Used hearts from morgue or hospital that seemed to be absorbed into patient’s body
- Created pestilential odor from sick animals that disappeared upon her presence
- Psychomagic emerged from understanding that ’the human body accepts directly and naively the symbolic language’
- If you perform exact operations with odors and movements, ‘you are then operated on’
- Pachita saw ailments as animated beings: tumor was ’evil creature that deserved to be burned alive’
- Black phallus ‘blowing like a toad’ removed from homosexual patient’s stomach
- Objects carry symbolic messages: oval bracelet with inset watch showed mother controlling daughter’s time
The Psychomagic Act
Psychomagic developed from tarot readings when Jodorowsky realized that awareness alone doesn’t heal - concrete symbolic actions are needed, prescribed with full understanding rather than superstitious belief.
- Psychomagic emerged from the limitation of awareness without action in therapy
- Two people per day for six months revealed all problems stem from genealogy tree
- Clients exclaimed ‘I have not discovered so much in two years of analysis!’ but remained unchanged
- An awakening not followed by action serves nothing
- Must prescribe precise acts without becoming director of consciousness or life guide
- Method requires complete confession followed by creative symbolic prescriptions
- Subjects client to interrogation about birth, parents, grandparents, siblings, sexual life, money, emotions
- Became ‘record holder of dreadful secrets’: thefts, rapes, incest, murders
- Belgian father confessed homosexual relations with ten people daily wanting to increase to fourteen
- Tarot helps expose shameful secrets that partial confessions omit
- Acts are irrational in appearance but rational because person knows why they must be done
- Swiss woman whose father died in Peru when she was eight remained emotionally eight years old
- Prescribed going to Peru to find father’s traces, then slapping mother who erased his memory
- Woman found letters and photos father left at boarding house, then successfully confronted mother
- ‘Perverse effects’ - uncontrollable consequences - give Psychomagic its richness
- Authorization comes from disidentification with ego during prescription process
- ‘In dispensing psychomagic advice, it is not I who speaks, but my unconscious’
- Requires lifetime work of disidentification from personal ‘I’
- Feels ‘animated by a totally positive and disinterested feeling’ when prescribing
- Payment is client’s effort and letter reporting results, never money
Examples of Psychomagic Acts
Jodorowsky provides specific examples of psychomagic prescriptions, showing how simple symbolic acts address complex psychological problems by speaking directly to the unconscious through metaphorical language.
- Acts address genealogical patterns and interrupted emotional development
- Dancer with same name as lover’s mother (who shared her father’s name) was unconsciously recreating abandonment pattern
- Prescribed burying cotton soaked in menstrual blood and honey jar at father’s grave where relationship broke
- Woman named Chantal traumatized by great-aunt’s tyranny at age four told to kick, scream, urinate on grave
- After expressing hate, Chantal felt spontaneous desire to clean tomb and cover with flowers, discovering underlying love
- Physical symptoms often represent symbolic emotional states requiring metaphorical solutions
- Woman with persistent vertigo told to place feet between another woman’s thighs and rub sole against vulva
- Act provoked crisis of tears and awakening, addressing ‘fear of being swallowed by mother, fear in relation to female sex’
- Young man ’living in his head’ and unable to advance financially told to paste two pieces of gold to shoe soles
- Taking client’s own words literally: ‘walk on gold all day’ to leave head, put feet in reality, and advance
- Corrective acts can repair damage from previous traumatic experiences
- Seven-year-old son Brontis buried teddy bear and mother’s photo for film ‘El Topo’
- Twenty-four years later, Jodorowsky recreated scene in reverse: ‘Today, you are seven years old, and you have the right to be a child’
- Synchronistic changes: rigid straw bear became soft, black-and-white photo became color
- ‘Unpredictable incidents and other changes independent of our will become part of the process’
Psychomagic Letters
Letters from clients reporting their psychomagic experiences reveal how symbolic acts produce profound transformations, from overcoming writer’s block to healing racial complexes to resolving relationship traumas.
- Symbolic acts speak directly to unconscious through metaphorical language of objects and actions
- Psychologist unable to work prescribed double square flowerpot with wheat planted in order (masculine) and randomly (feminine)
- Potter’s clay watered with holy water represented blessing the body and recovering feminine dimension
- Wire hearts in four corners of room and praying to female ancestors taught ’learn to love work, or you will never work’
- Found work March 2nd after sprouting exactly 22 plants matching number of Major Arcana tarot cards
- Writer’s block resolved through symbolic destruction and rebirth ritual
- American writer R.M. Koster had not written in 10 years, sinking into alcoholism
- Prescribed burning four incomplete manuscripts using alcohol as fuel, then exiting through window
- Thick smoke forced him to carry burning cauldron outside: ‘I could not take anymore’
- Single remaining sheet left white rectangle on basin lid - returned to writing with new creativity
- Mixed-race complexes healed through confronting identity directly
- Half-Vietnamese, half-French woman planted mango seed in France, grew it 33 days, took to Vietnam
- Planting tree with French black earth surrounded by Vietnam yellow earth created ‘fantastic symbol’
- Two people with African-French heritage painted themselves opposite colors and walked Champs-Élysées
- ‘No one saw anything. People are indifferent; each is doing his own thing’
- Abortion trauma resolved through joint symbolic ritual between partners
- Brigitte and Michel built wooden box lined with fine fabric as symbolic coffin
- Mango represented fetus; Michel cut bandage like surgeon while Brigitte relived operation emotions
- Kiss with red and black marbles: spitting red marble meant choosing life over death
- Throwing black marble in fountain returned ‘urges for death to her unconscious’
From Imagination to Power
Jodorowsky concludes that Psychomagic is fundamentally about teaching people to use their imagination therapeutically, recognizing imagination as the key to expanded consciousness and true freedom.
- Psychomagic acts may seem simple compared to lengthy therapies but address core problems directly
- ‘A labyrinth is no more than a tangle of straight lines’ - other therapies may introduce unnecessary curves
- An act ‘has a more definitive door than any conversation’
- Each act follows study of genealogy tree to great-grandparents level
- Like removing nail from shoe that affects whole world and sensibility
- True global healing requires finding interior God - all other therapies are partial
- There is but one global healing: to find God. There is no other.
- Only discovery of interior God can heal us forever
- ‘The rest consists, for better or worse, of beating around the bush’
- No therapy can be truly comprehensive without spiritual dimension
- Primary teaching is development of imagination across all human levels
- Besides intellectual imagination: emotional, sexual, physical, economic, mystic, scientific imagination
- ‘On all levels, including what we call rational, the imagination is open. It is at home everywhere.’
- Active imagination allows multiple perspectives rather than narrow paradigm of beliefs
- ‘This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world’
- Goal is therapeutic power of imagination applied to transform reality
- Book aims for readers to ‘accept the idea of the therapeutic power of the imagination’
- ‘Psychomagic, at the end of the day, is no more than a modest application of this very real power’
- Imagination enables approaching reality from multiple angles rather than restricted viewpoint
- Key to expanded vision beyond filtered perception of minuscule point of view
A Synthesis of Experiences by Interviewer Javier Esteban
Spanish interviewer Esteban describes the telepathic intensity of interviewing Jodorowsky and positions the book as lessons for a new generation of ‘mutants’ seeking consciousness transformation beyond traditional religious frameworks.
- Jodorowsky represents a new type of evolved being for ’effervescent generation of mutants’
- Far from being guru, ’laughs at himself’ precisely because evolved
- Paths appropriate for ‘whole effervescent generation of mutants who make use of individual formulas of consciousness’
- Tools include ‘meditation, art, dreams, certain sacred substances, magic, alchemy, language, humor, and the tarot’
- Has ’traveled a fantastic human voyage of thousands of years in a very short time’
- Approach emphasizes personal freedom over institutional authority
- ‘Totally distrusting the church, marionette or agent of the soul’
- Uses ‘synthesis of experiences with therapeutic and necessary results’
- ‘At the margin of whatever revelation or sacred text, of all dogmatic or ideological traditions’
- Reality ‘must be perceived in the first person and achieved artistically’
- Interview process produced telepathic consciousness states
- ‘State of unburdened consciousness led to a pleasant, telepathic drunkenness’
- ‘Questions connected in sequence like chains of images’
- Jodorowsky answered questions ‘while in a trancelike state’
- ‘During the days I went to his home, the dynamics were varied…the inebriation caused by his presence would often last for hours’
- Represents phenomenon of ‘religión a la carta’ or individualized spirituality
- Ideas connect with ‘perennial philosophy in its pure state’ but avoid ’narrow frameworks of traditional religions’
- ‘Neither theist nor atheist, spiritual nor religious, rather he is simply a person’
- Health equivalent to morale since ‘fulfillment cannot wait for the beyond’
- Reflects ‘phenomenon called religión a la carta…recently came slinking into our society’
Keys to the Soul
Jodorowsky explains various techniques for accessing higher consciousness including dream work, art therapy, language transformation, psychedelic experiences, and tarot reading, emphasizing practical methods over theoretical knowledge.
- Dreams evolved from nightmares to witnessing consciousness without interference
- Started with ‘horrible nightmares’ from neurotic family with parents who hated each other
- Lucid dreaming initially tempted with desires for fame, money, sexual experiences - but led to getting ’trapped’
- Now simply witnesses dreams where dream character acts exactly like waking self
- ‘I don’t have nightmares anymore. I am not afraid, because I control these situations’
- Art cures by reconnecting us with present moment and universal consciousness
- ‘We have to cure ourselves of not being ourselves, of not being in the present’
- Hasidic phrase: ‘If you are not you, who? If this is not here, where? If it is not now, when?’
- Working with Celtic harp music, perfume in shoes, drawing enneagrams with honey on feet
- Bad literature exposes neurosis - ‘cannot read Marcel Proust. He’s too sick for me’
- Language reflects and transmits consciousness levels - healthy language heals
- ‘Mental illnesses, like physical illnesses, are reflected in the way we speak’
- Creating ‘Intellectually Correct’ definitions: instead of ’never’ say ‘very few times’
- Instead of ‘I want to do’ say ‘I am being ineffective’
- Curse words initially revolutionary but ‘persistent use of jargon swiftly lowers the level of consciousness’
- Psychedelic substances can open consciousness but require proper guidance and limited use
- Hired guru Oscar Ichazo for $17,000 to guide LSD experiences for film ‘The Holy Mountain’
- Gurdjieff analogy: drugs show view from building’s terrace, but must climb each floor without them
- María Sabina’s mushrooms should be taken ‘calmly, without rites’ with experienced guide
- ‘One or two trips is sufficient for the brain to open well enough to last for the rest of your life’
- Tarot functions as ‘metaphysical machine’ and ‘optical language’ for self-understanding
- Twenty-two Major Arcana like alphabet - ‘if with Spanish alphabet one can write Don Quixote, imagine what you can do with twenty-two cards’
- Used for present understanding, never future prediction - ‘I reduce everything to the present’
- Acts as mirror allowing expanded self-perception through ‘rules of optical projection’
- Reading requires total identification with client without interference or expectations
The Trail of Life
Jodorowsky discusses how we can transcend our origins and conditioning through conscious choice rather than destiny, emphasizing the need to transform rather than discard what we’ve received while recognizing different levels of consciousness in society.
- We can choose each step of existence rather than being determined by past or origins
- ‘We have destinies from the past, without a doubt, but what is necessary is to be conscious of them without being subservient to them’
- Cannot prove past lives exist - ‘before birth there was something—I do not know what—and after death there will be something—I do not know what either’
- Rejecting karmic justifications for inequalities: ’everyone is guilty and there are no victims—or everyone is a victim and no one is guilty’
- Formatted by culture that ‘formats our brains’ - must fight this imposition to be ourselves
- Development requires transformation, not elimination, of what we’ve received
- ‘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 necessary to inseminate and to transform what has been given to us’
- Can work toward conscious islands of perfection within imperfect society
- Society operates at different levels of consciousness from animal to divine
- Animal level thinks ‘What I have, I have’ - mercenaries, thieves, assassins
- Infantile level treats everything as superficial game without consciousness of infinity
- Adolescent level seeks all solutions in relationships and romantic love
- Adult level recognizes ’the other’ - either exploitative or socially conscious
- Cosmic consciousness lives ‘in the whole universe, infinite space, eternal time’
- Reconciliation with parents requires symbolic ‘killing’ and rebuilding
- Must apply operative magic maxim: ‘Dissolve and Coagulate’
- First dissolve by seeing father ‘without his pedestal and without your fear’
- Then coagulate by rebuilding him and absorbing his values
- Children reproduce family psyche like dogs - ‘If a child kills another child, the parents are the criminals’
The Invisible Bridge
Jodorowsky explores the nature of human freedom, consciousness mutation, and spiritual development, arguing that we are evolving beings creating multiple possible futures while developing new capacities like a potential fourth brain.
- True aspiration in life combines longevity with authentic self-expression
- Must ‘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’
- Live with prosperity ‘for everyone, not a prosperity based on exploiting others’
- ‘Live as if we were immortals, thinking that we have a thousand years more to do what we want’
- Human beings have four centers that must work in harmony for healing
- Intellectual, emotional, sexual, and physical centers each have different goals
- Intellectual center ‘wants to be and becomes in silence’
- Emotional center ‘wants to love and arrives at loving through indifference’
- Sexual center ‘wants to create and arrives at creating by learning to fail’
- Physical center ‘wants to live and lives by learning to die’
- Freedom consists of choosing among possible futures rather than creating entirely new destinies
- ‘I see it like a fan or a matrix of possible futures…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’
- Inner freedom is ‘being able to choose freely one of the ten thousand paths, using what we have called free will’
- Must seek ‘futures distinct from the past’ to become ourselves
- Humans are mutants developing new capacities including potential fourth brain
- Pineal gland not atrophied but ‘seed of an organ that is developing and evolving into a fourth brain’
- ‘We cannot understand the universe, we are ignorant and limited…we are like chimpanzees’
- Medieval painters depicted fourth brain as halo - ‘golden circle around the head’
- ‘If the reptilian brain evolved into our three human brains, I sincerely believe that we are creating a fourth brain’
Visions
Jodorowsky envisions the future transformation of humanity through technological advancement, genetic modification, and spiritual evolution, while critiquing current religious institutions as outdated obstacles to human development.
- Religious intermediaries and institutions have become obsolete obstacles to spiritual development
- Monks ‘due to living in celibacy, are not worthy of faith. If everyone was a priest, the human race would end’
- Sects ‘make God their private property’ and declare non-participants ‘unfaithful, worthy of destruction’
- Future temples will be ‘multipurpose…cathedrals where they celebrate all the cults with free access’
- ‘If you give a name to God, you are appropriating him’ - need anonymous organizations
- Mythical figures like Jesus and Buddha are valuable as art rather than historical reality
- ‘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’
- ‘What is important is the quality of the message, which is marvelous’
- Cannot know if saints are ‘crazy or if he has hallucinations’
- Religious texts should be treated as ‘works of art. The Bible, for example, is a marvelous novel’
- Future humanity will transcend current physical limitations through technology and genetics
- ‘We are all bound to fly! Not to fly like birds, but by discovering an antigravitational force’
- ‘We will live in flying shells. The sky will be populated, the land will be free of streets and roads’
- ‘We will not have furniture; we will work with intelligent materials that will undo and recover their shapes’
- Genetics will allow re-creating extinct species: ‘From the tiger’s skin hung on the wall, we will bring out tigers’
- Genetic manipulation and cloning are essential for human evolution despite dangers
- ‘Genetics is sacred. It is not necessary to oppose it’
- Must create ‘a superior humanity, not a superior race’
- Current genetic limitations: ‘our conscience commits us to experimentation’
- Risk of creating ‘armies of zombies’ balanced by possibility of ’exceptional humanity, with long life’
The Art of Healing
Jodorowsky explains his therapeutic approach emphasizing that illness represents unresolved psychological problems, healing requires creative symbolic acts, and conventional medicine must integrate psychological understanding with physical treatment.
- Illness manifests unresolved psychological problems that the unconscious transforms into physical symptoms
- ‘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’
- Addictions stem from childhood shortages: ‘Alcoholism is generally produced from a shortage in mother’s milk’
- Heroin addiction ‘usually due to a lack of being, the absence of recognition’
- Shamanic healing works through ‘sacred trap’ theater that opens mysterious human dimensions
- ‘The shaman carries out theatrical acts and imitates powers; by imitating powers, he produces the effect’
- Effective because ‘opens the doors of this mysterious thing that we are’
- Must eliminate both belief and nonbelief: ‘Scientists do not believe, but they believe in not believing’
- Work with metaphors since ’the unconscious uses metaphors’
- Patients always resist healing because illness serves psychological functions
- ‘The illness, in itself, is already a symbol of resistance. A resistance to the message of the unconscious’
- Sick people ‘want to be relieved of the pain not of the sickness’
- ‘They want their symptoms to disappear but resist seeing the essence that produced the illness’
- Fear losing identity more than death: ’losing our identity is what we fear most’
- Future medicine must integrate psychology with genealogical understanding
- ‘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’
- Current medicine treats patients ‘cruelly and impersonally’ as machines
- ‘What is fundamental to healing is that the person express herself and speak’
Understanding Life
Jodorowsky presents life as miraculous diversity unified by secret connections, emphasizing the need for purpose, creative transformation of suffering, and recognition that reality is a collaborative dream requiring conscious participation.
- Life is miraculous variety with underlying unity and communication
- Each plant in meadow is different green, each ladybug different from others
- Man who photographed snowflakes ‘discovered that each one was different: thousands of millions of snowflakes, each one with its own shape’
- ‘Everything is variety, difference. But, at the same time, everything communicates; we are united by secret threads’
- ‘All of reality is a pure union of mental and emotional threads’
- Having life purpose prevents reality from devouring us
- Chinese sage asked: ‘What is your purpose in life?’ before agreeing to heal
- ‘If a ship crosses the sea without a purpose, it will arrive at no port’
- Jodorowsky’s mystic purpose: ’to know God. Not the God talked about everywhere, but this incredible thing that moves the universe’
- Higher purposes carry us farther than material goals
- What we give and receive creates our reality - nothing belongs to us individually
- ‘What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up’
- ‘Whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose’
- ‘The world is not ours, it is what we are…if we poison the atmosphere, we attack our lungs’
- ‘I do not want anything for myself that I do not want for others’
- Creativity provides the antidote to life’s suffering and lack of love
- ‘If we suffer, it is because of a shortage of imagination, for lack of creativity’
- ‘Illness is a lack of love’ - creativity counters this absence
- Must learn both to give and receive: ’the real leap is learning to receive, which is as difficult as learning to give’
- Daily creative practices: writing 4-5 line poems each morning, enjoying work like comic creation
An Accelerated Course in Creativity
Jodorowsky traces the historical development of human imagination from plant and animal incorporation through cosmic rhythms to modern technological consciousness, arguing that creativity requires breaking free from rational and moral limitations.
- Creativity is the universal key to solving illness and social problems
- ‘Without creativity, the world goes all wrong. I am sure that the majority of illnesses come from a lack of creativity’
- ‘The social problems we have in the world are due to this shortage’
- ‘Misunderstood creativity provokes war and crimes’
- Creativity allows becoming ‘Christ, Buddha, the Virgin, or Athena’
- Historical development of imagination progressed through incorporating different dimensions
- Plant totems: humans incorporated trees, worked earth, healing plants still used today
- Animal totems: gods emerged from animals - ‘Apollo is a frog’, zodiac uses animal figures
- Cosmic rhythms: moon and sun movements created law, royalty, social organization
- Rational machines: Enlightenment produced logical thought but created ’leprosy, an epidemic, a sickness’
- Modern consciousness integrates computer processing capabilities
- ‘Now we can look at a house from all sides…enter through the window, visit an apartment, and leave’
- ‘We can look at a person’s brain; go through all of her veins and all of her body’
- ‘We are beginning to have a computer attitude. This is the mutation that we are suffering at the moment’
- Changes how we ‘process data differently’ and perceive reality
- Breaking creative limitations requires confronting moral and excretory taboos
- ‘One of the biggest enemies of creativity is morality. One must be amoral to develop the imagination’
- ‘A person who deeply guards his excretions cannot be creative’
- Must allow ‘dirty child to exist within ourselves’ through exercises like urinating in designs
- Creative person ‘cannot have any sexual limits’ - must develop ‘sexual imagination free of all morality’
Exercises for the Imagination
Jodorowsky outlines basic techniques for developing imagination using mathematical-like operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and mixture to transform any ordinary element into fantastical creative material.
- Imagination operates through four basic mathematical elements plus mixture
- ‘The basis of the imagination has four elements, which are like mathematical elements: addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication’
- These operations can be applied to any object or situation
- ‘With these five things, you have the imaginations of crazy people. It is very simple’
- Forms foundation for all creative advertising and artistic work
- Addition and subtraction create giants and miniatures
- Subtraction: ‘In my left pocket, I can carry my mother; in my right pocket, I have my father’
- Addition: ‘You can enlarge a pumpkin…grows and grows and reaches the size of the planet, converting itself into a planet’
- Examples include King Kong, Godzilla, bonsai trees, shrunken heads
- Can expand or reduce force, speed, any human capacity
- Division creates autonomous body parts while multiplication adds extra elements
- Division: ‘There is a hand that walks alone, it jumps on your neck and strangles you’
- Jung’s Native American story of hero sending phallus through water to impregnate chief’s daughter
- Multiplication: Hindu goddesses with multiple arms, each hand with an eye
- Greek gods with three heads, cyclops with one eye (reduction)
- Mixture creates monsters and time travel expands temporal possibilities
- Egyptian sphinx: ‘human head, a lion’s body, an eagle’s wings, a cow’s tail’
- Hieronymus Bosch paintings mixing elements, centaurs combining man and animal
- Time travel creates paradoxes: ‘if I go into the past and kill my mother, then I would not have been born’
- Has ‘very strong oedipal foundation’ allowing seduction of parents in past
Therapeutic Applications
Jodorowsky demonstrates how to apply imagination techniques therapeutically by working directly with clients’ metaphorical descriptions of their feelings, transforming distressing sensations into healing imagery through creative visualization.
- Work directly with feelings as symbols rather than analyzing their meaning
- Client feels ‘wall in my chest’ - instead of removing it, create door to preserve individuality
- ‘No need to eliminate the wall, only to open the door’
- Wall made of ‘red bricks’ becomes friendly place with defensive function
- ‘You can work directly with them’ since feelings present as symbols
- Transform negative sensations into positive creative imagery through alchemical visualization
- ‘Ball of lead in solar plexus’ becomes alchemical material in body-oven
- ‘Let this fall so it gets to the fire in the belly…little by little, go about making it rise toward where it was’
- Lead changes colors rising through body until it becomes gold projecting rays
- ‘Through the use of creativity, the feeling of distress will go’
- Replace victim mentality with creative self-sufficiency
- ‘We should not delight ourselves in the feeling of not being loved’
- ‘If I stop asking for love, I am in a position to give it’
- ‘Instead of spending my life angering myself and annoying others and suffering, I will say Enough’
- ‘You do not love me, but I adore you’ - problem ends through creative response
- Barriers preventing fulfillment require creative breakthrough rather than acceptance
- ‘At our side are always the barriers that prevent us from fulfilling ourselves. Father, mother, true?’
- Must reject victim mind-set: ‘be a victim, live like a victim, and make yourself a victim’
- ‘If I want to play music, I play it. If I want to sing, I sing. If I want to write, I write’
- Stop asking and start acting: ‘I stop asking, and I start doing my work’