“Very simple,” replies the other, “Because I do not eat rabbit, and you do.”
A participant in one of my courses could not bear for her chest to be touched. As soon as a man, even one with whom she wanted to have sexual relations, made a move to touch her breasts, she would start screaming. This situation caused her much suffering, and she longed to be free from this senseless panic. I suggested that she bare her chest. She did so, revealing a nice pair of breasts. I asked, “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“I would like to touch you in a particular way, not like the caress of a desiring man eager to enjoy your body, nor like the touch of a doctor who examines you coldly. I would like to touch you with my spirit. Do you think my spirit could establish an intimate contact with your breasts that does not have anything sexual about it?”
“Maybe . . .”
I raised my hands, three meters away, and said gently, “Look at my hands. I’m going to approach slowly, millimeter by millimeter. As soon as you feel assaulted or uncomfortable, tell me to stop and I will stop approaching.”
I then brought my hands closer, extremely slowly. When I was ten centimeters from her breasts, she asked me to stop. I obeyed, and after a long while, slowly, very slowly, I started moving closer, watching for her reaction. Reassured by the quality of the attention I was paying to her and perceiving that I acted with delicacy and detachment, she did not protest. Finally my hands rested on her breasts without her feeling any discomfort, which caused her great amazement. Applying what I had learned from the man who fed the sparrows, I took another participant by the shoulder and, without letting go of him, had him touch her breasts as well. This caused her no suffering. But when I let go of the man, she started screaming . . . This story is an example of the detachment that, in my view, is indispensable for those who really want to help others. I was able to touch and feel the breasts of a woman standing before me while situating myself far away from my sexual center, without thinking of getting pleasure. In that moment I was not a man, but a being. The important thing is to place oneself in an inner state that excludes any temptation to take advantage of the other person, any temptation to abuse the fascination one exerts over the other in order to assert one’s power to dominate his or her will. If these things happen, the helping relationship loses its essence and becomes a masquerade.
For a magical act to have good results the popular charlatan must, by obligation, present himself as a superior being who knows all mysteries. The patient, in a superstitious manner, accepts his advice without understanding how or why it affects his or her subconscious. By contrast, the psychomagician presents himself only as a technical expert, as an instructor, and devotes himself to explaining to the patient the symbolic meaning and purpose of every act. The client knows what he or she is doing. All superstition has been eliminated. However, as soon as one begins to perform the prescribed acts, reality begins dancing in a new way. Unexpected things happen that aid in the accomplishment of something that seems impossible. For example, with an elementary school teacher who had been badly abused in childhood and was afflicted by chronic sadness I advised, among other things, learning to balance on a tightrope as circus performers do. “Impossible!” he said. “I live in a small village in the south of France. Where will I find someone to teach me that?” I insisted that he do what I proposed. Upon returning to school, one of his students told him that he was learning to balance on a tightrope from a retired circus performer who lived just a few kilometers away!
On another occasion, with a patient who had suicidal tendencies and felt that his blood was impure because he was the product of incest, I advised that he go to a slaughterhouse with two large thermoses, buy cow’s blood to fill them with, go home, and shower in the blood until all his skin was entirely covered in order to make his subconscious think that his blood had been replaced. Then, without washing off the blood, he should get dressed and go walking in the streets, proudly facing the stares of passersby. He also said, “Impossible.” However, when he went to the dentist, he found a copy of The Incal in the waiting room. He asked the dentist if he had read it. The dentist said no, one of his patients had left it there, a man who owned a slaughterhouse and admired my work. My client got the man’s address, went to him with some autographed copies of my works, and the slaughterhouse owner, very pleased, gave him all the liters of cow’s blood he needed.
One day I received a visit from a Swiss woman whose father had died in Peru when she was eight years old. Her mother had made all traces of the man disappear, burning letters and photos, so that my client remained an eight-year-old child on the emotional plane. I prescribed an act: she should go to Peru and visit the places where her father had lived, until she found tangible proof of his existence. When she returned to Europe she should bury the mementos in her garden and plant a fruit tree there, then go to her mother’s house and slap her. It should be explained here that her mother was an angry and virile woman who had mistreated and insulted her. The woman went to Peru, found the rooming house where her father had lived, and through that synchronicity that I call the dance of reality, found letters and photos. The father had entrusted them to the landlady, confident that one day his daughter would go to look for them. When she read those letters and saw those pictures, she no longer saw her father as a faceless ghost and finally knew that he had been a being of flesh and blood. By burying the documents in her garden, she also buried the eight-year-old child. Then she went to see her mother with the intention of giving her the prescribed slap. But she was surprised to find that for the first time her mother was waiting for her at the train station and, also, for the first time, had prepared a meal for her. Seeing her so kind, she felt very disturbed at having to slap her because, for once, her mother had given her no pretext for doing so. But she knew that the act was an inescapable psychomagical contract that must be respected. Over dessert, my client slapped her mother for no apparent reason, taking her by surprise, and feared a brutal reaction from her. But her mother only asked, “Why did you do that?” Faced with such equanimity, the daughter finally found words to express every complaint she had of her. The mother replied, “You’ve given me one slap . . . well, you should give me many more!”
A literary critic around fifty years old, married to a philosophy professor her same age but who was a perennial adolescent, called me from Barcelona because she had discovered that her husband had a twentythree-year-old lover. “We are intellectual, serious, mature people who shun emotional scandals. But I have fallen into a huge depression from holding back my anger. And he doesn’t want to give up either her or me. What should I do?”
“I am going to ask you to analyze your life as if it were a dream. Why did you dream that your fifty-year-old husband had a twentythree-year-old lover?”
“Oh, I remember when I was exactly twenty-three. I had an affair with a fifty-year-old man! It lasted three years. Then I left him for a younger man.”
“See? You are experiencing something that is like a recurring dream. In a certain way, you dream yourself into the place of the deceived wife and you realize how, when you were young, you made your lover’s wife suffer. If your affair didn’t last, it is very possible that your philosopher’s adventure will also only last another year, since you’ve found out that it’s already been going on for two years. Then he will come back and cry in your arms.”
“But each passing day seems like a century. I can’t tolerate this situation. I feel diminished, sick with rage, old.”
“I’m not a charlatan, I won’t advise you to wrap a dead hummingbird in red ribbon and get him to touch it or sprinkle rose petals on his footprints in the sand so that he will come right back. But I can help you to accept this triangular relationship in your subconscious and calmly wait for the year to pass.” I told her to go to a pet store and buy three canaries, a male (symbolizing her husband) and two females: one young and pretty (symbolizing the lover) and one older, ugly, and fat (symbolizing
herself). She should put the birds in a cage and hang them in her office, in front of her desk. After ten days, she should go back to the pet store and give the canaries back to the same man who sold them to her. I said, “The bird seller represents God (your father, an absent man). Once you feel good, you should give away this childish problem of abandonment.”
The days went by, then suddenly she called me in a state of shock: “Something amazing happened: I put the canaries together and fed them the same food. But bit by bit, the young female was getting fat, losing her feathers, staying still in a corner; the older one became prettier and thinner, and sang with joy. I learned later that a young female dies if she is not fertilized by the male. On the tenth day, today, when I sat down to work, I suddenly looked up at the cage, and at that precise moment the sick bird fell down dead. I’m terrified. She represented my rival. I feel like I’ve killed her. What should I do?”
“Reality has danced to comfort you. Accept this gift. Put the bird in the bottom of a flowerpot, fill it with soil, and plant a rose bush. Keep the rose alive in your house as long as you can, and go give the bird seller the remaining pair of birds.”
After some time, the client called me again to tell me she was glad of the act. It had been a long time since she had felt so good. She had returned to finding the joy in life. Now she did not care what her husband did.
It might seem like an easy surrealist game to give psychomagical advice, but in fact it can only be dispensed by a person who has done a great deal of work on him- or herself. Each act must fit the subtle characteristics of the client like a pair of shoes made to order. No two people are the same, so no two identical acts may be prescribed. A certain individual felt himself authorized to begin his own practice immediately after attending one of my lectures and rounded up a group of women. He asked each of his students to identify themselves with a doll, to discharge into it their childhood pain and rage against their parents, and to place it in a sack, which they would keep for a purification ceremony to be conducted later. They also had to send their mothers a large pair of scissors and the guts of a chicken. Catastrophic! You cannot prescribe acts “wholesale”! The supermarket of psychomagic is an aberration! Of course, the effect was negative. The relatives did not understand the act, and many thought that their daughters had gone mad. This was not so far from the truth: after the workshop, one terrified woman came to see me on the verge of psychosis, convinced that the “psychomagician” now had power over her. To calm her down I recommended that she go retrieve her doll, but the man could not return it because as soon as his students departed he had thrown them all in the trash. In sum, this was a matter of a businessman dedicating himself to making money by exploiting the credulity of a group of women. I am reminded of a story:
In a factory, a complicated machine breaks down. The best technicians arrive, working for days with all kinds of sophisticated tools, but they fail to make it work. Finally, an old man comes carrying a small case. He takes a simple hammer out of the case, gives a small tap on one gear wheel on the machine, and it starts up. The old man asks to be paid $1,000,001 for his services. The manufacturers complain: “How is this possible? You are asking for $1,000,001 for just one hammer blow!” “No,” the old man answers, “the hammer cost a dollar. The studies I had to do in order to do it effectively cost a million.” One can only propose an effective psychomagical act after a long apprenticeship.
When it became clear to me that my advice could cause a transformation in the mind of the client, I realized the enormous responsibility that this implied. An error could provoke catastrophes such as the worsening of an illness, a suicide, a divorce, depression, psychosis, or a criminal act. Therefore, as I began practicing psychomagic I took many precautions, the main one of these being to prescribe very small acts that involved no one other than the client.
I recommended buying pieces of honeycomb to a woman who had grown up verbally tormented by her parents and who could not speak without using harsh words. I told her to sweeten her mouth by chewing on these until nothing was left but a blob of wax, to save these remains in a jewelry box, and then after some time to form that wax into the shape of a heart, anoint her tongue with red vegetable dye, lick the heart to stain it red, and finally nail the heart to her bathroom wall in front of the toilet. Thus, her subconscious would receive the message that to speak is an act of love, not of excretion.
Another client asked that I prescribe her an act that would allow her to forgive her dead father and thus overcome the hatred she had toward all men. I asked her to tell me at what point her father had broken ties with her. “Shortly after my first period,” she replied. (It is common for a father to distance himself from his daughter once she becomes a woman for fear of arousal. The girl, not understanding why he draws away, suffers from no longer sitting on his knee and finds it painful to renounce this form of intimacy and contact.) I then asked her where her father was buried, and she suggested we go to his grave. “Bury some cotton wool soaked in your menstrual blood, along with a packet of sugar cubes, as close as possible to the coffin. The sugar is to indicate that this is not an aggressive act but a loving approach, a communication signifying that periods are not an impediment to happiness.”
When the person who has caused pain is dead, for the subconscious the grave is the representation of that person. If there is no grave a photograph is used, and if there is no photograph, a drawing. Another client was enrolled at the age of four in a school led by her great aunt. This lady bullied her sadistically. In her work with me, the client discovered the deep hatred she felt for this woman. She could not forgive her, but could not take revenge either, since her victim had already left this world. Therefore, I advised her to go to the woman’s grave and give vent to her hatred there: kick the grave, scream insults, urinate and defecate, but on condition that she thoroughly analyze the reactions caused by the execution of her revenge. She followed my advice, and after letting off steam on the grave, felt a fundamental desire to clean it and cover it with flowers. The hatred was nothing but the deformed face of unrequited affection.
If the hated person has been cremated and there is no grave, or if he or she is still alive, one can insult a photograph. Then the image must be burned. After this, the client should take some of the ashes, dissolve them in a glass of wine if male or milk if female, and drink it. Thus the evil, finally purified, becomes an antidote.
A young man complained to me of “living in the clouds,” explaining that he could not “get grounded in reality” or “advance” toward financial independence. I took his words at face value and suggested that he take two gold coins and glue them to the soles of his shoes, so that every day he might tread on gold. From that moment on, coming down from the clouds, he set foot in reality and moved forward.
Another client, married with no children, did not feel man enough. He had been raised by his widowed mother along with three aunts and a grandmother, all either widows or spinsters. For him, a father was a nonexistent being: a man who had impregnated a woman, then died. Because of this, he was afraid of his wife becoming pregnant. To make him feel that he existed as a man I suggested that he collect thirty thousand francs (he could borrow the money), roll the stack of bills up along its long edge and hold them together with a rubber band; buy a pair of Chinese balls (the kind that people hold and spin in their hands in order to calm down and meditate); and make a holder out of suede, in which he would wear the roll of bills between his legs as a phallus and the Chinese balls as testicles. With that weight in his pants, for three days he should go to work, visit friends, talk with his family, cuddle with his wife, and sleep wearing the apparatus. This advice, seemingly comic, had an unexpected result: in addition to changing his character, the man got his wife pregnant.
For a singer who was always unsuccessful in auditions, who felt that she had no talent, I advised putting ten gold coins inside a condom and inserting it into her vagina. Thus equipped, she should show up for an audition. She sang lik
e never before and got the part.
Sometimes in order to solve problems I do not hesitate to recommend acts that a prejudiced person might consider pornographic. However, if one intends to heal suffering spiritually, it is necessary to understand that the sex organs are sanctuaries where what we call God can be found. The client must also learn to value his or her body, not disdaining its secretions. Feces, saliva, urine, sweat, menstrual blood, or semen can be used as elements that liberate us from inhibited feelings. One client, a lesbian, felt unable to begin the book that she intended to write. As soon as she turned on her computer, she just started playing games. I explained to her that she had remained a child, that is to say sexless, because when she reached adulthood she knew that she was lacking phallic power. I advised her to go to a sex shop, buy a strap-on dildo, put it on, tape up a large white piece of paper at waist level, dip the dildo in ink, and write the first two sentences of her book with it. After this, the rest would be easy to write on the computer.
In Guadalajara, a pathologically shy man came to see me because he could not settle on projects or finish what he started. I advised him to go to the busy Plaza de la Liberación, naked under a big coat, sit on a bench, put a hand through a cut-out pocket and masturbate to the point of ejaculation. He should keep the semen inside an oval medallion with a picture of his mother, wearing it around his neck as a talisman.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 34