Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy
March 2, 2024
Ethan Maurice
By: Alejandro Jodorowsky Intro: Alejandro Jodorowsky is a creative of the highest order, acclaimed movie director, and inventor of a form of psychotherapy called “psychomagic.”
His art — controversial, spiritual, and surreal — spans life’s spectrum in full. His personal story could be described similarly and reads near mythical. His films were banned for causing riots in Mexico and ushered into the United States by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His “Psychomagic” a conscious reverse-engineering of the unconscious forces wielded by a famous medicine woman he apprenticed and decades of “acts” aimed at the unconscious level.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jodorowsky approaches and sees everything quite differently than most people. Psychomagic offers a look through his eyes, at his life, and the mechanics of the non-mechanical shamanistic view of reality, “as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet.”
It’s one of the most shocking and instructive books I have ever read.
I truly believe in the magic of reality. But for this magic to operate, it is benefitting to cultivate in oneself a certain number of qualities that are at times contradictory, at least in appearance: innocence, self-control, faith, bravery… putting this magic into motion requires a lot of audacity, and also purity, and a lot of work on oneself. So I insist that I devote my existence to perfecting myself, to knowing myself, and to making myself internally accessible. It is important to never lose sight of all the discipline without which this approach to existence would be but an illusion. Life is not there for satisfying the desires of the first sloth that was created! Life is wonderful to us when we abandon ourselves to it and when we overcome our egocentrism.
You know, a labyrinth is no more than a tangle of straight lines.
The magic we have called forth does not operate except by detachment. What makes the game possible is the lucidity of the witness, whereas identification with consensus reality, on the contrary, shrinks existence and reduces the realm of possibility. In dreams, as in daily life, the same laws operate: the more one is detached, the more one can enjoy perceiving all of existence as a vast playground. The less one is detached, the more life turns into a dead end. Dreaming thus taught me, paradoxically, to wake up and maintain a lucid current as a thread of existence, even if this requires a major effort. Because God knows how marvelous life can be when one is, above all, open to its magic!
“It is our belief in an “objective” world, our modern, self-stylized rational mentality that makes this kind of question torment us. We always allege to place ourselves as detached observers of a supposed exterior phenomenon, and so the mechanisms should be clearly defined. In the “shamanic” mentality, to contrast, this kind of problem is not even posed. There is not a subject-observer and an object-observed; there is the world as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet.”
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.
“Instead of my wife, the being with which I share my life.”
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.
“To be alive is an unimaginable gift.”
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.
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.
…always moved by a constant attention, by a constant desire of curiosity and of knowing without fear. This is audacity. It is the secret to life.
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.
You don’t have to fall victim to that reality; what you have to do is navigate 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… 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.
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