The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (30 page)

A statue of the Black Virgin, an idol of the Roma people, is preserved in a small church in the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue region of France. Once a year during the summer thousands of Roma, coming from all corners of Europe, gather there to pay homage. The saint is paraded, sung to, and prayed to in an impressive public ceremony. After these celebrations, the nomadic people leave and the little church stands empty again. When I visited in the winter, the doors were unlocked. No priest was guarding the place. I approached the Black Virgin, who despite her great importance appeared abandoned. Impressed by her legend, I knelt before her. My first impulse was to ask for something, as all others do. But I held back. I approached her and started to massage her back. One might say that this is a subjective projection—that a piece of carved wood cannot have feelings—but through my hands I perceived the effort this idol made to bear the weight of so many requests. I stroked her back as if she were my mother, filled with a painful tenderness that was gradually transmuted into joy. When I felt that she was restored I joined my hands, which despite the cold winter were full of warmth, and prayed, “Teach me to transmit consciousness through my hands.” Her sweet voice resonated in my mind, “Give life to the stone.” I did not understand the meaning of this sentence. I attributed it to a folly of my imagination . . .

Months later, during the holiday period, I was invited to give seminars on the Tarot in the south of France. The architect Anti Lovacs had a beautiful property on the slopes of the mountains in Tourrettes-sur-Loup with a sphere-shaped house in which I stayed for two months. On a long mountain road, from which one could see the valley extending to the coast, I found a rock that was almost oval in form and approximately six feet tall. Here was this mineral, simple, humble, anonymous, beautiful, a witness to the passage of millions of years. I understood the message I had received from the depths of my subconscious in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The Aztec solar calendar, with its symbolic system very similar to the Tarot, had placed its energy in my hands, entering through the intellectual portal. The Black Virgin, a powerful idol, had done the same, but had entered through the emotional portal. Now I had to face matter in its original state, without any human sculptors having intervened in its form. This was the body-to-body method. There was nothing significant about this stone other than itself. It was not part of a cathedral, a wailing wall, or the tomb of a demigod; it was itself, living with a rhythm infinitely slower than mine but also with a colossal capital of life. I remembered the five mottoes that appear on the engraving adorning the Rosarium philosophorum:
Lapis noster habet spiritum, corpus et animam
(Our stone has a spirit, a body, and a soul). And then
Coquite . . . et quod quaeris invenies
. The word
coquite
, being ambiguous—likely “sew”—I translated as “massage,” which gave me “Massage . . . and find what you seek.”
Solve, coagula
(Dissolve, coagulate) indicated to me that I should feel that I was dissolving the stone into its own consciousness, in order then to reintegrate it into its body again, this time as an illuminated material.
Solvite corpora in aquas
(Dissolve the bodies in water) told me that in the action of massaging the stone, I should dissolve both my body and the rock in an absolute communion, feeling the love of the mysterious alchemical elixir that dissolves everything, that transforms all things into unity. And finally:
Wer unseren maysterlichen Steyn will bauwen / Der soll der naehren Anfang schauwen
(He who wants to realize our perfect stone / should first contemplate the nearest beginning). In order to surpass the individual “I” it was necessary that I let myself be possessed by the impersonal “I,” the universal consciousness (the impersonal is closer to the truth than the personal), and thus, in a trance, reach the living heart of the stone. I decided to massage it for two hours every morning, from six to eight, before having breakfast with my students.

The first day, in a morning mist that submerged us in an abstract space, I saw the rock as an immense egg, insensible to my presence. It seemed clear that whatever I did, no contact would ever be established between us. But I thought of the fable of the hunter who wants to shoot the moon. He tries for years. His arrows never reach it, but he becomes the best archer in the world . . . I realized that this was not a matter of making the stone a living thing, but of trying to do so. The alchemist must attempt the impossible. The truth is not at the end of the road, but is the sum of all the actions we perform to get there. I felt that I should be naked while performing the massage. Patiently, with water, soap, and a sponge, I washed the stone. Then, aided by lavender oil, I began to caress it. The sun had not yet shone its brightest rays. Although I never ceased fondling the stone, its surface remained cold, impenetrable . . . True to my decision, I continued my massages every morning. Slowly, I began to love it as one loves an animal. I learned to forget the idea of an exchange, to give with no hope of receiving. I learned to love the existence of this stone without preoccupying myself with the question of whether it was conscious of my existence. The more insensible its body was, the more profound my massages. I remembered the words of Antonio Porchia: “The stone that I take in my hands absorbs a bit of my blood, and palpitates.” Those two months passed by without my knowing it. On the last day, concentrating on massaging as always, I do not know why I raised my eyes but a black raven with a white spot on its chest was there, quietly perched on the rock. It locked eyes with me, squawked, and flew away.

The workshops were coming to a close. A student confessed to having spied on me one morning, and requested a massage. I agreed. I asked her to undress, to lie on a table. I started to massage her without anything in mind. My hands moved by themselves. Accustomed to the apparent insensibility and hardness of the stone, they felt not only the skin and flesh but also the viscera and bones. This body appeared to me to be divided by horizontal barriers, and I dedicated myself to establishing vertical connections from head to toe. The next day, my student gathered up her savings and set off on a trip around the world.

In the series of dreams in which the central character, the self, gives more importance to the realization of others than to its own realization, there was one dream that marked me deeply and that may have been the result of my experience massaging the rock:

I am sitting, meditating before the gates of a temple. I know that they will not let me into the temple because I am carrying a huge bag with me, seemingly full of garbage. I believe that this bag is part of me and that therefore I have the right to attend the ceremonies that are performed inside the temple accompanied by my burden. A group of men and women approach, each one sadly carrying a bag similar to mine. I rise, full of joy, and say, “If you have to see it to believe it, then take a look!” I open my bag and empty it out. A thick stream of black ink flows out of it, forming a puddle at my feet. The poor people follow my example and begin to empty out their bags, which are also full of thick black ink. We have created a dark lagoon . . .

I remove a thin column from the facade of the temple with which I stir this goo. As the stone rod rotates, long stems emerge from the pool, rising up many meters. Enormous sunflowers open up at their ends. These flowers attract light, and soon the place is pervaded by a golden glow. The towers on the temple also open like flowers. The people’s joy is so intense that it infects me. I awake in a state of joyous excitement. Sunlight comes pouring in through the window of my bedroom.

In the Bible it is said in Exodus that Moses found a bitter pool while leading his thirsty people through the desert. God indicated a bush to him. Moses stirred the water with the bush, and it became sweet. Thus he slaked the thirst of two or three million throats (Exodus 15:22–25).

When Moses did not reject the bitter water, that is to say, did not reject the apparent nightmare and took action using the branches above him, making the plant into an extension of himself, the water was converted into his sweet ally. The conscious, when it recognizes the subconscious and surrenders to it with love, leads the subconscious to reveal itself with all its positivity. (This is the opposite of what was described by Robert Louis Stevenson in
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
.) In the world of lucid dreams we begin by acting, giving, creating. Then we have to learn to receive. Accepting the favor that the other person or thing can perform for us is a form of generosity. Knowing how to give must be accompanied by knowing how to receive. All the characters and objects in our dreams have something to offer us. All the beings that we see in real life, animate or inanimate, can teach us something. For this reason, little by little I set aside voluntary acts and obeyed the will of the dream more and more. At last, I felt very comfortable being what I was in this dream world: a serene old man, surrendering to events, knowing that by virtue of their manifestation, they are a celebration. The following are some happy dreams. I used to write them down. Today I no longer do. That which has a natural tendency to fade should be allowed to do so.

I am exploring the slopes of a mysterious mountain without any concern for the legend of it being inhabited by ferocious golden warriors. In an ice cave I discover a hot spring. I plunge my hands into the water, knowing that after healing all my diseases it will give me the power to cure the ills of others.

I am a child. I go into a school run by a family of fat people. The gym teacher is an elephant. During the exercises I become very fond of the animal. I grow two extra arms from my shoulders. I receive a diploma giving me the title of Rising Demon.

A Mandarin Chinese man lies comatose. A group of elderly priests apply a hot iron to his side to see if the pain makes him react. “You’re wasting your time,” I say. “He’s definitely dead.” The old men stop burning him, and the cadaver looks at me. Puzzled, I wonder, “What am I doing here in China? Who am I?” The dead man answers, “You are me. Worship the one who burns you!”

I have gone up a very high mountain in search of my dead son. I arrive in a valley by automobile. The snow has covered all the roads, but I drive with enthusiasm, despite the danger of falling off a precipice, because I am taking Teo to a huge party. He laughs. We enter a city. On the streets there are carnival parades, led by his brothers.

When we achieve the role of the lucid witness, when we submit our will to that of the dream world, when we realize that we are not ourselves dreaming, nor the person who is asleep, nor the person who is awake in the dream, but the collective self, the cosmic being, who uses us as a channel to make human consciousness evolve, then the barrier between waking and sleep, if it does not disappear, will at least be transparent. We realize that in the shadow of the rational world, the mysterious laws of the dream world thrive . . .

I suggest that my clients treat reality as a dream, initially as a personal and nonlucid dream, in order to analyze the events as if they were symbols of the subconscious. For example, instead of lamenting because thieves have ransacked the house or because a lover has left, I suggest that they ask, “Why have I dreamed that I was robbed or that I was deserted? What am I trying to say with this?” During my interviews I realized that events tend to arrange themselves, seemingly “by chance,” into series in the dream that correspond to the metamorphosis of a single message. It is common for people to suffer from a breakup with a partner, lose money, or be robbed. In other cases, people who are caught up in conflicts that give rise to irrational anger may dream that they are suddenly in the middle of a hurricane, an earthquake, or a flood.

One client’s mother, with whom he had had a love/hate relationship, had just committed suicide. After the cremation ceremony, his apartment caught fire. In this type of chain of events, reality presents itself to us as a dream inhabited by distressing shadows in which we are victims, passive beings to whom things happen. If we stop identifying with the individual self through conscious effort, if we are able to “let go” and become impassive witnesses to what seems to happen to us by accident, and even more, if we stop suffering from what happens to us and begin to suffer from suffering from what happens to us, then we can get past the stage that corresponds to the lucid dream and introduce unexpected events into reality that cause it to evolve. The past is not immovable; it is possible to change it, enrich it, strip it of trouble, give it joy. It is evident that memory has the same quality as dreams. The memory consists of images as immaterial as dreams. Whenever we remember we recreate, giving a different interpretation to the events remembered. The facts can be analyzed from multiple points of view. The meaning of something in a child’s consciousness changes when we pass on to the adult level of consciousness. In memory, as in dreams, we can amalgamate different images. I spent three months during a harsh winter stuck in a hotel room in Montreal, Canada, waiting for a visa to enter the United States as an assistant to Marceau. The room was gray and depressing, the bed narrow and hard, the sink constantly emitted grunts like a pig, and the window invaded by arrows of neon light from a nearby pizzeria. Not wanting to remember those months as a time of such painful loneliness, in my mind I started painting the walls of the room in brilliant colors. I gave it a large bed with silk sheets and feather pillows, converted the grunts of the sink into gentle trumpet notes, and replaced the arrows in the window depicting a bleeding pizza with a blue lunar landscape in which luminous entities danced. I changed my nasty room into an enchanted place, as if retouching a bad photograph. Eventually, the real room was forever joined to the imaginary room. Then I started to dig up other unpleasant recollections in order to add details to brighten them. I turned egotists into generous teachers, deserts into lush forests, failures into triumphs.