The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (45 page)

The family incessantly makes predictions about us: “If you do not study, you will fail in life,” “You don’t have a good ear; don’t sing,” “You are insufferable; no man will want to marry you,” “If you keep on like this, you’ll end up in jail.” The subconscious tends to fulfill the prediction. Anne A. Schutzberger, a professor at the University of Nice, mentions one aspect of this phenomenon: “If one carefully examines the past of a number of patients seriously ill with cancer, one will find that in many cases, they are people who unconsciously developed a ‘life script’ during their childhood, sometimes even with the date, time, day, or age at which they will die, and then they find themselves actually in this situation of dying. For example, at age thirty-three—the age at which Jesus Christ died—or forty-five—the age at which a father or mother died, and so on. These are all examples of a kind of automatic fulfillment of personal or family predictions.”

It has been proven that if a teacher expects a bad student to remain the same, it is most likely that nothing will change, while on the contrary, if the teacher believes that the child is intelligent but shy and predicts that despite this he or she will make progress, the child begins to study well.

The only way to free oneself from an obsessive prediction is to fulfill it, not to try to forget it. A Spanish friend of mine, a skeptic who always made fun of clairvoyants, had me read the Tarot for her out of curiosity. The cards told her, “Someone very close to you will die, and it will cost you a lot of money.” From that moment on, she never ceased to be distressed. The more she tried not to believe the prediction, the greater her obsession grew. I recommended, “Close the doors and windows of your home. Pump insecticides into all the rooms. Watch a fly die. Then it will be true that ‘someone very close to you will die.’ Then take a dollar bill and add six zeros to it in indelible ink. Wrap the fly in it and bury it. Thus it will have ‘cost you a lot of money.’” She did it. Her obsession vanished instantly.

A French woman with an exceptional voice who had been told by her father, “You’re a dreamer; you’ll never earn a living with your throat unless you sing at the opera house,” felt obliged to take singing lessons but never went on from being a student to being a professional. Her impossible goal was to sing at the opera. Knowing she was unable to achieve this, she felt like a failure. I offered to fulfill her father’s demands. She was to dress humbly, go to the Palace of the Opera at six o’clock in the evening, and start singing next to the gates with a bowl at her feet. Seven friends, one after another, would deposit a bill in the bowl. After the song, they should applaud her. With the money she received, she should buy an article of clothing that emphasized her beauty. Once the paternal requirement of singing at the opera house was fulfilled, her feelings of inferiority disappeared, and very soon after she became successful at singing the popular songs of which she was fond.

In Mexico City, I met with a young man who was afraid of committing suicide. This fear had been instilled by his mother who, when angry with him, had always yelled, “You’re going to end up like your father!” He had been told that his father was a bad man who ended up committing suicide with pills. I asked him what color he imagined these barbiturates to be. He said they were blue.

“Where did he die?”

“In a hotel in Buenos Aires, in Argentina.”

“Look in the city for a street named after Buenos Aires or Argentina. Rent a hotel room there, or as close to it as you can. Warn your mother that you are going to perform a therapeutic act that is necessary to prevent you from committing suicide and that you need her help. Go to the hotel room carrying a small bottle of blue sugar pills. Swallow all of them and lie in bed, completely still. An hour later, your mother should arrive and find you like that, ‘dead.’ She should cry, embracing your ‘corpse,’ uttering great lamentations and asking for forgiveness. Then she should call four assistants, who will carry you, very stiff, out of the hotel room. They will carry you, stretched out in a van, to the apartment where you live with your girlfriend. They will deposit you at her feet. She will embrace you, kiss you, caress you. Then you will wake up. You will tell your mother, ‘I have committed suicide like my father! Now that the prediction is fulfilled I will live my own life.’ To celebrate, you will invite your girlfriend, your mother, and the four friends to dine on tacos made from blue tortillas.”

A clairvoyant had predicted to a very fat, childlike man that on his next birthday he would have a serious accident. The fateful date was approaching, and he was so preoccupied that he could barely get up in the morning to go to work. I recommended that he buy one of those calendars from which one tears off a page for each day. The next day, in the early morning, he should tear off the pages until he got to the date of his birthday. Then he should go to a bakery dressed like a child and buy a multitiered cake covered in cream. He should carry it away unwrapped, walking down the street. He should purposely stumble and fall face down onto the cake, burying his face in the cream. He should scream like a child who believes he has had a major accident. Then he should go to the seer’s house with the crushed cake and smear it on him.

A woman was obsessed because a doctor had told her it was likely that she would have ovarian cancer. She felt sterile. To eliminate this negative prediction, I advised her to insert two fresh dove eggs into her vagina and keep them there for one whole night in order that they might confer their germinative strength. Then she should bury them in fertile soil, planting two large flowers there to symbolize her fulfilled ovaries.

A young woman was worried because all the women in her family tree were only children and had been widowed. She wanted to find a husband who would not die. I advised her to fulfill the prediction, since she was not currently living with a partner, by dressing in black and having business cards printed with her name on them, followed by “widow of X.” She should also make a human-sized doll representing the dead husband with her own hands, with which she would sleep for seven nights. After that time she should bury it and plant a tree over the “grave.”

In order to solve a problem I often make the client aware that, as in dreams, he or she is shifting the image of one person onto another. One woman could not break free from her former husband. Although she hated him, the separation made her suffer. I advised her to obtain a picture of her father’s face and a picture of her ex-husband’s face. The pictures should be large, life size, on transparent sheets. Then she should place the ex-husband’s face over that of the father and tape them to the glass of her bedroom window, preferably where the rising sun shines in, in order to see both images at the same time, superimposed. “Go to visit your father, and without him knowing it, dig in his laundry basket and steal a pair of underpants. Back at your house, cut a piece off the fly and stick it at the bottom of the double picture. When you truly realize that you are suffering not from your ex-husband’s lack of understanding but from your father’s, due to a repressed incestuous desire from childhood, you can burn the two transparencies and the piece of underwear, dissolve some of the ashes in a glass of wine, and drink it. Then you will accept the divorce with pleasure, knowing that it is a liberation.”

A very sensitive woman, Barbara, accused herself of being confrontational and destructive. “Because of this, I have destroyed the lives of my three daughters.” She wanted to rid herself of the “shadow” of her maternal grandmother, also confrontational and destructive. “My mother is always telling me that I look like her, that I’m following the same path, that I’m causing the same damage. In spite of all sorts of therapies, I can’t get rid of this shadow.” I advised her to dress up like her grandmother—underwear, clothes, shoes, wig—and stand next to a large surface covered by white paper, onto which she would cast her shadow with a spotlight. Her mother should draw the outline of the shadow with an indelible pen and then fill in the outline with black paint. After this the client should roll up the metaphorical shadow, go to a river, and facing away from the current, throw in both the shadow and the old costume over her left shoulder, then leave without looking back.

Sometimes these psychological shifts result in a dead relative possessing us without our realizing it, prompting us to seek reparation. In these cases, instead of struggling against those urges that we feel to be alien, we should submit to them. One man, with a face as inexpressive as if carved in stone, was deserted by his wife, who left him after giving birth to their daughter and returned to her parental home after one year of marriage. Her mother had done the same thing: right after giving birth, she had abandoned her husband and returned to the parental home. The man was suffering because he loved his wife and wanted her back. He thought that his wife had gotten bored of him because of his taciturn nature. I advised him to hire a band of mariachis and go to serenade his wife in the Mexican style. When his wife’s mother had returned to her parents, her proud husband had never gone looking for her. What she was asking for was proof of love. “Your wife is possessed by her mother and is repeating her act, hoping that finally her husband will behave like a man in love. You should also go dressed in traditional mariachi costume. It’s not really about you seducing your wife; it’s about her father seducing her mother.”

When a problem seems to have no solution because the client admits that he or she is the culprit and, out of repentance, feeling unable to repair the fault, brings about an illness, an economic or emotional failure, or a suicidal obsession, I turn to the concept that the “crimes” can be paid for. During the uprising against foreigners in Algeria, a son of French parents who had settled there watched from his bedroom window as his father and mother left the house, started their car, and were blown up by a bomb placed there by the revolutionaries. Instead of suffering, he began to laugh, feeling liberated from these narcissistic, intolerant, cold parents. Years later he came to see me, overwhelmed by guilt. He could not accept that he had felt so inhumane about the beings that had given him life. I did not allow myself to excuse his action by telling him that the person who had laughed was his badly mistreated inner child. Instead, I affirmed his guilt. Then I advised him to make a financial sacrifice by buying two very expensive jewels, traveling to Algeria, and burying the precious gems exactly at the spot where the car had exploded, without letting anyone see. Thus the emotional debt would be paid.

Sometimes an unjust feeling of guilt can lead to a neurosis of failure. One woman had been told too many times by her parents, “When you were born, you created a problem for us: we were poor. Your arrival plunged us even further into financial difficulties.” I recommended that she exchange a five-hundred-franc note for the same amount in five-centime coins. Carrying this heavy weight in a bag at the level of her belly, she should walk along a main street scattering handfuls of coins as if they were seeds while thinking to herself, “I am giving wealth to the world.”

Another technique is to transfer the painful feeling to an object and then “give” it to whoever has done the damage. One woman consulted me because she felt she had a symbiotic relationship with her sister, who unceasingly gave her orders, taking control of her will. Although this sister had died of breast cancer, my client still felt owned by her and wanted to be released. I advised her to put a steel ball, such as those used for playing boules, into a leather bag and wear it around her neck day and night. “Resist that weight as much as possible, because it symbolizes your sister, and when you can no longer support it, go to see your mother and give her the ball, saying, “This object is not mine, it’s yours. I am giving it back to you. It would be good if you would bury it.” I explained that competitive relationships between siblings are caused by the instability of the parents.

A lesbian woman suffered because she did not feel at ease with her lover. She had been sexually repressed and often lacked sexual energy, although sex had worked well with her lover until her desire ceased because her lover constantly asked her to be perfect, as her mother had done before her. I advised her to steal some of her mother’s dirty clothes, dress her lover in them, lie in bed with her, and during sexual relations tear up these garments with rage while shouting, “I’m not perfect, and you’re not my mother!” Then she should give her lover a massage with rose-scented oil. After this, she should wrap the shredded clothes in white paper and tie up the package with a blue ribbon. In another package of black paper tied with a pink ribbon, she should wrap up a new dress. She should send both packages to her mother with a letter saying, “I do not know if you will understand this: I have destroyed your old dress to return it to you changed into a new one. Thank you.”

Another woman, very distressed, said that she was having terrible problems with her period. She felt as if she would never stop bleeding. After analyzing her family tree, I told her, “You are suffering the anguish of your mother. You are bleeding because of the kicks in the belly that your maternal grandfather gave to his wife when he found out she was pregnant again. She gave birth only to girls. You were supposed to have been a boy. You must return these kicks to your grandfather. Go to his grave with a calf fetus and a liter of artificial blood. Throw this cadaver on the slab and pour on the blood. Then kick the grave ferociously. Expel your grandmother’s rage from yourself. Then bury the calf fetus nearby and plant a beautiful plant with red flowers there.”