I'll be processing this one a while. Completely changing the way I think of healing, art and the unconscious mind. His approach to healing takes Marinetti's statement "Poetry is an act" to the most fascinating extreme. His idea of the 'panic party'...the importance of a positive effect of art (something I would have scoffed at before)...I could sum it all up as, "Better living through metaphor." Really excellent to read as a companion to Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, which I read earlier this year.God how I wish I had read this when I was actively studying the craft of poetry. For anyone interested in creativity, the appendix on creative processes is priceless.Some of my favorite quotes:"At every moment, the capacity of the unconscious exceeds the limits of our reason, whether by way of dreams or by involuntary acts. With that in mind, shouldn't there be a way to make the unconscious behave voluntarily, like an ally?""The same advice given at the wrong moment will not have the least effectiveness...Similarly, when a person lets their guard down a bit, I often try to kick a psychological goal. We understand well that anyone who is prey to a vice continually maintains a position of defense. The ego refuses to yield. I must then seize or provoke a moment of distraction so as to let an order pass through the line of defense, into the unconscious. In order for the client to adopt the advice, it is important to penetrate his stubborn 'I' and to touch the much more impersonal zone of the self.""Every day we should carry out a free act, a little thing that serves others, like giving a chocolate to a child, simple things. I have come to true depravity in searching for goodness. Sometimes I put cash in the pocket of a sleeping homeless person, so he thinks he has good luck. I invent miracles. Even if you don't believe in miracles, you can do little things to help others.""The most difficult thing in the world is to create sublime art. Very few people have achieved this. But I could cite Rene Daumal, who learned Sanskrit and was a student of Gurdjieff; he achieved it. Federico Garcia Lorca is an opposite case: he could not achieve it, he did not know how to...When you read 'A Poet in New York,' it makes you sad...I remember some artists who said this world isn't worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain. I, for example, confess that I cannot read Marcel Proust. He's too sick for me, and his neurosis can contaminate me. Every day I see neurotic cases, why would I want to read others? Nowadays Franz Kafka is on the loose everywhere! I go to mail a letter, and I find myself with Kafka in the post office: an employee full of problems." (!!! As a sometimes-depressive who has alternately been completely in love with Kafka and Proust, I laughed out loud at this.)"A healthy person can read Emil Cioran or Michel Houellebec and laugh a lot.""In an unguided way, the true master lets wellness slip in and subtly introduces knowledge that can raise another's level of consciousness.""The plant, the rocks, the joke: they are sacred, these things are consecrated.""Throughout life, prejudices are not fixed, but beliefs are. I remember that at thirty years old I did something fundamental: I took a notebook and told myself, 'I am going to write down all the ideas I have in my mind. What do I believe in?' I wrote it, I did it to pick the ideas off, like fleas. And then I told myself, ' These ideas are not me; they may end up being useful, but they are not me.'""Behind every illness there is a book, be it the Qu'ran, the gospels, the Old Testament, Buddhist sutras...All books, if they are interpreted through fanaticism, produce illnesses.""Psychoanalysis notes the dreams and interprets them in light of reason; it goes from the unconscious to the rational. I go in reverse. I take the rational and capsize it in the language of dreams, introducing dreams into the language of reality."
Psihomagija : panična terapija"Sreča je biti vsak dan manj prestrašen. Odločitev je biti vsak dan manj zmeden.Pogum je biti vsak dan manj strahopeten.Pamet je biti vsakič manj neumen." - Alejandro Jodorowskystr. 7/8 - Z določenega vidika so bolezni sanje, sporočila, ki razodevajo nerešene zadeve.Tako, sem jo začel brati, vendar mi je po 50 straneh začela dolgočasiti. Ne, ker ni dobra ali zanimiva knjiga, ampak ker je ta knjiga, kot knjige Carlosa Castanede, drugačna. Globoka. Nerazumljiva. Čudna. Ni za vsakogar.Skratka, knjiga ima Zanimive zgodbe in sporočila, vendar moram priznati, da še nisem pripravljen na njo. Ko pride čas, jo bom zopet prebral oz. jo bom prebral.Seveda pri listanju (prebral jo nisem v celoti), mi je bilo najbolj všeč to, kako je mamo prepričal, naj za vsakič, jo da otroku zdravilo, verjame, da bo otroku pomagalo. In je. No, to je zame psihomagija.Vse ostalo, kot so šamani, vrači in itd., je pa stvar verovanja. Če verjameš, obstaja in ti lahko ali pomagajo ali škodujejo. Če ne, ti nič ne morejo, iz preprostega razloga, ker jih ni.Psihomagija je poizkus, da prepričaš človeka, da si lahko sam pomaga in to brez umetnih zdravil, saj je vse v tebi in si lahko sam pomagaš. Kot je zapisal na koncu (nekje proti koncu), da ljudje hočejo izboljšati stanje, vendar nočejo se odreči starim prepričanjem ali navadam oz. še bolje rečemo zasvojenostim. Mogoče bi bilo bolje reči izmom (alkoholizem, itd.).Za konec pa še enkrat najboljši citat letošnjega leta."Sreča je biti vsak dan manj prestrašen. Odločitev je biti vsak dan manj zmeden.Pogum je biti vsak dan manj strahopeten.Pamet je biti vsakič manj neumen."
What do You think about Psicomagia (2005)?
Quería conocer a Jodorowsky porque mucha gente tenía comentarios polarizados sobre él: unos decían que era genial y otros que era un charlatán. El hombre no es un escritor, sus libros son un compendio de entrevistas donde Jodorowsky explica sus teorías, pone ejemplos (muchos muy jocosos, explícitos, interesantes, divertidos) y comparte su punto de vista sobre temas como el perdón, el rencor, la voluntad, el amor, el dolor, etc. La psicomagia es un invento de él, mezclado con teorías psicológicas reales y maneras de trabajar de chamanes y brujos... y el libro gira alrededor de la presentación/explicación/aclaración de esa técnica ecléctica.Un libro muy interesante, fácil de leer, quizá uno de los mejores para leerle por primera vez si uno no lo conoce.No coincido con algunos de sus argumentos, pero terminé por respetar al señor. Incluso puede que en algunos meses busque algún otro libro suyo.
—Oxiborick
If you don't know who Jodorowsky is, you may recognize the name from movies like "El Topo", and "The Holy Mountain", which are surreal, mystical, some may say crazy movies about humanity that debuted in the 60's and 70's.In discovering art throughout his life, Jodorowsky went on a journey to learn about poetry, public art, directing films, Tarot, Shamanism,the subconscious mind, among other things, and from all this work he concluded that the subconscious understands in metaphors. In this book Jodorowsky shares how Psychmagic came into being. Psychmagic is the art that Jodorowsky has developed over many years of study to heal people from simple things like smoking, to all types of neurosis and other illnesses. Jodorowsky to this day practices Psychmagic to liberate people from all kinds of problems. He claims that most of society's problems today are based on limiting beliefs that we have produced in this world and that most of our personal problems were developed by experiences in our childhood. He analysis family trees and the history of the consultee, and after coming up with an analysis, he recommends an act of psychmagic which can range from the simplest of forms to what many may consider outrages acts. Nevertheless, the accounts of people who have been cured from performing these acts are numerous, to the point where Jodorowsky is one of the most popular artistic healing figures in Latin America today. The whole book was an interview that was recorded and then transcrived into a book. I found this format to be easy to follow because it breaks down all the topics discussed in the book in short form. If you are interested in learning about something new from someone with a really open mind, I would recommend this book, just don't go trying any psychmagic acts without first consulting a psychmagic artist like Jodorowsky.Good reads!
—Rommel
This is the guy. Relentlessly positive, incredibly unbelievable, and totally honest. Psychomagic lays out the method behind the madness.This book is actually in three parts. The first is the original book, Psychomagic, which is about the development of Jodorowsky's ritual psychotherapy technique he calls "psychomagic." It's a practice only he and a select few initiates can do, so it's really not a how-to book. It's more like a short biography in interview format, in which the interview approaches Jodorowsky incredulously. It's a pretty entertaining back-and-forth, and Jodorowsky manages to surprise constantly. He talks about poetry, theater, dreams, magic and finally his psychomagic.The second book, written ten years after the publication of the original, is also in interview format, but with a different interviewer. This is a very different kind of book, in which the interviewer asks a melange of questions about Jodorowsky's belief in various subjects, mostly new-age and philosophical. Jodorowsky defies all dogma, especially occult dogma. His way of seeing things is heavily influenced by Buddhist thought, backed by his own personal metaphysics.The third part of the book is a series of interesting exercises for the imagination.Jodorowsky draws from Zen, Tarot, psychoanalysis (including archetypes), and decades of personal experience around fantastic people. This book is incredibly entertaining, insightful, and lifted my spirits every time I opened it.
—William
