The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (9 page)

I asked the Rebbe, “You, who seem to know everything, tell me what I can expect in this life, what is due to me, what my basic rights are.” I imagined the Rebbe answering me as follows:

“First of all, you should have the right to be conceived by a father and mother who loved each other, through a sexual act crowned by mutual orgasm, so that your soul and flesh might have pleasure as their root. You should have the right to be neither an accident nor a burden, but an individual, hoped for and wished for with all the force of love, a fruit to give meaning to the couple, creating a family. You should have the right to be born with the sex that nature intended for you. (It is abusive to say, ‘We were hoping for a boy and you were a girl,’ or vice versa.) You should have the right to be acknowledged from the first month of gestation. At all times, the pregnant woman should accept that she is two organisms on their way to separation, and not just one organism expanding. Nobody can blame you for the accidents that occur during childbirth. What happens to you in the womb is never your fault. Sometimes, due to anger against the world, the mother does not want to give birth and, through unconscious action, wraps the umbilical cord around the child’s neck and aborts it. Sometimes the mother does not want to give birth because the child has become an appendage of power, so she retains it more than nine months, drying up the amniotic fluid and burning the child’s skin; or making it turn until the feet, not the head, slide toward the vulva, sending the child feet first into death; or fattening the child until it cannot fit through the vagina, requiring a frigid caesarean birth, no more than the removal of a tumor, in place of a natural birth. Or, refusing to accept the responsibility of creation, the mother might call for the help of a doctor who squeezes the child’s brain with forceps; or due to a neurosis of failure, the child might be born blue, half-suffocated, forced to represent the emotional death of the parents . . . You should have the right to a profound collaboration: the mother should want to give birth just as the boy or girl wants to be born. The effort should be mutual and well balanced. From the moment that this universe produces you, it is your right to have a protective parent who is always present while you are growing up. Just as one gives water to a thirsty plant you have the right, when you are interested in some activity, to see before you the great number of possibilities that may develop along the path that you choose. You are not put on Earth to fulfill the personal plans of the adults who have set goals for you that are not your own; the greatest happiness life gives you is to allow you to become yourself. You should have the right to your own space where you can be alone in order to build your imaginary world, to see what you want to see without your eyes being restricted by antiquated morals, to hear what you want to hear even if the ideas are contrary to those of your family. You are not put on Earth to fulfill anyone but yourself, you are not here to take the place of any dead person, you deserve to have a name that is not that of a family member who died before you were born: when you carry the name of a dead person, it means that they have grafted a destiny onto you that is not your own, usurping your true essence. You have full right not to be compared to any sister or brother; they are not worth any more or less than you. Love exists when essential differences are recognized. You should have the right to be excluded from all quarrels between your family members, not to be used as a witness in their disputes, not to be the dumping ground for their economic woes, and to grow in an environment of trust and security. You should have the right to be educated by a father and mother who are ruled by common ideas, their intimacy with one another smoothing their contradictions. If they get divorced, you should have the right not to be required to see men through the resentful eyes of your mother or women through the resentful eyes of your father. You should have the right not to be torn away from the place where your friends, your school, and your favorite teachers are. You should have the right not to be criticized if you choose a path in life that was not part of your parents’ plan; to love whomever you want without the need for approval; and when you feel capable of doing so, to leave home and go live your own life; to surpass your parents, to go further than them, to do what they could not, and to live longer than them. Finally, you should have the right to choose the time of your death without anyone prolonging your life against your will.”

THREE

First Acts

If Matucana felt like a stifling prison to me, then so did my body. Feeling ill at ease in my flesh, I fled into my intellect. I lived shut away in my mind, levitating a few meters above a walking corpse that felt alien to me. I was conscious of myself as a multitude of disordered thoughts that eventually lost their meaning and became masses of empty words without any roots to nourish my being. I was a dry well in which phrases floated around, accumulating into a fabric of anguish. I knew that I was somewhere in there, behind my face, but I could not tell who or what this self of mine was. I felt cold, heat, hunger, desire, pain, and sorrow, but at a distance, as if they were in an alien body. The only thing that kept me alive was the ability to imagine. I dreamed of adventures in exotic lands, colossal triumphs, virgins sleeping with pearls in their mouths, elixirs that conferred immortality. Everything that I wanted could be summarized in a single word:
change
. The essential quality that I needed in order to love myself was to become what I currently was not. Like the frog awaiting the princess, I waited for the arrival of a superior and compassionate soul who would overcome disgust and approach me to give me the kiss of knowledge. Unfortunately I only had two friends, and they were imaginary: the Rebbe and the aged Alejandro. For what I wanted to achieve, I needed more than a couple of ghosts. I decided to be my own helper.

Even after meditations that seemed eternal, I was not able to dissolve my intellect within my body. Getting out of my own head was as impossible as escaping from a strongbox. It was impossible to get rid of the supremacy of my identification with the flesh. Therefore, I decided to try the opposite: since I could not go down, I would make all my sensations ascend! Beginning as pure intellect I began by considering my physical form, then my needs, desires, and emotions. I examined how I felt, then what it was like to live with this sensation. I realized that so-called “reality” was a mental construct. Was it a total illusion? This was impossible to know, but quite clearly I never perceived what was real in me in its entirety. Intellect always provided me with an incomplete fantasy, distorted by the false consciousness of myself with which my family had imbued me. “I am living inside a madman! My rational ship is sailing on a sea of insanity!” What at first I thought was a nightmare changed, little by little, into hope. Since everything that presented itself to me as part of “my being” consisted of illusory images, nothing more than dreams, I was able to change my sensation of myself.

Thus, a long process began. I focused my attention on my feet. They felt heavy, numb, distant, incapable of balancing properly. I began to imagine them as light, fine-tuned, sensitive, confident, their toes extending intrepidly onto the paths of life. I imagined myself with the feet of Christ, pierced by a single nail that fastened them to the pain of the world, a bleeding wound offering ascendancy to change lamentation into prayer. I imagined that the wounds I endured were not mine but those of humanity, and that through those wounds I absorbed the suffering of others and let it circulate in my blood like a balm, transforming it into happiness.

Next, I focused on my bones, felt them one by one. How forgotten was this humble structure! I had lugged it around as a symbol of death, not realizing its vital power. I recreated my skeleton, giving it a strong and flexible material like that of a steel sword, bones almost weightless, with a core of molten lava, like those on which the eagle soars. Suddenly, I realized that I had created the skeleton of a dancer—the skeleton of my maternal grandfather. Without the intervention of my own will I then felt long, powerful muscles and indestructible entrails forming around this luminous structure, with abundant golden hair falling around its shoulders like a liquid halo. I realized that during my gestation Sara had unceasingly desired to recreate her father, the legendary dancer turned into a burning torch. Those wishes had infiltrated my cells, a mandate contrary to the natural order of things, causing me to be born giving forth cries of dissatisfaction. I was myself—what a sin!—and not the seven-foot-tall giant, the practically weightless solar Hercules. In order to be loved, I would have had to make myself into that myth. The flaming dead man was my ideal of perfection . . . I wanted to undo all of that and imagine another ideal body for myself. And yet, for all that I tried, I could not get rid of it. I recognized that I carried that model embedded in my genes, that every cell in my body aspired to be him. To keep struggling to change the effigy would be to deceive myself. Perhaps for centuries, from generation to generation, nature had been striving to produce that entity. Why not obey her? And if this meant that in a metaphorical manner, I would become my mother’s father, then what of it? She had dreamed of being the daughter of a strong yet sensitive man, an artist. Once, shedding many tears, Sara had told me that when her father, Alejandro Prullansky, was dancing down the street engulfed in a rose of flame he had shouted out poems instead of screaming, until he crumbled to ashes.

Feeling myself living in this graceful imaginary body, I now became capable of movements that I had never known before. Space, which had previously seemed to me a terrifying abyss, enveloped me like a soft coat and showed me where to go; it became a protective carpet and ceiling, stretched to the horizon like an enormous harp, standing before me offering views through infinite windows. For the first time, I felt at ease in the world. The sensation of divergence disappeared. Countless invisible threads tied me to the center of the Earth, to the land, to the sky. With the whole planet licking the soles of my feet, I was moved to dance, to jump higher and higher, to go beyond the stars, into the depths of the sky.

What I am relating may seem absurd. What could be the use of such self-deception? My answer is that as a young man struggling to escape the weight of depression during that time, imagining myself to be strong and weightless offered me a lifeline that saved me from suffocating in the trap that was my family and allowed me to undertake liberating work. But, without any guide, where was I to start? Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: “The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the ‘ordinary tumult,’ will hear the Master say: ‘Watch out, there is a wall.’ ‘But is this wall temporary?’ asks the restless soul, ‘can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?’ ‘I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself.’”

Who had written these lines, brought to me on a piece of paper that flitted down the street like a dirty butterfly? Was someone trying to tell me that my own being, which I myself despised, was worthy of attention from magical chance? And that I was not a vacant entity, that inside me there existed the power to cross or demolish the wall, because it was I myself who had built it? By saying, “Watch out, there is a wall!” the Master had stated that the disciple was not seeing due to distraction. Perhaps I was confusing the wall with reality, mistaking my mental limits for the natural boundaries of the world. Here is how I saw myself: since childhood I had been robbed of my freedom, my mind enclosed by a fence that prevented expansion. I closed my eyes. I saw myself submerged in a black sphere. This was the wall. As soon as I shut my eyelids, I found myself compressed within a dark skull. And because I felt blind, the possibility of existing escaped me. To lose sight of the outside world was to lose myself. The solitude became even greater when I plugged my ears with my fingers. Blocked off from light and sound, my wretched condition, my lack of sensation, my nothingness, manifested with implacable cruelty. In fact, I told myself, this blackness is impalpable. And if it is impalpable, then it does not have to be a thick barrier; it can be an infinite space. That’s it! When I close my eyes, I will imagine that my consciousness is floating at the center of the cosmos.

I began to feel that I was moving forward. I traveled and traveled for a considerable time, farther and farther, extending without end. Gradually, in the infinite blackness, points of light began to shine. Now I was moving through a starry firmament. After enjoying the vastness that was presented to me, I undertook the same experience in reverse, as if I had eyes in the back of my head, then to the left and right, as if I had eyes in my temples. Then I descended into a well of infinite circumference, never reaching the bottom. The farther I went the more I lost the sensation of falling, and at last the descent reversed and turned into an ascent. Farther and farther, always farther; I returned to my center and made the sphere grow in all directions at once. The space around me was constantly expanding. Then I began to contract it. Forward, backward, left, right, up, down, all directions were concentrated on me. I nourished myself with stars, becoming more and more intense. I had eliminated distance. I was a point of light. Ah, such concentration! Attention, attention, attention is all that I was! My mind turned me into a transparent receptacle in which words arranged into sentences without beginning or end—impersonal herds with no use besides their beauty—paraded like windswept clouds.

I allowed the sensation of my body’s presence to manifest itself. I concentrated my attention on all the different parts of the organism. I took stock of what I was feeling. Every organ, every limb, every region of the body had something to say. At first there were complaints, accusations of me abandoning them, not trusting them, but then came euphoric declarations of love. I discovered that my arms, my legs, my ears, skin, muscles, bones, lungs, intestines, the whole body was filled with an immense joy of living. I sank into my brain and entered the pineal gland. I imagined it as a diamond reigning on a throne amid reverent convolutions. I then navigated into the bloodstream. The heat of this thick liquid seemed to come from a distant past. I gave myself over to the ebb and flow, the coming and going from the center to the periphery and from the periphery to the center, as from the explosive central point of creation to the confines of the universe, an incommensurable rose opening and closing for all eternity.

Thanks to these exercises I was able to expand my limited mental space. Whenever an idea appeared, locked in a chain of words, I exploded it into a thousand echoes that transformed themselves like clouds. I never again thought linearly but in complex structures, labyrinths, where the effect sometimes came before the cause. The outer surface of my skull became the interior, and consciousness, like the pulp of a peach around its pit, became an exterior inextricably joined to the sky.

These sensations became my great secret. Neither my parents nor my sister knew about this transformation. In any case they paid very little attention to me, and even if I had revealed this to them they would have kept on seeing me the same way, as something invisible. I returned to the high school with no friends and no loving family. From that moment on I sat in my wooden chair with my feet parallel, firmly on the ground, a shoulder’s width apart, hands outstretched over my thighs with palms up, my spine held straight with no support at the back, and with eyes closed, devoted myself for hours to my exercises. My mind was a vast and unknown land, and I dedicated myself to exploring it. Thus I continued until the age of nineteen. I moved forward in stages. At first, to help prevent parasitic thoughts from invading my mind, I repeated an absurd word to myself: “Crocodile!”

Having conquered space, I then decided to alter my sense of time. To this end, I eliminated the idea of death. “One does not die, but is transformed. Into what? I do not know! But I was something before birth, and must be something after my body is dissolved.” I imagined myself ten years later, thirty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred. I kept advancing into the future, increasing my age to a dizzying figure. “It will be like this when I am a thousand years old, thirty thousand, fifty thousand . . .” I imagined the changes in my morphology. In a million years I would begin to lose my human form. . . . In two million years I would be transparent. In ten million years I would be an immense angel, traveling with other angels in a euphoric throng, traversing galaxies in a cosmic dance, helping to create new suns and planets. Fifty million years later, I would not have a body; I would be an invisible entity. A billion years later, dissolved into the energies and the totality of all matter, I would be the universe itself. And even farther, deeper and deeper into eternity, I would eventually become the point consciousness, the absolute root of existence, where all is in potential, where matter is nothing but love. Finally, after the explosion and implosion of countless universes, the stars dissolved and my mind froze. I began my journey backward, coming back into myself. Then I turned toward the past, seeing myself as a child, a fetus, imagining a multitude of lives, each one more primordial: dark beasts, insects, mollusks, amoebas, minerals, a rock wandering the cosmos, a sun, a point of continual explosion. Beyond this final stage I immersed myself in the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the infinite, the eternal mystery that, being incapable of defining it, we call God.