Alejandro Jodorowsky: Doing

“The person who does not control his territory does not control his existence. If someone is not conscious, he is taken over, not only outwardly but also with the thoughts that assault him. He is very vulnerable to desires and feelings. For example, you live calmly with your wife, and then—catastrophe! Suddenly you lose control because you have fallen in love with another. You don't have to fall victim to that reality; what you have to do is navigate in 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. In New York, when I was filming The Holy Mountain, I had problems of all sorts. I soaked six or seven T-Shirts a night with my sweat. I went to see a Chinese sage that someone had recommended. He was a poet, a great master of tai chi, and a doctor. When he first saw me, he said, "What is your purpose in life?" I was disconcerted and did not answer. He continued, "If you do not tell me what is your purpose in life, I cannot heal you."”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

So I understood that 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...
Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

Love , Life , Feeling , Mountain

“I say: "What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up." And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)
Context: I say: "What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up." And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to yourself; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose. If I keep my knowledge, I lose it. (...) One receives knowledge and gives it. When you give knowledge, you enrich yourself. If you do not give love, you are detracting from yourself. If I begin to help people, if I begin to heal people, I begin to heal. Do you understand? To be a therapist, you have to be a patient. The first thing to do to heal yourself is to heal others. I have one more saying: "I do not want anything for myself that I do not want for others".

World

“If we want to transform reality, we begin with ourselves. We do not ask the world to change, and we do not fight against society. It has to be us ourselves who affirm our own values.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

World , Reality , Change , Fight

“We have to stop thinking that God is going to fix everything and saying that if God made everything bad in this universe then we are here to do to, too, again. If there is a God, we are here to help him. This requires that we take possession of the world and of ourselves. We must do what we want to do with full consciousness and with full responsibility. In this level of divine consciousness, we find true art.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

God , World , Art , Thinking

“The symbolic act of the death of the father is absolutely necessary, but it is also necessary to do it in an intelligent way, with lucidity and without resentment. If you perceive your father in a violent way, it is because you are not killing him: you are asking him to love you because you need it. But if you are able to see him positively, without his pedestal and without your fear, you are no longer begging him to love you in order for you to exist. And this is when you kill him, when you make him fall. But once you've knocked him down, it is necessary to rebuild him and repay him, because fathers have essential value, even if they are monsters: they give us life, they leave their imprint on certain parts of our being, and they allow us to become who we are in a conscious way.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

Love , Life , Death , Fear

“I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Anarchy and Alchemy: the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky by Ben Cobb (2007) p. 115

Art , Thinking , Learning , Change

“When we do something we have never done, we are already on the road to healing. We must break the routines.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

“At that time they said I was crazy because I wanted to make a movie that was 14 or 16 hours. But now people do it. There are three—"Hobbit 1," "Hobbit 2," "Hobbit 3." Everything I wanted to do is possible to do today.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

People , Time

“When we didn't make the picture, Dan O'Bannon needed to be interned in a mental institution for two years, suffering because we didn't get to do "Dune." And when he came out he wrote the script for "Alien." "Alien" was the reaction to not doing "Dune."”

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Who would believe that? But it's true!
Alejandro Jodorowsky reveals how his Dune inspired alien challanges to get the script published http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/alejandro-jodorowsky-reveals-how-his-dune-inspired-alien-challenges-to-get-the-script-published-20140321

Suffering