The Light Behind the Eyelids: Jodorowsky, Arthouse Cinema, and the Inner Gaze

It was sometime between the man transforming excrement into gold and the monks ceremonially burning their own faces that the parallel clicked.

Watching The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is not unlike sitting under the Loom with your eyes closed and your awareness open. At some point, you stop following and begin dissolving.

Jodorowsky once said that a psychedelic film should not show psychedelic visions. It should provoke them. The goal is not to simulate a trip with special effects but to recreate the state of mind that leads to one. His films are not narrative. They are alchemical containers. You do not simply watch them. You undergo them.

That principle feels surprisingly close to the philosophy behind visual brainwave entrainment.

With the Loom we have always said it is not about what you see but what happens to you when you see nothing at all. The flickering frequencies are not there to entertain. They are there to loosen the ordinary hold of thought, to invite images and impressions from a deeper layer of the mind. If Jodorowsky’s medium was ritual, chaos, and celluloid, ours is light, rhythm, and silence. But the destination overlaps.

Jodorowsky used archetypes, sacred absurdity, and theatrical violence to shake viewers out of their roles. A Western gunslinger becomes a holy fool. The ego dies, then comes back wearing robes. His characters climb mountains only to discover there is no peak. Only the presence of the camera and the command to return to life.

Similarly the Loom offers an inner ascent. Not through story but through sensation. The Delta program with its slow undulating flicker often leads to visions that feel dreamlike, elemental, symbolic. Not by design. There are no images coded in. But by effect. People emerge from sessions talking about journeys, memories, apparitions. The mind responds to light the way it responds to myth.

There is something uncanny in the way El Topo or The Holy Mountain lingers. The way it opens inner doors and then disappears, leaving you to make sense of what walked through. Lightbath sessions can feel similar. You come back changed, if subtly. Rearranged in some quiet way.

We do not often look to cinema to explain our work, but discovering Jodorowsky’s films—especially now, decades after their release—feels like unearthing a long-lost cousin in the creative lineage. He used film to trigger something spiritual. We use light to do the same. Both are rooted in rhythm. Both bypass the intellect. And both trust the audience to fill in the blanks with their own experience.

There is no prescription. No correct interpretation. Just the invitation to go beyond.

It is easy today to expect spectacle. But some works are not here to dazzle. They are here to disrupt. To crack open the surface and let something older speak. Jodorowsky did this with symbols, absurdity, and surrealism. At Lightbath we do it with a light that pulses in silence and asks nothing of you but stillness.

And perhaps that is the synchronicity. Two very different mediums, separated by decades and format, converging on the same principle. Do not tell. Do not show. Cause.

When we talk about brainwave entrainment and the Loom we sometimes reach for science. But more often we find ourselves turning to metaphor, to experience, to art. Watching Jodorowsky reminds us that transformation does not need to be explained. It just needs space to happen.

Close your eyes. Let the light begin. Or press play on a film that was never meant to be watched. Only lived.