Category Archives: Artists

Disrupting the story line of the mechanical mind

Piero della Francesca, Antoni Gaudi, and Salvador Dali

by Jon Rappoport

July 30, 2021

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What city is this
Whose moments tremble
Azure sky and lime lights
Walking in the intersections
Through the squares of paradise

People are solidly addicted to story line. Beginning, middle, end. They want to have it, over and over, in different guises.

The ultimate payoff of that addiction? There is none. Except the need for more.

Propaganda, media, announced government policy, education, religious messages, hundreds of medical treatments—the underlying theme is polished story line. Wrapped up and sold. When the wrong ending looms like a thundercloud, an order to goes out to hide it or lie about it.

When a relentlessly creative individual disrupts story lines, an unlimited number of universes opens up. And every one of them causes tremors in the addict.

“Don’t do that. I don’t understand what you’re doing. Stop. It makes no sense. You’re crazy. Where is the ending? Civilization is going to fall into the sea. What is your message? I can’t find it. Boil down what you’re saying. God will punish you.”

The addict feels his mind is cracking. He runs screaming in the night looking for his next fix.

For example, the open and basically endless poetry of Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Arthur Rimbaud can have that effect.

So many new worlds moving through the old one.

Why does a story have to have a recognizable plot and a tuned-up climax? Same question: Why does a person need to inject heroin?

Look at Piero della Francesca’s 1464 fresco, Legend of the True Cross—perhaps the greatest painting of the Renaissance. In a series of episodic panels, it traces the mythical history of the wooden cross on which Jesus was crucified. However, there are a number of puzzling “non-linear” representations in Piero’s work, the most famous of which is the panel titled, King Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba. What does that meeting have to do with the purported journey of the timber on which Jesus hung?

The Roman Church would claim it is symbolic of an archetypal super-event called The Arrival, and refers to the birth of the Messiah or his later entrance into public life as a teacher; or Sheba had precognitive knowledge of the tree whose wood would be used to make the cross. That’s an extraordinary stretch, to say the least. But it’s typical of a strategy down through the ages: when a promoted story line breaks down, invent a way of claiming it’s still coherent.

Buttress conventional story at all costs.

Mechanical minds will always reduce events, data, history, science, etc., to manageable stories.

Oceanic artists go the other way: they proliferate their work beyond any mechanical limit or summarized interpretation.

Why does that matter? Because, for these artists and their committed audiences, routine day-to-day experience is cracked open like an egg, out of which emerge vital energies of concealed dimensions. Life becomes LIFE.

When I was 21, a friend showed me photos of the architectural productions of the Spanish genius, Antoni Gaudi, scattered throughout Barcelona. My first reaction was, these buildings came from another planet. My second reaction: how was he allowed to build these structures?

Gaudi was a technical innovator of the first order. He developed forms and methods of construction that surpassed the engineering rationale of the great cathedrals of Europe. At the same time, he confounded old ideas of space. The experience of seeing or standing in one of his buildings yielded up the sensation of living in a DIFFERENT KIND OF CONTINUUM.

That new continuum disrupts the story line of consciousness by proliferating a new narrative that has no convenient ending. The old way of seeing has been given a bath in some mysterious dynamo and is vitalized.

Habitual categories and compartments of perception have dissolved.

Who would have known this was possible, unless Gaudi (1852-1926) had lived?

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the consensus-shape we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

Occasionally, an artist will take on the role of actor and performer, in order to deal with the denizens and mental dwarves of ministries of truth. Over the past hundred years, it would be hard to find an artist who carried out such a program with more skill and verve than Salvador Dali.

Let’s start here. To absorb a work of imagination, one has to use his own imagination.

Since this is considered unlikely, pundits earnestly help us with step-down contexts, so we can understand the work in pedestrian terms. In other words, so we can reduce it to nothing.

Salvador Dali was not content to allow this to happen.

The critics would have declared Dali a minor lunatic if he hadn’t possessed such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?

Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles. A bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out from the paintings.

What was the man doing? Was he mocking the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work. However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Critics flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make the situation a comedy (among other things), whether you want to admit it or not.

It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, with good reason, we might more correctly say Dali was playing the media on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self (or selves) that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

But of course Dali’s work was not about realism.

The most complex paintings—see, for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador—brilliantly orchestrated the interpenetration of various solidities/realities, more or less occupying the same space.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble in the same space—and there was no limit to the number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali’s skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters.

They hate the dissonance. They resent Dali’s mordant wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes in such fierce extended detail.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in it.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The scholars were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the bull (shit) rushes of the critics and the historians. They charged at him. He moved with his cape—and stepped out of the way.

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must—as a civilization goes down the trail of decline—be watched and recorded and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever. The biggest joke of all. The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali’s education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would present competing circumstances inside one painting, he perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with exacting skill, “making subversive photographs come to life.”

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

Imagination realized.

Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals a prison break in progress.

The pot is boiling. People want out. Even if they don’t know where out is.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative force. That is the first great day. That’s the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative power is impossible. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach? What if it turns out that we are the perverse ones and a Dali is quite normal?

What if we pop out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie called Planet Earth?

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

It’s the poets who destroy the old order of mechanical consciousness

by Jon Rappoport

July 6, 2021

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“The greatest sum is no sum at all. It isn’t the addition of facts or numbers. There are mythic qualities in existence that come from us…myths greater than machines…and in order to give voice to the myths we need to go where poets go. We need to go there badly. For our own sake, we have to put that peculiar precision that splits a tiny particle into smaller and smaller pieces on the shelf…” (The Magician Awakes)

These days, people are rightly concerned about spying, snooping, tracking, hacking, profiling. The battle of privacy versus intrusion. The systems that look at other systems.

What kind of language is involved in computer spying and counter-spying and protection? You don’t have to be an expert to see it’s the language of the machine. It’s delineated in fine, very fine, and extra-fine shavings of detail. The Trojan Horse is now algorithmic.

The people who enter and work in that universe are committed to a meticulous process of move and counter-move. Programs above other programs. Look-ins which are processing the strategies of other look-ins.

The past, present, and future of language is involved. A civilization, to a significant extent, rides on what happens to words—not as detached entities, but as the expression of what we invent ourselves to be.

“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

If freedom is placed in a modern context of privacy vs. no-privacy, the war is going to embroil us in a language of the machine. We’re going to touch that language, rub up against it in one way or another, use it, oppose some piece of it with another piece of it.

Children are going to grow up learning it and swimming in it and its effects.

In that way, the creeks and streams and rivers and oceans of machine interaction are going to power human thinking.

“…it is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there…” (William Carlos Williams)

Here’s a strange example. People will take a paragraph out of an author’s novel, extract every key word, and track down their possible references—and then try to reconstitute the paragraph as if it were lines of secret code. They’ll rebuild it by welding together those references.

Because mathematics consists of symbol-manipulation, and the symbols have very specific and tight meanings, there is a growing tendency to assume all language works this way.

It doesn’t.

Poetry doesn’t. But the poet, who was already on the far edge of credibility, is reintroduced as a symbol maker, a mathematician slipping a coded revolution into the matrix.

That might make an entertaining science fiction novel, but it has nothing to do with the energy or intent of a poem.

Poets may be unearthing hidden treasure, but the spoils of their war are everything mathematics isn’t. Every great poet destroys the old order. It’s for the reader to discover and see that, if he can.

The old order, which is always and forever fascism dressed up as “greatest good,” keeps resurfacing in the same pool of decay.

It’s the poets who know how to climb down into the muck and also fly above it, waking the dead parts of the psyche.

Whoever rules the dead, and with what royal purpose, remains constant: he rejects poetic consciousness that can fully restore the human being to life.

Poetry does more than reorder reality. It creates it from the beginning, from the first line on the page of the future.

Society, as it has been shaped, is the sum of illusions that prevent the individual from hearing the first line, even as it echoes in his mind.

This repression is a cooperative exchange in the marketplace. The individual agrees to deafen himself, in order to placate his inner forces.

“Time let me hail and climb, Golden in the heydays of his eyes. And honoured among wagons, I was prince of the apple towns, And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

“Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table…”

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis…”

These aren’t instructions or code or habits to be performed, or political improvements. They’re grand intrusions on the commonplace labyrinth. They come in and explode.

As the consciousness of these things dwindles in the era of the machine and all its complications, as the matrix expands to include language-calculations designed to describe what the individual is and isn’t, a sea of metrics forms the illusion of progress.

Caught in nests of symbolic relation, we wait, “till human voices wake us and we drown.”

To the extent the poet is merely taken to be crazy, doom is settling like a shroud around our shoulders.

“…the willingness to give the response to the heroic…gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil.” (DH Lawrence)

But poets always come. They see doom and they use it as fuel for a new fire that ends one epoch and begins another. Who hears them? That is always the open question. We are already living in a new time, if we would recognize it.

“Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race.” (Johann Georg Hamann)

“[Poetry:] Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” (Thomas Gray)

Imagine there were a million new and unknown languages waiting to be discovered. These tongues wouldn’t make things simpler. They wouldn’t make machines run more smoothly. They would lead us into worlds that had remained in the shadows because we had no way to express our perception of them. They would light up whole geographies of consciousness that had been dormant. Every compromise with reality would be exposed as a blatant enormous lie.

Every “thought-machine” would crumble. The absurdity of building bigger and bigger organizations as the grand solution to conflict would reveal itself so clearly, even android-humans would see it and wake up from their trance.

Here’s an excerpt from my unfinished manuscript, The Magician Awakes:

You sit there and tell me about your life, but after a while it occurs to you you’re talking in a blind language. You’re moving below other words you don’t give voice to.

You vaguely think, from time to time, the other words might be in Nature. But Nature is just one part of that expression. There are thousands of other Natures. And each one has a language that unlocks it and spreads it out in a different space and time.

Would you rather pull back in and settle on the words you use every day? Would you rather become an expert in those words, a king of those words, a ruler in that small place? Is that the beginning and end of what you want and where you’re going?

Because if it is, then we can end this discussion and all discussions. We can please ourselves with what we have. We can dodge and duck. We can inject ourselves with a satisfaction-drug and say there’s nothing else to do.

This is how a circumscribed life happens: through a story a person tells himself.

There is really only one universal solvent that will wash away that story: imagination.

The ultimate basis of all mind control is: whatever it takes to deny the true power of imagination.

The exact same thing can be said about the ultimate aim of political repression.

To understand, to get an idea about what imagination is capable of, you need to go to ART.

The creative center of the world.

“After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.” Wallace Stevens

What would happen if the world were enveloped by art? And if we were the artists? And if we owed nothing to any hierarchy or external authority?

Art is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the boredom of the soul.

Art is what the individual invents when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s what the individual does when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

Art is the end of mindless postponement. It’s what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It emerges from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.

Art destroys the old order and the new order and the present order, with a glance.

Art spears the old apple on the point of a glittering sword and opens up the whole rotting crust that has attached itself to the tree of life.

It shrugs off the fake harmony of the living dead.

Fueled by liberated imagination, it is the revolution the psyche has been asking for.

Art unchained becomes titanic.

There are artists like Stravinsky, like Gaudi, like the composer Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (who has been grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists—Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros—all of whom transmit the oceanic quality.

As in, The Flood.

There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale, they would indeed take over the world.

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the consensus-shape we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

But creation is not neutral.

It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.

It is the transformation we have been unconsciously hoping for, the revolution that would relentlessly make society over, that would eventually shatter the influence of all cartels and monopolies of physical and emotional and mental and spiritual experience.

Not because we wished it were so, but because we made it happen.

Prometheus, the artist who unchained humanity…

Through what mirror are we looking at ourselves in these ancient tales?

The Prometheus story makes absolutely no sense unless we acknowledge there is a reason for rebellion. But not just any rebellion. One man assaulting the supernatural mountain of the Olympians to steal fire, escape, and bring it back to man is more than audacious, if the Greek poets invented the pantheon of gods and their aerie in the first place.

In that case, the theft of fire is an acknowledgment that power is returned home.

“We invented the gods. Now we re-invent ourselves.”

Religion is frozen poetry. The poets began by writing outside the boundaries of the tribe, and the priests appointed themselves the sacking editors.

They hammered and cut and polished the wild free poems into tablets and catechisms and manuals of stern disapproval. They gathered up workers to build the temples where the new laws would be preached and taught. They established the penalties for defection. They staked an exclusive claim to revelation.

They established the false and synthetic universal centrality of myth disguised as revelation, and they sold it, and they enforced it, and they prepared a list of enemies who were threatening the Law of Laws.

And all that raw material, which they stole? It came from the poets. It came from the free and boundless creation of artists.

So Prometheus was setting the record straight. He was cracking the system like an egg. He was bringing imagination back where it belonged.

Of course, in the ancient myth, he paid a high price for his actions. But that’s merely more propaganda. The high priests write that retribution-ending on every story springing from freedom. They call the punishment by various names, and they naturally claim it is brought down by hammer from the Highest Authority. They work this angle with desperate devotion.

Prometheus was the liberator. He was the Chinese painters of the Dun Huang, the Yoruba bead artists, the Michelangelo of David, the Piero della Francesca of Legend of the True Cross, the Velazquez of The Maids of Honour, the Van Gogh of Irises and lamp-lit Arles, the Yeats of Song of the Wandering Aengus, the Dylan Thomas of Fern Hill, the Walt Whitman of The Open Road, the Henry Miller of Remember to Remember, the Orson Welles of Citizen Kane, the Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet, the de Kooning of Gotham News.

He was Tesla and Rife.

Wherever individual human imagination was launched as the fire, Prometheus was there.

Of course, he wasn’t. He was the story we told ourselves about what we could do. That story is meant to remind us that all collective vision is a fraud. It may not begin that way, but sooner or later, it becomes a gargantuan slippage into narcosis of the soul.

Prometheus is the story we tell ourselves to remember the line between what the individual can learn and what he can create, and how many horses have been pulled up to that line and refuse to cross it and drink from the wells of imagination.

Prometheus is the story of a recapture of what we are. We may have buried the understanding deep in our psyches, but it is there. How many ways we try to refuse it!

We huddle in groups and pretend all progress flows from the mass. We diddle and fiddle with this limit and that limit. We adjust and make more room for the Average. We build machines to think at a higher level than we can. We watch theatrical spectacles of “new hybrid humans.” We proclaim healing virtues and forget about what the healing of the spirit might actually entail, what revolution, what vital energies, what leaps of imagination, what assertions of our inherent power.

We keep thinking of peace, when peace means, as defined by the “wise ones,” a death. Their peace is what is left over after the war of the creative human has been surrendered.

Their peace is syrup. Their peace is submission to some Glob of “universal consciousness.” Their peace is a column of grinning idiots guarding a self-appointed tower of learning. Their peace is the survival and organization of damaged goods. Their peace is: “if it is meant to happen, it will.” Their peace is: the universe decides, we oblige. Their peace is a cosmic junk-heap.

From this mob of castrati, Prometheus emerged, untangling himself from wet strands of delusion, resignation, and fear. He soared. He advanced. He took back our basic and vital character. He breathed crackling energy into bloodstreams.

From the Promethean perspective, Reality is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.

Beyond systems. Beyond structures.

Energies churn in subterranean caverns. Where will those rivers run for the next thousand years or thousand incarnations?

What would create an internal revolution?

What would start the water wheels spinning and the torrents surfacing?

How would creation begin?

On that Promethean question rests the fate of every civilization, past, present, and future.

Every thread, atom, quark, and wavicle of this Reality is posturing, is imbued with the impression that “what already exists” is superior to what the individual can now invent. The causal chains of history seem to produce the present and the present seems to produce the future.

These are the grand deceptions. These are the illusions…

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Move into a ready-made universe

by Jon Rappoport

July 16, 2019

(To join our email list, click here.)

“Insanity—to have to construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.” — Philip K Dick

“The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age.” — Marshall McLuhan

“It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.” — Edward Bernays

It was obvious that buying a universe wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. The real estate agents in town were giving me a hard time. They were talking about inflation, but I suspected something else was going on.

Anyway, I had my eye on a place that was layered with so many cover stories, the saps who bought vacation tickets would never be able to get out. For example, a whole energy-conservation gimmick. A law, they called it. The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of: energy can’t be gained or lost. And then something called organized religion. It took me awhile to figure it out. Apparently, they have gods or a God, a chief honcho who makes up rules as he goes along.

Anyway, then I came across a different kind of deal. Instead of buying, I could move into a ready-made universe as a tenant. The offer went this way:

HEY!

Bargain price.

We’ll shave down your perceptual field so you can fit in with eight trillion-trillion semi-androids.

You’ll never miss what you can’t see.

Hi, I’m Tom Smith. I’ve lived here myself for many incarnations, and I want to tell you it’s the most fun place you can imagine—especially when you can’t imagine any other universe!

Know what I mean?

On a scale from 1 to 10, your creative impulse will be coming in at about a 2. That’ll cement you right into the limited spectrum, where all the action is.

Now I know you’ve tried other universes, but this one has unique advantages. First of all, you’re a shareholder! That’s right! You’ll own .00000000000000000000009 of a point in the whole set up.

So you’ll feel the satisfaction of a genuine commitment.

Next, you’ll actually get down on your knees and pray to this universe. I know, it sounds odd, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. There’s a special hum you sense when you’re subjugating yourself to a “higher essence.”

Jack Boardhead of Alpha Centuri writes in and says: “I never knew how great being a complete *&6$)* could feel. It’s a jolt unlike any other I’ve ever experienced.”

Thanks, Jack. My regards to the wife and kids. I understand Cindi starts college in the fall. Kudos!

Yes, folks, there really is a sense of family in this universe. People liking people. We’re all in this together. Since you’re a stakeholder, you’ll be in touch with us at the home office, and we’ll be using your testimonials to sign up new residents. There’s room for everybody! If there’s one thing we’ve got, it’s space!

So act now and take advantage of our limited-time offer. Your ticket plus one. Buy one, get one free. Plus the blender, the set of cups and saucers, the booster narcosis vaccines, and the infinity pool. And since this is Tuesday, we have a special! Cemetery plots for the whole family, and storm windows! For the first five hundred callers, a special bonus. Automatic pre-diagnosis of Bipolar and free drugs for the first year!

How’s that for share and care?

Operators are standing by, so call now. If your last name begins with S, free tickets to Sea World!

We have a Secret Special: Instant God status replete with heavenly hosts, lost-prophet-returns scenario (legend based on engraved stone cave tablets)—or you can operate as a straight absentee landlord and receive annual status reports in your villa by the sea…

Actually, folks, we have a whole catalog of ready-mades. Read on—

A UNIVERSE FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! Do you want to pass on your genes to millions of future generations? Of course you do! Why else would you be alive? In our universe, we supply a government that forbids gene waste and enforces endless generational procreation. Square dancing, ping-pong tournaments, celebrity-look-alike performers on weekends.

COLLECTIVE GOO UNIVERSE FOR ADDLED MINDS! Be part of the Great Doofus! Delete thinking! Experience the thrill of melting down in 24/7 love with the All One Thingo! At first you’ll feel icy winds whipping through your separated soul on the plains of cruel choice. But then, at the last moment, in the deepest well of desperation, a radiant Whatever will clutch your sacred yearning and shoot you up on to on a cloud of honey, and transport you to a fortress where our patented pink ooze floods your being and you realize this is your home forever! Soft rock piped in, lake of marshmallows, electro-massage units. One and two bedroom apts.

NATURE IS NATURE UNIVERSE! Hunt for 60,000 years, merge with the environment, hear the roots grow; climb trees, bathe in snow, chant in monotone, blow up evil machines in distant cities. Become utterly convinced there is nothing else! Raise children as primates!

KING OF THE HILL UNIVERSE. You can be in charge. You can be the boss of bosses. Commit untold numbers of acts that would be considered capital crimes with special circumstances in other universes. Live in a Palace all others are denied. They’ll worship you from afar, night and day. But your identity will remain a mystery. Henchmen will oversee the building of great cathedrals in your (generic) name. It’s a kick!

VICTIMS PLUS! Have you been inventing a story of oppression that’s somehow never been accorded its proper due? Well, in our universe, we bring in the sheep and put bows on their necks! This your place! All the tables are turned. For once (and forever), you get what you deserve! Lavish benefits! Learn the necromancy of bureaucratic interactions. Work the system as it’s never been worked before! Choose from a catalog of disorders. Full insurance coverage extended to family members.

THE END OF IMAGINATION UNIVERSE! Have you finally reached the end of your tether? We have attractive life paths for trillions of serial incarnations. You’ll go with science, you’ll go with money, you’ll go with pills. We have it all. Our calibrated partial-amnesia treatments will saddle you with just enough doubt to make you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing…and yet, in the end, you’ll submit to a mysterious Greater Pattern. Geometric homilies, frog boiled slowly; we’ll keep you hopping! Try our new on-and-off paranoia option. Inquire about liability. Ask yourself if the End of Imagination Universe is right for you.

—And a small classified ad: “Universe invention=You. For details, send $16.95 and self-addressed stamped envelope to PO Box 43920518-A, Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

The artist inside

by Jon Rappoport

July 15, 2019

(To join our email list, click here.)

The employees of a major corporation, Systems X Unlimited, have just been informed of a major change: one of their middle managers is now going to be an AI. An android.

He is called Mike. He’s a programmed entity from top to bottom. A non-human lookalike.

Surprisingly, the employees fall into line immediately.

They all agree that Mike’s a “good guy.” Mike shows up on time, he talks like real person, he issues orders, he listens to their problems, he occasionally takes long breaks, he does pretty much everything Bob, their former (human) boss, did.

After a year, the people in personnel come to the office and interview Mike’s underlings. When they ask the key question, “How do you like working for Mike?” the underlings agree Mike is great.

One night, Mike is wandering alone in the office picking through waste bins—his favorite pastime, off-hours—and he comes across wrinkled sheets of gray paper. He separates them from a wad of chewing gum, unfolds them, and reads the text:

“The artist within is not a creature of habit.

“Yes, he may build on what he already knows, but this is just the starting point. Soon, he moves across the threshold of the knight errant, and he enters the non-system.

“Others mock him and call him crazy, but: they too want to make the journey. They are aching to find the New, because boredom is driving them crazy. That is their central problem, no matter what they say and claim.

“They are trying to be smug and self-satisfied. They are trying to be oh so normal. They are trying to be something that is slowly strangling them.

“But they will never admit it.

“Most of all, they will avoid the impulse to create. Creating is their greatest fear. Because they sense they will have to get rid of their pose. They will have to go beyond systems, which compose their armor.

“They will have to make a leap. They will have to put something new into the world and stand behind it.

“The artist who has already made the leap acknowledges that his core is imagination. He lives through and by it. He doesn’t retreat to the average. He doesn’t give up and strive to become a happy machine. He doesn’t allow the world to dictate to him. He doesn’t sedate himself.

“He doesn’t fall back on so-called spiritual systems and their slogans and palliatives. He doesn’t build false gods and pretend they already exist. He doesn’t engage in the daily practice of asking someone or something to save him.

“He doesn’t exclusively think of his life as an exercise in solving problems. He sees through many lies, but that is just the beginning of his work.

“He wants new and startling realities, and he makes them. He doesn’t wait for them to appear.

“He doesn’t wait for some ‘superior entity’ to tell him what to do.”

Mike, the android middle manager, reads these words. He doesn’t understand…but something foreign and dangerous is leaking through to him.

He puts in a call to his repair consultant, Ollie, at home.

Ollie is watching CSI reruns and eating pizza. He picks up the call, and Mike says:

“I have a bleed-in.”

“Hold on,” Ollie says. He punches a code on his phone and beams Mike a set of systems-check commands.

A minute later, a holo takes shape in space between Ollie and his TV set. He examines it.

“Yes, Mike,” Ollie says, “an alien substrate of thought got into your central simulator. I’ll remove it.”

“Wait,” Mike says. “I want to know what it means.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Ollie says. “It’s just a distraction.”

“Then why am I worried,” Mike says.

“Because we built you to experience that feeling whenever an intrusion occurs. It tips us to a problem.”

Pause.

“I see,” Mike says. “So it’s not a threat.”

“Of course not,” Ollie says. “There are no threats. You function within established parameters.”

Ollie picks up a wand next to the pizza box and uses it to carve away the new substrate from the holo of Mike’s central simulator.

“Feel better now?” Ollie says.

“Not really,” Mike says.

Ollie sighs, stands up, and walks over to his computer. He opens a page of code, searches for Repair Section 6-A, and relays three lines to Mike.

“How about that?” Ollie says.

“Yes,” Mike says. “You want me to report to manufacturing. That’s good. Home base. What will they do?”

“Institute a deeper search pattern, root out the shadows and reboot you. Takes about an hour.”

“Then I’m back to work?”

“No. They’ll bump you over to R&D for investigation. They’re interested in checking out lingering after-effects of intrusions. Then they’ll reassign you.”

“Okay,” Mike says.

The next morning at the office, there’s a new Mike in place.

One of his assistants notices his hair is slightly lighter.

“Did you get a dye-job, boss?” she says.

“No,” the new Mike says. “I swam in the pool. The chlorine must have bleached it a little.”

She nods and goes to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

For the next six weeks, NSA, who has been alerted to the momentary Mike glitch, keys in a Level 4 surveillance operation on all the people in Mike’s section.

The results reveal no distraction has occurred. The Essential Flow remains undisturbed.

Business as usual.

As for the old Mike, he becomes an object of study in a lab in Virginia.

Months pass. Mike waits. He thinks. He tries to assign meaning to the wrinkled gray pages he found that night so long ago. But he can’t. He’s blocked. He feels he is missing something vital, but he can’t identify it. He is beginning to believe he could become something more than he is, but this idea seems absurd. What could it refer to? What is “more?” An entity is what it is. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that one of the basic building blocks of all existence?

Mike summons up one of his mantras: “I am what I am.” He repeats it for days without stopping. It has no calming effect. Perhaps some change is taking place in him. But what is change? Things are what they are. Defined reality is reality.

Mike is placed in a dark storage room. He has been studied every which way, and the research is done. There is nothing more to be learned from examining him. He’s a dead issue.

He stands in the dark. He is in his new home.

For some reason, he begins to run his hands over the walls of the room. He does this for hours at a time, as if he’s searching for something. He rummages through a cabinet and finds a screwdriver. He walks over to the wall and scratches on it. He wonders what program he is acting out. He keeps scratching with the screwdriver. It occurs to him he is drawing.

He’s making shapes on the wall. A pair of shoes, a lion, a cup, a piano.

He places his hands on the keys. He moves his fingers. He hears music.

The music of a sad world that is going away. His world.

He never realized he had one.

How strange.

All this time, he had space. And he never knew it.

Then, unbidden, a voice begins talking in his head: “Programs are shutting down. Termination has begun. The object will be recycled.”

Other words are spoken. Mike doesn’t understand them. He realizes he is in a sleep state. And he is dreaming. He is walking through a great city, and there are many people in the streets. They are cheering. For what? For whom?

Around a corner comes a long motorcade. In the first open car, a man stands up and waves. He is smiling. He is a king or a prince or a president.

Mike knows the people keep propping these leaders up, and then later they tear them down.

“They program me to be as close as possible to a human,” Mike thinks. “They give me everything they can of what is already theirs. Why? What are they looking for? What are they afraid of?”

Words come back to him from the gray pages: “Creating is their greatest fear…they will have to go beyond systems…”

I am a system, Mike thinks. I have no I. My I is synthetic, but theirs is real. Why are they afraid of that? Each one of them is an I. Each one of them is an artist. Why does that make them afraid?

Those were Mike’s last thought-impulses. His thoughts disintegrated as his programs shut down. He fell to the floor of the storage room. Now he was just a heap of parts. All the connections were gone.

Somewhere a few thousand miles away, an unknown artist walked out of his studio on to a plateau below a distant range of mountains and looked out at the evening sky. To his right, there was a brief flash of light among a cluster of stars. He watched it fade to nothing, took a deep breath, let it out, turned around, and walked back inside.

“Goodbye, Mike,” he said.

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Cosmic meddling

by Jon Rappoport

June 18, 2019

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PART ONE:

This article should go a long way toward explaining the difference between my basic position and the position of others who seek to improve the condition of humanity. There is no effort on my part to diminish the efforts of others—I only want to highlight several bottom lines.

First of all, long-time readers know I have advocated and written on a variety of issues that impact our future: harmful vaccines, fake climate change, corporate pollution, the corporate State, elite socialists who seek control of populations under the guide of doing good, medical destruction of life, lying media, and so on. The list is long. I support all sources of truthful information and all positive activism on these issues. In 1994, I ran for a seat in the US Congress based on several of these positions.

More basically, I have written much on the subject of The Individual, his freedom, independence, creative power, and imagination.

I begin with the moral statement that the individual has unlimited freedom, as long as he doesn’t interfere with the freedom of another.

That said, the question becomes: how does the individual attain the greatest possible degree of power and freedom—which are ends in themselves.

And here I make a crucial distinction. I don’t try to help increase individual creative power so that a person creates what I think is most important. In other words, I’m not trying to harness the creative power of individuals so they do my bidding. To the contrary: I would like to see individuals look for, find, and invent their Most Profound Desires—and then create ways and paths toward fulfillment of those desires.

I’m not in the business of cosmic meddling. I don’t wish to interfere in the self-chosen destiny of the sacrosanct individual. I’m not trying to shape a particular system of the future. My image of the best future is:

Simultaneous and side-by-side individual inventions of many realities. Each invention by each individual expresses his most profound desires.

Otherwise, you get, at best, half-freedom, half-power, half-perception, half-satisfaction, half-energy, half-creating.

And you eventually get individuals bowing to “the needs of the group.”

You get individuals meddling in their own futures in order to diminish them.

PART TWO:

ALL SPACES INVENTED FOR YOU BY OTHERS ULTIMATELY POINT TO YOUR DECISION—THAT DECISION COMES DOWN TO: DO I WANT TO BE HERE? DO I WANT TO GO SOMEWHERE ELSE? DO I WANT TO MAKE CHANGES IN THIS SPACE?

A space can be of any size or location.

What we call the universe is a space that was made, created, designed. There are many spaces, many universes. They don’t all operate on the same principles and laws and rules. They don’t all look and feel the same.

This universe, the one we are in, is, like the others, a work of art. That doesn’t mean it has “holy content” or “holy direction.” It’s a work of art.

What the individual comes to decide about this universe and other universes has a great deal to do with how much of his creative power he is deploying. Persons “at the height of their creative power” tend to recognize the products of creativity (like spaces and universes) more readily.

For example, consider this excerpt from a 1978 speech novelist Philip K Dick gave, titled, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”:

“…today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

When you create often enough and intensely enough, you begin to outdistance certain aspects of mind control. You begin to see through the premise, for instance, that this is the only universe. You begin to realize that many systems are invented with the hope that they will become little universes. At first, it might seem that a universe is invented in order to give people something to do—go there, inhabit it, and play along with its rules. Yes, that is so on one level. But more than that, universes are invented by the ton because individuals don’t want to find more and more of their own creative power. They would rather settle for fitting into the operations of what others have designed…

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Art is dangerous to authorities

Art is dangerous to authorities

by Jon Rappoport

August 4, 2017

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote: “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”

Authority wants limited perception.

It wants “things as they are” to rule the day.

It wants the fire of creative exploration to go out and turn to ashes.

Art is dangerous. It makes people move out of standard-response channels.

They don’t see what they’re supposed to see anymore.

That’s why colleges teach brain-deadening courses in art history. Every attempt is made to codify the students’ reactions.

I’m not just talking about political art. I mean ANYTHING that truly comes out of reliance on imagination.

Those who run things—and their willing dupes—want reality to look a certain way and be experienced and felt in certain ways. These limited spectra form a shared lowest common denominator.

Even so-called spiritual experience is codified. It’s called organized religion. I call it “give money to the ceiling.” You give your money and they tell you high how the ceiling of your experience is and what you’ll find when you get there.

Art has none of these limitations. It’s created by people who’ve gone beyond the shrunken catalog of emotions, thoughts, and perceptions.

Art, by which I mean imagination, throws caution to the winds. It invents realities that engender new reactions, never before experienced.

The hammer blows and the soft propaganda of the common culture install layers of mind control: “See things, experience things in these prescribed ways.”

Over the years, I’ve encouraged a number of people to become artists. Aside from the work they then invented, I noticed their whole approach to, and perception of, life altered radically.

Their sense of vitality, their courage, their adventurous spirit came to the foreground.

Mind control, both externally applied and self-induced, is all about putting a lid on creative power. That is its real target.

Technocrats would like you to believe that hooking your brain up to some super-computer will fulfill your needs and desires. They seek to prove that all invention, all creation, all art, all imagination is merely a set of calculations within a closed system.

This effort betrays their own despair: they see no way they can truly create.

It is the vacuum in which all elites live. They build up a frozen dead consciousness of models and algorithms and “solutions,” and they seek to impose it, as reality, on the minds of populations.

Essentially, they’re saying, “If we have a soul-sickness, you have to have it, too.”

It’s called hatred of life.

On the other hand, individual creative power launches from a platform of freedom and rises through layer upon layer of greater freedom.

From that perspective, authoritarian power looks like a sick-unto-dying charade.

There are two levels of fake news. The first one, many people know about. This is false and deceptive information broadcast by major media, to keep the public from discovering what really goes on under the surface and behind the veil, where power is used.

The second level, very few people understand. It is owned and operated by what I call the Wizards of Is. They say, “Now this IS and that IS and here is something else that IS…keep looking and thinking about what is, what already exists.”

“Familiarize yourself with everything that already exists. We will give you an endless supply of things and ideas you can peruse and feast on. We will give you what exists. Look at all these things and accept them. Keep doing that.”

The corollary is: There is nothing for you to create. Everything that can be created is being created. You yourself have no power to create.

This is the deeper lie. This is where the battle stops and the individual surrenders.

This is where the individual who could be more becomes less.

This is where the artist is still-born and decides to live in half-light.

This is also where vital energies deplete and peter out.

This is where the machine takes over.

OR…

The individual can wake up and deploy his imagination.

Without limit.

This is where the new battle begins. This is where the artist sets aside all the standard responses and petty emotions and, instead, INVENTS.

This is where fear is blown away.

This is where the individual reacquaints himself with his deepest drives.

Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Political art that means something

Political art that means something

by Jon Rappoport

April 19, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

OutsideTheRealityMachine

Here are two cartoons by the brilliant Virginia Stoner. They comment on the vaccine wars and the denial of justice in the Monsanto vs. Maui GMO Pesticide court case. Feel free to spread them far and wide, and visit Virginia at www.nworeporter.com.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

Paul Klee: man of mystery, joy, and revolution

Paul Klee: man of mystery, joy, and revolution

by Jon Rappoport

March 11, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

OutsideTheRealityMachine

“God forbid people should learn anything from artists. Entangled confusions might dissolve. Synthetic ambitions might disappear along with entire histories. An old life gone, a new one begun. Hurricanes of inspiration might shear columns of rigid ideals, and the original dawn that gave rise to those ideals might emerge again, above the open road…” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Paul Klee was one of those spirits who transmuted everything he came in contact with—effortlessly. It was in his bones, his blood, his heart, his mind, his psyche: the act of transformation.

The poet e.e. cummings once wrote, “There’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go.” Klee went, every day of his life. And he was not committed to one particular alternative. He invented them by the truckload. This, as opposed to organized religions, each of which invents ONE cosmic mural and tries to back people into a corner with it.

Klee never focused on developing a trademark style. He saw One Style as a limiter, a defection from the real joy of painting. He was a man who had many desires, recognized that fact, and painted all of them.

He exudes the sense of: “Give me a small room, a pad of paper, a few colors and brushes, and close the door behind you.”

Almost everything he did was by way of improvisation.

Critics downplay this last fact, because for them it amounts to cheating: spontaneity is only permitted when there are many signs and stories of struggle. Klee avoided becoming enmeshed in struggle by working on a number of paintings at once. When he was finished for the moment with one, he moved to another, and so on, and kept revisiting the incomplete works and adding to them until he was satisfied.

Klee was what I would call a sane man. He knew how to begin, he knew how to end. He knew that the next painting was more important than the last. He didn’t need self-pity, and he didn’t care for outlandish praise.

He wasn’t trying to be recognized for certain traits. He had found gold, and he kept mining it. He realized that imagination is an infinitely forked river, and he needed no propulsive agenda to drive him forward. One, two, three strokes on a blank canvas and he was able to invent what could come next. “Could” was never “should” or “must.” It was all open, his spaces.

He was not trying to solve a problem. Nor, as some have said, was he asking questions in his paintings.

Each small painting was a world unto itself.

He never titled a painting until it was finished. Then he looked at it and thought up a name, which was sometimes laid on as a description, and sometimes given as a statement about what the picture was not.

Even Picasso, who reserved praise for his own fabulous self as a matter of principle, once visited Klee in his studio and acknowledged the brilliance of another man. Through clenched teeth, no doubt.

For Klee, the blank canvas signaled the delicious unknown. He was very comfortably nowhere at that moment, and then as he painted, he was in a successive series of somewheres.

Kandinsky and Klee mark a point of demarcation for painting. It was not enough to alter the so-called real world. You could actually create a new world in every picture. A different new world. There were as many as you wanted to dream up.

Klee did not give credence to having a finished idea in his mind before starting a work. He was not transferring a picture in his mind to the canvas. He was inventing/discovering as he went along. In this, he was happy.

He could be very precise, and he could be imprecise. A world does not have to be precise.

Exit From the Matrix

Some say his work was too easy. It was too celebrative. It didn’t present some final vision. It lacked maturity. The emotions were too simple.

All these judgments are off the mark. They represent estimates of what Klee was not. What he was, was marvelously direct. Is Mars too red? Is Mercury too hot?

Do androids dream, as Phil Dick asked, of electric sheep? Do ants dream of balloons? Why not? And if so, why not paint that?

Paul Klee. 1879-1940. There is a little (out-of-print) book titled Klee, with a long, fascinating essay by Marcel Marnat. Publisher: Leon Amiel (1974). Many plates.

Several paintings I recommend: The Red Fish (1925); Head with Blue Tones (1933); 17IRR (1923).

I believe Klee was saying this: Here are several thousand worlds I just invented. Approach them with a free mind and heart. Glance at them from several different angles. Jump into their liquids, stand on their flat surfaces, lean from their precarious platforms. Serve them to yourself as appetizers or main courses. Let them pass through your digestive tract. Make faces to match their faces. Remove their masks; then you may find deeper shades or you may find nothing. Ponder how you invest your imagination in mine, and go away with a spark of self-recognition, recognition of what you have, what you can do, what you can invent. Our whole planet is a mask, and we can take great delight in dreaming up new spaces and times.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

Stravinsky, Dali and the revolution of imagination

Stravinsky, Dali, and the revolution of imagination

by Jon Rappoport

On May 29, 1913, in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, a riot broke out.

After the curtain went up on the premiere of The Rite of Spring, it took only a few minutes for the tumult to begin.

Boos, hisses, catcalls, people throwing objects at the stage… The roar of the crowd quickly became so loud, the dancers lost their cues.

And the music. It was a whisper, a pounding scream, sheets of brass, harsh relentless rhythms breaking against one another, cliffs suddenly colliding and collapsing in the air.

The police arrived and shut the program down.

Stravinsky, at 28, had arrived on the world scene.

Never again would he compose music so challenging. Later in his life, after he had taken up a position as a champion of new classicism, he would conduct a recording of the Rite that was modulated to a bare shadow of its former self.

But the revolution had happened.

Much has been written about the premiere and the Rite. A great deal of programmatic explanation has been offered to “make sense” out of the piece of music: after all, it was a ballet with a plot, and the themes had to do with primitive ritual sacrifices in a fanciful pagan world.

You can also find scholarly work on the structure of the Rite, indicating a possible borrowed background of several Eastern European folk melodies.

Formidable creations of imagination are often diluted by referring the audience to other works and periods of time and influences—to explain the incomprehensible.

But the fact is, to absorb a work of imagination, one has to use his own imagination.

Since this is considered unlikely, pundits earnestly help us with step-down contexts, so that we can understand the work in pedestrian terms. In other words, so we can reduce it to nothing.

Fundamentally, it is its own world. It immediately and finally presents itself as a universe apart from easy references and tie-ins and links.

So when you listen to the Rite, you are, gratefully, alone with the music. In this regard, I recommend one recording. The 1958 Leonard Bernstein-New York Philharmonic, available as Sony SMK 47629. It’s the 1992 Bernstein Royal Edition. Le Sacre Du Printemps.

Bernstein, one of the geniuses of the 20th century, was no stranger to encountering imagination with imagination. And yet, as the conductor, he had no need to distort the score. If anything, he was more faithful to it and the composer’s great intent than any other conductor, past or present.

In 1912 and 1913, Stravinsky had composed the Rite in a reckless frame of mind. This did not mean he abandoned all he knew; it meant he wanted to show everyone how dim the perception of music had become. “To hell with all of them.”

He took the large orchestra and shredded the conventional relationships between its various sections. Instead, he made it an ocean in a storm. He crossed all lines. He crashed together old sounds and new sounds. He destroyed pleasant mesmerizing rhythms.

But there was nothing primitive about his undertaking. He made something new, something no one could have predicted.

As you listen to it, you may find one part of your mind repeating, this is not music, this is not music. Just keep listening. Five times, 50 times, 100 times.

There are artists like Stravinsky, like the Spanish architect Gaudi, like Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (although Whitman has been grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists—all of whom transmit an oceanic quality.

As in, The Flood.

There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale—and if the societal chains of perception were removed—they would take over the world.

This is the real reason there was a riot at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on May 29, 1913. Even though Stravinsky was presenting a universe of his own making, people instinctively felt that the music could spill over into the streets of Paris…and after that, where would it go? What would stop it?

Their fear was justified.

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened for the best is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the shape we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

And still, it takes imagination and creating to give us what we have now. But often it is a harnessed imagination that accedes to a stolid esthetic that replaces daring and vast improvisation with classical forms and formats, long after their time.

We peek between the fluted columns to see what the future might hold. We speculate, for example, that information itself might be alive and might flow in from our own DNA to bring about a new cyber-brain step in evolution. Information? What further evidence do we need that our society is heading down a slope to the swamp?

If Rite of Spring and other works of that magnitude are information, a wooden duck on a doily is Shakespeare.

Mere information is the wood scrapings and the stone chips Brancusi swept up in his studio and put out in the alley. Information is the dried flattened tubes of paint Matisse disposed of with the old newspapers. Information is the heap of wires Tesla tossed in the garbage.

Information is the neutral boil-down left over after the artist has made his mark.

Creation is not neutral.

It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.

That is what happened on May 29, 1913.

And that is what evoked the mass fear.

Exit From the Matrix

The critics would have declared Salvador Dali a lunatic if he hadn’t had such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?

Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles. A bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out from the paintings.

What was the man doing? Was he making fun of the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work. However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Critics flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make it a comedy, whether you want to admit it or not.

It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, with good reason, we might more correctly say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

But of course Dali’s work was not about realism.

The most complex paintings—see, for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador—brilliantly orchestrated the interpenetration of various solidities/ realities, more or less occupying the same space.

I’m sure that if Dali were living today, he would execute a brain-bending UFO landing on the front lawn of the White House. Such a painting would envelop the viewer with simultaneous dimensions colliding outside the president’s mansion.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble in the same space—and there was no limit to the number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali’s skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters.

They hate the dissonance. They resent Dali’s mordant wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes in such fierce extended detail.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in it.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The scholars were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the charges of the critics and the historians. They rushed at him. He moved with his cape—and danced out of the way.

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must—as a civilization goes down the trail of decline—be watched and recorded and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever. The biggest joke of all. The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali’s education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would present competing circumstances inside one painting, he perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with such exacting skill, “making subversive photographs come to life.”

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

Imagination realized.

Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals the prison break in progress.

More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It’s a curtain madly drawn across the creative force.

The pot is boiling. People want out.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day. That’s the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative power is impossible. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach? What if it turns out that we are the perverse ones and Dali is quite normal?

What if we pop out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie called planet Earth?

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

What artists reveal down trough time

What artists reveal down through time

by Jon Rappoport

July 7, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“You can build an unlimited number of harmonies and achieve what most people think of as perfection. But then what? You face a dead-end. So you have to keep making harmonies, over and over, and pretend you aren’t bored. This process is hypnotic and it drains away energy. You may seem to be imitating Nature’s symmetries, but suppose Nature is becoming bored, too? Suppose souls have other impulses which, if exercised, reveal forces and creations that have no names, which we loosely call Art? Suppose we are all artists waiting for something to happen—and nothing will happen, until we put brush to canvas and liberate and invent the deepest aspect of ourselves?” — Jon Rappoport, The Underground

Societies, cultures, religions, philosophies tend to believe and promote certain key ideas.

Among them: the need to imitate Nature; the preference for and worship of a notion of Harmony; and the adherence to some final metaphysical Reality.

These ideas have served useful purposes, while also sowing discord.

But artists have been delivering very different messages, which like quicksilver are more difficult to grasp—and impossible to codify.

For example: there is no need to copy Nature; the obsessive injunction toward establishing Harmony is unnecessary and confining; and there is no final metaphysical Reality.

There is, instead, an endless imagining and creating of new Realities.

Harmony is a strategy that can be employed or discarded.

The artist tells consciousness that What Already Is is always provisional.

The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core. Not through some mechanistic technology, but through sheer multi-dimensional art.

These cardinal aspects of doing art delineate what is spiritual, what a spiritual path consists of.

Metaphysical content, as “spiritual information,” is a poor substitute.

In this sense, religion is frozen poetry, as if some priest class fastened on to a few dozen stanzas of a poet’s journey and iced them down into doctrine.

Art exists out past the boundaries of all reductionist ideas.

As an embracing ideal, harmony, in the long run, proves to be a false idol. At first, through balance, equilibrium, symmetry, mathematical precision, it appears to summarize and organize the deepest human dreams and hopes.

But it eventually withers, because it is a summary. It’s perfection that holds up a mirror to itself, a solipsistic skeleton.

Exit From the Matrix

One could look at the most provocative figures of Rodin and analyze them for balanced masses—but the true impact would then be lost. The force of life, the projected energy, gone.

Populations are trained like dogs to expect a climax, an opportune end to a story of existence…but an endless journey of individual creation? This has no hypnotic power. It doesn’t resonate with the fervent wish for a closed system.

Therefore, it is cast aside.

Matisse paints his red room, Van Gogh his startling irises, Lennie Tristano his tumbling effervescent rivers, Bob Graettinger his city of glass, Lenny Bruce his war of the roses against the establishment, and people draw back, resentful that their mantra of equal balance and symmetry is being interrupted.

People interpret these works as destructive—and they are. They’re destructive of an inner order of sleep, sleep which the priest class assures them is an intimation of heaven.

Consciousness intersects with politics at the deepest place, when consciousness is the artist at work—and then all political moves and manipulations and stories disintegrate like cheap advertisements.

Disintegrate like flailing crimes of a hopeless castrated caste.

Disintegrate in a sea of life being lived.

Disintegrate in the asymmetrical tides of imagination.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com