Occult Man and his search for his true nature

by Jon Rappoport

July 28, 2017

The word “occult” is frequently associated with some secret society, and it is given a negative twist by pitting it against organized “clean” religion or “totally rational” science.

But the Latin root of the word comes from the verb, “to hide.” That’s all.

Occult Man means man who is hiding something. And it really means man who is hiding something from himself.

What would that be?

Occult man is hiding his true nature from himself.

In order to discover what that true nature is, he would already need to be free from the belief that he owes his time, energy, and life to another person or an idea. He would need to be free from the self-debasing concept of spiritual debt—regardless of how fashionable it might be to incur (or pretend to incur) such a negative balance sheet.

Legion are those who invent these “debt scenarios” for themselves, and they rarely give them up, regardless of the consequences. They prefer to imagine they “win by losing.”

When Occult Man embarks on the journey to find his true nature, he enters a labyrinth. Sooner or later, he needs to realize the maze is composed of all possible answers to his self-inquiry. How to choose one answer above all others? How to discern?

Nevertheless, despite the difficulties, he will choose. He will clutch an answer, he will adopt it, and he will begin to live on that basis. He will say, “This is my true nature,” he will climb into that conveyance and drive it down the road.

After a certain period, he will see its limitations, he will experience first-hand the pressure of those restrictions, and he will look for a more inclusive answer to his inquiry.

As this process of accepting, testing, and rejecting answers continues, he will become aware that each solution to what-is-my-true-nature gives birth to a space that is defined—and his primary role is to fit himself into that space.

In the majority of cases, Occult Man eventually talks himself into accepting a space and learning how to adapt to his position in it. It is as if, all along, he has been asking himself, “What is my place?”

Relatively few people are prepared to admit this is a loaded question. They would rather adhere to one of thousands of “philosophies” which are determined to tell Occult Man what his place is.

According to this sort of guidance, Occult Man is supposed to take pride in finding that place.

For those who can avoid this end, there remains a less-defined path. “Where do I go? What do I do? What am I looking for?”

What about looking within? As interesting as this option may seem, and as rooted in tradition, what results does it confer?

Either Occult Man looks within and sees, disappointingly, spaces populated by random objects and ideas, or he presupposes what he is going to discover, and then discovers it. Needless to say, such sleight of hand isn’t the means for finding his true nature.

What now?

Now we come to the threshold of a shift into another dimension of experience. Regardless of how long the journey has taken so far, now Occult Man begins to examine his very role as the searcher. The seeker. The discoverer.

Is the whole paradigm of questioner-question-answer able to yield up the effect of finding his true nature?

At every turn, it seems as if he’s been looking for some sort of content or material or information that will unlock the door.

All along, he has been searching for some kind of reality that is already there. A deeper reality, a more elevated reality. Concealed, out of view. Hidden.

Which is why he is Occult Man. Because of the way he has been proceeding.

But suppose…there is no such hidden reality which is his true nature. Suppose that is the cosmic joke.

And suppose, instead, he is the maker of realities.

Suppose that is his true nature.

Suppose that is the secret.

Suppose every question about existence he has ever had will yield up answers once he becomes a maker of realities.

Suppose every self-deception and every cynical conclusion about his life he has ever entertained is a cover for: refusing to see he is a maker of realities.

Suppose thinking about projecting realities is far, far different from actually projecting realities that are closest to his deepest desires, and making those realities fact in the world.

(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 29^th 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 free and independent individual

by Jon Rappoport

July 26, 2017

In Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, newspaper columnist, arch manipulator, and promoter of absolute collectivism, Ellsworth Toohey, tells his social-climbing weak-kneed follower, Peter Keating: “If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it—and the man is yours…enshrine mediocrity.”

There is a whole army of experts, whose job is to tell you success only comes with you being part of a group.

They imply your status as an individual is transmitted to you through some diabolical portion of your brain that is loaded with false messages. Therefore, give up. Take the elevator down to the basement, get off, and join The Group. That’s where the love is. That’s where your useless courage dissolves into sugar, and you discover a paradise of the lowest common denominator. You’re home. The sun never rises or sets. Nothing changes. Sameness rules.

Since the 1960s, many people have decided that, in order to create the future they want, they should engage in a certain amount of introspection.

Spiritual or psychological introspection.

I have encountered a large number of such people, who have swung the balance to the point where introspection has become indecision and paralysis.

There are “so many issues to consider.”

Starting in the 1960s, we saw the import of various Eastern philosophies and practices. They arrived here in diluted and distorted forms. They introduced their own versions of “karma” and “balance” and “surrender” and “abdication to the wishes of the universe.”

“If it doesn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be.”

In the end, it amounts to waiting around in a cosmic station for a train that never arrives.

Or in psychological terms, it is: “I have to resolve my past before I can pursue my future.” “How can I know what I want if I’m trapped in past conflicts?”

The effect of all this was to diminish the potential realm of human action. It was a kind of court case where all the priors of the defendant were allowed into evidence and dominated the verdict.

More recently, another limiter came on to the scene. It is expressed this way: “Now I see through fake reality, I see how reality is being manipulated by the powers-that-be, so what can I do? We’re at the mercy of these forces.”

These vectors were and are an intentional operation, whose purpose is to demoralize the individual and cut him off from his own freedom, independence, and power.

Here is the superior principle: even if the individual determines, in a worst-case scenario, that all is hopeless, he should launch the life and future he desires ANYWAY. Despite all the good reasons to give up, he should ignore all of them and launch.

Because if he does that, he soon begins to see his own view change. It’s not the same anymore.

Many, many individuals, since the dawn of time, have thought themselves into smaller and smaller boxes until there was no space left—and then some of those individuals, who were spiritual riverboat gamblers, shoved in all their chips on projecting action into the world anyway…and they revolutionized their destinies.

We can go even deeper. What is the ultimate purpose of thought and reflection and introspection? Is it to arrive at certain conclusions, after which the thinker (the person) serves those conclusions like a slave? Or is thought itself a process through which ideas then serve the individual and his goals?

It is the latter.

The first great philosopher of the West, Plato, followed the first path. Which is to say, he applied his mind to understand the basis of reality, and he came to the conclusion that there were immortal and pure Ideas that existed in a higher realm, and they were unchangeable. Society, therefore, could only triumph if certain wise men, who could apprehend these Ideas directly, ruled over everyone else. Thus, the freedom and independence and power of open inquiry led to totalitarianism. Freedom led to slavery.

Give us your huddled masses yearning to be free. Masses? No. A mass can never be free. And even if a mass can successfully demand freedom, on whom does that outcome then fall? The individual. This is where the buck stops, and no one can change that truth.

There are those who believe a quiet lake is the marvelous end of all existence.

And then a boat comes along, and new ripples begin spreading. A dynamic individual has arrived.

You can be the person looking at the lake, banking on no-action, or you can be in the boat, forwarding your best ideas and visions and dreams, despite all the reasons not to.

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.”

Every individual has the potential to be an artist and maker of reality. He achieves this by walking through the corridors of what he has learned from others, until he emerges into the sun of his own self-generated thoughts.

No one else can tell him what his thoughts are. Those thoughts don’t follow machine patterns. They don’t cling to any system. They don’t wind up in some superficial trash of generalities.

An individual’s mind and imagination aren’t asking for convenient generalities.

The key question, as always, is: what do you want to create?

Answering the question and then acting on it transforms a life.

(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 29^th 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 individual vs. the illusion of consensus reality

by Jon Rappoport

July 21, 2017

This is such a supercharged subject, I could start from a dozen places.

But let’s begin here: the individual is unique, because he is himself. He is unique because he has his own ideas, because he has his own desires, because he has his own power. That power belongs to no one else.

In particular, it doesn’t belong to the State. The State will always try to suggest that it is granting power to the individual, but this is a lie. A lie broadcast with ill-intent.

While everyone else is trying to manufacture connections to the group, under the banner of a false sense of community, the individual is going in the opposite direction.

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

Consensus reality is the reality of sacrifice. It is coagulating energy, form, content, substance that takes on amorphous shapes studded with slots into which people can fit themselves.

The independent individual thinks what he wants to think. Over time, he keeps graduating into new, more nearly unique levels of what he wants to think.

He rises to his own thoughts.

There is no subject and no substance which is not infiltrated by consensus reality. Wherever you look, you will encounter it. The group is the basis of consensus reality, and the group-pact extends everywhere. The group fears a sector where only individual thought can tread.

That would be dangerous to the illusion. “Well, we’ve got things well in hand in most places, but over there and over here we’re not in charge.”

No, that doesn’t work for the group. The exceptions would blow a hole in the rule.

“Stay away from the corner of Lexington Avenue and 34th Street. Something too weird is going on there. We come in and try to inject consensus on that spot and it doesn’t work. Our ‘sharing’ energy bounces off that corner. We may have to call in the troops to surround the place and cordon it off.”

“Group consensus is fraying and fragmenting in Area 768-B! Call the professors and pundits! Discredit the individual! Call him a monster! Do something fast!”

Consensus reality is an illusion in the sense that you can see it and I can see it, but we didn’t sign up for it.

The individual can opt out. That doesn’t necessarily mean the consensus disappears; you can still see it, but you see it without accepting it.

You can see the oasis in the desert and know it is a mirage. You have your own water, you don’t have to run toward the mirage and fall down on your knees and try to drink from the pool.

Philip K. Dick: “Because 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…increasingly, we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated electronic mechanisms…And this is an astounding power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

The strong and free individual evolves. He doesn’t stay the same. He continues to emerge with new ideas, new energy, new invention. He becomes larger. He gains more power.

When the illusion of consensus reality attains a level beyond mere slogan, it enters the realm of systems. This is its most convincing format. A system appears to be watertight. Each one of its parts has relations with the whole.

This is interesting, because that mirrors what a group is. Each member is a part that connects to the whole.

Consensus as a system is like a game of chess that plays the same moves over and over. Game one is the same as game two, three, four…

That’s where its illusion of power comes from.

The individual, though, doesn’t proceed according to systems. He isn’t moving from one closed context to another.

Consensus is the coin of the realm. It is forced from the top, and it is signed up for at the bottom. One hand washes the other.

Societies may begin through consensus, but if they have any courage, they shift focus to the job of pulling away coercive restraints on the individual. Regardless, the individual asserts his freedom. It is his to begin with, not the group’s. No one gives it to him.

Earth’s societies have moved rapidly to an inverse, an upside down structure, in which freedom is looked upon as a privilege grudgingly accorded in the absence of a reason to take it away.

The group has conception of Normal. Normal is like a message passed around, from hand to hand, and when you look at it closely, for content, it dissolves. There was really nothing there.

Group consensus is mindless hive-action covering a vacuum.

Here is what occasionally happens to people who have hidebound political ideologies. The people on the Left move further and further to the Left, and the people on the Right move further and further to the Right. Finally, they are both so distant from the State they meet and stare at each other in shock. At that point, they are just individuals.

“But society runs on groups! It must have groups!”

And what? The individual must give in and join and belong?

Consensus reality is a cartoon that is trying to become as real as steel. What deconstructs the steel and exposes the cartoon? There is only one thing that can do that. Nothing and no one else is going to do that.

The individual does it.

(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 29^th 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.

My conversation with Jeff Rense

by Jon Rappoport

July 19, 2017

Last night, I was a guest on Jeff Rense’s show. We had a wonderful wide-ranging conversation about education, the joys of reading, the decline of civilization, and the long view of the future.

I said: at some point the whole issue of human destiny will revolve around whether individuals accumulate wisdom or keep accepting the cycle of rise and fall of societies—and Jeff came up with an electric phrase—he said, we need a RENAISSANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL.

That need never goes away. We need it now, ten years from now, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now.

I then read him several of the relevant quotes I included in yesterday’s article, from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

So today, I found some notes I made perhaps 20 years ago—a long dialogue between two “unknown persons.” It started as an exercise, a warm-up one day, when I felt I had nothing to write. It evolved along several tracks. Here is an excerpt plucked from that dialogue that touches on a renaissance of the individual soul:

Unknown Person #1: You want this, you want that. You’re pressed for time. You want to be entertained. But suppose you could move from being a mildly concerned spectator…suppose you could create a fictional destiny for yourself and then make it real?

Unknown Person #2: I choose to be detached.

Unknown Person #1: Yes, and that’s my point. You see yourself right now as the final version of what you can be. You draw a line. But that line isn’t really there. It’s an illusion you’re buying. You’re buying it like the most rabid consumer. It’s the ultimate product for you. You guard it night and day, even in your dreams. If you suddenly dream about a majestic future, you close it down. You take that exhilarating destiny spread out like valleys and mountains and skies and you stand over it and pour acid on it. You dissolve it before it gets too real. You deny any connection between that vision and yourself. But there is a connection. Your psyche has no limits.

Unknown Person #2: When I was sixteen, my parents took me to a cathedral for a service. It was a gigantic dark place. During the sermon, I fell asleep. I had a dream about a mountain range. I was walking in that range, and the immediate power of the place…I was free. The feeling was sheer ecstasy. A few days later I decided, if freedom could be THAT, I would do anything to defend it. But then I crushed the dream. I rejected it. No one made me do it. I did it myself.

Unknown Person #1: And you still bury it and crush it.

Unknown Person #2: You want to know how I do that? I say the dream was wonderful. I say it’s “inspiring” even now. I even take pride in reminding myself I had the dream. But then I just let it lie there, like water, like a pool stagnating. That’s how I separate myself from it. I never take that energy and ecstasy as a clue about what I can do in this life.

Unknown Person #1: But you could take it as a clue.

Unknown Person #2: Yes. Instead I opt for nostalgia. I prefer nostalgia. That’s how I look at the dream, that’s how I escape using the dream as knowledge about what I am.

Unknown Person #1: And of course you say everyone has had a dream like that, and everyone has done what you did to it.

Unknown Person #2: I’m part of that “community.” The community has strength in numbers. Why would I desert that family? We all reject the meaning of the dream. I look in their eyes, and I see they left the dream behind, and they see it when they look in my eyes. It makes us happy, in a way, to know we all did the same thing.

Unknown Person #1: It’s never too late.

Unknown Person #2: Three days from now, I’ll forget we had this conversation. It won’t register. I’ll have new complaints, and I won’t make any connection between them and the dream I deserted.

Unknown Person #1: When I look in your eyes, I don’t see that you deserted—

Unknown Person: No, you see the dream. I understand. But now I’m going to walk away, I’m going to walk away, I’m going to walk away…

(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 29^th 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.

Suppose you’re an errant knight on your mission

by Jon Rappoport

July 11, 2017

“The cosmos is a forgery of the individual.” (Visions of the Empire, Jon Rappoport)

If, late at night, or upon rising in the morning, a person can think of nothing that differentiates him from “the way the world thinks,” if he can imagine nothing that distinguishes him from “the culture,” then what does he have?

Well, he has passivity. He can be a spectator. He can be audience.

Or suppose he has a “vision” for his future that comes from somewhere else? It isn’t his. He imported it like a rug or a car or a block of cheese.

A personal vision implies action.

It doesn’t depend on a group.

A personal vision isn’t disconnected from self. It comes from self. It’s dreaming inside deep desire.

A personal vision is a person’s conscious entrance point into the world. It spells out a person’s difference from what “the world is proposing.”

Or…coming at this from a somewhat different angle:

“There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun. This lone word makes them see something majestic and untamed and astonishing. They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching. CREATE is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the smug boredom of the soul. CREATE is about what the individual does when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him. CREATE is about the end of mindless postponement. It’s about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It’s about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.”

Yes, that’s a little better.

Could you handle living as Gulliver in a land of Lilliputians?

Suppose you already are?

Suppose the Lilliputians are Gullivers who have misplaced that core fact?

Suppose the world is a giant repetitive game of tic-tac-toe, and you find yourself looking in from the outside, and you perceive your job is alerting the hypnotized players?

Suppose in the fog of your subconscious, there is a vision and a dream moving toward the surface, at which point, if you choose to pay attention, nothing will ever be the same?

Suppose you’re an errant knight on his mission, and you’re approaching, in a forest, a secret threshold, beyond which you’ll immediately apply all your years of training and discipline, to a series of mysteries also requiring you to respond with an undetermined number of absolutely spontaneous inventions, the potential for which has been waiting in silence inside you for centuries?

Suppose what has been commonly been called reality has been waiting for you to revolutionize it down to its core?

Suppose THESE questions are the actual substance of an education which is about to begin, and is solely in your hands?

Might that exceed a wide-screen movie at the multiplex and a slice of pizza?

(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 29^th 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 world is not you

by Jon Rappoport

July 10, 2017

You meet a person who talks about elites’ war on the population, and this person, you realize, is doing two things: he’s speaking the truth; but he’s also canceling out his own life. It’s strange. It’s as if, in all his truth telling, he’s left a hole, and that hole is himself. The balance is gone. But it’s more than that. The decay and the disintegration of society is his excuse for his own absence. His own absence, even to himself.

You try to imagine what would happen if 100,000 people like him joined together in a great cause, and won. What would they do? It occurs to you that they wouldn’t suddenly reconstitute their own lives. They wouldn’t know how.

They wouldn’t be able to assert the value of the individual. They’d laid that aside and lost it along the way.

Societies and civilizations, if they have vitality, would be dedicated to the freedom and power and independence of the individual—and restoring THAT would be a noble cause.

When, in 1776, the American colonists declared independence, what was it for? What was the central core idea, the very best idea? And later, when the Constitution was written and ratified, what was the bottom line?

Liberation?

If so, for whom would that liberation be confirmed, for whom would it be acknowledged and protected?

Everyone, as a group? Or every individual?

As the decades after 1776 rolled on, and as more and more corruption set in, it became easier to think about the group than about the individual. It became easier for the individual to think about the group, rather than himself—in any profound way.

We are now living in the Time of the Blob. The Great Cheese Melt. Humans are perceived as groups. It’s a cultural imperative. Which group is preferred over which other group? Is the Cheddar Blob better than the Mozzarella Blob? Which side should one fight on?

From 1982-2001, I worked as a freelance reporter. When my articles were published, they appeared under the banner of a media organization. I gave it little thought, except when I couldn’t publish a piece because it was too controversial for the tastes and biases of editors. But once I broke away from that system and started my own site, I quickly realized that I was absolutely doing my own work, and I was the ultimate decision maker. And then I began to coalesce my ideas about The Individual.

Where is he? What are his best dreams?

Why is the culture trying to grind up the life-force of the individual?

Who will stand against THAT?

If so-called liberal institutions of higher learning suddenly dispensed with every shred of propaganda about groups and favored groups, what would they be left with? How many professors would be able to teach even an hour of coherent substance?

When you boil down the collectivist view of existence, it is a massive fraud. Persons pass, from mind to mind, empty ideas about The Group. The absence of these ideas’ true content is not a problem to them, because the sole action of passing and transmitting and “sharing” is the key feature. If that is culture, a donkey is a space ship pilot.

It always seemed to me that a person’s unique character and talent and desire were the foundation of a life. It always seemed to me that surrendering this foundation was a terrible mistake.

In a real culture, whatever can be done, voluntarily, to empower individuals to build and invent on that foundation is the central premise.

In the process of advancing such a culture, the individual would never lose sight of himself and the future he envisions. He would never lose sight of his deepest dreams. How could he? That is what he stands for, for himself and others.

(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 29^th 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.

Shocker: some things are learned for their own sake: not for “application”

by Jon Rappoport

June 21, 2017

At college a few lifetimes ago, one of my earliest experiences was reading Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium. Here is the famous last stanza:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

At the time, in those college years, it was well understood that you learned some things for their own sake. You didn’t even have to agree with the sentiment expressed. You could appreciate the expression.

Certain expressions were aesthetic and spiritual and alive in their own way. Argument on that score was unnecessary.

What about the opening lines of Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill? If they don’t take you off your chair, read them out loud a few times:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
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.

No one asked the student how he was going to use those words of a poem when he was working, years later, for a bank. No one asked him how he was going make the words count when he was fronting for a suit filed by a corporation. No one said he had to postpone appreciating poetry because injustices still existed in the world.

Education can expose students to glorious things they will never apply.

Yet, those things can transform their lives.

As civilization declines, an impression is imparted that there are only crises. Every event is some kind of crisis.

If that were true, what would be left over? What inner life would be possible?

What joy could be experienced for its own sake?

All of this leads me back to a theme I’ve covered from many different angles over the years. Reality, ordinary reality is not the end-all and be-all.

Art, for example, proves that.

The thrill of actual poetry proves that.

Why do I bother saying all this? Because part of what it means to have a civilization is part of what it means to be an individual: there is a profound appreciation of human creations. When that goes by the boards, when education ignores that because “more important issues” must be presented and framed and slanted, for purposes of sheer indoctrination, life-force drains away.

Elevated language taken to poetic heights is not a mere distraction.

Many years ago, when I was working at a community college, I started an informal poetry project. I brought together a small group of foreign students and taped them reading poems in their own languages (Portuguese, ancient Persian, English, etc.). I wanted them to hear the sounds of those poems, apart from their meaning. I wanted them to hear the music(s).

Now we’re talking about real diversity, not the fake imposed version. Now we’re talking about great energies that have been injected into, and fortified in, many languages by individual poets from all times and places.

Now we’re talking about the heights those cultures reached, not the depths to which they sank.

Now we’re talking about an authentic level of understanding reaching across bridges and gaps.

There is something very right about that.

Burned flowers of the field
My noon is over, growing old
Everything I have is finally sold
Sewed designs for men with money
Thinking it was duty
To watch them lead the world to war
From my little field of beauty

I wrote that poem when I was 23. It was published in 1966, in The Massachusetts Review. At the time, I was focused on the break-up of The American Dream. Soon after, I had my moment of insight, when it became clear to me that individuals and their minds and imaginations and choices could exceed the negative reach of any civilization and, at the same time, fertilize that civilization. Reality (things as they are) is not the answer; it is the lowest common denominator, which waits for people to sign declarations of surrender.

Preposterous surrender.

(New piece up on OUTSIDE THE REALITY MACHINE: The James Comey Film Dream: Episodes, voices, montage/collage.)

(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 29^th 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.