Category Archives: Energy & Imagination

The formula of war vs. a pandemic of freedom

The formula of war vs. a pandemic of freedom

Notes on the exit from titanic boredom and failure.

Follow the bouncing ball all the way to the end, which is a beginning

by Jon Rappoport

January 15, 2016

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

Making war makes money. Winning a war makes more money.

The desire to keep making war requires building up and maintaining a standing army.

When many nations are pursuing this general course, the “threat-need” for maintaining a standing army rises to a new level.

The “need, for the sake of defense and preparedness,” to strengthen armies is exactly what war makers exploit.

Dismantling this whole operation, by scaling back foreign military bases, withdrawing troops, and setting boundaries and no-go zones is anathema to war makers.

If JFK, as a few scholars suggest, was planning to get out of Vietnam, and if he was also in the process of planning space missions with Russia, these would have been ample reasons for his assassination.

Everyone has his favorite reason for JFK’s murder—he wanted to take money-creation out of the hands of the Federal Reserve; he was about to blow the whistle on UFO secrets; he was on the verge of destroying the CIA; he signed the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty with Russia; he and his brother were trying to destroy the Mafia; JFK was about to lay taxes on multi-billion-dollar Liberian shipping operations; anti-Castro Cubans hated him because he failed to back the Bay of Pigs invasion; he was determined to push forward an ocean-turbine technology for the generation of electricity. Everyone who has a reason for JFK’s murder is quite sure it is the primary or only reason.

If withdrawal from Vietnam was one reason, it speaks to the “sensitivity” of the war machine and its allied industries.

If international peace broke out, what would happen to the US economy? To be more precise, what would happen to those corporations who depend on the largest government military contracts? To be even more precise, what would happen to these corporations, who depend on government taxes and money invented out of thin air by elite government-backed banks?

Those corporations would imagine new enterprises or crash.

And?

The nation would have to find another way to have an economy. Would this signal, beyond the chaos, the end of the world? No.

Along a similar front, if gangs were wiped out, along with drug cartels, and if the main terrorist groups were isolated, attacked, and defunded (cut off from drug money, diverted government tax money and elite invented money), other sectors of the economy would take a hit, but again, the world would not end.

Along a similar front, if corporations who manufacture and sell poison (e.g., drug companies, pesticide companies) were punished to the full extent of the law, and even disbanded, the economy would take another hit, but again, the world would not end.

Along a similar front, if cheating, lying, and thieving banks and allied Wall St. firms were punished to the full extent of the law, and even disbanded, the world would not end.

What would the new emerging economy look like? That would depend on the imagination, and challenging work, done by individuals (not governments) who see new possibilities. That would depend on people who attempt to wake up a population muddled in passive acceptance of whatever consumer products are shoved down their throats.

Yes, I know all this speculation sounds like dreaming impossible dreams. But while I’m at it, here is another one: what would happen if everything I’ve written so far in this article became the subject of reasoned debate in colleges? I’m talking about serious lengthy debate about a new economy.

Several things would happen. First, it would come to light that the overwhelming number of students are intellectually incapable of carrying on such a dialogue. That in itself would rank as an inconvenient truth.

Students don’t learn how to think in a rational fashion. They know next to nothing about logic. Most of them aren’t even aware of what a line of reasoning looks like. They can’t follow such a line.

Second, it would become obvious that the overwhelming number of students are incapable of conceiving a new economy that is not spearheaded and controlled by government.

Students are brainwashed into thinking that all significant change must come from above. It must be planned. It must be designed to produce some vague outcome called “equality.”

This preference for central government control and planning is sustained even though, with a little thought, it’s clear that government has been the driving (and permissive) criminal force that protects the very economy that is causing all the trouble.

Third, it would become obvious that the faculties of colleges are also intellectually incapable of carrying on this debate. They, too, have been trained to ignore logic. They’ve also been trained to push a values-laden agenda that celebrates centrally planned collectivist economies.

Fourth, the idea that free and independent and creative individuals could spearhead a new economy seems outrageous, preposterous, and even illegal to the mass of students and professors. For them, all non-group-associated individuals, viewed in any light, are, a priori, greedy criminals.

So actually, this article isn’t about creating a new economy. It’s about the barriers to a rational, extensive, lengthy dialogue and debate about the creation of a new economy. A dialogue, by the way, that goes beyond what might be contained in cell phone texting or tweeting. How shocking.

Here is just one idea that might spring up in the kind of dialogue I’m talking about. Urban farms. They already exist, of course. In each case, they began as an idea in the mind of one individual. They didn’t spring to life, originally, when six people, walking down the street, suddenly turned to each other and said, “Urban farms.”

These are very large operations that grow food crops for residents of cities, especially those who can’t afford good food. The people themselves learn to grow the crops.

What would happen, what would be the consequence of, say, 10,000 urban farms across America? What would this do for the health and morale of people in cities? How would profit be made? And, peripherally, why is it that local, state, and federal government haven’t backed such an idea—for an infinitesimal fraction of the money they spend on alleviating poverty; money that, by the way, seems to make things worse.

Again, peripherally, what would happen if thousands of college students, who matriculate on privileged campuses and yap endlessly about their lack of privilege, instead turned their victimhood-energies to starting urban farms and working in them? Would the world end? Would the sky fall? The same questions could be asked about the students’ professors, many of whom are merely paid propagandists of the State.

There are all sorts of interesting questions that could arise in a real debate/dialogue. Here’s another one: what would a world without Monsanto or Merck actually look like? Or: what would America look like with an army dedicated only to defense of the nation?

Such a dialogue could lead to action. Many separate actions. What a thought. Would the world end? Would the sky fall?

You want more? Pay particular and close attention to this one. What would happen, if one state in the union decided that anyone could offer health advice and non-harmful, non-toxic treatment to another person, for any ailment or illness, without control from above, without the need for government licensing? Suppose this arrangement, between consenting adults, was done by contract, not license? Suppose both parties asserted that no liability or blame would be attached to the outcome of such advice or treatment? In other words, God forbid, the citizens would actually take responsibility for themselves. Do you think many citizens and practitioners might flock to such a state? Do you think an economic bonanza might explode in that state? Do you think the outbreak of freedom might raise the morale in that area? Do you think improved health might result? Do you think other states might follow suit, merely by removing, at no cost, their grotesque rules and licensing/enforcement bureaus? Would you be afraid of such an arrangement, understanding the fact that current orthodox medicine, as licensed and practiced throughout the land, results in widespread pharmaceutical devastation? Shown a projection of the foreseeable economic bonanza from the new arrangement I just outlined, do you think there is at least one state in the US that might throw irrational caution to the winds and enact this program of health freedom?

In the kind of extended dialogue I’m talking about here, individuals come up with lots of interesting ideas—ideas that could very well lead to action. And in the process, the nightmare zombie cloud of government control and meddling takes major hits. All its operations aimed at interfering with freedom are exposed. The crud washes off. The unconscionable dreck drains away.

People start actually thinking again. They start imagining again. They feel their chains slipping away. They come out of the collective dream. They experience cascades of new energy. They think about entrepreneurship in a new way. They think about morality and ethics in a new way. They re-find themselves.

Does the sky fall? Does the world end?

No. It begins.

Perhaps (miracle of miracles) the quantity of self-invented victims begins to diminish. Perhaps untold numbers of people floating along in a New Age daze (because they see no way out of the dilemmas and conflicts of our time) rise up from their plastic lotus pads, sensing a genuine impulse of hope and desire for the first time in many years. Their own hope. Their own desire. Perhaps millions of people trapped in dead-end robotic work feel a creak in the psychological and spiritual machinery that surrounds them, as it begins to malfunction and split apart. Perhaps moon-blown, full-bore, doctrinal collectivist freaks feel a few pin pricks in the purple bloated corpse of their one-size-fits-all planetary vision.

Who knows what might happen if a true ongoing dialogue about a new economy persisted long enough?

If a person is dead inside and doesn’t want to be dead inside, he has to ask himself (paraphrasing Clint Eastwood) this question: Did he fire six shots into his psyche or only five? If only five, can he fire that last bullet into the passive trance that keeps him in thrall to Control Central?

Waking up may be hard to do, but it’s also contagious. If a college dared to offer a four-year course which consisted entirely of the dialogue/debate I’m proposing, carried out along respectful lines, omitting and barring the screaming opponents of free speech, who knows what might happen?

As William Blake wrote, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” As the dialogue proceeds, all sorts of foolish ideas would come to light and unravel, and turn into other ideas, and those ideas would transmute into useful ideas, out of which would be born a few brilliant ideas…and on it would go.

And the process itself would act as a catalyst for every person within listening range. His own imagination would rev up. He would discover his own future path.

Would that be a calamity? Would the sky fall? Would the world end?

Or would the dawn finally break?

exit from the matrix

It’s instructive to read what authors wrote about core values a hundred or two hundred years ago, because then you can appreciate what has happened to the culture of a nation. You can grasp the enormous influence of planned propaganda, which changes minds, builds new consensus, and exiles certain disruptive thinkers to the margins of society. You can see what has been painted over, with great intent, in order to promote tyranny that proclaims a greater good for all.

Here are several statements about the individual, written in 19th century America. The authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper were prominent figures. Emerson, in his time, was the most famous.

“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.” — James Fenimore Cooper

“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of [by] formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” — Henry David Thoreau

“They [conformists] think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members….Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist…. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you imagine, today, any of these statements gaining traction in the public mind, much less the mainstream media?

In the public mind? Yes, I can.

The world, as it is presented to us, is a shrunken mural in which the individual must carve down his energies, in order to fit in. If he reverses that process, he finds a new world that didn’t seem to be there before.

But now it is.

It most definitely is.

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 creative fire of Australia: forgotten films

The creative fire of Australia: forgotten films

How I fell in love with Australia

by Jon Rappoport

January 13, 2016

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

Hightide (1987): “Story about a backup singer for an Elvis impersonator who re-enters her past when she leaves a tour in a small town and finds her daughter in a mobile home park.” (IMDb)

“Movies are made from the outside in, the inside out, every which way. But then you have the actor. If all of a sudden he gives you something so startling and illuminating it throws the whole movie out the window, ideally the director has to find a new movie in the old one.” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

“The Hollywood culture has developed its own subconscious ideas about what emotion is and what it isn’t. Some emotions are permitted to exist; others aren’t. Audiences don’t realize this kind of exclusion, for obvious reasons. They don’t see the censored outpouring of feeling; it isn’t on the screen.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Yes, we have fine Australian actors like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman, and the unstoppable Russell Crowe of LA Confidential.

But for my money, put Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush down anywhere, in a café, on the street, turn on a camera and just let them talk and walk and move in and out of pretending they’re other people for six or seven hours; and I’m there. They’re Australian immortals. And perhaps the two greatest film actors in the world.

Judy Davis was hatched in a different galaxy, the Australia of the 1980s, when filmmakers were young and free and precocious, and knew in their bones, with no shame or embarrassment, what life-force was.

In the early 1960s, I haunted the Thalia Theater in New York, and watched dozens of foreign films. I was struck by actors who revealed what were, to me, alien (non-American) “energies.” Gunnar Bjornstrand in The Seventh Seal. Monica Vitti in L’Avventura. Alastair Sim in The Green Man.

Years later, while living in Los Angeles, I experienced the same strange phenomenon, while watching three Australian films: Winter of Our Dreams (1981); Heatwave (1982); and Hightide (1987).

Judy Davis starred in all of them. See them yourself. She comes alive in a way that American actors rarely achieve—if they even grasp the possibility of her raw emotional recklessness (that somehow reaches blowtorch focus). It occurred to me there had to be something Australian about her performances…some kind of power Australians could recognize as their own (during a period before the country would turn into a caricature of itself).

Particularly in Hightide, as she comes upon her long-abandoned daughter in a bleak coastal town and struggles with that shock, Davis takes you into feelings, if you’re an American, that seem to be coming from another planet, a place you want to say is completely foreign and impossible…but you know it’s the fuse and force of pre-modern society, when there was no taboo against emotion pouring and striking from the electric core of a human out into the landscape.

You suddenly say, because you can’t stop yourself, “Well, this is what I’ve always known. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Davis doesn’t let down for a moment. There are no gaps, no resting places. Who knows how director Gillian Armstrong achieved that victory? And while you’re riveted on Davis, Jan Adele, who plays Davis’ mother-in-law in the film, poleaxes you with a volcanic mother/protector performance from another vector that is so seamless you absolutely know she couldn’t be acting at all—and maybe she isn’t. Maybe a few Australian actors in those days had some mysterious hybrid version of performance which, in the American vocabulary, has no name. I don’t have the filmography to prove it, but I suspect Adele would be on a par with Davis and Geoffrey Rush, had she been given the necessary roles during her career.

Heatwave, a Judy Davis film from 1982, directed by Phillip Noyce, is described this way: “A planned housing development in Sydney’s Kings Cross in the mid 70s…becomes the centre of controversy as tenants and squatters in the doomed, older houses refuse to move. Their most outspoken member is Kate Dean (Judy Davis), who works with the publisher of a small but vocal local paper, Mary Ford (Carole Skinner) – whose relentless rabble rousing against the development is silenced only with her disappearance. Kate searches for Mary…The union bans work on the site, but a well timed fire changes the dynamics of the dispute – but leads to tragedy.” (urban cinefile)

In the film, Davis makes solo activism an irresistible wrecking-ball life. Even when her own emotions have burned out into ashes, she keeps making war. At first, you don’t know what you’re seeing. You can’t believe what you’re seeing. She’s so much more than a movie, in a movie. It’s as if you finally and embarrassingly begin to understand, for the first time (how could this be?), what tragic means. Not in the classical sense, but as it comes to the surface in a single human being. It was always there, waiting to be unearthed; and then it is. In that respect, I know of no other film that touches on what Davis is doing in Heatwave.

Modern society reflexively closes the door on everything I’m alluding to in this piece. “Don’t play with fire.” “Don’t explore this.” The depth and the free flow of natural emotions are ruled out, because we now have a better system. Our world is devoted to the good of everyone. In order to bring it into being, sacrifices must be made. An area of the soul has to be excised. Amnesia about the psyche must be induced. For the sake of “equality,” humans must be redrawn on a smaller map.

A cosmic fire department is pressed into service. And for the sake of efficiency, the department’s main function is prevention. Don’t let the flames find incendiary material. Recognize sparks and snuff them out.

Re-channel energies into acceptable boulevards. Hold up the correct leaders, so others may follow them.

From this perspective, you could say the early Australian films are strange historical documents. They reveal a time that is now retired as a lost landscape. They remember a possibility that (we’re assured) was once too real to be real.

Except for this—what is covered over and buried is never fully extinguished. You can decorate an artist with a blooming bar of effects and embroideries, in an effort to obscure him, but he can eventually break out. And if he does, if he stands against the artifact of the landscape, he can even disturb the blind in their beds.

Re the great ones from Australia: never let their films disappear.

Coda: If I could transport one American actor back to the Australia of the 1980s, to work with Gillian Armstrong or Phillip Noyce, it would be Ellen Barkin. In America, she’s had one basic problem: she’s bigger than every film in which she’s performed. She spills over the edges of the scripts and the story lines. She jumps out of the screen. (Watch her opening scene in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law.) Why waste time—build a film around her. Understand that she can project emotional fire power beyond the unwritten rules of American movie production. It would be a genuine revelation to see her finally go all-out and take over. Despite her acknowledged “powerful” roles (Sea of Love, Switch), she has as-yet uncalled-for bundles of dynamite waiting for a director with a match, a director who is hell bent on exploding her full range. Revisit her American films. There are always “pull-back” moments, where she’s forced to retract some of her unapologetic force. The Americans just can’t conceive of her otherwise. She’s too strong. Without restraints, she would make a tattered shamble of the script, she would present a character who is beyond the audience’s comprehension. Well, there are always such characters—until they actually come to life on the screen. And then all bets are off. Then audiences discover what they’ve been unconsciously waiting and yearning for. But Hollywood and its adjuncts operate on fear. “Maybe this is too much. Maybe it’ll flop. Maybe she’ll walk right off the screen and yell Fire and drive the audience out of the theater. Maybe we should confine ‘power’ to crashes on the freeway and heavy weapons. Maybe the whole area of pure emotion is too hot to handle. Because we ourselves are afraid of it…”

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it?

Go back and watch two American films that were supposed to be iconic “emotional breakthroughs,” A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Yes, it’s unfair to pull these films out of their historical context, but Streetcar is a highly stylized version of emotional and physical violence, couched in Tennessee Williams’ sweet sticky prose, the “inevitable” conclusion of which is rape; and Waterfront gives us “the loser who becomes a winner,” even though the mob still controls the New York docks. In neither case is the Brando character allowed to propel his emotions into a true victory (or tragedy).

For that, watch Hightide and Heatwave. The adequate scripts are permitted to melt, because Judy Davis burns them up, just as she should. Because she could.

exit from the matrix

I predict that no American or Australian actor who happens to read this article will like it. These days, everyone has made his adjustments and compromises; everyone has awakened fully to the way things are; everyone knows the score. Everyone has tailored his conception of what movies are about. Everyone has accepted a simulacrum of acting, within the structure. Everyone has bought the script of scripts dictating how emotion can be expressed and how it can’t be expressed. Everyone has bought The Cartoon as an imitation of life—which involves forgetting what life is or could be.

As I suggested earlier, however, death is never final for the artist. Try as he might to maintain occupancy in a zone of prepackaged accommodation, something will come along and give him the chance to escape. And then another something. And then another. These little unasked for moments arrow into his psyche.

He can keep trying to refuse, but—

The artist is forever.

“Wait! I didn’t sign up for that!”

Yes, actually, you did.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

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 individual is not the group

The individual is not the group

by Jon Rappoport

January 8, 2016

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

“Exercises and techniques for accessing and deploying imagination…these would be essential. Exercises that allow the individual to reinstate his basic creative position in his own life, his own future. Exercises that allow the individual to use his imagination in many different ways. Ramping up power.” (Preliminary notes for Exit From the Matrix, Jon Rappoport)

There are many ways I could launch from the headline of this article.

In this case, I want to point out that all life is not composed of groups trying to solve the problems created by other groups.

This may come as revelation to some.

In the long, long, long run, the struggle pitting one group against another fails, because, swallowed up in the process is the individual.

He sacrifices what he is and what he can be for the sake of a cause. It may be a just cause, a good cause, a foolish cause, a crazy cause—but the outcome is the same. In the long run.

The best version of a free Republic, whether it was actually envisioned that way by its founders, is: the organized State exists to allow the greatest possible latitude to the individual.

This, in case there is any doubt, is not a prefabricated utopia. Far from it.

What does the individual have to offer? He has everything he is capable of doing, when he liberates himself from petty ideas and limitations about what he is. That journey of liberation is his own. It isn’t anybody else’s.

It is, as I’ve pointed out many times, a journey of imagination.

Here are preliminary notes I made as I was putting together my second collection, Exit From The Matrix:

Imagination lets a person know what could exist but doesn’t now exist. Imagination lets a person know what could be invented. Imagination lets a person know that, despite claims to the contrary, the future is open and unwritten.

Imagination lets a person know that he can think thoughts that have never been thought before.

The journey of individual liberation is, therefore, much more than discovering what already exists in one’s own mind.

The world as it is, things as they are—this is eventually the sensation of depleted imagination. Of course, imagination never diminishes, it just waits. For you.

The deployment of imagination unlocks hidden energies. A power, sought after and never found in other endeavors, appears.

Psychological tests are tests of imagination. The less you have, the more normal you are. If you have none, you’re perfect. Then they put you in a field and call you a rock.

Tiny imagination is just part of this absurd culture. You don’t have to go along with it. You don’t have to think the leading frontier of imagination is about finding a spray that will make your hair look like a shellacked rabbit.

Imagination is larger than any universe. It needs no sanction from the world or from other worlds. It is not some secret form of physics. It is not religion. It is not cosmology. It is not any one picture of anything. It’s what you invent.

The group does not have imagination. It poaches on individuals with imagination.

The group is a graveyard where imagination has been downgraded and forgotten.

The group is the rationalization for people who have lost the thread of their own imaginations.

The group is the feel-good place where people can console each other about the loss of their own imaginations.

The group sometimes acts to liberate the individual, but then the group forgets what it’s been doing and moves forward for its own sake, for its collective power. And that power opposes what the individual can be.

The group is a locus for discussion that eventually leads to a zero effect. Anyone who wakes up to his own imagination would leave the group.

The group is a place where people are invited to forget they are individuals.

The group is promoted by people who are afraid of their own imaginations and the implication that they create their own futures.

The group is promoted by people who want to leave their own individuality in the dust.

The group is for people who demand: “We must all agree on something.”

The group may have temporary value, but it never disbands. It becomes a fungus. It seeks more territory.

exit from the matrix

Imagination soars. It is the individual at the edge of his own exploration.

Imagination was the source for the building of modern civilization. But then civilization became dedicated to itself and the group.

The individual never goes away, and neither does his imagination.

Imagination can light up a room, a house, a city, a nation, a planet, a galaxy, a universe.

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.

Interview with a dead Orson Welles

Interview with a dead Orson Welles

~revised and updated~

by Jon Rappoport

January 5, 2016

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

Someone somewhere will surely think this is “channeling,” so allow me to set the record straight. It isn’t. It’s fiction. However, as well all know, fiction often makes more sense than fact. Enough said on that point.

In this interview with Orson Welles, we consider matters he’s been keeping bottled up for a long time, ever since Hollywood more or less cast him aside. For some reason, he seems to agree with my views on many points.

Q (Rappoport): You’re a comedian. Would you agree?

A (Welles): Of course. That’s not all I am, but yes. Comedy has effervescence. It spills over the sides of the container. The container is “things as they are.” When you keep pouring new material into it and let it flood over the sides, you’re going to run into laughter, eventually.

Q: The container itself is a joke.

A: It’s a joke that can kill you, but sure. When you’ve been around theater as long as I have, you understand that the whole construction called ordinary reality is just another piece of theater—except it’s posing as the only show in town. That’s the joke.

Q: How old were you when you figured this out?

A: I think I’ve always known it. People take on roles and they act them out.

Q: Why?

A: That’s a hell of a question. I guess it’s because they don’t see an alternative. There is a psychological fixation on One. One role, one idea, one answer, one ultimate objective, one cure, one ending. It represents a hunger for limits. I never liked that.

Q: You never like to come to the end of things.

A: No. My endings were usually tricks. You know, a way of arriving at the conclusion of a story. But actually, I could have gone on forever. I could have extended every movie I ever made out to infinity. Why not? It’s more interesting. You just keep inventing.

Q: So reality is infinite?

A: It could be. There’s no rule against it. This is another aspect of comedy. At some point, as you keep extending things, it’s funny. Your characters, in a movie, break out of their confines. The seams split. You can make that serious and horrible, but if you keep going long enough, it turns into comedy. Because the roles disintegrate. The limits crack. You’re in new spaces. Freedom takes over.

Q: Immortality.

A: Well, yes. I mean, I’m dead, but I’m not. Death is just one way of ending the story, but you don’t have to tell or live a story that way. You just go on. You move on.

Q: In your later years, you gained an enormous amount of weight.

A: That was the result of boredom. And the boredom came out of the fact that I wasn’t ingenious enough to assemble everything I needed to make the films I really wanted to make. You see, after Citizen Kane, which I made in my 20s, I saw where it could all go. I saw I could make movies that no one had ever thought of. This may sound odd, but Kane was really a movie about making movies. That’s what I discovered. On a higher level, let’s say, it was a movie about shadows and light and camera angles and the emotion coming out of characters on the screen, all rolled up into moving paintings. It was quite beautiful to me. I was struck by it. I loved it. I wanted to take off from there and fly into the wild blue yonder. The possibilities were endless.

Q: You had the energy—

A: You have no idea. It was titanic. It was radiating out of every cell in my body.

Q: So you make Citizen Kane and you’re 24 years old.

A: It was a gargantuan act of ego.

Q: That’s why it’s endured.

A: Yes, I would say so.

Q: So in your case, it’s beneficent ego.

A: Well, not all the time. I once threw a man off a bridge.

Q: That’s a new one.

A: He attacked me. He said The Magnificent Ambersons was a drawing-room drama.

Q: Did he die?

A: Oh no. The bridge was four feet above a narrow river. They fished him out and we all went and had a drink. People have the wrong idea about ego. Big is not a problem. Small is the problem. And if you stay in the middle ground, you experience the worst case. Then you’re torn to pieces. Attrition and gnawing from all quarters. Beyond a certain point, more ego is a balloon and you float up off the ground. If you can hold on and allow the ride, you develop spontaneous resources.

Q: Ego is a medium, like paint or film.

A: You can use it if you want to.

Q: But people then assume art means humility.

A: People assume God is waiting for them in a city built on clouds, where they’ll melt like butter into a piece of cosmic toast. Humility is a delusion. An ideal of sheer pretension. It’s an amateur’s role in a doomed play.

Q: Ego as a social behavior is buffoonery.

A: That’s why Citizen Kane is a comedy.

Q: And the reason why it’s not seen as that?

A: Large looming sets, and camera angles slanted upward from low positions. You can have a gloomy comedy. I may have invented the form.

Q: Touch of Evil—they say, every frame is a galvanizing photograph.

A: Why else make a movie? I was like the poet who realizes language is the flight from the ground into the air, or the descent below the surface. In film, you build the architecture to photograph it, and you choose the angles that make the photo. Frankly, if I can’t invent every frame so it has original architecture, then I’m lazy. I’m letting the extraordinary slip by. I may as well be home getting drunk. But you see, I forced the issue. I didn’t sit back and hope. I didn’t wait for every marvelous accident. I was up on the beat, and I stayed there. Well, I didn’t stall. I hit you with image after image. That was the point.

Q: You were the troll under the bridge.

A: The troll waits for years, for even centuries. But once he starts to move, he doesn’t stop.

Q: At what point did you realize the plot of Citizen Kane was a throwaway?

A: Oh, I knew that from the beginning. Stories are everywhere. Grab one. Think of one. Don’t give it much concern. One understands, of course, the audience is a sucker for stories, so that’s what they’ll focus on. You can’t help that. But the Rosebud business, the whole career of Kane, his whole life, drawn in episodes—who cares? It’s just the occasion for doing what I wanted to do. I never put stock in it. I may have said I did, but that was a lie or a momentary fascination. I wanted big space, so I chose a big man. Stories are a rank addiction. How will things turn out? Who will prove to be the winner? What’s the missing clue? Find the right story that touches all the bases, and you can sell it. But I was destroying stories. Understand? If my films had a theme, that was it. Story disintegrates. It has no foundation.

Q: You’re supposed to be obligated to telling a story.

A: Drivel. Wisdom is supposedly choosing the right story, but that’s sheer nonsense. Crap. Every story is a lie. You come to the end of it, and you feel unhappy. I knew that when I was 16. That’s why I had a hard time with studio executives. They’re sucking on the teat of their own religion. They see themselves as priests. They’re selling story to the public. A to B. You begin the fairy tale at A and wind up at B. No switchbacks. No irony. It’s sheer stupidity. I’m not trying to hide the weapon in the desk drawer until the last scene. I’m injecting invention in every frame, so it spills over the edges. The foam shooting over the rim of the glass. That’s what I want. It’s the same with any world. You want to bring sheer abundance to it. Even in the desert, you have an abundance, an over-abundance of space. That’s what I’m aiming for. Over-abundance. On Earth, you have it. Jungles. They just keep on twisting toward the horizon. They lean over the banks of the rivers, trying to swallow up the water, and the water won’t be stopped, either. You have black jaguars, some of the greatest hunting machines anyone could devise. They’re bursting at the seams. Look at their modeling. And lions. And cloudy leopards, pure and sufficient and heartbreaking beauty. You make many types. Let’s not diddle around. The people who made this place, Earth, do you think they held back? Do you think they were wearing lab coats and saluting genes? What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Q: Joseph Calleia in Touch of Evil.

A: Poor old Joe. He could make that sadness sing. Abundantly. He was quite good at comedy, you know. But he pulled on the cloak of sadness, and his elevator would take you down three or four levels, and he would die at the bottom. You knew he had to. There was a collection of caricatures in that film. Not exactly caricatures, because I was inventing, how do I say it, a special kind of type. Not a cartoon. Not tripping falling farce. Not quite naturalism. Perhaps a mixture. They call it grim noir, but that was a comedy, too, that film. You had Ray Collins doing his special brand of flapdoodle. The DA. Coat and hat, barking like a dog. One second he’s three dimensions, the next second he’s flat. And Akim Tamiroff. Farce. But he’ll shoot you. Entrances and exits. The characters appear, flare, flatten out, and disappear. Cardboard town. Cardboard and oil. A collapsible universe.

Q: With different rules.

A: Yes, the rules of, say, GK Chesterton. Reality as facade. But in Touch of Evil, if you put your hand through a wall, you feel you might get bit by something on the other side. The characters aren’t trapped by their natures. Not really. I trap them. That’s part of letting the audience see I’m doing the inventing. They see it going on. Just enough. Same with Citizen Kane.

Q: Reminds me a little of Pablo in Steppenwolf.

A: Yes. He can fold up the bar and the people in it into a toy and put it all in his pocket. He doesn’t do it. Maybe once, to drive home a point. But he could. So could I. Obviously, I don’t. But the fact that I could is part of the overall atmosphere.

Q: Collapsible universe.

A: Magic Theater. It’s a decision you make, and the earlier the better. Will you pose yourself in reality and then mingle with it? Is that your main thrust? Or will you punch holes in it and find velocity and manufacture the worlds you want? You might discover one or two cultures in the history of the planet that, at their beginning, opted for the second alternative. Briefly.

Q: This society we live in provides us with snapshots of artists.

A: Caught, for an instant, on the run. So the life of the artist becomes the watchword. His tribulations. The fact that he’s a fool in his personal life or he’s desperate or he’s rich or he’s this or that. Maybe 20 years out of his endless trillions of immortal years are captured in a highly suspect snapshot. But he’s somewhere else now, still working. He’s exponentially increasing his power. As an incidental effect, his impact on reality, any already-existing reality, is growing. Somewhere out on the rim of a place we’ve never seen, he’s made vanish a few square parsecs of space and invented his own territory to replace it.

Q: Maybe he’s casting a film.

A: Casting comes last. He’s drawing up camera angles, building sets.

Q: Huge houses?

A: Maybe. Maybe pillars and towers and looming sky. Maybe a cardboard town sinking in leftover oil. If it’s Tuesday, it’s one, if it’s Wednesday, the other.

Q: Just out of curiosity—everything you’re saying here, did you know it at the time or only now?

A: Oh, I knew it all along. The individual is immortal. But people want to hear about other things. And I was willing to give them what they wanted, except in my work. In intelligence operations, why would you blow your cover stories? The world of humans is built on cover stories, one after another, in stratified layers.

Q: The Third Man. You and Joseph Cotten.

A: Well, that was all atmosphere. We didn’t have anything else. Atmosphere wrapping a mystery. And when it’s solved, it’s a throwaway, of course. Who cares? But with the crooked streets and lighting and pace, you make your own little temporary religion. An altar sitting somewhere ahead, in the fog.

Q: And who’s God?

A: No one. That’s the point. You say, “Look, suppose there’s no God? That might not be a bad thing.” It might not be a disappointment, after all. No-God can turn out to be an interesting story. If you play your cards right, it could be exciting. You worm your way through the mystery and you find it all folds up in your pocket and you walk away laughing. You leave that sadness behind, a hat blowing across the street. I used to stumble out of the theater after watching Ingmar Bergman, and I’d be choking on laughter. The Seventh Seal. One of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Wild Strawberries. Hysterical. Gunnar Bjornstrand, a man at the end of his tether, staring nothing in the face. Do you remember the scene where he’s sitting in the car talking to Ingrid Thulin? Well, tragedy for me has always had a tinge of laughter about to break out. You move over one inch from where you are, and the tears magically dry up and you’re feeling wonderful, as if you’ve just had a good breakfast. You look around and wonder what happened.

Q: Improvisation helps.

A: You might be right. You can always throw a howling cat into a funeral. As people approach the open coffin, the cat runs in chasing a rat. Emotions are mercurial. Of course, in a film, you can saddle them with iron weights, if you want to. But I never thought that was necessary. Why bother with it? It’s a waste of time. Something else is going to happen next, anyway. You have the noble, beautiful, suffering widow standing at the coffin, where her husband is lying in his suit with a flower in his buttonhole, and she glances to her left and sees a man staring down her dress. And she starts to smile. Just a little. Of course, what is she doing with cleavage at the funeral?

Q: Is that a metaphysical question?

A: Well, it could be. Because that’s what you find out. You’re ready for the emotion to lay its card on the table, the emotion that will sum up your experience and confirm the absolute and final significance of it in the overall scheme of things…and then a leaf blows in the window and it doesn’t really matter. Now you have that emotion and the leaf, and as a director, what are you going to do with it? You begin to discover that improvisation is one of the great stable centers behind any universe.

Q: The planning department will hate that.

A: Sure. They pretend they’re working out all the details. They’re going to launch Universe X-B tomorrow, and they’re putting the final touches on the last few sub-sub-sub anomalies. Meanwhile, they’re just the front office. What’s going on behind the scenes is the real main event. Somebody like me is back there, and I’m talking to the tiger. The tiger with wings. I want to see whether he’s ready to burn bright in the forests of the night. Whether he doesn’t care about me, the man who made him. I want him to forget all about me and go on his way. He and I, the two of us, are back there. And yes, I can see, his ferocity is intact. He’s his own man. And just as he brushes by me, padding out the door, he gives me a little smile. Just for a second. That’s all I want. That’s all I need.

Q: Okay, let’s take a short break here. I want to present a quote from William Burroughs (Naked Lunch):

“A bureau takes root anywhere in the state…always reproducing more of its kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised…A bureau operates on…principles of inventing needs to justify its existence. Bureaucracy is wrong as cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action.”

And I want to recall an old recording session you did. It was a voiceover for an ad—Findus Foods. You were the spokesman. You were doing takes on cod, peas, beef. The recording engineer kept the outtakes. Here are a few of your comments:

“That [what the producers want Welles to say] doesn’t make any sense. Sorry…” “You don’t know what I’m up against. ‘Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp…coating’…I think, no…” “‘We know a little place in American Far West where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie beef and tastes…’ This is a lot of shit, you know that!” “It isn’t worth it. No money is worth this…” [Welles walks out]

A: Yes, I remember that. I could have used the money, but the script was such a load. I couldn’t do it.

power outside the matrix

Q: One of the predictable effects of the Internet is the need for information over fiction. Beyond a certain point, it becomes a disease. It confirms the robot part of the mind. People shrug off fiction as unnecessary. It’s fluff. Why bother, when the truth is so much more riveting? Well, there is a reason people think that. They have no experience with their own imagination. Information structures have one job: deliver. And the people on the other end of that wire, the audience, are set up to eat what’s brought. It’s a giant Domino’s operation. Or look at it as a see-saw. On one end (information) is a 100000000-ton steel ball, and on the other end (fiction), a grainy pebble. Theoretically, it could have been the other way around. A million short stories for every factoid. But that won’t work, because again, people have very little conscious experience of their own imaginations. It’s a hell of a lot easier to sit back and take in the flow of info—good, bad, or indifferent. And then react. People think magic is a talent, like being able, at the age of six, to draw a cowboy with his six-gun in the holster. Actually, magic is all about imagination, and if a person has no experience with it and no inclination to gain the experience, then he can kiss magic goodbye. Of course, he can remember that, much earlier in his life, he did live through imagination, and he did run and play right in the center of it. Then he might change his mind about a lot of things. He might decide, for instance, that an unending torrent of information reaches a limit, beyond which it does no one any good…Let’s pick up again with any one of your films…

A: Take Touch of Evil. The story line is interesting, but it doesn’t knock you out of your chair. And the role I play, the corrupt sheriff, that’s old hat. Of course, the casting was delicious, because I was able to use Charlton Heston as the earnest lawman, and that fit perfectly. He knew I was doing that, letting his innate sincerity come through, and he saw the ironies that multiplied out of it. But everything was the staging, the atmosphere, the angles, the shots.

Q: What many people would dismiss as inessential.

A: That’s the way the modern world works. Strip things down. Reduce them to their lowest common denominator.

Q: Like machines. One goal, one plan, one strategy, one action to reach the end of line.

A: I was always moving in the opposite direction. Inventing multiple new ways of seeing things. You see, for many people, that is a waste of time. They want their messages simple. They want simple over and over again.

Q: I say it’s a disease.

A: Well, yes. If I’d had to stick to that code, I would have given up making films. I would have written novels. At least there, you’re alone. You can invent whatever you want to. Take the expression “the bottom line.” This has been extended from business and accounting, where it originated, to the idea that you should take the shortest path between two points. You should arrive as quickly as possible at the conclusion. And the conclusion should tell you how to sell something. Or buy it. Or believe it. Or reject it.

Q: When you talk to people about imagination and magic, they tend to look for that same approach.

A: Of course. They’ve been trained that way. They’ve succumbed to the spirit of the times. In Touch of Evil, although the plot itself was fairly tight, I was really using the opportunity to stage a series of scenes in which the characters alternated between being human and being caricature—that shuttling back and forth between realism and facade, between the natural and the bizarre, between the obvious and the esoteric. Esoteric in the sense that people tend to play out roles in life, and when they do, and when you see it, reality itself begins to look different, begins to take on odd qualities. What I’m doing is showing the audience a different kind of reality, one that at first glance looks like the world, but after a little while looks like someone looking at the world. That’s what I’m really revealing—how I can look at the world. Only instead of explaining it, I’m showing it as drama, I’m populating my point of view with characters, and I’m letting you know that’s what I’m doing. I’m not hiding it. I’m enjoying it. Celebrating it.

Q: It’s as if you’re saying to the audience, “I’m dreaming, and here is my dream, only I’m having it while I’m wide awake, and I’m INVENTING the dream as I go along and I’m happy to admit that’s the case.”

A: Yes, that’s right. It’s, you might say, another level of art. Laid out there at a time when we already know so much about art of the past, after we’ve digested so many conventions and traditions of art, after we’ve woken up to the fact that these habits of art are just that—we’ve seen through so much about how artists create reality in traditional ways and forms—and now it’s time to go further.

Q: When you look at how certain so-called classical novels were written, with the all-knowing and all-seeing eye of the third-person narrative looking down from a higher plateau…

A: That’s also, of course, the style of religion. It’s the style of religious discourse and narrative, and people in that venue still buy it. They want the calm and steady hand of the authority. They want that narrator to come across that way. It’s old and worn out and rather absurd, but people cling to it. It’s a cousin, I’d say, to the manual.

Q: The manual?

A: Yes, the instruction book that tells you how to do something, how something works. That calm voice, that assurance.

Q: I see. Yes. And people feel, in the absence of it, they’re lost. They don’t know where to turn.

A: Well, this goes back to your statement that people don’t have the conscious experience of their own imagination. Instead, they look for the steady guiding hand from somewhere else. They think there are only two possibilities. The calm authoritative voice, or chaos. It’s a joke. Imagination tells us there are an infinity of ways of presenting realities, not two. Not one. People watch Citizen Kane and they think it’s about the corruption of the human spirit. That’s the hook for them. It’s one of those “big themes” they’re familiar with and can plug into. Let me tell you something. If I were making a film about corruption of the spirit, it would have looked nothing like Citizen Kane. Nothing. Kane was a movie about the possibilities of film. It was a series of episodes in which the visual language itself was expanding and I was showing people what could be done with space. With dimension. With emotion shot through these larger dimensions. I was talking in a new language. I was introducing the idea that new language could have great impact.

Q: That was the magic.

A: What else could it have been? A return to older techniques? A re-hashing of hackneyed ways of describing reality? People are terribly confused. When you talk to them in a new language, they keep looking for the OBJECTS of what you’re talking about. They keep looking for the old objects embedded in the old language. If they don’t find them, they throw up their hands in dismay. Where are the old things? But you’re not presenting old things. And even worse, you’re not talking to them in the language that would convey those old things. You want them to hear and see and feel the new language, the process of that language unfolding, but they search after familiar themes and ideas and stories.

Q: As if some official minister of information will present them.

A: Yes. That reassuring floating sound from above that tells them everything will always be as it once was. You know, when you assume that voice and use it, it doesn’t really matter what you say. You could be talking about new discoveries or lies or breakthroughs or the most outrageous nonsense—it doesn’t matter. They’ll buy what you’re selling. But if you change the voice and the language, they don’t know what to do.

Q: So they thought you were an egoist.

A: And I was and am—but not in the obvious sense. I was creating a different language, with power, from my mind and imagination. And I had no desire to dampen the power, because it was an inherent part of what I was inventing. I was launching out radiance and I was in a state of radiance at the same time. Joyous…and celebrating this new language and celebrating the fact that I was doing it. Why not?

Q: In the bureaucratic world of our times, what you did could be looked at as some sort of condition that might be diagnosed.

A: These petty pernicious little grasping bureaucratic minds, who have no existence except an official one, need to be destroyed. And destroyed in only one way: through a mass exodus away from them. Leave them in their seat of influence. Let them stew there and write their papers and reports. Let them win in a complete vacuum. Treat them as morons who are deranged beyond rescue. Go away and create something entirely different. For heaven’s sake, CREATE SOMETHING.

Q: The voice of calm authority you speak of…it’s a form of hypnotism.

A: I know something about that subject. One thing I know is this. In the long run, it doesn’t matter what’s coming from that voice. The most important thing to know is that the CONTEXT, the space, is hypnotic. And that’s where the whole lie is. That’s what makes the entire performance a lie. WAKE UP to that. Walk away. Invent your own voice. One of the functions of art is the stimulation of imagination in the audience. Then, for those who have the desire, they become artists, too. They catch the glimpse in themselves. It’s always been that way. A real artist isn’t hanging around hoping for information. He’s inventing something much more powerful.

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.

Maps of consciousness, ancient Tibet, and a new psychology

by Jon Rappoport

January 4, 2016

(To join our email list, click here.)

“For the most part, today’s individual wants his spirituality to sit there like a plum on a tree. He doesn’t want it to be highly dynamic. He certainly doesn’t want to make it intensely personal and unique to himself.” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Readers who have been with me for a while notice that I work against the grain.

This is my natural tendency, but it’s also the result of 30-plus years of research into a number of “sacred cows.” The findings of my research have shown me that civilization supports numerous false realities, and this extends to so-called mental, spiritual, and metaphysical foundations.

There are wide cracks and leaks and large holes.

I have enormous faith, long-term, in the individual. Not in the group. I see the individual as the future, no matter how long it takes, no matter how deep his potential is buried under a mass of propaganda and misdirection.

Over the years, I have written several articles describing the underpinning for my 3 Matrix collections.

This is another one, based on my investigations of: Tibet, modern “consciousness writing,” and the role of psychology in a controlled society.

To begin with, psychology, in theory and therapeutic practice, has a way, over time, of “settling in” to the society around it. With some exceptions, it more and more mirrors the values of society.

Mainline psychology considers the individual as having key relationships, and seeks to strengthen, repair, and normalize them.

This is all very well for the patient who already considers himself to be living inside fairly conventional boundaries. But when the boundaries themselves are the issue, psychology tends to waver, wobble, tap dance, and even cast doubt on the mental health of the patient, as if his challenging the limits were somehow a sign of “inner imbalance” or neurosis or misperception.

The “playing field” of society is taken as the fundamental ground of operation, and the person who is walking outside those lines, looking in, assessing what is going on, is suspect. He may “require help.”

You won’t get a psychologist to admit what I’m pointing out here, but this conformist aspect of his work has come all the way down from the early, wide-ranging, fantastical ramblings of Freud, to a comfortable and even smug, small narrative.

Why? Because psychology has been determined to establish itself as an institution within the context of society. Smallness of conception is the fate of all such efforts.

For the past 75 years or so, a counter to psychology has emerged and gained popularity. I call it “consciousness mapping.” It begins by acknowledging that normal and average perception is grossly limited, and then moves on to offer an alternative.

However, the emphasis has been placed on explaining a structure or an ultimate object which consciousness, in its elevated state, would apprehend: a pot of gold; a cosmic entity; a universal connectivity.

“This is where you will arrive, and this is what it looks like, and this is what you will know.”

The Big It.

Well, this is attractive, because many people want to hold on to a Big It. They want to know what lies at the end of the road before they step foot on the road for the first time.

The metaphysical calculus of religion is transferred to consciousness itself.

In my search for a different approach to the power of individual consciousness, I came upon the history of early Tibet, before the society hardened into a theocracy.

Several sources were particularly helpful. The work of author John Blofeld (The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet), the writings of the intrepid explorer, Alexandra David-Neel, and a quite unconventional healer, Richard Jenkins, with whom I worked in the early 1960s in New York.

Jenkins once wrote to me: “There are people who want to tell us what consciousness should perceive. They’re blind to the electric, alive, and free nature of awareness. They’re wrapped up in content and addicted to it. Their biggest mistake is omitting the creative nature of human beings…”

That creative nature was the intense focus of the early Tibetans.

These practitioners, teachers, and students, some 1500 years ago, realized that most people viewed consciousness as an accumulator of knowledge. A searching tool, or a receiving apparatus.

Instead, the Tibetans embarked on a far more adventurous course.

Their many images (e.g., mandalas) weren’t meant as depictions of what finally exists in higher realms. Those realms were just as provisional and changeable as the physical world. You might call the multiple locales and dimensions representations of “what humans in certain Asian cultures would expect to encounter in their journeys of spirit.”

In other words, the Tibetans consciously treated their pantheons of gods and semi-gods as convincing illusions.

Several of their key exercises and techniques were all about having students mentally create these illusions in voluminous and meticulous detail. That was difficult enough, to be sure. Far more difficult was the next aspect of their practice: get rid of these creations.

Put them there; take them away.

The Tibetans were committed to living life on the level of imagination, with all that implied.

And what does it imply?

A new psychology. A psychology of unlimited possibility:

A person’s past, his history, his problems, his relationships are all framed against the wider context of what he can imagine and then invent, create, in the world.

Living through and by imagination long enough, the individual discovers that his prior relationships are transformed. They no longer set themselves up as questions or problems.

He is operating from a platform that affords an utterly different, original, and unexpected outcome.

A psychology of possibility not only looks forward to the future, it has a reason to do so. Bringing electricity back into life depends, initially, on viewing possibilities in the space of one’s own imagination.

It may strike you at this point that our current civilization is bent on lowering possibilities; and that is true. That is the psychology of the psyop.

There is a good reason for this programming, as well as the staging of events that seem to give the programming validity. Those who aim to control the destiny of humankind want to shrink the “size of humans.” That is their intent.

A psychology of possibility would reverse that trend and expose it.

To the casual observer, the weight of this civilization and all its accoutrement seems enormous. But the creative potential of the individual outstrips that structure by light years.

How does the individual realize that fact? What is the spark that ignites his understanding? It all begins in imagination, which is the home of possibility.

If you truly wanted to gain insight into the basis of a person’s problems, you would find it in an area of his imagination where he stored all those things he considered impossible.

Over the years, the “impossibles” build up. And so the future diminishes.

Shrinks.

He carves down the size of his journey. He even turns around and tracks backward, revisiting the places he has already inhabited.

What will he find? Basically, what he already knows.

He becomes like the painter who repeats the same theme over and over.

Whereas the blank canvas actually stands for unlimited open space, unlimited possibility.

exit from the matrix

In the arena of The Group, we see all manner of problems presented along with their solutions. Replace the free market with government control. Conduct a religious revival to wean populations away from their consumerist addictions. Eliminate money altogether, in favor a more “equitable” plan. Provide monetary compensation for every group who has ever been wronged in the past. Achieve better education by reducing it to a Pavlovian series of stimuli and responses. Track and observe every human, 24/7, in order to curb anti-social behavior. Hook all brains up to a super-computer which has trillions of important data. Genetically alter humans, to make them more talented and healthy. And so on.

Each and every solution winds around and ends up against a brick wall, where the outcome is worse than the original dilemma, where suffering is compounded.

If only we were smarter. If only we were more ingenious. If only we had a better plan. But no, I’m afraid that isn’t the difficulty. The difficulty stems from considering humans as groups in the first place.

The secret to the labyrinth is at the beginning, where the individual surrendered to the idea of the group. It was all downhill from there.

As the future of society plays out over the next few hundred years, there will be a return to the individual.

And then he will decide what happens next.

He will decide whether he should remove the filter, through which he sees all remedies as collective and mass remedies.

He will decide whether to breathe life back into his infinite imagination.

He will decide whether to take his own power as seriously as he now takes centralized spirituality.

But why wait for hundreds of years to pass? Why not now?

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 basics of Earth Culture

The basics of Earth Culture

by Jon Rappoport

January 3, 2016

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

People assume the culture of Earth is normal and understandable. Even critics harbor this opinion.

“Well, even though massive conformity isn’t desirable, we can see why people embrace it…”

Really?

Examine the annals of science fiction; even there, the majority of ET cultures in the literature exhibit conformity to norms. That’s how far the assumption goes.

Culturally speaking, what is conformity? It’s the passing of an idea through many hands and minds, rendering it lifeless and limp, drained of vitality. What these minds are accepting becomes a dead habit, a series of empty gestures.

That’s the fundamental of Earth Culture. Everywhere on the planet.

If, somewhere in the galaxy, a civilization existed in which Individual Difference and Independence were universal virtues, and if scouts traveled to Earth and took a cursory look, they would report back: “Slave Culture.”

Of course, conformity can operate under a variety of names: “Unity.” “Common goals.” “Shared values.”

These are euphemisms and covers. They point to a kind of mind control—illusions people foster in themselves to explain and celebrate their own slavery.

Those who claim externally imposed propaganda and other methods account for slave mentality are only telling half the story. People form themselves in groups of various kinds, and resonant behavior is expected in those groups. People willingly and even eagerly enlist. They program themselves. Ignoring this factor is actually another familiar feature of Earth Culture.

“I am the way I am because of other people…they made me do it.”

Another excuse given for Earth Culture: people must pull together to survive. However, this doesn’t require group conformity to an extreme degree, spilling over into every aspect of behavior and thought.

Concerning my definition of conformity, notice that a machine-like quality pervades human communication. Certain subjects are pleasing; others are taboo. Conversations which probe below the surface, in order to reveal hidden factors in events, are considered “strange,” in social settings. They aren’t “normal.” They provoke anxiety.

Rather than solely explain the taboo by citing the fear of “standing out from the crowd,” look at the other side of the coin: people want to behave like machines. They enjoy the sensation. They embrace shallow predictability.

Recent reports out of China describe a new system, in which citizens receive scores based on their obedience to government. This is a kind of game. It encompasses, at the very least, online behavior. Apparently, people are taking to it like ducks to water. They’re proud to announce their high scores for acting like good machines. They like it.

Do you think all those college students, who are trying to outlaw certain words that “might be offensive to someone, somehow,” are merely motivated by a strange brand of idealism? They like the idea of carving down the language and using sanitized terms. They, too, see it as a kind of game. Humans acting like programmed machines—wonderful.

And the preposterous idea that someday, soon, human brains will be linked up to a super-computer that will pass down “the very best” answers to all questions? The advocates of the “breakthrough” are delighted by the prospect. Some of them even believe it will signal the visible emergence of God. Again, humans behaving like machines.

All problems dismissed. All confusions banished. All debates settled.

Conformity at all levels—to be wished for most fervently. Not simply the result of fear.

Look below the images of ads in which great athletes are presented as superior humans. Their dedication to practice is highly admired, even worshiped. What are we talking about here? Repetition of exercises. Numbers of reps. Familiar actions, done over and over and over. Humans as machines. Isn’t it beautiful.

More and more, Earth Culture is coming to be machine culture, and those who support this notion are finding pleasure in it. They see it in a very positive light.

Let’s take this one step further. Machine Culture is the eradication of consciousness. Well, consciousness was always a thorny problem. It never yielded up simple answers. There was something in the nature of a struggle about it. How fine a thing to be able to discard it entirely. Maybe it never existed. Maybe it was always an illusion.

Don’t worry, be happy. Learn to pursue lowest common denominator pleasures in a single-minded fashion. No distractions. Be a cop decked out in black military gear standing in a phalanx of other such cops. No visible faces. No identities. Machines ready for action. Beat down the mind. Subdue it. Offload it.

The body is a machine. The mind is irrelevant. Maybe it, too, never existed.

And if the possibility of automatic and reliable genetic alteration presents itself, to make the body even stronger and more resilient—and if the mind can be redirected and rebuilt to become pure automatic talents…why, that is perfect. That is supreme Earth Culture.

Yes, Earth Culture has an aesthetic, and it is the aesthetic of the highly efficient machine.

Consider the age-old prescription: order from chaos. This is the basic principle of control ops. Introduce chaos, then come in behind that to impose order. In terms of this culture, the order is the machine. The closed system.

It sounds horrible? Well, for many, many people, it’s utopia.

Gone are the days of confusing choices. Here are the days of effectively directed action. And it all happens outside the space of freedom. It happens by design.

“If there is a question that takes longer than three seconds to provoke a correct answer, the question was meaningless in the first place.” That becomes the new basis of IQ.

In the long run, culture is based on pleasure, not pain. People sign on willingly. They yearn for a preferred outcome.

In this case, on Earth, they love the idea of becoming machines.

The preconditions for establishing Machine Culture? People must sour on the idea of freedom. They must sour on the idea of learning how to think rationally, by choice. They must sour on the idea of deploying their imaginations. They must sour on the idea of building up their own individual power and using it to create their own deeply desired futures in the world. Or any world.

Then they will look at all these realities as forgeries and empty promises.

Then they will forget these realities ever existed even as concepts.

But you don’t have to forget these things.

exit from the matrix

You can go in the opposite direction.

Your pleasures will be multi-dimensional, and without limits. They will tower above the Culture.

I once ended a short story with this: “And the machines passing in the street took no notice of me. Why would they? They were on their way to perfection. Today, tomorrow, and always. They were in love with their own function. That was their one emotion and their one impulse. For them, the struggle of the ages was over. They had beaten the odds.”

Yes, hail Earth Culture. A re-animation of life in which no life exists. Instead, the goal of socialization triumphs.

I write, in order to forward the infinity of other goals, the authentic ones that emerge out of great individual desire and great imagination. The true dream, in any universe.

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.

Earth Culture and the era of imagination

Earth Culture and the era of imagination

by Jon Rappoport

December 30, 2015

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

“There is the craziness you can see from ground level, while you’re in the muck and investigating it. And then there is the craziness you see as you float up above the muck. From a height, you obtain a different view of the insanity. You see culture. You see what culture really looks like, when it’s heading down a trail of failure without consciousness.” (Preparatory Notes for Exit From The Matrix, Jon Rappoport)

There is an Earth Culture, and, yes, it is heavily influenced by controllers who make all sorts of war on the population, but it is also an organically deteriorating mass of small-minded concepts that presuppose we are living in small spaces.

As a reporter, I’ve spent 30 years drilling into a number of these concepts, in order to expose them as shams and scams. Deep medical fraud has been one of my targets.

Good science and good technology have taken us to good places, but increasingly science is occupied with promoting lies and fake realities, in order to achieve political objectives; and technologies are being deployed by people to render themselves incapable of distinguishing between closed systems and free open life.

Consider the issue of vaccines. Getting down into the morass of information on this subject, several things become apparent (and I have covered them in detail): vaccines contain highly toxic elements; studies claiming safety are mainly based on short-range observation; in the US, the apparatus for reporting serious adverse effects is broken and inoperable; the most reasonable estimate of vaccine damage yields up alarming figures; claims for marvelous success are based on the erroneous notion that the absence of familiar disease symptoms means the disease has been prevented—when, in fact, this absence can very well indicate a suppression of the immune system, whereby that system can no longer mount a strong inflammatory response. Additionally, the sharp decline of so-called infectious diseases in the West was the (non-medical) result of improved standards of living, and the most important improvement was in the area of nutrition.

Having established and seen all this from ground level, so to speak, one can rise far above the whole fray, look down, and view vaccination from another perspective—as in, what are these lunatics doing to each other?

There they are, giving and receiving injections of toxic poisons, and thinking they are promoting health and well-being. This is a social and cultural phenomenon, when watched from a significant height. This is worried and fearful and greedy people running around and adhering to a social model of behavior. The model is madness. The model is enforced. The model is entered into willingly as well.

The model is part of Earth Culture. An observer with no ties to the system would say, “Well, that’s one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen. Are they trying to destroy each other and themselves? Are they under some sort of spell? Are they hypnotized? Is this just one more aspect of their profit motive? Is this a way citizens can proudly proclaim they’re doing good? Is that the need this mad system fulfills?

I’m using vaccination as just one example of what one can see of Earth Culture from different levels and distances.

Now consider a less visible aspect of culture. One could argue it isn’t culture at all. It’s a tradition that, here and there, has existed since the dawn of time. In my book, The Secret behind Secret Societies, I call it the Tradition of Imagination. It has mainly been forwarded by artists and inventors.

You don’t see it as a collective enterprise, because it isn’t. It involves the individual. It always has and it always will.

Through great struggles for liberation, by the end of the 19th century, increasing numbers of people were becoming conscious of the primacy of imagination. Many hidebound beliefs and convictions of the Culture were finally seen as a species of art. They weren’t intrinsically true; they were invented.

And since this was so, what else could imagination produce? What far better effects? How far could it go? How much of what we take to be reality could be changed, dispensed with, outdistanced by individuals deploying their imaginations to invent new realities and futures in the world?

This was the breathtaking brink. This was the new edge. This was the birth of a new era.

It was not a great surprise that a counter-revolution would occur—an attempt to drive back progress and put the genie back in the bottle.

But the Tradition of Imagination is not based on the machinery of collective Earth Culture.

We are in the era of imagination, no matter how many “realists” deny it.

Many, many people now understand that the precious beliefs that underpin Earth Culture are actually very low-level inventions of imagination; they’re not reflections of “the way things are.”

This doesn’t mean victory has been achieved. Far from it. There will always be a collective program dedicated to brainwashing the populace to accept a lowest-common-denominator reality.

But a breakthrough has been made. What happens now is up to the individual. Does he want to discover what his imagination can do? Does he want to live through and by his creative force? Does he want to expand that power?

From a great enough height, one can see that the totality of Earth Culture operates in order to convince the individual that he is unimportant, he is insignificant, and the waves of mass events taking place are the only events worth considering.

The totality of Earth Culture amounts to a surrender of individuality. And that is a trick. That is a very clever piece of stage magic.

It is necessary to understand this.

This is the true import of Earth Culture. And, without intending to, it highlights the potential response:

NO.

The free individual rejects that Culture. He sees it for what is, and he looks to his own inner resources.

He discovers how great they are.

“Our first endeavors are purely instinctive prompting of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies. Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor.” (Nikola Tesla, 1919)

“All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!” (Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, 1959)

“This world is but canvas to our imaginations.” (Henry David Thoreau, 1849)

exit from the matrix

When you come down to it, why does any individual allow the fumes of his past to influence what he thinks or does now? Why does he stall at the gate of his dreams? Why does he limp into the chains others are willing to supply him? Why does he believe it’s fashionable and interesting to belittle his own independence and separateness? Unity is not a virtue per se, and separateness is not a crime. Civilization is in the business of inverting, turning things upside down, and reversing the good and the bad. Society is organized trickery, promoting the illusion that the man or woman standing on top of the mountain is a violator. Those who eagerly enlist in society are committing to meddling, as a way of avoiding what they once wished they could see. They want to forget what that was. They want to forget their greatest notions.

So be it.

But nothing in the nature of things says you must join them.

There is no one who can tell you what great vision you should bring to the surface today or tomorrow. And when you stop and think about that, you might realize it is a happy circumstance, an ecstatic circumstance.

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.

Your vision, your life

Your vision, your life

by Jon Rappoport

December 28, 2015

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

I decided to sprinkle this article with quotes from my work-in-progress, The Magician Awakes—

Who is in charge of your life?

Quote 1: There are those who believe life is a museum. You walk through the rooms, find one painting, stroll into it and take up permanent residence. But the museum is endless. If you were a painter, you’d never decide to live inside one of your canvases forever. You’d keep on painting.

In a climate of mediocrity, the independent individual is not moved to agree with the prevailing narrative or some fabricated need to go along with the crowd.

Quote 2: There is a non-material faculty called imagination. If that is stimulated, perception immediately expands.

Who can tell you what to do, how to think, what to envision? Who, besides yourself?

Quote 3: We re-learn to live through and by imagination, and then we enter and invent new space and time. But space and time aren’t superior forces. They operate and come into being at the tap of imagination.

The person who is enmeshed in a thousand excuses for opting out of the future he wants—that person is never going to move off the starting blocks. He’s going to become an artist of his own stagnant swamp.

Quote 4: With imagination, one can solve a problem. More importantly, one can skip ahead of the problem and render it null and void.

Excuses are not impressive. As clever as they might be, they don’t exhibit very much. They’re minor works in a small distant storage room of the museum.

Quote 5: There are a billion murals on a billion walls, and the person chooses one and falls down before it and devotes himself to it. He spends a thousand years trying to decipher it. So be it. Eventually, he’ll wind his way out of that labyrinth, because where else can he go? Then he’ll enter another labyrinth and undergo the same process. He’ll do this on and on and on, and finally he’ll get the notion that he can imagine his own labyrinth. So he does. He invents many labyrinths. Then one day, it’ll occur to him that he can imagine whatever he wants to. It doesn’t have to be labyrinth.

Finding, discovering, inventing your vision of what you’re going to launch—that’s another matter entirely.

Quote 6: You can enter imagination as if were an infinitely fluid medium, or you can give it sharp lines and edges. You can balance left and right, or you can tilt it eighty degrees to the right. You can do anything you want to. You can put a million pink quarks into a bowl and turn the bowl upside down in the sky. It’s Tuesday or it’s Thursday. It’s raining. The sun is out. It’s raining and the sun is out.

You’re the king in that domain. You’re the one. If anyone ever suggested this would be a walk in the park, they were lying. On the other hand, you can supply yourself with great energies. You can fulfill your own destiny. And by destiny, I don’t mean something that is preordained. I’m talking about your recognition that you have power.

Quote 7: You can imagine a cosmos that is a forgery of, and a substitute for, the individual. In fact, historically, people have done that on a continuous basis. It’s called organized religion.

Contrary to the silliness that prevails in some quarters, the future is not written. It is wide open. It is a space that is waiting to be made. And no one can make it for you.

Quote 8: Imagination isn’t a system. It might invent systems, but it is non-material. It’s a capacity. It feels no compulsion to imitate reality. It makes realities. Its scope is limited only by a person’s imagining of how far imagination can go.

Here is the secret about time. There is always a gap, a discontinuance between the past and present. Why? Because you and your vision and action are that gap. It is always there, in the same way that a blank canvas is always there for the painter.

Quote 9: The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.

Whether this era is any different from others doesn’t matter. “Better or worse” doesn’t matter.

Quote 10: I’m not breaking a system into parts. I’m not trying to teach a person how to tie his shoes. I’m talking about the proliferation of endless new worlds, not seen through a porthole, but imagined and invented.

If you’re going to be the adventurer, if you’re going to develop a vision of your future, how much sense does it make to restrict, shrink, and lessen the vision? And how much sense would it make to build the vision and then just leave it there, like one of your possessions, on a shelf?

Quote 11: In educating people about a subject, you can break down information into palatable bits. When you do that with imagination, you disintegrate power.

What does waiting accomplish? What does postponement achieve?

Quote 12: Imagination is larger than any universe. It needs no sanction from the world or from other worlds. It is not some secret form of physics. It is not religion. It is not cosmology. It is not any one picture of anything.

exit from the matrix

In this sense, the universe, the cosmos is the last stop on a train route. It sits there. It doesn’t offer you a ride. It doesn’t collect a ticket. It doesn’t present a fount of wisdom. You do all that. That’s when the universe comes alive.

Quote 13: Feelings are considered to be internal human structure and architecture. But what you imagine and create are far more important—and the creative process radically and naturally changes feelings, as a side effect.

The same is true for the cells of the vehicle you’re inhabiting, your body. They respond as you create the vision of your life. That’s when they really come into their own.

Quote 14: It’s interesting to remember an earlier period when you had more imagination at your disposal. You might find an array of feelings you appreciate more than the feelings you’re feeling now. You might realize imagination stimulated those feelings and brought them into view. Imagination can go anywhere. It can especially go to places that don’t exist. But now they do.

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.

Imagination beyond the power of symbols

by Jon Rappoport

December 26, 2015

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“Here is the symbol,” the old wizard said. “It doesn’t matter what it means. It only matters that you take it. Then I’ll tell you what it means. I’ll keep telling you until you fall into a trance, and then I’ll be able to help you. I’ll be able to cure you of whatever you have.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

This article has to do with the individual, his consciousness, and imagination.

Symbols are, for the most part, group-tactics—assigned meanings designed to achieve certain effects on a mass level.

We could be talking about the arcane symbols of a secret society or even consumer objects, which are given meanings to impart the sensation of status. The new car, the necklace, the ring, the dress, the house.

For a passive mind, the world takes on its shape as symbols mark out space.

A more active mind can analyze and reject the meanings of symbols.

But there is another level the individual never reaches or understands unless he is deploying his imagination. Why? Because imagination invents its own spaces and meanings, against which symbols pale by comparison. A creative person can even invent his own symbols, imbue them with meanings—and then turn around and give them new meanings or destroy them. He isn’t only rejecting mass symbols; he’s inventing realities that go light years beyond them.

Of course, his inventions may strike passive minds as strange, possibly incomprehensible, because passive people define their space and their lives through conventional signs. They view all incursions or exceptions with suspicion.

I’ll take this further. Large numbers of people view the universe as something “extra-special,” and therefore they consider certain symbols “embedded” in it as sacred, permanent, intrinsic, and cosmically authoritative. Let them do that. Sooner or later they may wake up to the fact that the universe is a work of art. No one would be tempted to say a symbol found in a painting by Chagall is, by virtue of its presence on the canvas, a forever-thing with a forever-meaning. In the same way, no object in the universe can lay legitimate claim to some sort of eternal authority.

Consider the following thought-experiment: a person draws hundreds of symbols. He makes them up by the truckload. For each one, he concocts a meaning out of thin air. If he keeps this up long enough, it will begin to dawn on him that symbols and their meanings are arbitrary.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, this fact did, indeed, start to become obvious at the edge of consciousness. But then, with alarm at the implications (“I’m inventing my own realities, I can invent them”), there was a hasty retreat. People began to look for already-established symbols and their meanings. They opted to fit into one firm consensus or another. They went into hiding. They deserted their own imaginations. This was a crucial revisionism.

Orthodoxies which had been on their way out returned. Energy and conviction were pumped back into them. It was basically a show, a pretension, but the new adherents blinded themselves to that.

When it comes to the arcane symbols of secret societies, people are sucked into a trap. They buy these referents as inherently powerful—which is exactly what the “manufacturers” are hoping for. All the absurd trappings of the secret groups are concocted to achieve that effect.

In the 20th century, advertising agencies exploded with their brand of art. By associating products with feelings, sensations, and status, they made the products over into symbolic representations of “the good life.” At the same time, PR agencies rose to a position of unprecedented power. They made certain people, groups, and institutions into symbols of authority, truth, and goodness.

Television networks spent enormous amounts of money promoting and shaping elite news anchors as sculptures of believability. “You want our messenger of truth in your home every night.”

It’s easy to see that, in order for all these machinations to work, the individual and his consciousness of his own imagination needed to be downplayed. The very notion of the individual had to be minimized. The program was: mass symbols for a mass reality.

To the degree that people could be convinced to believe that symbols had inherent and permanent meaning, the program would establish itself as the prime mover in society.

Lessons were learned from the long-running show called organized religion. After all, the controllers of that game had been winning the war of symbols for centuries. They could invent, revise, and distort history to their hearts’ delight, and substitute their own referential stories.

Initially scorned and derided, the profession of psychoanalysis formed itself into its own religion with its own pregnant symbols: the Oedipus complex, transference, and so on. Except it flew the new banner: science—itself a sign of unimpeachable accuracy.

Its nasty stepchild, psychiatry came to invent some 300 symbols, which were called “mental disorders.” The trick was, all 300 required drugging. “We want to do more than sell our concepts. We want to put toxic chemicals in your body.”

On the political front, leaders discovered they could peddle a war quicker than a rabbit could run down its hole. With the aid of media, and a bedazzled public, foreign leaders could be transformed from nobodies into incarnations of evil overnight. Gear up the troops! Attack! These days, by manipulating a cluster of symbols all at once, the public will believe: a leader must be overthrown; the rebels and freedom-fighters who are trying to accomplish that must be supported; those rebels are evil and must be destroyed. Absurd contradictions? Senseless gibberish? Who cares?

A whole civilization can chew and swallow its own tail, turn upside down while singing a catchy tune, go to war, and juggle a few hundred trillion dollars of debt, and it all seems to “make sense,” as long as the citizenry accepts designated symbolic references.

Exit From the Matrix

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

Against this insanity stands the individual, with his untapped power of imagination, his capacity to invent realities and futures of his own choosing—if he will wake up to that truth.

The truth has always been there, not in the jingle-jangle jigsaw crazy world, but inside himself.

Here is a note I made as I began putting together my second collection, Exit From The Matrix:

“Society, civilization, the world may all try to legislate and propagandize against the individual and his power, but the individual can always rebel. However, he needs to remember that rejecting the hypnotic consensus is just the beginning. After he shakes off the tangles and webs, he needs to imagine something else, something different, something new, something close to his deepest desires, and he needs to build and create that in the world. This is the yes that follows after the no. This is the difference between despair and triumph.”

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.

Once when we were free

Once when we were free

by Jon Rappoport

December 24, 2012

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

We’re so much more sensible now. We don’t live our lives as much as we arrange them and organize them. B follows A. D follows C. We take our medicine and our shots because the doctor says so.

We’re careful, because accidents happen.

We don’t say what’s on our minds a lot of the time, because other people might pass that on, and who knows? We might get into trouble.

But once upon a time, when we were young, we were free. We didn’t take any shots, and when we got sick we recovered. We were stronger than kids are now. We didn’t ask for much protection and we weren’t given much, and we survived.

There was no talk about the needs of the group. When we went to school, we weren’t told about ways we could help others. That was something we learned at home. We weren’t taught about The Planet. Instead, we learned to mind our own business, and it wasn’t considered a crime.

When we played games, adults weren’t hovering or coaching every move we made. We found places to play on our own, and we figured it all out. There were winners and losers. There were no plastic trophies. We played one game, then another. We lost, we won. We competed. Losing wasn’t a tragedy.

There were no childhood “conditions” like ADHD or Bipolar, and we certainly didn’t take any brain drugs. The idea of a kid going to a psychiatrist would have been absurd.

People were who they were. They had lives. They had personalities. They had eccentricities, and we lived with that.

There was far less whispering and gossip. There were fewer cliques. Kids didn’t display their possessions like signs of their identity. A kid who did was ignored, even shunned.

Kids never acted like little adults. They didn’t dress like adults. They didn’t want to be fake adults.

Our parents didn’t consult us about what we wanted. We weren’t part of the decision-making process. They didn’t need us for that.

We weren’t “extra-special.” We weren’t delicate.

No one asked us about our feelings. If they had, we would have been confused. Feelings? What’s that? We were alive. We knew it. We didn’t need anything else.

We could spot liars a mile away. We could spot phonies from across town. We knew who the really crazy adults were, and we stayed away from them.

We didn’t need gadgets and machines to be happy. We only needed a place to play. If you wanted a spot to be alone, you found one, and you read a book.

There was no compulsion to “share.”

School wasn’t some kind of social laboratory or baby-sitting service. We were there to learn, and if we worked hard, we did. Teachers knew how to teach. The textbooks were adequate. Whether the books were new or old didn’t matter.

Kids weren’t taught how to be little victims.

Sex was a private issue. You were taught about that at home or not at all. You certainly didn’t learn about it in school. That would have been ridiculous.

Some of us remember being young, and now, we still have that North Star. We still don’t take our shots and medicines. We still don’t take every word a doctor says as coming from God. We still know losing isn’t a crime or an occasion for tragic theater.

We still know how to be alone. We still think gossip and cliques are for morons. We still feel free. We still want to live, and we do.

We still resent intrusion on our freedom, and we speak up and draw the line. We still like winning and competing. We still like achieving on our own.

We can spot self-styled messiahs at a hundred yards.

As kids, we lived in our imaginations, and we haven’t forgotten how. It’s part of who and what we are.

We aren’t bored every twelve seconds. We can find things to do.

We don’t need reassurances every day. We don’t need people hovering over us. We don’t need to whine and complain to get attention. We don’t need endless amounts of “support.”

We don’t need politicians who lie to us constantly, who pretend we’re stupid. We don’t need ideology shoved down our throats. Our ideology is freedom. We know what it is and what it feels like, and we know no one gives it to us. It’s ours to begin with. We can throw it away, but then that’s on us.

If two candidates are running for office, and we don’t like either one, we don’t vote. We don’t need to think about that very hard. It’s obvious. Two idiots, two criminals? Forget it. Walk away.

We don’t fawn, we don’t get in other people’s way. We don’t think “children are the future.” Every generation is a new generation. It always has been. We don’t need to inject some special doctrine to pump up children. We remember what being a child is. That’s enough.

When we were kids, there was no exaggerated sense of loyalty. We were independent. Now, we see what can be accomplished in the name of obligation, group-cohesion, and loyalty: crimes; imperial wars; destruction of natural rights.

It didn’t take a village to raise a kid when we were young, and it doesn’t take one now. That’s all propaganda. It panders to people who are afraid to be what they are, who are afraid to stand up for themselves.

We don’t feel it’s our duty to cure every ill in the world. But it goes a lot further than that. We can see what that kind of indoctrination creates. It creates the perception of endless numbers of helpless victims. And once that’s firmly entrenched, then magically, the endless parade of victims appears, ready-made. When some needs have been met, that’s never enough, so other needs are born. The lowest form of hustlers sell those needs from here to the sky and beyond. They make no distinction between people who really can use help and those who are just on the make.

We didn’t grow up that way. We don’t fall for the con now.

When we were kids, the number of friends we had didn’t matter. We didn’t keep score. Nobody kept track of the count. That would have been recognized in a second as a form of insanity.

As kids, we didn’t admire people simply because other people admired them. That was an unknown standard.

We were alive. That was enough. We were free. That was enough.

It still is.

exit from the matrix

When we were young, we had incredible dreams. We imagined the dreams and imagined accomplishing them. Some of us still do. Some of us still work in that direction. We haven’t given up the ghost just because the world is mad.

The world needs to learn what we know. We don’t need to learn what the world has been brainwashed into believing.

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.