KINGS WITHOUT SUBJECTS

 

KINGS WITHOUT SUBJECTS

 

JUNE 21, 2011. Different emails are coming in these days. Artists, inventors, innovators. People who are quite serious about magic.

 

They are kings without subjects, because they just CREATE. They don’t rule, and they don’t want to. They know all about that ludicrous arrangement. The power of these kings without subjects exceeds anything the most venal dictator can muster, even if the fact isn’t immediately apparent.

 

These true kings have walked out on the massive self-defeating stage play. Gone, gone.

 

I continue to return to the subject of MEANING. What means something and how does it mean something and who decides what it means and how narrow and locked-in does meaning have to be before it makes sense to the bulk of humanity—and what training has that bulk received that makes meaning such a tight and close passageway? And why is this important?

 

Every society needs shared meaning, but the inevitable outcome is the closing of the noose and the polishing and trimming of ideas and words until they are mere nubs of what they could be.

 

Imagination goes in the opposite direction.

 

It has no conditioning. It isn’t pre-programmed. It doesn’t bow down to any central authority.

 

Kings with subjects require a chained vocabulary and troops to back it up.

 

The artist throws that off and doesn’t look back, because he’s already out ahead of it. He’s already digested the common language and has embarked on a journey that goes light years beyond it. Which is where magic is.

 

Sometimes he think he should mollify and reduce his personal revolution because he has invented meanings that outstrip the consensus by so much. But he learns this is not the operating principle. He needs to keep going, he needs to improvise even more intensely.

 

The world is busy enforcing and adjusting and tempering its basic hallucination of consensus. Eventually, this leads to humanity as an ant colony. It may be a good ant colony, with specialists trained to within an inch of their lives, carrying packages here and there. But no matter how many explanations are given to bolster the existence and necessity of the colony, no matter how much tinkering is done, the result is inevitable. A living machine.

 

And an explosion of buried rage will be, in the long run, ineffective.

 

For those who’ve seen the north star of imagination, it was never a real option.

 

Think about this. Those old alchemists who were trying to transmute consciousness into a much larger version of itself…what were they dealing with? Well, they had concepts of elements—earth, air, fire, water—and they had this thing called Quintessence, which they never quite identified. They had the notion of transformation of elements, and they had the idea that these elements, in some form or another, existed in consciousness, like archetypes. Suppose…these notions had never been thought of before? Pretend. Suppose these notions of elements and Quintessence and so on had never been thought of by anyone before the alchemists. They invented these ideas to help them in their quest.

 

But, people say, that’s impossible. The thoughts and ideas had to come from somewhere. Somewhere earlier. That’s always the case. Or: there’s a kind of pattern of meaning that already exists, and the alchemists were tapping into the pattern.

 

But suppose that wasn’t the case. These alchemists just cooked up the ideas out of nothing.

 

They invented the ideas and they invented their meaning.

 

What I’m getting at here is that magic needs new meaning. Brand new. Yet most people think it’s an ancient lost art, and we have dig down and recover it. It’s already there. It has to be unearthed.

 

This is—taken to an extreme—the ant colony argument. The pattern of the colony and the history of colonies…they are THERE. They just need to be discovered and refined and adjusted and streamlined. The perfect colony awaits us. We need to lay out the MEANING on a table and look at it and put it under a microscope and trace it. Then we’ll know.

 

This is false.

 

Every artist has a moment when he realizes this, when he realizes he is inventing meaning that has never been there before.

 

He’s not merely adding a little twist to an already existing meaning.

 

He’s inventing meanings, and they are not packed-in and perfect. They burgeon with implications.

 

This is also the road of magic.

 

Society does not believe in magic. Society has no truck with magic. Society wouldn’t know magic if it was standing in the middle of the street. Society knows organization.

 

At some point, organization becomes coercion. This force, organization, explains itself to the populace, and the majority accepts the explanation—even if the force is harmful and destructive. This is why I write about the medical cartel. Few people actually recognize the degree of poisoning that is going on. From the drugs. Few people recognize that because they are wide-awake hypnotized…they have bought the explanations. They pride themselves on being able to recite the explanations. They pressure family and friends to go along with the system.

 

This is just one example of what happens when MEANING becomes a shared and tight territory.

 

Magic is something else, something entirely different.

 

The caterpillar spins a cocoon and then, later, comes out of that chrysalis of old discarded meaning into a space where sheer creation and improvisation and invention are the cardinal facts of existence.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

HISTORY, SCIENCE, AND MAGIC

 

HISTORY, SCIENCE, AND MAGIC

 

JUNE 21, 2011. You can take any object, event, or structure and look at it as the end result of a cause-and-effect relationship, or you can see it as a spontaneous creation in this very moment.

 

The first way is a pattern that gives rise to societies.

 

This first approach also becomes an investigation that has no end or conclusion. Of course, that fact has never stopped anyone.

 

Cause and effect investigations (history, science) satisfy the user that some sort of progression exists, an emerging exists, a fruitful tree of knowledge exists—and why not? It’s a style, a fashion, a long-running point of view. It has payoffs, once you assume you are in a continuum of great value. In a real sense, historians and scientists are actors. They know how to improvise inside a continuum and dredge up new discoveries. That’s the style of an historian, a scientist. And if such a person goes through a number of struggles and false starts to arrive at a gem of understanding, that, too, is part of the role. It works. To say Einstein was an improviser would be taken as an affront by most physicists, but so be it.

 

To see an object, structure, or event as a spontaneous creation of this very moment, however, is something else again. This perception has vastly different “production values.” For example, the pen sitting on your desk ceases to be a solid that is born out of the causative action of tiny particles in motion. Instead, it is a vivid and instantaneous presence which has no reference to time.

 

It could just as easily not exist as exist. Right now.

 

There is a flexibility about it, in that sense.

 

The hard line between either and or, between yes and no, disintegrates.

 

There is something wavering about it. And that something has to do with you, not the object. A clue is being passed to you.

 

YOU COULD CREATE THIS THING.

 

You could do this spontaneously, instantly. You could also make the pen on the table vanish.

 

What seems like a beautifully elastic holiday, during those seconds or minutes or hours when you are in the present moment, when nothing else matters, has another layer. An upper edge.

 

Which is:

 

You could create that space and time. You could create. You could imagine something else entirely. You could improvise, on the spot, other spaces and times. You could see through the stage flats of present continuum-reality into a silence.

 

This is one of the things I mean when I say the road of magic is the road of art.

 

FUTURE is an infinity of infinite possibilities. Or to look at it from another angle, imagination is the imagining of imagination.

 

No limits.

 

Every significant myth propagated by humans has a submerged dimension, and its translation opens up future, imagination, and the creation of realities beyond this continuum. For instance, each sign of the Zodiac—which itself is a time wheel—finally reveals a preoccupation with altering the ordinary sense of time. Aries stands in a vessel whose prow is out ahead of cause-and-effect, Taurus launches a frontal campaign against the tightly held assumptions about continuum, etc. So in a more profound sense, the Zodiac is not about what will happen to you; it is about what you will do with time.

 

From this perspective, the religious adoration laid at the feet of the universe is nothing more than a distraction from making magic.

 

The alchemists had an inkling about all of this. They wobbled on the edge of realizing that Quintessence, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir, was imagination.

 

And although modern science departed from this path, there is another kind of possible science that flows from what I’m illustrating. It is a vastly powerful subjective approach, whereby machines and devices and technologies are invented that operate FOR THE INVENTOR and for the inventor alone.

 

He is no longer trying to unearth what is possible within the constraints of the so-called objective continuum. He is building vehicles for himself. Success in this endeavor has implications beyond his personal use…but the inventor and his universe certainly expand beyond their former conception with each breakthrough.

 

One message from this: the universe we all pay lip service to, the jointly adored corporation, can transfigure and thereafter function as a service provider to the scientist of imagination. It can feed into his personal theater. It can eagerly do so, as if it has waiting for such a moment to show its deeper aspect.

 

Was Tesla working along this line? Regardless, his myth, like all myths, suggests such a welcome prospect.

 

If we had 100,000 truly subjective scientists on this planet, brilliant and tireless improvisers, we would see changes in the continuum that would be as stimulating as watching fish walk out of the sea. The energies liberated in the process would consign the precious Law of Conservation to a shelf in a small-town museum of curios.

 

Stop messing around with that! You’re the only one who think it’s real!”

 

Beautiful. That’s exactly what I’m aiming for. But to the extreme. And by the way, when I get extreme enough, you’ll experience quite a surprise.”

 

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

William Blake

 

Rather than accepting the proposition that the observer changes what he’s observing—a passive formulation—opt for this: the inventor changes what he invents. He spontaneously accommodates it to himself. In this radical sort of science, a different theme is expressed.

 

Actually, it turns out that the subjective and objective categories of experience contain shades of meaning. A scientist can range back and forth between them, discovering and inventing, inventing and discovering, taking apart physical reality, imparting something new to physical reality, back and forth, without thinking about it. This is what the alchemists were exploring. To say they made a few contributions to the emerging “real” science is to miss the point.

 

In the end, it’s all imagination.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUPREME COURT UNDER RADAR

 

SUPREME COURT DECISION UNDER THE RADAR

 

IN A MEDICAL DICTATORSHIP

 

JUNE 9, 2011. It happened in February. The media gave it brief attention and moved on.

 

The US Supreme Court decided that parents whose children are severely damaged by vaccines can’t sue the manufacturer.

 

The case was Bruesewitz v. Wyeth. In 1992, Hannah Bruesewitz, six months old, had a hundred seizures after receiving the DPT vaccine. She was never the same.

 

Her parents tried to sue the manufacturer, Wyeth, but there was already a federal law on the books which stated that the only recourse was through the government’s labyrinthine Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

 

Appeals were lodged, and the case finally wound up the Supreme Court’s lap. The Court essentially ruled that no suit can be brought against a manufacturer for “design flaws” in the vaccine, because the architecture of a vaccine implies there will be “unavoidable adverse effects.” It’s a fact of life.

 

This decision sets a new practical standard for crime without punishment. Unless the plaintiff can show that an alternative design of a vaccine would have eliminated the adverse effect, without diminishing the “positive benefit” of the vaccine, it’s a no-go.

 

Aside from derailing all attempts to sue vaccine companies based on design shortcomings, this Supreme Court decision opens the door to a spillover in the entire arena of pharmaceutical drugs. Today, vaccines. Tomorrow, drugs.

 

It can now easily be argued that the design of any drug delivers inherent and unavoidable harm to some patients.

 

And clearly, the drug companies know they can make this case.

 

So what could they do? Copy the vaccine-compensation system created by the government. You apply for a hearing, you enter a wilderness of red tape, mostly you lose, and when you win, the payout is miniscule compared with the potential judgment a court could award. No punitive damages. The $$ paid out in government compensation are funded by a tax bump on the price of all drugs sold in the US.

 

The government protects the drug companies all the way down the line.

 

A fundamental right to justice is erased.

 

Years from now, people may remember Bruesewitz v. Wyeth as the watershed moment, when the whole system took a universally visible turn to into overt criminality.

 

Yes, there were 50,000 heart attacks, but the drug has helped many people. And there was no way to design it in a way that would have avoided these unfortunate effects without destroying its benefits. If you think another design was possible, prove it.”

 

Well, I don’t have the $50 million I’d need to prove it.”

 

Your problem, not ours.”

 

As the federal government and state governments try to close the door on parents seeking to opt out of vaccinating their children, we may also be looking at the day when official policy and law render the following reality:

 

You are forced to accept a product (vaccine) manufactured by a company. If the product injures or kills you or your child, you can’t take legal action against the company. You can only appeal to the government for compensation.

 

Finally, keep this in mind. The 1986 law which the Supreme Court upheld in its recent decision, the law that exempts vaccine companies from financial liability, made it possible then, and makes it even more possible now, since the Supremes have spoken with finality, to guarantee that epidemics will be profitable enterprises.

 

Did you get that?

 

All the phony epidemics that I’ve been documenting for some years now? West Nile, SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu? All those duds? They wouldn’t have been possible to launch as PR fabrications, unless the vaccine companies could make and sell the vaccines that were touted as sure-fire prevention.

 

Well, in 1986, those companies went to the federal government and struck a deal, based on the threat that they (the companies) were going to get out of the vaccine manufacturing business, because the successful law suits (for harm, for injury, for death) were draining them of money.

 

The deal was inked. A law would be rammed through to protect these companies from major financial exposure. And thus the way was cleared for the ensuing wave of “epidemics.”

 

Everybody would win, except the public. The vaccine companies would ring up huge profits, there would be no law suits, and the government would have another tool for frightening the population and increasing its level of control.

 

Based on nothing. Based on the invention of the idea of “killer germs on the loose everywhere”–which is what you see when you go to the movies and sit in the dark and eat popcorn.

 

Yes, I bring you news you won’t find elsewhere.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

PSYCHIATRIC POPULATION CONTROL

 

PSYCHIATRIC POPULATION CONTROL

 

JUNE 22, 2011. This article is being sent out as a press release to media outlets, indicating that I’m available for interviews on the subject. If you would like to pitch in, feel free to distribute it far and wide.

 

A recent development has highlighted the trend of authoritarian psychiatric invasions into everyday life.

 

A new book has revealed that the diagnosis of “bipolar disease” among American children is a scientific fraud and a precursor to the administration of highly dangerous drugs.

 

Psychiatrist Stuart Kaplan, a professor at Penn State College of Medicine, has written an article for the June 20th issue of Newsweek, based on his book, YOUR CHILD DOES NOT HAVE BIPOLAR DISORDER: HOW BAD SCIENCE AND GOOD PR CREATED THE DIAGNOSIS.

 

Kaplan states that, in 1995, there were fewer than 20,000 outpatient visits for pediatric bipolar disorder in the US. As of 2003, that number had swelled to a mind-boggling 800,000.

 

And yet there is no recognized psychiatric category called “pediatric bipolar disorder.”

 

But the publication of a 2002 best seller, The Bipolar Child, followed by wall to wall media coverage—Oprah, Time, 20/20, Dan Rather—took the country by storm.

 

Worse yet is the treatment regimen for children stemming from this false diagnosis. Two major drugs: Lithium and Valproate.

 

Adverse effects of Valproate include:

 

acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;

 

life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;

 

brain damage.

 

Adverse effects of Lithium include:

 

intercranial pressure leading to blindness;

 

peripheral circulatory collapse;

 

stupor and coma.

 

Bipolar disorder has been diagnosed in children as young as two.

 

But this is not the first time an arbitrary psychiatric diagnosis has been made on children (or adults), then leading to the administration of highly dangerous drugs.

 

Mr. Rappoport is prepared to speak extensively about ADHD and Ritalin, and depression and Prozac (Paxil, Zoloft). Those two scenarios are strikingly similar to pediatric bipolar disorder.

 

Two vital facts:

 

In the years 2006-2008, a staggering 7.6% of American children were diagnosed with ADHD. (Source: Pediatrics, May 23, 2011)

 

27 million Americans are taking antidepressants. (Source: Archivesof General Psychiatry, 8/4/2009)

 

In what sense is all this population control? When you move in on the mind and make arbitrary diagnoses and follow up with highly toxic drugs, you are essentially waging war on the brain. These figures should indicate the scope of that ever-expanding war.

 

Call it profit-seeking, call it pseudo-science, call it incompetence. There are many ways to frame the issue. But the effects are no different from what happens on a battlefield. Great and lasting damage. And professional ignorance is no excuse, because these facts are out in the open, for anyone to examine.

 

Over the last 35 years, Jon Rappoport has gained a reputation as one of the most relentless medical investigative reporters in the world. Nominated early in his career for a Pulitzer Prize, Jon has written for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magizines in the US and Europe. His is currently the associate producer on a film in progress, American Addict, detailing the effects of pharmaceuticals on the US population.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

ZENO’S PARADOX

 

ZENO’S PARADOX

 

JUNE 18, 2011. Zeno was a very clever Greek philosopher who offered proofs that time and space are continuous and can’t be broken up into segments. An attempt to do so would lead one to the absurd conclusion that traversing any distance, large or small, is impossible.

 

I use that as a metaphor to move in the opposite direction: any group activity, in the long run, diminishes the energy, vision, and creative power of its individual members. Whereas it might seem, by addition, that the sum of the strengths of the individuals would make the group more effective and powerful, the opposite is true.

 

In the early 1960s, through my friend, Richard Jenkins, an extraordinary healer, I was asked to sit in with a small group in New York. These people were, at the time, doing unusual things: acupuncture; psychic work, energy-center release, and alchemical compounding of minerals. Each person had his own practice.

 

The group decided to take on the case of local diplomat who was having severe arthritis problems. After much discussion, it was agreed to try to help him with collective action. A number of sessions were done. The patient sat in his bedroom in Manhattan while, gathered around him, the four members of the group transmitted energies to him.

 

After a month, no noticeable changes were observed.

 

New discussions followed. Confusion and disagreement began to set in. Finally, the acupuncturist said, “You know, working by myself, I’m sure I could do more for the patient than all of us together.” The other three practitioners agreed. “What are we doing?” said one of them. “We’re compromising ourselves. We’re unconsciously trying to tune our energies to each other because we think that’ ll be more powerful. But it’s not true. We’re becoming fools.”

 

When I went back to Jenkins and told him what had happened, he shook his head. “Temporary insanity,” he said. “I’ve seen it lots of times. This group thing. Who said the group is dominant?”

 

Consider a group myth about groups, about the collective. It starts here, from a seed: the observer affects what is observed. That idea comes from the so-called Indeterminacy Principle—which was about something quite limited.

 

Heisenberg, its author, stated that you couldn’t measure the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. If you shined a light (a photon) on the electron to measure it, depending on the characteristics of the photon, you could either determine the electron’s position or its momentum, but not both.

 

This was eventually taken to mean that the observer, the human observer, was somehow affecting what was observed. And it was extrapolated further to indicate that any observer of anything affects that thing. And it was taken still further to mean that consciousness affects matter and energy. This last statement, which I believe to be true, isn’t, however, derived from the Indeterminacy Principle.

 

To trace a bit more cultural history, the next thing that was made out of Indeterminacy was: we’re really talking about mass consciousness affecting matter and energy—not individual consciousness. Because the world is all about the group, not the individual.

 

Now in fact, Dean Radin and others have done some experiments to show that random number generators, sitting in various locations around the world, continuously spitting out strings of numbers, suddenly “alter the shape of their randomness” just prior to major events, such as 9/11. This is inferred to signify that mass consciousness seems to have undergone a pre-cognitive insight—which physically alters the mass and energy of those number-generator devices.

 

But don’t expect such outcomes to be permanent.

 

Mass consciousness making changes or being affected by the changes—the operative word is, in either case, GROUP. And that spells decay in my book. The group always disintegrates into something that considers the individual less than he really is. Going down that road sooner or later reinforces that concept.

 

And if we want a good metaphor and multiplier for Quantum Entanglement in the human sphere, it is the entangling of the individual in group goals. This sharing can perhaps happen at the speed of light or even faster, but why should humans behave like quanta? In my experience, something untoward always happens: the most attractive ideas turn into hot grease. People do some odd things when they join up. They filter their dreams through a collective lens, and this alone begins to corrode what would otherwise be their highest aspirations.

 

How can admirable ideals and best intentions wind up heading toward a swamp? Involve a group. Bring on board people who are “admirable and best,” and watch what happens after a while. They know, at some level, that they’re changing their own energies and creative impulses, in order to fit an agenda.

 

It may be the best agenda ever conceived, but as time passes, the individuals react like minerals with a diminishing half-life.

 

And again, whatever change they may render comes undone.

 

It’s worth noting that all lab experiments testing whether paranormal abilities exist are done with groups of volunteers, whose efforts are tallied as a collective statistic matched against the law of probability—itself a group concept.

 

I have no ax to grind with groups who try to achieve paranormal aims. I simply point out that, finally, the individual has more power than the group. There can be no science behind such an assertion, because science defines itself in terms of groups and repeatability.

 

This is a good thing. It leaves the territory wide open.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

THE POINT AT THE END OF A METAPHOR

 

FROM “THE MAGICIAN AWAKES”

 

THE POINT AT THE END OF A METAPHOR

 

Most people have no idea how a magician would operate. They look at old images and a few stereotypes, like costumes in a closet. A magician is a secret because people are blind to him and want to be blind to him. Being blind is an art form. It has rules; where to look and where not to look. What to see, what to miss. Being blind is a first cousin to android-ship, a condition many people would take pride in, if they could figure out how to slip into it. The fairy tale, for example, of genetic enhancement is an attraction. It appears to endow a human without him having to move one inch to the left or the right. He just lies there and receives the sacrament. And then confusions evaporate. Problems dissolve. He can do what he can do, and he doesn’t have to think about it. He doesn’t even have to put it on like a glove. It operates from inside him, moving him in explicit directions, into situations where he can display his wares. This is what most people think of as magicianship.

 

JUNE 19, 2011. People often are impaled by a metaphor.

 

They hang on the end of it, they dangle there. They’re swinging back and forth between something old and something changed, but they don’t feel that movement.

 

They look at the right hand, but they don’t see the left hand of possibility. They’ve never learned about possibility.

 

A bottle is a bottle until it becomes a prism, and then it is just and only the new thing.

 

If it was suggested that being able to carry around a sleek little case that gives him the ability to talk to another person a few thousand miles away is enough, that he never has to open the case, he would stare through the suggestion, as if it were invisible.

 

And suppose, just suppose that somewhere there existed a civilization whose language was nothing but possibilities. If you put him there, he would behave as if he were in an invisible place.

 

He might look for visible people who could help him set fires and burn down the invisibility. Or he would pray.

 

Perhaps after a thousand years, he would hear his first word there. And then he might have a thought, the sort of thought he’d never had before.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLOSED VERSUS OPEN SYSTEMS

 

CLOSED VERSUS OPEN SYSTEMS

 

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human

 

JUNE 18, 2011. There is a trick in the physical and social sciences. It can get a professional grant money and promotion and something to chew on for 30 or 40 years.

 

Here it is: invent a category that is basically useless, convince everyone it’s real, and then argue about its definition forever.

 

Take the term “system.” When you boil it down, it means a piece of equipment or a bunch of ideas that fit neatly together and admit nothing from the outside. It’s a fortress with a moat and slavering dogs and troops on the turrets.

 

But then, to get cute, you introduce the notion that a system could, somehow, be closed or open. Which is like saying a washing machine could possibly be a nectarine. Now you’ve set the stage for 10,000 articles in professional journals that will debate open versus closed.

 

The concept of an open system is actually surrealism.

 

The fortress was buttoned up tight, but then time travelers broke through the sky and there they were, in the throne room. We thought the system was closed, but it wasn’t.”

 

How many pins can dance on the head of an angel?

 

On the other hand, we have this: “During the Renaissance, painters developed a system of perspective.”

 

Actually, they didn’t. They developed some rules. Guidelines.

 

If a system is anything, it’s self-referring. Formal logic, for example. A machine. You set up terms and their definitions, you set up operations and their descriptions, and then you let the machine run. And it always runs the same way because that’s how you built it. And if some little piece of it suddenly works in a new way, you just say, “Well, that’s not logic. That’s a different animal. Shoot it.”

 

A system is like a dream that always play out the same. Start to finish.

 

Closed? Open? Balderdash.

 

Moving on—an artist is never doing a system.

 

He’s often doing anti-system on purpose, breaking apart a cluster of habits people have gotten used to.

 

A robot would be a system. He can perform 100000000000 operations and each one is specific and bounded. And that’s all he can do, no matter how you dress him up.

 

People try to teach magic as if it were a system, when it isn’t. They cite rules and rituals and symbols. If that’s magic, a spider can fly a jet plane.

 

But people who get involved in magic don’t want to admit they don’t really have a system, because that would be tantamount to admitting past practices shrouded in the mists of history are irrelevant. Which would put them in the present moment, needing to figure out what magic really IS. Right now.

 

You could say Tic-tac-toe is a system, because you can figure out all the ways to win or tie, depending on who moves first. But Tic-tac-toe isn’t magic. It’s a child’s game.

 

The universe—is that a system? It’s a juicy question for debate. You can drag in the Indeterminacy Principle, and Quantum Entanglement, and all sorts of interesting notions. But when all is said and done, what you have left is this: the universe is a great big IS. It’s the cardinal IS. It’s the IS circus under the big tent. It rings all bells as REALITY. Universe is reality. So it doesn’t really matter whether you call it open or closed.

 

And magic is not about IS.

 

It’s not about universe.

 

It’s about proliferating new realities. Tons of them.

 

How many tons? Let me guess. 1000000000000000000000 tons. If you did that much proliferating, then you would see universe in a quite different way, and you would be able to affect it as if it were a lump of wet taffy.

 

And THAT ain’t system.

 

Again, moving on—magic runs on desire. You desire X, you want to materialize it. But now, let’s think on the far edge of that assumption. How many IS’s do you want to materialize before you begin to get tired of the whole business? How many wishes do you want the genie to fulfill before you say stop?

 

How heavy and deep is your fixation on exactly what you want and desire? How fast could it theoretically be satisfied?

 

There are a whole lot of two-and-three wish people in this world. A whole lot of five-and-ten wish people. Give them what they want and they’re done. They’re as cooked as a player who just won the lottery.

 

And that’s because they’ve made desire into a kind of system. It’s a sort of closed network. It’s tight. And you walk in there and give them what they want and boom, they’re done. They’ve really got nowhere to go after that. Their energy peters out.

 

This is interesting—because it suggests—and you might want to chew on this for a while—that there is another version of desire that isn’t so precise, isn’t so defined, isn’t so definite…and if that is so, we are looking at desire as possibility. Not in the sense of “I see all the possibilities,” but in the sense of implication, metaphor, suggestion, open-ended X.

 

People tend to recoil from this. They want the Caddy with the big fins, and they want it now. They want the prettier fingernails, the new nose, the butt implants, and the island in the Pacific with the yacht.

 

At least that’s what they think, because they don’t have them, and they tend to define their future in those terms. So they’re yearning and longing and drooling.

 

But what if there is a whole other space, a whole other future that isn’t so simple? And what if its uncertain shape makes it even more attractive?

 

What if the poem you’ve read a hundred times, the one you never quite understood, is the one you admire the most? The one that sends your mind and imagination off in so many directions.

 

And what if this has something to do with what magic is really all about, or is a kind of magic that normally escapes attention? What if magic can be like this, can be a road with thousands of forks that take you into undiscovered territory you’ve never dreamed of before?

 

What then?

 

What if our programmed sense of what reality is, the precision and the definition and the thing-ness, is a diversion from what, underneath it all, we want?

 

What if the most subtle illusion about reality isn’t all the things themselves laid out end to end across the universe, but instead is the conviction that reality is an absolute IS separated from a theoretical ISN’T?

 

What if trying to meld the IS and ISN’T in a harmonious Yin-Yang circle is just another dead-end illusion?

 

What if that keyboard on your computer, which is so THERE on your desk, is only one KIND of thereness? And another kind of thereness is implication-not-fully-realized…and although you’ve always been quite sure you want the THERE of that keyboard and the yacht and the villa, you also want the implication-not-fully-realized…and you want it so much that it would fulfill the requirement of magic?

 

In other words, for all this time, desire has been, for you, a kind of closed system that is leak-proof and bulletproof, and that’s why it has remained unfulfilled.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

WHAT ARTISTS TELL THEMSELVES

 

WHAT ARTISTS TELL THEMSELVES

 

JUNE 18, 2011. There is an element of story in what any artist creates, but there is also a story artists tell themselves about their their work, their effort, their lives—and in this latter venue, the tale is often self-defeating or self-limiting.

 

In other words, in work the possibilities are unlimited, but that lesson doesn’t cross over. Which is a rather extraordinary thing when you think about it.

 

On the one hand, the artist is taking a rocket ship to another galaxy, but then he’s also out on a lake rowing in a leaky boat with an oar that’s splintering and falling apart.

 

Art should be about lifting all boats.

 

Art and life weren’t meant to be separated. Art should infiltrate the spirit of the artist’s life and transform it.

 

It’s not my intention to be pollyannish about this. Believe me, I understand all too well the day-to-day exigencies. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, the artist has to take a clue from his own work and imagination.

 

The myth of the suffering artist started out as a story. And the artist has to see it on that level. What he invents in his work has all the characteristics of transferability. The artist’s work will naturally spread to his life if he lets it.

 

This is how you come to magic.

 

Basically, the artist is undefeatable. He already has the consciousness of immortality in his grasp.

 

It may take some time to temper that blade, but it happens.

 

However, the process isn’t merely passive. It has to do with the him continuing his work over time.

 

It has to do with his ability to reject belief in a limiting and self-defeating myth.

 

Once you drink from the cup of your imagination, the usual excuses ring hollow. That’s the price you pay for being an artist.

 

The cost may seem steep, but it’s actually the doorway to another kind of perception. You may not have realized it, but there it is.

 

The story the world is now telling itself has everything to do with the drama of being a victim, in all ways, on all fronts. It is intensifying. You can be part of it, a player on that stage, or you can walk away and carry on with your self-created destiny as an artist. It’s a naked choice, and no amount of dressing it up will change that.

 

I fully understand, when I write about imagination, creating, and magic, that I’m speaking to people who are out there in no group—they’re lights of their own in the world. They conform to no demographic or ideology. They aren’t groupable in any category. They are individuals. That suits me. That’s what I’m aiming for.

 

You can’t spoon-feed what I’m writing about. You can’t put a rope around the artist’s neck and lead him to water. You can’t even get him in the vicinity of the pond. It either clicks or it doesn’t.

 

Everyone, and especially the artist, has the impenetrable freedom to live a life according to his own dictates. If that means magic, so be it. If that means a sense of misery or boredom, so be it. Those are the rules.

 

Over the course of the last 40 years, I’ve had many artists explain to me how their lives can’t be any different than they are. I sympathize to a degree, because I like artists. But I never buy it. And never will.

 

I draw a line in the sand. That’s my rule.

 

An artist, who is well aware of the power of imagination, can walk away from it and pretend that, “in real life,” it is suddenly of no value…he can do that, but at some level he knows it’s a bizarre move.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

JON DOES IT FOR FREE!

 

JON DOES IT FOR FREE

 

AND HERE IT IS

 

JUNE 17, 2011. This is for people who’ve been reading my articles about imagination/magic and know what they’re getting at.

 

I had an idea last week and it’s coming to fruition. You may be interested.

 

I’m doing a conference call in a week or so, with a group, about magic. This group is very interested in the subject.. Well, they’re not exactly a group. They’re quite definitely individuals who are coming together for the purpose of this conference call. It’ll last a little over an hour.

 

So…you can put together one of your own.

 

No charge. I’m doing it for free.

 

I’ll be there.

 

There are a few conditions.

 

You set up the call with one of the free online services. You do this efficiently. No muss, no fuss.

 

You bring people to the table who are serious about magic. At least five people. A hundred if you want to. When I say “serious about magic/imagination,” I mean they should be open to the subject and definitely interested in it.

 

Understand, this won’t be me trying to break down my approach into handy tidbits. Get it? I’ll talk straight from the shoulder. No holds barred.

 

If you decide to make it happen, email me at:

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

On the call, I’ll talk about magic. Period. I do this in many different ways, and on that night, I’ll do it again. It’s fresh every time.

 

Will I take questions on the call? Yes, a few. I’ll talk for about an hour and then answer a few questions.

 

That’s my offer.

 

I look forward to this project.

 

Remember, one more time: on the call I won’t be pulling any punches. I’ll be going as far out as magic is. Which is far.

 

This is probably, as they say, a limited time offer, so if you want it, dig in!

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAGIC CREATES REALITY

 

MAGIC CREATES REALITY

 

JUNE 16, 2011. The religious devotees of science pretend they understand the processes that underlie reality. But when it comes to fathoming the fact that existence exists, they abandon the battlefield.

 

Approaching existence itself is one of the great lessons, because you come to understand that it is the tree falling in the forest, and without consciousness (which is non-material), existence becomes a fading nothing.

 

Existence is a production of magic.

 

Magic belongs to the individual.

 

Magic is imagination with power, great power.

 

And here is a bugaboo of modern society: INDIVIDUAL POWER.

 

Those little armies of termites who believe it is their mission in life to define what is correct and acceptable and moral and permissible and inescapable—they nibble and nibble and labor on behalf of the collective, the group.

 

Whereas, magic not only makes reality, it turns it on its head when it becomes nothing more than a consensual puppet show.

 

Very early in the 20th century, an art revolution called surrealism reared its head. It was born out of sheer boredom. But it is still in its nascent stages, because people are very, very stubborn about giving up their massive addiction to ordinary reality, serial time, and and juvenile rote versions of symmetry, harmony, and perfection.

 

In a primal sense, ordinary reality is a trance. It is especially a trance, because people use it to explain why they themselves don’t create/imagine radically different alternatives.

 

Surrealism explodes the consensus. It juxtaposes things that wouldn’t otherwise go together in a million years, and its messages aren’t literal. Surrealism doesn’t offer solutions to problems.

 

If approached head-on, surrealism provides a tremendous stimulus to create and imagine. It liberates imagination.

 

My work in the area of magic has taken three roads. One, describing what magic really is. Two, stimulating people to use their own imaginations. And three, in my audio seminars, providing exercises that lead you further and further into the living of real magic.

 

There are people in this world who want to partake of these three aspects.

 

There are also people who want to feel inspired, but don’t want to budge from their unadventurous lives. They want a little electricity on their marshmallow islands. A little kick. A little reminder about what could happen—the sort of thing you might get from a movie. For a few minutes.

 

After interviewing Clay Jenkinson last week on my radio show (and it was a very interesting conversation as he performed the role of Thomas Jefferson), I confirmed my conclusion that ALL politics, in the long run, ends up being about the group. That’s the bottom line. Whereas, I’m interested in the INDIVIDUAL, who is a source of, yes, life, existence, perception…and above all, imagination and creating and magic.

 

My work is not about routine or system. It’s not about ruminating on what might be. It’s not about the invention of fairy tales to explain why power should be limited.

 

It’s not about religious myths or the past.

 

There is an extraordinary amount of non-sense afloat on this planet, and there are very large numbers of people who spend their time promoting it. They promote it as good, necessary, and correct. If you want to understanding brainwashing and mind control, this is the place to start—with popular pictures of reality.

 

But knowing these are false pictures is merely the first step, and the celebration and the congratulations should be brief, quite brief. Because the next step is deciding what you want to create, and creating it.

 

ACTION.

 

Taken with POWER.

 

No hand wringing, no whining, no complaining, no excusing.

 

Whining is now a major industry, rivaling media and government and mega-corporate structures in size and scope. It’s meant to be huge, because a titanic amount of propaganda goes into encouraging it.

 

Magic, on the other hand, is the individual cut loose from all this.

 

Magic is IMAGINATION IN ACTION.

 

In that sense, a horse galloping across a tomato is more important than a stone building on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street.

 

A magician wants magic, and then he wants more magic. He doesn’t only want to make a better future. “A better future” all too often is translated down into cliches that have no bark or bite left in them. They’re dried stuffed products of taxidermy. They require no courage, no daring.

 

Is that all we were born for?

 

I think we were born for making art, however you want to define that.

 

Years ago, I spoke with a actor who had made a career out of doing one-woman shows. At the time, she was part of an ensemble cast, performing a play in a small repertory theater. I asked her about the shift, and how she felt about it. She told me it was wonderful to work with other actors, but she always kept in mind the fact that the play had been written by one person. Everything sprang from the imagination of that playwright. It inspired her to know it.

 

One imagination above and beyond reality,” she said. “A new reality. Somebody made another world.”

 

She went on to say, “Every night, we [actors] experience telepathy with each other on stage. It’s extraordinary, but we accept it, because it happens so often. It’s magic. I wonder why it happens so infrequently in ordinary life. Maybe it’s because we lose the sense of imagination there. We think we’re ‘just living.’ But we’re not.”

 

She said she would never retire. For her, that would mean parking her imagination, and she didn’t see how she would ever want to do that.

 

Being alive and creating go together,” she told me. “I can’t separate one from the other. And why would I want to?”

 

As we talked, the space around us brightened. Life itself became more.

 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com