FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A MAJOR RADIO EVENT!

AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER INTERVIEWS

THOMAS JEFFERSON!

When: Wednesday, June 15, 7-8 PM, Eastern Time

Where: www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

Scholar Clay Jenkinson, who has portrayed, with stunning accuracy, Thomas Jefferson, in venues all over the world, will assume the identity once more, for a sit-down interview with Jon Rappoport, Pulitzer-nominated reporter.

“Mr. Jefferson,” in character, will answer Jon’s questions about life in 2011, from his 18^th-century perspective.

“I wish we had three hours,” Jon stated, “but we’ll squeeze in everything we can in one hour.”

What is Jefferson’s view of where America has gone in two centuries? Is it still a Republic? Should it be? How can a Constitution designed to fit fewer than three million citizens apply to a population of 300 million? Do even the rights and powers of individual states make sense, when one state, California, has 37 million residents? What about the national health-care plan? The state of public education? Mega-corporate influence? Two political parties with common agendas? The military-industrial complex? The Federal Reserve? Invasive surveillance?

The questions pile up.

This will be an intriguing and riveting hour of radio—a unique experience.

Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute and the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. A humanities scholar, he is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Thomas JeffersonHour. (www.jeffersonhour.org)

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 35 years. He has published articles on politics, health, and media for LAWeekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin Magazine, Stern, and is the author of Logic and Analysis, a course for high-school students.

(www.nomorefakenews.com)

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For further information, contact Jon Rappoport at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

FROM THE MAGICIAN AWAKES

Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my…soul’s limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside…People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror…can’t you recognize that there’s a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are.

(Ivan Illich, interviewed by Jerry Brown, KPFA, March 22, 1996)

JUNE 4, 2011. Unlike other of my projects, The Magician Awakes will probably never end. Right now, it’s scattered in 20 or 30 places, several of which are lost owing to a hard-drive crash…which is okay, because the structure of the book allows something like that to happen.

It’s in taped talks, in pictures, in essays, in fragments of fiction, in poems. It doesn’t move in a straight line.

So today, I write a few more pieces of it.

I was planning an interview with Salvador Dali. I thought I would have him explain things he would never have bothered to explain while he was alive. It seemed like a good idea. But then, as I began to punch keys, I realized this wouldn’t work. For example: “You haven’t seen most of my paintings. They’re underneath the layers of the ones you know. They’re quite ordinary. A glass on a table. A soldier drinking coffee at a truck stop. A necklace on velvet. This is my real work. I’m a hack. I’m a machine that went haywire. You ask for something extraordinary, all of you. You keep refining your need for the amazing. If a person talks to you and then doubles back on what he’s saying, you’re disgusted. You want a trip to Mars to have certain qualities which symbolically represent your addiction. If a flying saucer turns out to be an object that was sitting under a cup of coffee, you want to kill someone. I find that interesting. It’s literal-mindedness taken to such purity it’s a little fascist empire of The Astonishing. Your personal museum.”

I was sitting at my desk and wondering what would happen if the objects on it became words in a language. The envelope, the pen, the headphones, the hammer, the clock, the keys. The dullness of such a language could be enormous. It might envelop the world. People would fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Then they would dream in that language, and look for a way out. But to what destination would they want to flee? I think it would be a courtroom, where decisions are rendered in simple terms. Justice delivered in bromides. Final decisions. It looks good, but nothing changes.

Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was witnessed as he levitated. Many times. Occasionally to a great height. Once after kissing the foot of the Pope in his chamber. He had to be ordered back down. In some respects, Joseph was an idiot. He was obsessed with devotion to the cosmological artifacts of the Church. It just goes to show. Would you sacrifice your personality to fly a hundred feet into the air? I know people who would. I believe this subject would make an interesting Sunday sermon.

Public relations is in the business of manufacturing clowns. If you’ve ever been the subject of a real campaign, you’ve experienced it. Magic as animation. A doctor moves along at your side, injecting you with local anesthetics and carving away pieces of you. By the end, you’ll believe anything. You’ll believe there is a wheel of karma, and you’re turning on it. Or the moon is a coin in your pocket. But you have no power over the moon. It just sits there in your pants, and occasionally you take it out, to see what it looks like without a sun to shine on it.

I used to think waking up was done in a straight line. But each time I found a line to walk, it led me to a smaller place. A place where I could possess one and only idea: I’m awake.

Obviously, the telephone should have been invented after the computer. The phone is so much more inflected. In the same way, magic should have been invented after the establishing of modern civilization. Well, it turns out that is the case. We are inventing magic now. And it has very little to do with technology. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple. Let me offer you a provisional hypothesis. When you apply Simple (even if it is stunningly lucid) to the world, Simple begins to deteriorate in a few hours. It’s wonderful, it’s delightful, it may even be ecstatic, but it’s kindergarten magic.

People love the new sheriff who comes into town and takes care of the bastards. I suppose I’m as addicted to it as the next person. But at least I understand that the clapboard hotel has tunnels under it, and the tunnels lead to the center of the Earth. And then there is this: there is no center. There is a place called a center, and it can be correctly measured, but it doesn’t give you a gun you can shoot, so that you can wipe out your mind. If you want that, try the little white church with the steeple at the end of Main Street. They might have something for you.

There is a notion that if pressure were taken off the minds of people, if they were released from controls imposed from the outside, if things were more just, the natural life would flow like honey. I’ve never seen that happen. Here is something I have seen: citizens trying (and failing) to impose a tyranny based on demanding a three-word answer to a profound question. There is a clue in this. If the answer has to come in three words, then the question wasn’t really deep. The words of the question may have been impressive, but it was being asked from the inside of a cartoon casino, where everything is cast in plastic, and people are sitting at roulette tables and slots, and watch keno and bet on blackjack. And they’re all trying to beat the house with cons. And later, they’re standing out on the sidewalk with drinks in their hands, wishing they could collar a random person passing by and make some kind of citizen’s arrest.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

FULL SPECTRUM INSIGHT

“Watch television?” She was awake now.

“Well,” Rydell said, “Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.”

“God’s on television?”

“Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.”

“So they watch tv and pray, or what?”

“Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter intothem.”

(William Gibson, Virtual Light)

At a cocktail party, one oligarch says to another, “I commit crimes to help myself.”

The other oligarch replies, “So do I. But I mask them so it appears I’m helping others.”

A third oligarch stops by. “You know,” he says, “I follow a simple formula. Try to get people to forget they have imagination. After that, everything takes care of itself.”

A fourth oligarch strolls over. “I created a universe,” he says. “People live in it. They can’t get out. They think I’m…what do they call me…God. They sing songs and write poems to me. It’s really quite ridiculous. But I’m on the tennis court most of time, so who cares?”

“How’s your game these days?” says a voice coming from the air around them.

Hermes, the trickster, suddenly appears in the room. He’s holding a gray L-shaped piece of metal in his hand.

And that was that.

A few days later, a key opened the sky and all the people escaped.

Hermes stood on a plateau and watched.

“Easy come, easy go,” he said.

Tripping the light fantastic.

(Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes)

JUNE 4, 2011. Human perception can be likened to the light spectrum, which is only partially visible to the eye.

Through the use of instruments, we know the rest of the light is there, but we don’t access it under normal conditions.

In 1995, after a number of smaller experiments, I made a series of three paintings on large pieces of brown cardboard. They appeared to be “pages” of text…pictographs in an unknown language. After I finished the paintings, I leaned them against the wall of my studio and left them there for several weeks.

One afternoon, I was lying on my bed, and I glanced over at the paintings. I asked myself, “What if these pictographs really WERE from another language?”

And then they were.

A shower of meanings…

To describe them…it isn’t a matter of making a translation into English. The meanings were…shifts of sensation-in-motion. They were also additional pictographs—some of which were flying figures.

The sensations and the flying figures were…“elevating aesthetics.” A doorway had opened for me, through which I saw and felt “versions of beauty-in-action” that were unlike anything I had ever experienced…and yet it was somehow familiar.

I entered a wider realm of sensation/feeling.

I knew, of course, that my imagination was playing a role, but there was another X factor.

The message was: there are languages like this.

They don’t function in the usual way. They don’t give you words that have specific limited meanings. They give you strings of pictographs that trigger wide elevated sensations and images, the immediate impact of which is undeniable.

These languages transport you.

I could see and infer that such languages could be read and spoken.

And there would be no problem of “what do you mean by that?”

The point wouldn’t be to “inflict” specific meaning on the other person.

One set of pictographs, dealt to another person, would set off an explosion of aesthetic sensations/feelings/images, and then a new set of pictographs would go back the other way and return the favor.

The spectrum of meaning, like light, is only partially visible to us. In fact, the spectrum of meaning has no limit. It hasn’t been set or pre-established in a finite way—and can’t be.

What happens to consciousness in the process of speaking or reading these new languages is the realization of a deep desire.

Psychology generally assumes that what is repressed is “negative material.” But actually, the reverse is true. The much more important repression is all about wanting access to wider realms of meaning. Realms in which fantastic, wonderful, elevating sensations/feelings/images are revealed/invented AS PALPABLE MANIFEST REALITIES.

From a societal point of view, the repression of THIS causes all sorts of untoward events and circumstances. It’s like being chained to a fence—you can go a certain distance from the fence, but then the chain reaches its limit. The frustration builds.

Yet, somewhere down deep, people realize this is a false state of affairs. The fence and the chain are delusions.

For the most part, people operate within a context of consensus meaning. They get used to it. They forget there is anything else. They make the best of things. They take their pleasures where they can find them. I’m not saying this reality is a veil of tears. But the major aspect of the spectrum is invisible.

Part of what magic is, is the opening of the gate of meaning.

With more and expanded meaning comes greater freedom.

Religion, generally speaking, is the accommodation that is made to the chain and the fence. It offers a glint of light, a promise of escape and release, and a suggestion of expanded perception/meaning.

However, one discovers that each religion has its own cosmology, its own picture of the cosmos. Its own set of meanings.

Whereas, we have the capacity to transcend all cosmologies.

Entertainment media, beyond the simple strategies of selling a story the public will buy, and re-inventing an old plot a network will bankroll, continues to search for new meaning…but within the narrow context of what is familiar. So even in this restricted territory, there is the consciousness of “the rewards and pleasures” of invented meaning.

Human desire is, in some respects, a strange animal, by virtue of the fact that it has been tamed. It expresses hope and wish within acceptable contexts. And then people pursue these tamed desires, thinking their fulfillment will make them happy. When that doesn’t happen, confusion sets in.

“But this is what I wanted. Then I got it. So where is the continuing joy?”

It turns out that, through imagination, through exploration of a wider spectrum of meaning, untamed desires surface. THIS is what the spirit and psyche really want to pursue. And when they recognize that, and when the pursuit is launched, a new and deeper happiness and joy appear. No longer superficial gloss that lights up and then fades, this fierce joy keeps ringing bells and pushing clouds in a landscape that has never before been experienced, and yet is familiar…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

OPEN-ENDED MAGIC

I’m sitting there at The Blue Scam having my second beer and thinking about how I can escape a teaching offer, when Jimmy Skimmy walks into the place high and hard with his fire-engine red sports jacket and matching fedora, a green parrot feather in the band, and kisses Marie on her heavily powdered cheek, coming away with a spot on the end of his long sharp nose.

He sees me, reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out two long tickets. He nods. We’re in.

The seasonal rains are pelting the metal roof of the place, and people are blabbing at tables and the speakers are playing a ride tune by Mars, the wall of pinball machines is shaking with explosions, and I think I’m screaming, but I can’t hear myself—tomorrow night, Jimmy and I are leaving.

Blowing this universe.

Finally.

(Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes)

JUNE 1, 2011. Consciousness itself wants improvisation.

That may sound like an odd statement.

But, backtracking, realize your consciousness is not a certain amount of “air or liquid” in a container for all time.

Unfortunately, some quasi-philosophies suggest that. They view consciousness the same way a soup manufacturer assesses his work: make the can hold so much volume and fill it up with soup.

Then, of course, we have cosmologies in which consciousness is a buttery sauce spread all over the cosmos, from which we take little sips.

Let’s start here:

Consciousness creates more consciousness.

That is its primary interest.

Not floating, not expanding, but creating. More of itself.

Itself? What does that mean?

Are we talking about molecules of the “same stuff?” Just more of them?

No.

Consciousness is diverse. It’s not stuff to begin with. It’s the capacity to be conscious. It’s being conscious. It’s non-material.

In a live way. Not in some dull fashion.

For example, if you knew what tomorrow was going to bring, you would be aware of MORE.

But there is another road that is much different. It’s best described by two words: spontaneity and improvisation.

These are VERY interesting words. Spontaneous comes from the late Latin, and means “of one’s own accord.” Improvise is from French and Latin—“not foreseen, unprepared.”

The French and Latin roots don’t begin to encompass all the modern meanings and implications.

Awareness is often about seeing patterns and systems and structures.

But consciousness wants more and wants DIFFERENT. Face it, seeing patterns, after a while, doesn’t turn on the adrenaline.

However, when you improvise, when you take an action that is spontaneous, you break out of old reality into something else, something that has no name.

Consciousness wants THAT.

It can’t catalog it, it can’t fit it into neat compartments, but it wants it.

In 1963, I was painting in a very small apartment in Santa Monica, California. A table, small sheets of paper, oil crayons. One night, I had a blank sheet in front of me. I was about to begin. All of a sudden, there was a shift. To describe it, it doesn’t seem like much. But I knew in a way I had never known before, that I had the freedom to make any shape on that paper. This wasn’t a dry obvious fact, it was an exhilarating magic. And yet, I had no shape in mind. This was all pre-painting. This was a tremendously elastic and flexible sense of freedom. It was warm. It was more real than real. It was a unique immersion in happiness.

All in a minute.

And then when I put the crayon to paper and began to make a shape, the feeling grew. This line, this shape, any line, any shape…it was so much more than I’d ever realized. Drawing.

Spontaneous, improvised.

I drank it in.

It was as if this was what I had been looking for, without knowing it, all my life.

Some truth about that moment has never left me. It confirmed suspicions and leanings I’d had previously, and it handed me, on a silver platter, something I truly wanted to know.

Under endless disguises and masks and apparatus, improvisation-from-nothing really exists.

So when I say magic isn’t a system or a manual or a structure, perhaps now you have a better idea of what I’m talking about.

When you feed consciousness a spoon of THIS, it has the party it’s been looking for.

Of course, you can’t chain yourself to the floor and remain in such a moment. “I had a spontaneous and ecstatic Q-3TY-7 and now I’m going to tie lead weights to my legs so I can continue to be in Q-3TY-7.”

Fortunately, CREATING and SPONTANEOUS and INVENTION and IMAGINATION and IMPROVISATION are all close cousins, and they all engender escalations out of old reality systems…no cover, no minimum, stay as late as you want to.

Free is free.

Magic is open-ended.

Imagination/creating are the open sky and the rocket and the infinity of possible paths, and that’s just for starters.

“…a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

When scientists try to talk about consciousness in terms of the flesh inside the human skull or twists of DNA, they are as far from the truth as the farthest universe is from a doll house in an attic in Pittsburgh.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

FINANCIAL MARKET REALITY

JUNE 1, 2011. I know that many readers are with me as I go to the wall and gladly blow through it to depict and explain the power of imagination (magic) and present a completely different picture of reality. All this information and MUCH more is in my audio seminars, where unique exercises are presented as well.

But you see, other people cozily opt for consensus reality, which is the bottom of the creative barrel and is, hilariously, thought of as rock solid and dependable all the way along the line.

“I dunno about this imagination stuff, I think I’ll stay with plain ordinary every-day reality. I wuz brought up that way…”

Yeah. Sure.

So with that, have a look at the recent financial meltdown from a different perspective.

Aside from those famous sub-prime mortgages, what else do we need to know about? The whole investment-market universe is a propaganda-induced hallucination. How about that?

There was a time, maybe 50 years ago, when people bought stocks because they saw them as a symbol for confidence in companies and growth and expansion and, therefore, confidence in America and democracy and ingenuity and so on.

A hard-working moderately successful husband, who wanted to parlay his assets into something more, for the future, would find a broker and open up an account. “Buy something, Bill, and hold on to it, and let it rise.”

Long-term investing.

But all that changed, as the game of buy and sell itself became the main event. It morphed into Vegas.

So-called stock speculation, which carried an aura of sleaze, became the hip thing to do.

“Buy and sell in your underwear from home. Buy and sell 20 times an hour and become a millionaire by next Friday. I did it, and I’ll show you how.”

Clue: He didn’t do it. If he did, do you think he’d be wasting his time teaching you his secrets? Judging from his demeanor, he’d be on his yacht with seven hookers and a liquor cabinet.

With the Great Morph in the way trading was done, the companies whose stock people were buying was the last thing on their minds. America? The future? Confidence in this great nation? Is that what a demented addict at the craps tables on the Strip is thinking about as he blows on the dice?

The whole game changed.

And big companies like banks and insurance outfits and even pension funds got deeply into the deal. They were all investing in the market and shoving in their chips on making a profit that way.

The reach of the game widened.

In this vast interlocking CONSENSUS REALITY OF VEGAS-ON-WALL-STREET, everybody and his brother got into the act.

So if the market suddenly tanked, the reality could split at the seams.

Probably the Pope could develop ulcers.

From this perspective, think about the following: institutions whose lifeblood is lending money to people…if those guys are investing, investing, investing in the market, and if they suddenly experience big losses, and they don’t have the same ability to lend money, then everybody who wants loans to start businesses or order new materials is up the creek and creek is dry.

This consensus reality, involving so many various players, could cause the whole economy of the country to spiral down out of control.

That’s ordinary reality for you.

That’s the religion so many people are backing.

From the point of view of a company that’s selling stock to raise money for expansion, the vagaries of the market can be brutal.

“We’re performing well as a company, but our stock goes up and down without any seeming reference to that.”

What did you expect? Sanity?

When bad mortgages were packaged in units, like stocks, and traded like baseball cards all over the world, it was with the assumption that the whole game of buying and selling could somehow remain independent of the value of those mortgages, forever. Big banks in this game, finally incurring huge losses, tightened up their lending policies on all fronts…and in a society that runs on credit (loans), the curtain began dropping.

Of course, at that point, things became quite confusing, because these banks and other big players started lying in new and inventive ways. Who knows how many lies were told?

But regardless, when loose credit turns into tight credit overnight, the chance of a crash and depression looms.

Hence, the bailout.

Imagine players at a Vegas casino, where the bosses (insanely) extend blanket credit to cover losses and encourage further gambling…and then, one night, the bosses say enough. No more credit. Lots of people at the tables are caught with their pants down.

When the government issued $700 billion to patch-patch the broken system, banks turned around and said, “You want us to lend this money now. You want the credit to flow again, but at the same time you’re telling us to be more cautious about whom we lend money to.”

In this nexus, there was certainly lying and cheating going on, but the upshot was the lending didn’t smoothly pick up again.

The fundamental thing a person asks for, from consensus reality, is that it be consistent. If you have a table, and you put objects on it, they stay there. They don’t start walking around on the table and floating in the air. Because if they do, what’s a table for? Each thing has a function, and the functions mesh.

The sudden bubble in the trading markets popped because the commonly held hallucination developed flaws. Its elements didn’t obey their assigned functions. And then, as the repair work began, the loans didn’t flow as they were supposed to. More dysfunction.

Remember AIG, the insurance giant? A trader there invented a money maker. AIG would sell insurance to companies that were trading the packaged bad mortgages…just in case the packages turned bad. Of course, the idea was they would never turn bad. Well, what kind of insurance plan is that? “We’ll sell health insurance on the premise that no one will ever get sick.”

People inside the hallucination were doing things that would explode it. Why? Because they were convinced the consensus would hold, no matter what. The hallucination would remain.

It’s not so very different from a person on LSD who, say, walks around thinking he’s a Dutch settler in the American colonies. It all works until he arrives in New York looking for Indians who want to unload Manhattan for a handful of beads.

Assume for a minute that the financial meltdown happened through manipulation, on purpose, as a way of impoverishing, demoralizing, and pressing down on populations and making them helpless and malleable. Even then, we’re still talking about a basic set-up (trading markets and how they operate) that massive numbers of people have to buy into, in the first place, as consensus ordinary reality.

“This is America. This is the world. This is the way it works. This is a mutually beneficial trillion-dollar operation that goes on and on and on…and smart people take advantage of it, to expand their assets…this is what every intelligent person does.”

Brush your teeth twice a day, buy stocks.

Bottom line?

Every ordinary reality has loopholes, and people will try to capitalize on them, and in the process, actual holes will show up and expand, until the hallucination sags and deteriorates…at which point the monitors will do anything they have to, to re-inflate it.

These ordinary realities, through thick and thin, are viewed by most people as basic to life itself.

The truth is, they are products of imagination.

And since that is so, why not start from the real platform of power, which is you and your imagination and what you deeply want to create?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

To view Jon’s audio-seminar catalog, scroll down in this email and click on MARKETPLACE, or visit the site and go to the store.

UNIVERSE MANUFACTURERS

MAY 31, 2011. Here are several ads from an interdimensional newspaper that might prove informative:

UNIVERSE MANUFACTURING! Let us build it for you! Move-in ready. All appliances and energy sources. Consult our catalog. Gods supplied or not. Easy entrance, no exit. Pre-hypnosis induced painlessly in our clean spacious facilities by licensed physicians!

CUSTOM BUILT UNIVERSES OUR SPECIALTY! Uni-language, gated planets, military emperors. Inspect our plans, work with a seasoned professional. Dignified cemeteries. CSI reruns.

A RETIREMENT UNIVERSE for the whole family! Do you want to pass on your genes to millions of future generations? Of course you do! Why else would you be alive? In our universe, we supply a religion that forbids gene waste, under penalty of deportation to a state-run hospital. Appoint surrogates to wage an eternal war between matriarchal and patriarchal gene-transmission preference. Square dancing, ping-pong tournaments, celebrity-look-alike performers on weekends.

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

NATURE IS NATURE UNIVERSE! Hunt for 60,000 years, fit into the environment, hear the roots grow; climb trees, shepherd goats, bath in snow, chant in monotone, blow up evil machines in distant cities. Exclusive Gaia tweets. Become utterly convinced there is nothing else! Raise children as primates! “Secrets of the Urine Garden” for first five callers.

AT LAST! THE SOULMATE UNIVERSE! Let us design your agonizing quest for the other half of yourself. You met a stranger for 18 seconds in a hotel bar? He’s here! Receive your initiation rites in the Oprah Palace and journey out on to the landscape of despair. Lifetimes of synchrony…and just-misses…and then….but we can’t give away the glorious ending. You know you want it, so let us build this low to mid-range IQ universe with billions of extras and millions of planets. Herbal wraps, hot stones; vegan paramedics on call.

PROMISE OF PARADISE UNIVERSE, slightly used version, for sale at giveaway price. Commit untold numbers of righteous acts that would be considered capital crimes with special circumstances in other universes, along the severe path of loyalty to a standard that will put you in a heaven others are denied. Commandments, holy book, some flagellation required. All races and religions invited. We have our own God and he’s pissed off!

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

THE END OF IMAGINATION UNIVERSE! Have you finally reached the end of your tether? Want to attribute all magic and creation to an external source? We have attractive life paths for trillions of serial incarnations. You’ll go with God, you’ll go with science, you’ll go with money, you’ll go with pills. We have it all. Our calibrated partial-narcosis treatments will saddle you with just enough doubt to make you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing by your existence…and yet, in the end, you’ll submit to a Greater Pattern. Geometric homilies, sacred this and that, ideal forms, gradualism, “it’s all about family,” “I’m doing this for the children,” “you only live once,” endless distractions constructed on the basis of “realism,”–you’ll become facile with them all. We’ll keep you hopping! Try our new on-and-off paranoia option. Limited light-year adventures available in some areas. Inquire about liability. Ask yourself if the End of Imagination Universe is right for you.

And a small classified ad: “Universe disintegration plus universe invention=You. Details re imagination. Send $35 and self-addressed stamped envelope to PO Box 43920518-A, Altoona, Pennsylvania.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

If you received this as an email, scroll down to MARKETPLACE and order an audio seminar.

HOW DEEP THE SCAM

MAY 31, 2011. The words “religion” and “imagination” are not usually used in the same sentence. Bad for business.

If they ran an imagination contest, and somehow a devotee of religion won, he might say, in an unguarded moment, “Look, this is the score. I imagine God and religion, because I can’t do any better. This is as far as I can go.”

Of course, he’d confess to that like an ant would read the label on a bottle of honey.

Religion IS default imagination. It’s what’s left over when a person gives up on imagination.

“Okay, hit me with the myth. Embroider it. Bring in all the angels and the rituals and the texts. I surrender.”

Why do you think the Roman Church built all those cathedrals in Europe? To convince the population their own imagination couldn’t rival these gigantic stone hulks.

Today, it’s TV. Same deal.

“Do you really think you can go up against 400 reruns of Law and Order every day?”

To put this a slightly different way, if people got together and said they wanted to install a ceiling on imagination, whatever they came up with WOULD BE RELIGION.

How else could they make the limitation stick?

One of the main features of society is that it’s a place where you can “get religion.”

COME ON IN, FOLKS. LEAVE YOUR DONATION AT THE DOOR. ALL ARE WELCOMED. LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT WE HAVE TO OFFER. OH, LOOK AT THIS. A CEILING ON IMAGINATION. THIS IS VERY, VERY POPULAR. IT’S CALLED RELIGION. LET ME EXPLAIN HOW IT WORKS.

With burgeoning revenues, religions can hire artists to produce painting and sculpture and design to actually DEPICT THE CEILING ON IMAGINATION. That’s quite a twist.

A few centuries of this sort of operant conditioning and you’ve got a sizable flock.

So some guy wanders into the Pope’s chamber and says, “Your Highness, I want to show you a universe I’ve created myself. It’s very interesting…”

I think they still have his skeleton in the Vatican basement.

Here’s another scenario. A painter paints an abstract painting on a large canvas. Somebody with a few billion dollars decides to mount a PR campaign to extol this painting. Relentless. After 20 years, 50 million people have seen and adored the picture. At least they think they adore it because in various in ways, they’ve been told to.

What do you have? Chances are: religion.

“I stood before it and I was transported into another realm where I heard music. The notes showered down on me and I fell to my knees and saw my dead aunt. She spoke a language I had never heard before…”

A friend just emailed and reminded me about the use to which the UFO movement has been put. One segment of that community (and this has nothing to do with whether UFOs exist or where they come from) think that, with the arrival of space aliens, we will UNDERGO A RELIGIOUS CONVERSION. Wait. How did religion get into the act?

My first action as president, emperor, ruler-of-all will be to declare a religion holiday.

MY FRIENDS, ON JUNE 9TH, WE WILL TAKE A BREATH AND STEP BACK AND FORGET ABOUT ALL RELIGIONS. WE’LL REMEMBER THAT THIS WAS ALL IMAGINATION. AND STILL IS. AND THEREFORE, IMAGINATION IS VERY POWERFUL. LET’S NOT DEMEAN IT OR SET A CEILING ON IT, LET’S USE IT.

Hmmm. Have to rework that. Comes across a little too much like an ad for GE or IBM.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a new HOLY SACRED pill. You take it once a month and for a three-minute chunk out of the month you experience an intense influx of HOLY SACRED, which keeps you satisfied for the rest of the month. The pill experience is designed to make you feel the HOLY SACRED is coming from an external unnameable mysterious source. Side effects include dropping to your knees, a flood of tears, extensive gratitude, feeling tiny, and, occasionally, inflicting wounds on self. But these effects only last for three minutes, then you’re good for the month.

You realize your imagination is infinite, and you get on with creating new realities.

The uplift from THAT more than makes up for the loss of HOLY SACRED.

Amusing coda: as I was putting the finishing touches on this piece, our doorbell rang eight or nine times. Ding. Ding ding. Ding ding ding…

Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I kid you not.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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SAY THAT AGAIN?

“The trouble with Buddhism?–in order to free oneself of all desire, one has to desire to do so.”

Henry Miller, “Henry Miller on Writing,” 1964

MAY 30, 2011. Here is a slice attributed to Joseph Campbell, celebrated author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

Maybe he penned that on a slow Saturday afternoon. Maybe he had indigestion. Maybe he was sipping a few rum and Cokes.

It’s hard for me to think of a quote I’d disagree with more.

Hitch your imagination up to a few horses, and let’s take a ride into the heart of Nature, where we’ll do the Great Merge, and then, like Sampson, we’ll all have suitable haircuts and wear badges as citizens of the great Match.com.

No thanks. I’ll fold that hand.

The deck is being dealt from the bottom.

Give me the joker, the wild card—imagination—and you can keep on playing strip poker.

I’ll wait and watch everybody go broke.

Whatever else you want to say about it, Nature, universe, is one work of art among many, among a potential infinity of works of art.

The others are supplied by imagination.

The ancient Tibetans had it right. Become the tree if you want to. Go all the way inside the inside. Merge with the rhythms, the sap, the energy, the space and time of it, the mind and soul of it…go as deep as deep is…love it with all your might if you want to…and THEN, when you’ve hadenough, DIS-ATTACH. Ditto for rock, cloud, sky, star.

Do you really want to believe your goal is to merge PERMANENTLY with one work of art? Do you want to believe you’re not going to create your own?

Kandinsky is credited (sort of) with painting the first abstract painting, in 1911. A picture that didn’t refer to Nature. Then critics decided: well, OF COURSE Kandinsky was making reference to Nature. He had to. Where else can a painter go?

This sort of pundit-nonsense will always be with us. Just as hypnotism will always be with us.

I’d prefer the opposite extreme of commentary: “we’re no longer “bamboozled by Nature or the universe…”

The problem here? It’s RELIGION. The propaganda of devotion to universe/Nature. As if, in such humility, there is great pride.

Always a bad sign.

Just to make things clear–

Question: “If we’re not going to match ourselves to Nature, what’s left?”

Answer: “99.99999999999999999999 %.”

Prostrate ourselves before universe? It’s like saying all magic springs from wood sprites. If you buy that one, I have a an 18-wheeler on Bernard’s Star I’m unloading at a loss.

Like all religion, universe-worship is a confession of creative bankruptcy.

“This is all I can imagine—don’t bug me. I’m a nature guy.”

For some artists, Nature/Universe is like a pole pole vaulters use to get over the bar. Fine. No problem. Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne. Go to it. But let’s not take this into the realm of ultra-psychology, as Campbell does in his quote, above. Wonder whether he really wrote it.

At any rate, the sentiment expressed is one that millions of people believe they believe. Until they don’t. Until they see, quietly, it’s a mask.

The other day I saw a guy hawking newspapers on the corner:

HEY, GETCHUR PAPE! UNIVERSE AND US ARE ONE BIG GOO! JOIN UP. BE A BLOCK CAPTAIN! SPREAD THE WORD! GOO GOO. WE MERGED! FOR GOOD! NO GOING BACK NOW! THE WEDDING’S OVER! FROM HERE ON OUT, IT’S ONE LONG HONEYMOON!

“Imagination was fun for a while. But then we got goo. Much, much better.” Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The joker in the deck, as I said, is imagination. It’s the override. Of course, some people think of this as a felony.

Basically, poet/ philosopher Giordano Bruno was executed for it by the Church. On February 17, 1600, in the Campo de’ Fiori, after languishing in prison for seven years—the length of his trial for heresy—Bruno was burned at the stake.

Now, imagination is simply ignored, and little gods of nature jet set around the world spreading the holy message of devotion.

“I want meadows red in tone and trees painted in blue. Nature has no imagination.”

Charles Baudelaire

In America, the Indian spirit has been mythologized with gloss, by others, for a long, long time. As if their Oneness with Nature was so profound it was a constant hum. Think about it. Do you really believe that when food was short and winter on the plains was long, when the Buffalo went far away, when times were very, very tough, when people were sick, all the Indians all the time maintained a solid stance and inhabited the painting that is Nature? That some didn’t curse and wish for another kind of world? Separate the phony historians and the B movies from the truth. Do you think all Indians were the same—or were there differences between people as there are in any other group?

This myth and other similar tales are blown way out of proportion for self-serving reasons, by people who were never part of any functioning tribe, who never really “lived in Nature.”

I point this out, because Universe/Nature as religion is coming back strong again. Has been, for some time. It’s a facet of deemphasizing the individual—who is the one who has imagination. The only one.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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ONCE UPON A WEIRD

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

Lenny Bruce

MAY 28, 2011. There was a society that consisted of only 20 people. They lived in cottages in a valley.

There was no one else on the planet.

These people had no children, but they lived for a very long time. In fact, no one had ever died.

Above the planet, there were 20 moons. Each person had his own moon. Every night, he/she looked at his/her moon.

Joe told Carol, “You know what? There are only a few things we need. Food, clothing, shelter, and trinkets.”

Carol said, “You just figured that out?”

“It strikes me,” Joe said, “that whatever work I do, it’s about one of those four things. But I want to do something more. Yesterday, I imagined doing much more.”

“And what was that?” Carol said.

“Moving my moon.”

Her mouth fell open.

“That’s impossible. The moons rise and set. That’s it. They’re on their own.”

“I know,” Joe said. “But it’s the only thing I can think of doing that excites me.”

“And if you can move it,” she said, “everything will spin into chaos.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “That’s what we all think. I mean, nobody talks about it, but we all believe it. Suppose we’re wrong.”

“Then you move a moon. So what? You have to balance that against the possibility of destroying the world.”

“Well,” Joe said, “I’ve figured it out. See, things are in balance. And as long as they are, nothing changes.”

Carol told Mike about this, and Mike told Ethel, and Joe ended up in a locked room in his cottage. A prisoner.

At his trial, he said, “Two things. One, everybody says it’s impossible to move a moon, so why can’t I try? And two, I was just talking to Carol about doing it. Why is that a crime?”

Mike, who was appointed judge, said: “I’ve thought long and hard about this, Joe, and I’ve decided you’ll be confined to quarters for the duration, for the foreseeable future.”

In his room, Joe started painting his moon on sheets of paper. He painted it faithfully, but after a few years, he began making moons that were purple, green, red, orange. He painted flat moons and triangular moons and moons with holes in them. He painted moons that looked like beds, sandwiches, and long horizontal eyeballs.

One day, he painted a moon with saw teeth, and he felt the floor tremble and the walls tremble. Outside his room, a tree fell and huge blue plumes of energy streamed out of the ground, up into the air.

People came to see it.

One man accidentally stepped too close and he was propelled a hundred feet into the air and sat there. He looked around him.

So a woman tried it next, and she was also shot into the air and came to rest a thousand feet above the ground.

Eventually, everyone tried it—and they were all floating at different heights. Then they began drifting. They drifted back to earth and then rose again. They found they could walk through air back to the ground.

That night, they noticed Joe’s moon had moved in the sky. It was higher and off to the left.

And there was a man on that moon. He was waving. He was wearing a robe and it was flapping. He was jumping up and down, and every time he jumped, he shot up into the sky, and then came down. Finally, he jumped off, spread his arms, and flew down to the ground.

He was a large man with a beard.

By this time, somebody had let Joe out of his room and he was there, on the grass, when the man with the beard hit the turf.

“Who are you?” Joe said.

“Moses,” the man said. “I was climbing this hill, see? I had led my people out of Egypt and we were wandering in the desert for a long time, and then I decided to walk up this hill because there were big stones there. I was going to carve laws in the stones and bring them down to the people. It would have been a pretty good deal. You know, some people obey the laws, some don’t. You’ve got arguments, interpretations, recriminations, punishments, revenge, a deal with God.”

Who?” Joe said.

“God,” Moses said. “The Guy. He’s in charge.”

Everybody looked at everybody.

“And then, bang,” Moses said. “I was up on that moon.”

“Where’s this God?” Joe said.

“You make him up as you go along,” Moses said.

Joe thought about that.

“Who made you up?”

Moses smiled.

“I’m a guy in a story. I don’t know who wrote it. I was a slave and then I broke out.”

“Broke out of the story?”

“Yeah…I guess.”

“Weird.”

“I know.”

“You want some coffee?”

“Sure. I’ll have to do something else now. I’m cut loose.”

In the following days and weeks, all sorts of characters from stories began appearing.

They were interesting. There was a man in a red robe with a cross hung around his neck. And a tall hat that looked like a fish. He said he was the Pope. At first, he tried to boss everyone around and get them to build a tower, but then a tough guy in a cheap suit named Mike Hammer told him to back off.

A dapper man emerged from the earth and said he was a critic for The New York Times. Hammer grabbed him by his collar and frog-marched him to a pond and tossed him in.

Then one day, Moses laughed.

The 20 people looked at him and asked what that was.

“I’m not sure,” Moses said, “but I want to do it again. Say something funny.”

“Say something what?”

“Funny. I think it’s like when you shoot up off the ground.”

“Like?”

“You know, when you compare one thing to another.”

The 20 people were bewildered. They considered bringing Moses to trial, but with all the new people around, they were distracted…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

IMAGINATION IS LITERAL

LIKE A BIRD IS A TRUCK

MAY 28, 2011. Once upon a time, each thing was itself and nothing else. This suited the clan.

Then on a slow Tuesday afternoon, a member made a comparison in language—one word to another.

Half the clan wanted to throw him over a cliff, and the other half wanted to get down on their knees and pray to him.

They flipped a coin—or a wheel or a rock—and decided to reserve judgment because, fortunately for the future, the coin landed on its edge.

Thus metaphor was allowed to expand.

Something heretofore unknown was stimulated: imagination.

Immediately, an underground movement was formed to stop this. It was illegal by a Higher Standard, and it would certainly corrupt the young.

I’ve lobbied for a bill that would require every child, by the age of 18, to come up with one interesting metaphor, or face death, but the bill has stalled in committee.

And green and golden, I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

(Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas)

In the New Age—rainbow and pot of gold—there is no more metaphor, because that is confusing. Better to reinterpret it as literal truth and make believe it’s so. Flatland revisited.

In another venue, walk up to Security at a major airport and say, “My God, this is a Venice brothel without the cheap champagne,” and see whether you wind up in a small room with four cops.

The literalists take over. And they don’t even care anymore whether the trains run on time.

If you write a sentence that is more than declarative, the majority is baffled.

That girls at puberty may find

The first Adam in their thought,

Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel, Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding resides

Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make

His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

(WB Yeats, “Long-Legged Fly”)

This is this. That is that. This is THIS. That is THAT. On and on, like a steamroller, until the mind and imagination go to sleep.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

(William Gibson, “Neuromancer”)

Deploying imagination (or understanding it) is not like sending columns of troops out to battle.

And without irony or metaphor—two of the million children of imagination—there is no laughter.

Just stolid old USSR eyes asking for records.

Imagination doesn’t work in a straight line. You can’t take a simple declarative sentence and make a one-for-one translation and turn it into imagination.

Conversely, you can’t ask Melville to write a children’s book. You can’t put imagination in a step-down decompression chamber and come out with anything except mush.

The literalists think there is something good about taking a star a million times bigger than our sun and icing it until it looks like our moon.

They are trying to engineer a Flatland reality for the masses. They may not know it, but that’s the limit of what they can conceive.

These are the letters of my ancient fathers,

And these are the letters of the roses

Blowing across the rolling apparatus

That moves the sun,

Shining through old windows

On statues of drowned men.

Now they shake off the rime

And stagger up from their trench,

Without a city.

They form a many-rayed subconscious moon.

(Rappoport, from The Thunderhead Cantos)

Society: all the possibilities of metaphor harnessed to produce a non-metaphoric cartoon.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

If you’re receiving this as an email, scroll down a little and click on MARKETPLACE to see my audio seminars.