THE REAL PARADIGM

MAY 11, 2011. The word paradigm has been thrown around like a football at a picnic. In loose-knit spiritual communities, it signals any new musing on subjects ranging from Earth’s pole shifts to bowel movements.

Scientists who want greater recognition in the public arena will call their latest speculation a paradigm shift.

Real paradigm shifts involve changes of perception.

Suppose we came upon a fundamental factor that always changes perception of reality.

A factor that has been masked, buried, and hidden away.

Imagination.

Imagination, employed intensely.

Roughly 1600 years ago, the Tibetans, doubling down on the teachings of a few itinerant immigrants from India, decided that UNIVERSE WAS A PRODUCT OF MIND.

This extreme fact could be experienced, if a student imaginatively constructed what, in essence, was a piece of another universe.

Suddenly, the whole game would change.

Paranormal abilities could walk in the door as a side effect of the focused use of imagination.

John Blofeld explores this Tibetan practice in his 1970 book, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. I recommend the book.. Also, Alexandra David-Neel’s accounts of her journeys through Tibet.

But for artists and inventors, for anyone in any human field of endeavor who presses the use of imagination, perception of the world changes in various ways.

In which case, the way the world alters is less important than the driving force that made it happen.

I offer the following testimonial that touches on this phenomenon.

In 1961-2, in New York, I found myself with a little cash in the bank and no job. I had embarked on a small adventure, prompted by a sketchy friend I ran into, in Washington Square Park, a place where many borderline cases dwell.

Mike told me he had just landed a gig as the superintendent of an apartment building nearby. Free rent in exchange for a little work around the place. He hadn’t moved in yet. But he was leaving the country in a few days.

“Something just came up in Paris,” he said.

I knew better than to ask what.

“So,” he said, “the landlord of the building lives out of state and he’s never met me. If you say you’re me, you could walk into a nice little studio and take over as the super.”

I needed a place. I’d been up in Massachusetts for a while, and now I was sleeping on a friend’s couch in mid-town Manhattan.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

It turned out the landlord lived in New Jersey. I decided to pay him a visit. He was an old codger who owned several buildings. In his house, we sat and chatted. I realized he was quite out of his mind. He kept referring to “a pack of soldiers,” as if they lived on his property. He was probably under the influence of a few powerful meds. Looking back on it now, I’d guess Thorazine.

I told him I wasn’t Mike. I explained the situation to him, but it didn’t make an impact. He nodded sagely, but kept on calling me Mike. Finally, I gave up trying.

And so I became Mike. Just like that.

Three days later, I was ensconced in the studio, and I was sweeping hallways and collecting rents. I was the super.

A new idea occurred to me. Why didn’t I embroider my new ID with a few twists and stitches? (I wouldn’t use them on my friends, of course—just strangers.)

I spent an afternoon in Central Park mulling over the possibilities.

Gynecologist? Disbarred lawyer? Minor-league baseball player?

This is an experiment, I told myself. I’ll try it out for a month and see what happens.

I was painting small canvases in the studio. Perhaps something similar. I could say I was a sculptor. Not just a stone cutter. I needed a modern angle.

I could say I was looking for abandoned buildings. Spaces in those buildings where I could pound down walls and make new changes. Public art. That was supposed to be avant-garde. Of course, I’d never actually locate such a building. I would just be looking.

So for the next month, I wandered around Manhattan making a point of meeting new people, and I tried out my new role.

As I suspected, people ate it up. They were excited.

Would I need city permits? Was I going to become a squatter? Did I plan to stage events in the building?

A recently fired schoolteacher I ran into in a bar near Carnegie Hall introduced me to a friend who was a realtor. He loved my plan. He started phoning me every day with updates. We went and looked at buildings in the Bronx.

He, in turn, passed me along to a photographer who started shooting pictures of my “search” for abandoned spaces. The photographer was dating an ER doctor who had relatives in Connecticut. She drove us up to see her aunt and uncle, who lived on a farm that had a large empty barn. Why not shift from the bombed-out Bronx to pastoral settings?

In fact, the doctor said, why bother actually “sculpting” changes in buildings at all? I should, instead, figure out another reason for exploring abandoned structures—a whole series of photos could be taken, and there could be a gallery show. Sure, I said. Why not? I was flexible.

In fact, I was so flexible events began to feel like they were occurring on a stage where all the actors were improvising. What was going on, on stage, was realer than real. That was my sense of it.

Out in the countryside, the doc said, we could shoot pictures of animals who lived in barns and empty ruined houses. Mice, rats, maybe raccoons.

After a few driving expeditions into the hinterlands, she and the photographer lost interest. We weren’t finding lots of animals.

I didn’t care. I was having the time of my life. I noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. My eyesight seemed to have improved. As we trampled through woods and fields, I was seeing colors more sharply. Shades and distinctions of gray, green, brown.

Every morning, I was waking up with great energy and enthusiasm. As the super, I could fix things around the building. I had never been able to fix anything. But now a broken chair, a sagging couch, a fractured light fixture. Piece of cake.

One afternoon, on the spur of the moment, I walked into an art class in lower Manhattan and told the teacher I had studied with ____, a famous New York painter (I had never met). The teacher immediately got me a chair, easel, pad, and charcoal, and for the next hour, I drew the model who was posing on a platform. I sold one of those drawings to a woman who worked for an ad agency. She introduced me to a friend who was a collector, and I brought him down to my studio and sold him three small paintings.

Through this collector, I met several UN diplomats, and when a man named Richard Jenkins walked into a bookstore where I was temporarily stocking the shelves for a friend, I was able to drop those names—he knew people from the UN. They were his clients. Richard was an extraordinary healer. I wrote about him in my book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies. He helped change my life.

Richard had a dog and a cat. I made friends with the dog, Bill. I began taking him for walks in Central Park. I’d let him off his leash, wave my hand, and he would run off and play. Then, I would silently “reach out” to him 30 yards away, and he would suddenly turn around and race back to me. This was quite interesting.

One afternoon, the dog and I were outside a deli. We were just standing there, looking at the street. I started focusing on three brownstone apartments on Columbus Avenue. I began memorizing their architecture. I wanted to draw them later. After a minute, the buildings began communicating. It was as if they were announcing themselves. They were saying, “Here we are. This is what we look like. We’re always telling the people what we look like, but they don’t hear us…”

At that moment, the dog turned toward the buildings and barked. I decided “to return to normal.” To resume “average perception.” The buildings would just be buildings. The dog stopped barking. I pitched back up to “seeing the buildings as alive.” The dog started barking again. I tried this several times. Back and forth. Same result. The dog barked. He stopped barking.

I said, “Bill, you know you’re quite something.”

A man who was buying a newspaper at a stand turned and looked at me.

“Did you call me?” he said.

I shook my head and pointed to the dog.

He walked over.

“I’m Bill,” he said.

We talked for a few minutes.

I said I was a sculptor. I told him about my search for empty structures.

“Interesting,” he said. “Can you write?”

“Sure,” I said.

He walked with me. I took the dog back to Richard’s apartment and dropped him off. Outside, Bill told me he was putting together a report on the possibility of the reunification of Germany.

I asked him who he worked for.

“People at a bank.” He was intentionally vague.

That day, we made a deal. I would meet him at the 42^nd Street Library the next afternoon, and he would show me his notes. I would sit there for a few hours and write up several pages of the report for him. A try-out.

That’s exactly what I did, and it turned into my first paying job as a writer.

One night near the end of my month-long experiment, Bill knocked on my door. I let him in. His face was pale and he was sweating.

He sat down and told me his doctor had just diagnosed him with “a very serious disease.” For some reason, he wouldn’t say what it was. He told me he was going to quit his job and leave the city.

I liked Bill. He had a devil-may-care attitude I enjoyed. I’d had several dinners with him and his wife at their apartment. They had a good marriage.

Suddenly, I felt very, very lucid.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I know there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine.”

He looked at me. Something happened. It was as if we were exchanging words on another level we both understood very well. As if we were dipping into the future. Bill saw it, he glimpsed it, and so he knew he’d be okay. He and I both saw him in the future. We knew.

He laughed.

He stood up and looked around the room.

There were tears in his eyes.

He nodded at me and walked out.

Over the next few days, I called him several times, but there was no answer.

Two weeks later, I found out he’d moved. No forwarding address.

Six months went by. I got a letter from him. He was in Arizona.

He wrote that he’d quit his job and moved his family to a place outside Phoenix.

“I never wanted that job in New York,” he wrote. “Now I’ve really got something. After the night we talked at your place, I floated down 5^th Avenue like I was on a cloud. I don’t know what the hell it was, but I was free. I just had a checkup from a specialist here, and it’s all clear. But I already knew that. The world isn’t really what we think it is, is it?”

From a mutual friend, I found out the name of Bill’s doctor in New York. My new pal, the ER doc I’d gone barn hunting with in the country, visited the neurologist on the upper East Side. After a bit of wrangling, he told her he had indeed diagnosed Bill with a “serious neurological condition.”

After that month-long experiment, in which I’d imagined and invented my life from scratch, during which time, therefore, I saw reality in a new way (and still do), I decided to leave New York, too, and come to California.

Imagination/creation/invention. The hallmarks and the keys.

Sixteen years after Bill left New York, I ran into him in LA. He was healthy as a horse.

We had supper at a little restaurant in Santa Monica.

“You know,” he said, “that revelation I had in New York all those years ago, I’ve never forgotten it. It’s impossible to describe, but I’ve become more myself.”

The waiter came over with drinks. He said, “You two must really like the food.”

Bill looked at him.

“Why do you say that?”

The waiter said, “Last night, I was just going home and I saw you guys eating dinner here.”

I don’t know what the waiter saw, but as Bill wrote to me all those years ago, the world isn’t what we think it is, is it?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

MAYBE POSSIBLE ART

MAY 13, 2011. This is part of my flood. The flood that says: other people are imagining reality for you, so why not invent it for yourself THE WAY YOU WANT TO?

Contrary to popular belief, this shift doesn’t involve going crazy or finding yourself in a deserted cosmic bus station at 3 in the morning, unless that’s where you want to be.

Today, I do a little more dissection on the corpse called Media.

In particular, what passes for medical reporting.

I’m motivated by my radio interview this week with Becky Estepp, who is the project director of a lawyer-group called EBCALA. Becky explained that, although the federal government has quietly paid out $$ claims to parents of autistic children, who were damaged by vaccines, publicly the government asserts there is absolutely no connection between the vaccines and autism.

These payouts are done through a federal agency called VICP. VICP puts parents through a lot of red tape, and denies most claims.

Well, VICP was originally set up when big pharmaceutical companies—losing huge lawsuits filed by parents of kids harmed by vaccines—approached the feds and said, “We’re in deep trouble. If these suits continue to be brought against us, we won’t be able to manufacture vaccines anymore.”

The feds and the companies then cooked up their plan. Create a new agency, VICP, and mandate that ALL claims for damage must go through it. In fact, the US Supreme Court has decided that parents can’t sue vaccine manufacturers anymore, on the basis that their vaccines could have been safer. VICP is their only option. Thus, the drug companies are protected.

And as more states consider making it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children, we have a potential situation wherein a product—vaccines—must be accepted…and if anything goes wrong, there is no recourse involving the maker of that product.

When mainstream medical journalists approach this subject, they invent a cozy little universe in which “everything is okay.” Actually, most of the time, that’s the universe they invent whenever a controversial medical subject comes up.

Conventional medical journalism is an art, believe it or not. It’s not a high art, but it still qualifies. Reporters learn how to use certain words and phrases, especially when, in the middle of an interview with a high-ranking researcher at a prestigious institution, they realize the researcher is straining, like a constipated blowfish, to inflate the importance of his own work.

The reporter slumps in his chair. He has no story. He has a deadline, but no content.

So he shrugs it off and gets ready to pepper his article with terms like:

“Could very well be a major advance on.”

“A possible coming breakthrough.”

“Glint of light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Evidence suggests.”

“The cutting edge of.”

“More research is needed but.”

“The future holds promise for.”

“A growing consensus that.”

“Are beginning to believe.”

“Strong conviction in light of.”

“In a related field, studies showed.”

“Colleagues agreed that.”

“Results never seen before.”

“Opportunities abound for further.”

“If this turns out to be.”

“Although there were side effects.”

“Hope is spreading that.”

“Never tried in the past.”

“In a few patients, we noticed.”

“Animal studies supported the idea that.”

“In his laboratory late one night.”

Look for these and similar plums in a medical story coming to your screen, TV, newspaper, magazine, journal soon.

Here’s one I found from today’s serving in about three seconds: “In detailing a new process that might someday speed the development of…”

Might. Someday. Speed the development of.

I’ll it file in the black hole I use for post-dated PR-could-be’s and check back with them in ten years.

And yes, this is art. Low-level, but art. It is literally the manufacture of reality—by the ton.

It’s a first cousin of the situation where, in a college fraternity room, a senior tells a freshman, “Now when you write the paper for Jones, use words like massive invasion, breached the boundaries, overwhelmed the civilian population, fire from the sky, surgical strike, heroic holding action. Jones watches a lot of History Channel.”

In the medical arena, the reporter needs to weld together a whole lot of vaporous bloviation to make the story stick together.

Whether he knows it or not, he’s inventing reality, and he’s pawning it off on the reader or viewer, who is supposed to take away a positive feeling about the researcher and his work.

Then there is the placement of subordinate and main clause, as in: “Although some parents are expressing concern, health officials assure the public the vaccine is completely safe.” Instead of, “Although health officials assure the public the vaccine is safe, some parents are expressing concern.” Depending on what editors in the newsroom perceive the “prevalent mood” is “in the community,” the clauses can be dealt out in either sequence.

As we all know, the reporter who interviews the self-aggrandizing researcher, Dr. Blowfish, needs to obtain a few supporting quotes from other experts. “I his work is an important step forward in the battle to conquer…”

Then, near the end of the art piece, there will appear a line or two expressing reservations:

“Dr. Forstskull, of the Bongloidia Foundation, was less sure of the results. “I believe, in the long run, we may find more thorough prevention in another form of the vaccine.”

Balanced. Fair. And completely meaningless.

Actually, the reporter also interviews a biologist from Stanford, who says, “This is by far the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever seen.”

He doesn’t make the cut in the article.

But you did make the cut. You’re the audience, and reality is being spooled out by the yard. Just for you and a few million other viewers.

Day after day, in many ways, they imagine reality. They drape it on your head. The accumulated coverage is supposed to convince you that inventing your own reality, in this or any other venue, is futile and impossible, and only a fool would try it.

That’s the whole point of the exercise.

And if you walk away and say, “I don’t believe any of that stuff they’re putting on me,” but do nothing, imagine nothing, invent nothing, create nothing, they’ve achieved their goal.

In the flowering of time, they don’t really care what you believe.

Prime elites only care that you don’t become prime mover of your own imagination, don’t walk through the door into territory beyond any of their systems.

Where, by the way, the magic is.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

GOVERNMENT “CONFESSES” VACCINE-AUTISM LINK

MAY 11, 2011. Listen to my radio show today. 7PM ET. www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

If you can’t make that, catch it in the Progressive archive. This is a big one. I’ll be interviewing Becky Estepp, project manager for the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy (EBCALA).

EBCALA just held a press conference in Washington yesterday. They presented families who have received GOVERNMENT PAYOUTS based on vaccine damage to their kids. Damage that involved AUTISM.

Get it?

This is the government “confessing” the vaccine-autism link is real. Of course, they deny that. They say they paid out the claims for “encephalopathy,” which is a catch-all term for a host of “brain diseases.”

But this is just a word game. It’s an escape hatch. It’s “we won’t ever admit directly that mercury in vaccines can cause autism.”

It’s “we just got through proving mercury has nothing to do with autism, so we’re not going to take that back now.”

It’s “well, you see, encephalopathy is sometimes ACCOMPANIED BY autistic behavior or autism.”

But the government PAID OUT CLAIMS. They parted with cash. They proved they’re liars.

And these are the people who are supposed to be running the new and improved national health insurance plan? Are you kidding me? It’s a sick joke.

In my 30 years as a reporter, I’ve seen lots of these word games. They all add up to lies. They transfer blame and meaning from one category to another, and only the most dull and gullible among us would buy in. For example, kid is diagnosed with ADHD and is given Ritalin, a cheap form of speed. At first, he feels better, clearer, more centered. Then, sooner or later, he crashes—as people do who are on speed. This crash prompts mommy and daddy to take the kid back to the doctor, who will never admit that Ritalin was responsible. He says, “Ahem, well, your son now, I’m afraid, has a NEW condition. Clinical depression. It happens. So I’ll write a prescription for Paxil.” Then, quite possibly, on both of these drugs, the kid goes bouncing off the walls. The speed effect is multiplied. He lashes out, does all sorts of irrational things. Back to the doc, who says, “Your son’s condition has worsened, I’m afraid. He’s now borderline schizoid, psychotic. I’ll have to put him on a stronger medication.”

Which causes brain damage, euphemistically called Tardive Dyskinesia. (See the “major tranquilizers” section of “Toxic Psychiatry,” by Dr. Peter Breggin.)

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

THE NAKED FEAR OF HEALTH FREEDOM

MAY 10, 2011. I have sent out this article before. In the light of recent events (bin Laden, the nuclear disaster in Japan, US hurricanes, etc.), the issue of health freedom has taken a back seat. In truth, it only surfaces during crisis moments, when big government makes overt moves to limit our health choices.

But that doesn’t mean people have lost track of it. In 1994, I ran for a Congressional seat in the 29^th District (Los Angeles), on this issue, and I know some of the people who were with me are still working to keep the flame alive.

First, I do have two updates in health-freedom news—

Right now, because I can’t find reports on the status of a bill in Washington State, which would limit parents’ choices re refusing to vaccinate their children, I have a query into the governor’s office. The bill would require parents to obtain a pediatrician’s signature, before claiming a philosophical, religious, or medical exemption. It is pernicious. It limits freedom by making a doctor the arbiter of another person’s religious or philosophical views. In a perverse way, it’s fitting—because in the last hundred years, doctors have become the modern priests of this era. Their white coats are the prelates’ robes; their instruments and medicines are the sacraments of the faith. They cite certainty as priests do—and they cover up the crimes. (See Starfield, July 26, 2000, JAMA, for evidence the medical system in the US kills 225,000 people a year.)

Second update: a group called EBCALA (Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy) is holding a press conference at noon, ET, today, on the steps of the US Court of Federal Appeals, in Washington DC. The link for live viewing is www.ustream.tv/channel/ebcala

The subject? Kids brain damaged by vaccines. EBCALA states they have proof the US government has been paying out settlement claims to parents of kids who developed autism after vaccination.

This would mean the government’s statement that there is no link between vaccines and autism is a lie and a cover-up.

EBCALA has obtained a bombshell email sent by David Bowman (US Health and Human Services spokesman) to a reporter, in which Bowman denies the government has ever paid such a claim. But the interesting language comes near the end of the email, after Bowman indicates the government has paid out claims for vaccine-caused encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is a catch-all term for a number of “brain diseases.”

Bowman writes: “Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms, including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.”

It’s the old disease-label shell game. “We pay for vaccine-injured kids who develop encephalopathy, not autism. Even though in cases, encephalopathy IS autism…”

Feel free to break down Bowman’s sleazy logic into its finer points.

Here is my 2010 article:

Usually, when politicians discover a large voting bloc that has no champion, they move in like gold prospectors with a fever in their heads. Tap that bloc; mine it; use it.

However, in the case of millions of Americans who passionately want to manage their own health without government interference, who want access to the full range of nutritional supplements and unlimited access to alternative practitioners, there is dead silence in Washington.

Why?

First, few politicians are willing to challenge the agenda of the pharmaceutical companies (drug everybody from cradle to grave). Second, these health-freedom advocates are radical decentralists—which means they know how it feels to be denied the right to take care of their own bodies. They have met the enemy and they know how it operates on a very personal level.

There is no chance politicians will be able to finesse these voters or make empty promises to them or wow them with “task forces” created to “study problems.” Health-freedom folks are too smart for any of that nonsense.

They want unbridled freedom. They want, for example, to be able to say no to vaccines for their children without having to walk the gauntlet of officials who try to dissuade and intimidate and threaten them.

They want to find alternative treatments for cancer in many cases, and cancer happens to be one of those tightly guarded provinces, where big money and big government insist on radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, come hell or high water.

If politicians aggressively and publicly courted health-freedom people, they’d be exposing themselves to vicious attacks from the medical/government axis and its media dupes.

They’d be opening the door to the notion that people can really choose their own solutions, despite “the best science” and the authoritarian pronouncements of doctors, who are modern priests in white coats wielding hypnotic power.

In other words, FREEDOM would become the top issue and the trumping issue all the way across the board—and very few politicians of either party want to step out into that world.

It’s too raw, too real, too much about naked choice.

That’s why, even as states try to nullify ObamaCare, you don’t hear conversation about how the Dept. of Health and Human Services is poised to compose a list of permitted medical treatments and will eventually outlaw alternative options.

See if you can find, even among the most conservative legislators recently elected to office in the Republican landslide, any who speak up about health freedom.

Good luck.

It remains a taboo in the halls of Congress.

This means individuals will have to carry the burden themselves. They will have to speak out and keep speaking out. They will have to challenge government repression on the most fundamental level. They will have to make this issue electric.

In doing so, they will be accused of everything under the sun. They will be called anti-science Luddites, and religious crazies, and even killers of their own children.

Notice that I’m not advocating the wholesale rejection of modern medicine; I’m saying every individual has the right and the freedom to choose to how to manage his own health. Period. That right takes precedence over anyone’s idea of science or “best evidence.”

On that basis, the fight can be won, in the long run. On any other basis, defeat is certain.

I have lobbied for the formation of a PR agency, funded by nutritional companies, that would widely disseminate information about the health benefits of supplements and the false science behind many conventional medical treatments—and the response has been zero. These companies have no stomach for such a campaign. They, too, fear health freedom, in their own way. They continue to exist in a twilight zone of hope and fantasy. “Maybe the government will ignore us and let us go on doing business.”

In 1994, when I ran for a Congressional seat in the 29^th District (Los Angeles), on a platform of health freedom, I gained profound knowledge about who would come out of the woodwork to offer help and who would stay in the shadows. The results, in that regard, were quite sobering. One or two nutritional companies supported me. The rest stayed away.

When the inessentials are stripped away and you are talking about sheer freedom, and when people realize this is your sole concern, they tend to retreat and find other things to do. On the one hand, they will admit their own health is a top concern, but they won’t come out and fight for the right to pursue it according to their own dictates. It’s a strange landscape.

Call me crazy, but I believe a presidential candidate, fully funded, who argued vigorously and widely for health freedom (and other freedoms), could win an election, even in this day and age.

But we are not about to test that hypothesis, because the fear of health freedom is too deep.

And this tells us something.

It tells us we are in the right pew. We are mining a red-hot idea. We’re discovering a lever and a fulcrum that could move the nation.

Back in 1994, I saw passion about politics that far exceeded anything I’d ever run into before. The health-freedom supporters who emerged from their homes were battle-tested veterans in a war that, out of media range, had been going on for decades. They carried a revolutionary spirit of outrage. They weren’t opting for New Age rainbows and pastel prophecies. They had a spirit toward which the Founders would have tipped their hats.

I’ve learned it’s never too late for freedom, because freedom is not part of ordinary time. It’s stands above the passage of events. It is. It’s waiting.

The current trigger is this shuck-and-jive ObamaCare program. This sanctimonious share-and-care sop. Behind it is the plan to force all Americans into a straitjacket of pharmaceutical insanity.

That’s what’s up the road.

But we can take other roads.

If we will.

Neither mainstream political party will ever admit that the government/pharmaceutical axis is a perfect example of a fascist operation. Neither party will ever state, in clear terms, that every citizen has the right to define and follow his own dictates in managing his health. They are afraid to touch that electric core.

But we aren’t.

And that is where hope resides.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

THE PATH OF MAGIC

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.”

William Gibson, “Zero History”

“Imagination makes memory. It makes language, then gradually buries it under new-spun fields of words. By degrees, this repeating process moves the world into space-times as far from the one we now inhabit as a young Tesla is from a worker ant dutifully carrying his package into a hill.”

Jon Rappoport, “The Ghost Machine in the Silver Heel of Hermes”

MAY 9, 2011. Where is modern magic?

Invoking Tesla or Frank Lloyd Wright or Bucky Fuller doesn’t have punch. It seems to be a misnomer.

Those men exemplified the individual creative principle. But is that enough to rank as magic?

Tesla was a brilliant inventor, but wasn’t his trick being able to hold in his mind all the parts of a new working machine before he ever put it together? In which case, he was “just a scientist,” albeit a “terrific visualizer.”

Even the notion that he was CREATING something escapes most people.

And if they grant that he was creative, so what? Where is the magic?

Humans on Earth keep drawing a line of demarcation between creating and magic. Artists create. Perhaps scientists do, too, on occasion. But magic is supposed to be something different. It’s arcane, strange, it’s done with spells and code, it’s a foray into another dimension that is waiting to be discovered.

In the 20^th century, though, a few people saw an equivalence between magic and imagination/creation.

It had been a gradual shift. It started much earlier, as a new consciousness bled into the culture—in the late 18^th century, we suddenly had the example of a Republic based on the notion of individual freedom. Freedom, the naked platform from which creation could be launched—without the old cosmologies and religions and priesthoods. Without the odd symbols and spells and initiations.

The figure of the magician was stripped of the need to wear a flowing cloak and a beard and engage in portentous proclamations.

And so he slipped under the radar.

But the principle, the creative principle, was there. In truth, it had always been there, had always been the essence of the thing.

Several modern problems have arisen, to add to the confusion. The modern stereotype of the creator, the artist, involved starving and suffering and becoming the victim of society. That certainly didn’t help people equate magician with creator. And many artists were commercial hacks, planning their work purely on the basis of finding a boss that would reward them with a paycheck. Magician? Hardly.

Enter the 1960s. Magic was intertwined with striving after fictional versions of pagan religions and using (in the long run, debilitating) drugs to enhance consciousness and pretending that it was all one great “return to ancient traditions.” The robes and beards made a comeback. They were part of the Disneyesque revival for the brain-addled.

Here is another distinction. From the hyperactive, instant-must-have-it-now perspective of the present day, magic is viewed as something that will, with a few correct flips of thought and ceremony, plunge the student into the heart of a realm where miracles automatically takes place. As if that was how it had been done in ancient times. Whereas, creation, involves, perish the thought, work. Magic just springs into being. For the adept, it’s like making a cup of instant coffee. Bingo, bango, bongo.

“Magicians were much more powerful in ancient times. They knew secrets that have been lost. They were initiated into the mysteries. We don’t have that now. If we did, we could make magic, too.”

If you read that quote with a vague whining overtone, while nursing a joint, and glazing over with the concept that the “universe” is a benevolent mother that grants wishes like a sub-atomic genie, you pretty much have it.

Through a combination of ingenious marketing ploys and technological advancements, we now think of a few years as a significant period of time, in which great changes race across the landscape. If a month goes by with no riveting happening reflected by the media, we lapse into boredom. But if we look back and consider, say, the years 200-300 AD or 400-300 BCE…it feels as if we’re watching paint dry. I bring this up because only a hundred years have passed since the upheaval in art that declared, once and for all, that the artist doesn’t need to imitate Nature. A hundred years are a mere blip on the calendar.

More great things are in store for us.

The modern artist is getting his sea legs. He will produce new kinds of languages that, for people who grasp them, will usher in an era of magic. In previous articles, I’ve tried to describe features of these languages.

Just as, in the 17^th century, it was unthinkable that you could sit at your desk and, in real time, see and talk to another person thousands of miles away, it is now a jolt to imagine that languages can be invented which will make present-day communication seem like an archaic, frazzled, dessicated series of mumbles.

It’s always this way: the present moment appears to be THE paradigm of reality. Whatever challenges it is absurd.

But listen. The human race has already achieved the stage of developing language that mirrors physical reality. The job is done. The syntax is up to the job.

Poets have stretched and twisted words into greater shapes…

But now we are ready for something else. Language that transports us into realms of feeling, sensation, and perception we’ve barely glimpsed. We may think such an idea is absurd and baseless, but the door has been opened part way already.

This new language won’t be imitative in any sense. It will be created. And what it conveys will also be new. Again and again, we’ve circulated around the cluster of meanings and emotions and yearnings we identify as “profoundly human.” This is going to change. In the journey, we won’t be lugging old suitcases full of psychology and cosmology and metaphysics and science. We’ll be exceeding every previous attempt to paint “ultimate reality.”

And when we make that leap, we will find that everything is magic.

The myriad present strategies of human self-sabotage will look to us like the ravings of church prelates, who demanded obedience to a fairy tale of doctrinal redemption under threat of death.

As I say, these predictions may seem absurd. But from the vantage point of the coming future, after we pass through the open door, what we are experiencing now will appear as a minor obsession wrapped inside a comic nightmare.

Then we will know art is magic—and always was.

When all our experience and thought is poured through a vessel of language that is only equipped to deliver a tiny fraction of what we can invent and perceive, we go around and around on the wheel. We condition ourselves to pretend—unconsciously—that language is an admirable mirror of our potential.

This is a delusion.

Think of the cave man struggling in his world to express a few ideas to his clan. Then, unload on him the full weight of a sophisticated lexicon. Pick one. Tang Dynasty Chinese. It would look to him—if it looked like anything at all—like a dazzling galactic storm. Ideas, emotions, distinctions, metaphors signaling levels of being and experience beyond possibility.

We are at a similar crossroad.

We are quite sure our present experience of life, of our own lives, is firm and full and expansive and even adventurous. How could we ascend further to the point where we perceive millions of new dimensions of Self, where we realize our old (2011) sky and universe is a mere low-hanging reverie on the fabric of our imagination?

Fortunately, we aren’t invulnerable to change. We will eventually look back on this present as lackluster, as if people in the year 2011 were exercising premeditated restrictions on themselves and their language. Now, we only see a hint or two of our future. We insist on a tranquil view of our accomplishments; we think of ourselves as so generous with language. If only we knew.

By the way, Shakespeare (1564-1616) invented some 1700 new words in his plays. He expanded the vocabulary of English significantly, as well as the way verse was written and metaphor could be extended. Those words include several I embedded in the previous paragraph: premeditated; lackluster; invulnerable; hint; generous; tranquil.

The invention of language extends consciousness—and that is a magical event. Language creates realities that were never present before, like rabbits appearing out of hats, cards moving from one pocket to another.

Before Shakespeare, it was Chaucer who multiplied English. People mistakenly think such feats are no more unusual or revolutionary than finding new strains of tobacco. But when mind advances from the size of a pea to a palace, because of words, the whole vista of life changes.

This expansion, via language, is continuing as we speak. It’s invisible, in part, because we are using old language and its forms to think about that fact. This is called a knot, or a paradox, but the knot is coming loose.

Ecstatic moments that suddenly appear and then vaporize in dreams; exotic irrelevant shapes that well up through the push-pull of analytic calculation; chains that snap during odd alpha-state reflections; huge propelled desires that seem to find no home or target; dynamic glints in the skies…these unlabeled events that put cracks in our armor will become letters and words and sentences in a new tongue and script. And then there will be magic.

Then we will know that art is greater than we imagined—because we will be imagining greater art.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

MAGIC IS THE PRICE OF IMAGINATION

“…my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.”

William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum”

MAY 9, 2011. For a longer version of this piece, which brings in the recent bin Laden events, go to my radio archive:

www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com/archives

Scroll to The Jon Rappoport Show. The show aired on May 4.

As long-time readers know, I’ve written much on the subject of imagination.

This time, I’m taking a slightly different slant:

When you live by and through imagination, you WILL produce magic. There is no question about it.

The question is: can you accept that? And can you deal with it?

I’ll offer a boiled-down definition of magic. It is the bringing about of events that stand outside the normal chains of cause and effect.

Some people would use the word synchronicity, but that tends to imply the generating spark comes from a mysterious force outside the person. No. The initial spark comes from projection of imagination.

People generally believe they are supposed to fit into the world…cogs in the machine. Or they believe rebellion against fitting in is their highest possible aspiration.

But what happens when you punch through the cover stories and deceptions that constitute phony realities? Where do you go then?

Do you just sit in the increasingly sour and rancid stew of your own discoveries?

Or do you take the clue and realize that the imposition of fakerealities is itself an act of imagination?

Seeing THAT, you can begin to invent your own realities out of your imagination—and project them into the world.

And if you do exactly that long enough and intensely enough and adventurously enough, magic will occur.

Fortuitous events will take place that have no business taking place. Ordinary patterns of cause and effect will experience “lapses.”

The only limitation: people don’t take imagination far enough. They stall at the gate. They give up. They dip their toe in the water and then back away.

The remedy for this is a deeper understanding of imagination.

Creative power is at the root of life. It could be the power that assembles circumstances and lies FOR you, externally, or it could be your own imagination.

Here I’ll pull out my museum paradigm. You walk into the galleries of a large museum filled with paintings. There are three possibilities. One: you wander from room to room, looking at the canvases on the walls. Two: under the influence of advice from others, you stand in front of one painting, stare at it for a long time—and then walk into it and take up residence there, forever, in the deceptively described One and Only Reality. Three: you leave the museum and go home and begin to paint.

Number two is, of course, the outcome of all the lies and cover stories that are floated to depict what the world and the universe are and must be.

Number three is what works.

As technology advances, the paintings in the museum will become more complex and enchanting. So the temptation to walk into one and take up a permanent home—abandoning imagination—will increase.

It’s called entertainment.

The entire media apparatus of the planet is the embodied imagination of its directors. They calculate what will sell, what will make an impact, what will attract audiences. They work from those premises.

Some of them also, of course, work from the premise of building cover stories to conceal what elites are actually doing to control more and more of the minds and property of populations.

So this gigantic media apparatus is engaged in mind control.

But more importantly, it is engaged in IMAGINATION CONTROL—or to put it more accurately, IMAGINATION SUBSTITUTION. Theirs in place of yours.

It’s hard for most people to see this, because they are already in the “reality pocket” media has created for them. They believe. They accept. They accept the spin that has been put on events, many of which were manufactured to begin with.

EVERYONE WHO BLINDLY ACCEPTS ORDINARY REALITY IS A FUNDAMENTALIST.

We think of fundamentalism in terms of religions. And it’s true that religious fanatics are launched on a particularly harmful course. They always were and always will be. But in a deeper sense, consensus reality—that creation—is the basic culprit.

Accepting it without question appears to be mandatory. Why? Because the very engine one would use to invent his own reality—imagination—has been put on the shelf. It’s gathering dust.

Talk about imagination to most people and they won’t even know what you’re referring to.

Part of the reason? Awareness that imagination exists is a relatively new phenomenon. Many ancient societies had no real concept of it. Instead, a dream one had at night was “a vision sent by a god or demon.” Art was “induced by a spirit.” And the meaning of such dreams and art was circumscribed and severely limited by the operating cosmology and world view and priesthood of the group.

The path of imagination cuts across the grain of such established norms, and in the process, ironclad cause-and-effect relationships in physical reality are loosened. Gaps appear. Fortuitous events occur, in accordance with Desire.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

BIN LADEN STORY SHAPE SHIFTS

MAY 7, 2011. On May 2, the White House held a press briefing. Counter-terrorism chief, John Brennan, took the following question:

“Was it—was there a visual, or was it just radio reports or phone reports you were getting [during the raid]?”

Brennan: “We [in the situation room] were able to monitor the situation in real time and were able to have regular updates to ensure that we had real-time visibility into the progress of the operation. I’m not going to go into detail about what type of visuals we had or what type of feeds that were there, but it was—it gave us the ability to actually track it [the raid] on an ongoing basis.”

Then the world was presented with the photo of Obama, H. Clinton, and others intently watching the raid in the situation room.

This cemented in the notion that top US officials were, in fact, watching the raid take place in real time.

But on May 5, CIA Director, Leon Panetta, told PBS: “Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information. We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”

So the implication was: we saw everything.

Then the claim was: we saw nothing of importance.

Brennan managed to suggest, without actually spelling it out, that the team in the situation room saw everything that was vital…and then his story collapsed.

Can’t these people keep their scenario straight?

There are several possible reasons for the abrupt change. Perhaps the most interesting is: the team in the White House situation room wants deniability, in case something untoward eventually surfaces about what actually went on inside the compound. Shooting unarmed women and children, for example. Or the man who was killed wasn’t public-enemy number one.

“We didn’t see that. We didn’t see anything.”

At this point, you can make up your own version of events, and you’ll probably be as close to the truth as what we’re getting from official sources.

Briefly, a report surfaced about a doctor in the compound being arrested. Where is he? What does he have to say about bin Laden’s physical condition for the last five years? Where is the kidney dialysis equipment that was needed to keep him alive? If it were there, you’d think US officials would have released that information, as part of their “verification” procedure indicating that the man who was shot and killed was, in fact, bin Laden. If, indeed, he had been suffering from very serious kidney disease since 2001 and needed dialysis—where are those machines?

“Oh, of course we found them. We dumped them in the sea with the corpse.”

Then there are the gruesome death photos that were going to be released, but weren’t. What happened there? Where are the photos now? Who has them?

DNA experts have already weighed in and said the original DNA sample from a bin Laden family member may be insufficient to provide a convincing match, given the complex structure of the family tree.

Imagine you had hired an architect to build a skyscraper. He comes to your office with a few sketches and partial blueprints. You examine them.

“Here, where these pillars are located? I don’t quite see how they support this slab. Then the girders. Where are the connections to the upper floors? And the roof. I don’t see how it’s fastened in place.”

“Look, the building will stand. I assure you. I’m the architect. Accept that. Why would I present you with a dud?”

Make up your own mind. Examine the evidence, the lack of evidence.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

BIN LADEN AND MAKING POLITICAL HAY

MAY 2, 2011. 11:30 AM, Pacific Time. This is an update on the article, BIN LADEN QUESTIONS, that I wrote earlier this morning.

For those who didn’t read the first piece, I’ve included it below.

It’s important to understand that, in one stroke, the image of President Obama has changed.

The effects may not be noticed for a little while. But his stature vis-a-vis the coming election…this is a new ballgame.

And therefore, IF the reported death of Bin Laden is a fraud, some major political op has been waged.

Up to this point in his first term, Obama has failed to fulfill one of the basic requirements of a president in many voters’ eyes. His health plan didn’t do it. His bailout of Wall Street didn’t do it. His handling of the recent Middle East crisis didn’t do it. His military foray into Libya didn’t cut it. His jobs program certainly didn’t rate high.

And his continuation of the war in Afghanistan was an indifferent bog.

For many, including some independent voters, Obama hasn’t presented himself as a distinctly AMERICAN PRESIDENT.

That was always his weak point. Bush may have stumbled across his lines in speeches, he may have launched a crazy war in Iraq, but he was a cowboy. He was cozily American.

But Obama? No dice.

However, now, “at his direction,” as commander-in-chief, Obama has run a military/CIA/seal attack that killed public enemy number one.

This wasn’t policy wonking. It wasn’t trying to broker peace. It wasn’t hope and change. It wasn’t high-IQ stuff. It wasn’t “every American deserves health care.” It wasn’t snippy little remarks aimed at Republicans. It wasn’t “hang in there, I know it’s tough but we’ll get the economy rolling again.”

It was search, attack, and destroy. It was: you want tough guy? Thisis tough guy.

His stature just went from 1 to 9. All of a sudden, he’s presidential, not just a politician. And presidential is hard to beat in a race for a second term. Subconsciously and instantaneously, many, many Americans already know a defeat for Obama in 2012 would amount to a rejection of the man who killed bin Laden. And to them, that doesn’t feel right. That doesn’t sit right. That seems like a slur. A slap in the face to a personage who did what America has been aching to do since 9/11. A slap in the face of America itself.

“The man who killed Osama bin Laden has just been defeated in his attempt for a second term as president of the United States.”

Get it? That doesn’t sit well. That doesn’t compute. How could that happen?

Then there is this. All the criticisms of Obama, the man, and his presidency—and there have been many—can’t have quite the same impact and sting they had before yesterday. They are now balanced out by the fact that he killed bin Laden. The weights on the scales have changed.

“Mr. Trump, you want to know whether this guy has a valid birth certificate and he just took out bin Laden?”

It takes time for people to realize these tectonic shifts in the subconscious have occurred. But this one just happened.

Okay. Here is my earlier article from today–

MAY 2, 2011. 9:15 am, Pacific Time. Everything could change minute by minute, but right now there are serious questions…

The face photo of a dead bin Laden that has been circulating on British media online sites is a fake. That has been confirmed by TheGuardian site. It’s a composite of an old bin Laden photo and an unknown dead man whose face was mashed up. The Guardian has the photos on its site, and you can see the fake was put together from two others.

GEO TV, a Pakistani media outlet, had apparently been reporting that Pakistani forces just killed bin Laden. That story: a Pakistani military helicopter was doing a search mission and was shot down by unknown persons. Pakistani troops then engaged in a fire fight with the shooters, and in that clash bin Laden was killed.

Now, however, on the GEO site, the story is changed. The new version is the official one. A US operation killed bin Laden.

Of possible relevance: In all the press reports I watched last night (Sunday), I heard no reference to the exact time of the attack on the house in Abbottabad. It’s elementary journalism to nail a fact like that down. What happened?

What about the DNA test on bin Laden? Last night (Sunday), US news outlets were reporting that a DNA test match had already been made between the man US Seals killed and bin Laden. So apparently, they already had a genuine DNA sample from bin Laden. But DNA testing takes time. How was the match arrived at so quickly?

Now, US news outlets are changing their tune. The DNA testing is underway. It wasn’t used to confirm bin Laden’s death. Instead, “facial recognition” was employed. This is not described. Does it mean eyeballing the corpse? Was facial-recognition software used to ID a photo of the dead bin Laden?

It appears, from press reports, that about a month ago, the White House was significantly leaning in the direction of believing bin Laden was living in the walled compound in Abbottabad. So since then, what measures were taken to assure he didn’t leave? Nearby ground surveillance? That could arouse suspicion. Satellite viewing? If so, and if bin Laden had fled, could he have been tracked and killed before disappearing?

For a long time, reports have circulated claiming bin Laden was already dead. The Pakistan Observer reported he died in December of 2001.

So far, since yesterday, neither US or Pakistani officials have released a photo of the corpse of bin Laden. The White House is now, it’s reported, debating about whether to release a “gruesome” picture.

We are told bin Laden was living in a large house in Abbotabad, which is a town where the Pakistani version of West Point is situated—a mile or two away from bin Laden’s hideout. Also, many retired Pakistani military officers live in the town. Two accused terrorists, CNN reports, Umar Patek and Tahir Shehzad, were arrested in Abbottabad in the past year, in house raids staged by Pakistani troops. Why would bin Laden set up shop there? Why would he stay after the raids? Although there appears to be evidence Pakistani officials have shielded bin Laden over the years, one can’t rely on all the military people in the town to follow suit.

And then there is the fact that this compound stuck out like a sore thumb in the area. It was far bigger than any other house in the area, had been built at a cost of $1 million, it had walls and security wire, the residents burned all their trash, and the women in the house spoke Arabic. Was bin Laden, the terrorist genius, announcing his presence?

President Obama claimed, last night, that bin Laden’s burial would be handled in accordance with Islamic custom. So the press is now reporting his body has been dropped at sea. At least one Muslim cleric claims this is not Islamic custom, the body must be buried in the ground—and if officials are worried the site could become a rallying point for terrorists, the secret grave could remain unmarked. The body is gone. No photo of it has been released. We have no details about how “facial recognition” was achieved. We have conflicting stories about who staged the attack. A phony death photo of bin Laden’s face has been discredited. The DNA-test story initially released has now been withdrawn.

On August 15, 2010, General Petraeus stated that capturing bin Laden was still high on the US agenda. So now, two-and-a-half months before the date American troops are supposed to come home from Afghanistan, there is a “mission-accomplished” public relations tune that can be played…and a partial drawdown of troops, plus a repeated hailing of the killing of bin Laden can be used to assuage bitter feelings about the war…as the next presidential election season approaches.

A few days before the 2004 election, a bin Laden video surfaced. Its authenticity was questioned. Some speculated it helped George Bush win a second term in office.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

QUESTIONS ABOUT BIN LADEN

MAY 2, 2011. 9:15 am, Pacific Time. Everything could change minute by minute, but right now there are serious questions…

The face photo of a dead bin Laden that has been circulating on British media online sites is a fake. That has been confirmed by TheGuardian site. It’s a composite of an old bin Laden photo and an unknown dead man whose face was mashed up. The Guardian has the photos on its site, and you can see the fake was put together from two others.

GEO TV, a Pakistani media outlet, had apparently been reporting that Pakistani forces just killed bin Laden. That story: a Pakistani military helicopter was doing a search mission and was shot down by unknown persons. Pakistani troops then engaged in a fire fight with the shooters, and in that clash bin Laden was killed.

Now, however, on the GEO site, the story is changed. The new version is the official one. A US operation killed bin Laden.

Of possible relevance: In all the press reports I watched last night (Sunday), I heard no reference to the exact time of the attack on the house in Abbottabad. It’s elementary journalism to nail a fact like that down. What happened?

What about the DNA test on bin Laden? Last night (Sunday), US news outlets were reporting that a DNA test match had already been made between the man US Seals killed and bin Laden. So apparently, they already had a genuine DNA sample from bin Laden. But DNA testing takes time. How was the match arrived at so quickly?

Now, US news outlets are changing their tune. The DNA testing is underway. It wasn’t used to confirm bin Laden’s death. Instead, “facial recognition” was employed. This is not described. Does it mean eyeballing the corpse? Was facial-recognition software used to ID a photo of the dead bin Laden?

It appears, from press reports, that about a month ago, the White House was significantly leaning in the direction of believing bin Laden was living in the walled compound in Abbottabad. So since then, what measures were taken to assure he didn’t leave? Nearby ground surveillance? That could arouse suspicion. Satellite viewing? If so, and if bin Laden had fled, could he have been tracked and killed before disappearing?

For a long time, reports have circulated claiming bin Laden was already dead. The Pakistan Observer reported he died in December of 2001.

So far, since yesterday, neither US or Pakistani officials have released a photo of the corpse of bin Laden. The White House is now, it’s reported, debating about whether to release a “gruesome” picture.

We are told bin Laden was living in a large house in Abbotabad, which is a town where the Pakistani version of West Point is situated—a mile or two away from bin Laden’s hideout. Also, many retired Pakistani military officers live in the town. Two accused terrorists, CNN reports, Umar Patek and Tahir Shehzad, were arrested in Abbottabad in the past year, in house raids staged by Pakistani troops. Why would bin Laden set up shop there? Why would he stay after the raids? Although there appears to be evidence Pakistani officials have shielded bin Laden over the years, one can’t rely on all the military people in the town to follow suit.

And then there is the fact that this compound stuck out like a sore thumb in the area. It was far bigger than any other house in the area, had been built at a cost of $1 million, it had walls and security wire, the residents burned all their trash, and the women in the house spoke Arabic. Was bin Laden, the terrorist genius, announcing his presence?

President Obama claimed, last night, that bin Laden’s burial would be handled in accordance with Islamic custom. So the press is now reporting his body has been dropped at sea. At least one Muslim cleric claims this is not Islamic custom, the body must be buried in the ground—and if officials are worried the site could become a rallying point for terrorists, the secret grave could remain unmarked. The body is gone. No photo of it has been released. We have no details about how “facial recognition” was achieved. We have conflicting stories about who staged the attack. A phony death photo of bin Laden’s face has been discredited. The DNA-test story initially released has now been withdrawn.

On August 15, 2010, General Petraeus stated that capturing bin Laden was still high on the US agenda. So now, two-and-a-half months before the date American troops are supposed to come home from Afghanistan, there is a “mission-accomplished” public relations tune that can be played…and a partial drawdown of troops, plus a repeated hailing of the killing of bin Laden can be used to assuage bitter feelings about the war…as the next presidential election season approaches.

A few days before the 2004 election, a bin Laden video surfaced. Its authenticity was questioned. Some speculated it helped George Bush win a second term in office.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE NON-DUALITY GAME

APRIL 29, 2011. Of all the spiritual concepts imported from Asian philosophies, non-duality may be the most persistent and best loved.

It basically states, as Western thinkers interpret it, that consciousness is one universal sea, and each of us is a “droplet” in that ocean.

In this way, we are all connected, always were, and always will be.

It’s easy to see how smaller versions of this idea hook up to the main premise. For example, the so-called biological web of life, which has become so popular, and is used as a warning sign to humanity that, by allowing or causing extinction of species, the whole chain of existence on planet Earth is endangered.

I think shooting non-man-eating tigers or putting wild animals in cages is something done by execrable assholes, but I also think cutting off water to farms in California because a tiny fish may run into trouble is insane. Seems to me that huge numbers of species have gone away since the dawn of life here, and without any human intervention…and yet, here we are now. We exist, the planet exists. But hey, what do I know? I do know this. If human beings wipe themselves out and pollute the world into a much worse condition than it is now, in the process, the planet will survive. It will live on. Things will grow.

To put this another way…I’d rather boycott the eight biggest chemical companies in the world (I started such a boycott 15 years ago) than to pray or publish at the altar of “the web of collective life.”

Anyway, non-duality is a wonderful platform for all sorts of “advanced thinkers.” Some of them even assume the Big Bang created the “universal sea of consciousness.” I fail to see how an explosion of matter and energy can do that…but again, I’m sure the Wise Ones can explain it to us.

“Yes, ahem, well, you see, if you blow up stuff hard enough, you get this thing called awareness, because electrons and quarks and wavicles turn inside out and then they wonder where they are and what the hell happened, and boom, you have the first glint of Universal Mind…”

But the most annoying thing about non-duality is the ocean-and-droplet concept itself. I know it’s not popular to point this out, but when you control a society by claiming that everyone intrinsically has his place (giving rise to a caste system), it helps to have a basic way of diminishing the importance of the individual.

As in, “Hi, droplet, I’m another droplet. How u DOin’?”

This would be followed up with, “You see, by the roll of the dice of Karma, I happen to be a droplet at the front of a wave, while you are riding at the back…so for the meantime, you stay behind me, get it?”

Then, finally, “From your hovel made out of cardboard on the wrong side of the tracks, where nobody’s got anything, you can connect with the Sea of All Consciousness, just as I can from my estate on the hill with the gold gates…so, in that sense, we are the same.”

But there is something more fundamentally wrong with non-duality. Go back to the wisdom of Tibet to find it, before the Tibetans messed it all up by clogging their own system with ritual after ritual and a rigid priest class. It was fairly simple: YOU CAN BE ONE WITH ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE ONE WITH, AND YOU CAN ALSO NOT DO THAT.

They had exercises in which a person would sit by a tree and become one with it for a while…and then the person would stand up, shrug it off, and walk away.

In other words, being a droplet in the great ocean was NOT a fundamental and enduring fact. It was a thing you could do on a summer afternoon.

It was, if you will, a piece of magic.

Anybody can do it. Try it sometime. A fly is buzzing around your head? Become one with it. Nice and easy. You might find the fly stops buzzing and swooping, slows down, and lands on the table.

Now, experiments have been done that show random-number generators will significantly alter their usual randomness before a momentous event occurs. An event like an earthquake, for example. The explanation is: all of us preview, somehow, or pre-cog this event and the result of the group-consciousness has this visible effect on the number generators, which are pieces of matter. Therefore, consciousness can affect matter.

Okay. Great. Accepting this explanation, however, doesn’t show that we are, inevitably, one great big glob of consciousness. It could show, for example, that each one of us, separately, is pre-cogging the coming earthquake. Or it could show that, for a few minutes, we all subconsciously come together. But is that tantamount to saying we are always connected, or that if we are, we are connected at the most profound level of being? I think not.

Suppose you and a close friend finish each other’s sentences and sometimes think the same thought at the same moment? I know, it feels good, it feels weird, it feels whatever it feels. But does that mean you are fundamentally the same consciousness? Does it mean you are the same consciousness all the time? Does it mean there is no higher goal to aspire to than being the same consciousness all the time?

Back to the Tibetans. You can be One with your friend or not be One with your friend.

There are some passionate spiritual story tellers who will, in line with the droplet-and-ocean theory, tell you how you really aren’t you at all, that what you think is you is just ego talking, and we are really all molecules in the Great Sea—but that’s just a story. It’s a story that radically contrasts with modern culture in the West, and as such, it really has a great zing to it, and it feels good to turn everything you know on its head and dance with that for a few minutes. Sure. Why not? But as a description of the way it really is all the time and always was and always will be, forever? Ultimately?

Which means your only choice is to go along with that flow or live “a lesser life?” Come on.

No, there is choice. You can be the tree or not be the tree. It’s simple. You’re still you. Which may come as a disappointment, but hey, don’t blame me.

I wouldn’t bother to discuss any of this, except for the fact that droplet-and-ocean tends to cast an enormous fog over the basic dynamic force of the individual: imagination and creation.

Because people who believe in droplet-and-ocean USE THAT to remain in a more or less passive state. They also tend to follow leaders. They think “it doesn’t matter” because somewhere, sometime, they’ll get back the consciousness, on a conscious level, that they are a drop in the ocean. It’ll happen. Yawn.

Along with this ocean-of-one-consciousness idea, we have, in physics, the so-called Indeterminacy Principle. It’s usually stated as: the observer changes what is observed. And this gives rise to non-duality as well, in many people’s minds. In other words, consciousness (observation) changes matter, and therefore, All is really Consciousness. The logical leap escapes me, but there it is.

The observer and the observed are not really separate, since the observer is automatically changing the observed—and therefore, the duality between observer and observed is erased. Therefore, no duality, no separation, non-duality is the law, and we are all drops in the ocean. Again, one or two formidable (ludicrous) leaps of thinking there.

My admittedly crass and amateur knowledge of the Indeterminacy Principle goes like this: if you shine a light on a tiny particle, like an electron, you can’t precisely state both its position in space and its momentum at the same time. The flash of light might illuminate its position, but the force of the photons of light alters its momentum.

Well, I don’t see how that adds up to: we’re all droplets in the sea of consciousness. I’m sure an expert will fill in the gaps.

In our world, it seems that many people will try anything they can to rule out imagination and creative power of the individual. They’ll figure out something to derail that. Non-duality is just another attempt.

Non-duality is also used, in various forms, to promote collectivism. Since we are all One, we have to abandon any idea or motive that seeks to create reality, on an individual level, apart from the mass, the glob.

I don’t want to ruin the party, but the people who promote the collective, whether on a material or spiritual basis, have been promoted into becoming leaders, while the rest of us should become followers—and I would say this even violates their own philosophy of drops-in-the-ocean. Again, some drops are better and more privileged than others.

Universal-one-joyous-goo-of consciousness-forever…as ultimate, final, authoritative Reality…doesn’t exist. It doesn’t already exist. Rather, realities are created. New realities. They are imagined and they are created. By the individual.

And if that sounds like duality, well, it is. It’s duality and tri-ality, and quad-ality and quint-ality, and so on. It’s all the alities.

And if there is, among everything that exists, a sea of consciousness, it’s another interesting phenomenon. Like a star system or a galaxy or a dance craze. If you like it, plug in. If you get bored, go somewhere else.

I stand on the metaphor I’ve been using for a long time: the universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.

I’m on the side of the artists.

And of course, I mean that in the nicest possible way, because I don’t want to create a ripple on the vast all-one sea and wake up the spiritual collectivists.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, 60 years ago, some shmuck from a prominent Northeastern University, working as an analyst for a think-tank, sat in a small room and wrote, “To bring the whole planet under the control of a single management system, we need a broad attractive concept that will rope in future generations. A universal “sea of consciousness” could do the trick. We import it, promote it, and hose down the young with it. Most of them don’t want to be individuals anyway. It’s too daunting. Unless we can find a gene for creativity and delete it from the human genome, I favor this ‘sea’ idea. It can go the distance.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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