WHEN IMAGINATION SWALLOWS BELIEF

APRIL 23, 2011. Imagination and belief are not completely clean categories. There are fuzzy places and obscure corners and overlaps. But essentially, a belief is hardened imagination. It is imagination that slowed down at some point in space and coalesced into a sense that THIS IS THE WAY THINGS ARE or THIS IS WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE or THIS IS WHAT I MUST DO.

Cultures are based on beliefs. Most of the time, the beliefs are thought of as facts.

“The big spirit in the ground talked to us.”

This “fact” started out as a belief, which in turn was originally a piece of imagination projected by an artist.

As the civilization of Rome came crashing down, there were competing religious cults and groups who had all sorts of beliefs about gods…and these had started out as imaginative ideas flung out by poets. But now they were beliefs warring for supremacy as facts.

So in the chaos that was the fall of Rome, Constantine made his moves. He willed into being the new Roman Church and its doctrines, and that Church spread its influence far and wide. It eventually reached a point where its honchos ordered inquisitions, torture, confession, and death for those who dissented.

You can chart the course of a number of civilizations and find similar patterns.

There is one progression that hasn’t yet taken hold on planet Earth. The move from belief to imagination. In order for this to happen, people have to have as firm a hold on the consequences of imagination as they presently have on the consequences of belief. They need to see imagination as something quite powerful, not as a flimsy vaporous diversion from “reality.” No one is going to replace the rock of belief with what appears to him as an insubstantial haze.

Belief may be hardened imagination, but most people don’t see it that way.

If you’re driving a wagon drawn by three horses, and you’ve handled that vehicle for a long time and know it gets you from one place to another, you’re not going to leave it by the side of the road for a bright red Ferrari—if you don’t know what an ignition key is or what an engine is or what a steering wheel is. You’re going to have to become confident in your ability to drive the car and maneuver it. Then you’ll free the horses and get rid of the wagon.

In my series, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL, I explained the obsession with What Exists. Well, belief is the underpinning for that obsession. Belief forms a map of What Exists.

Imagination, on the other hand, is a bird that leads you to new worlds. Actually, you imagine the bird and create the worlds. So this isn’t a minor shift. It isn’t a walk in the park.

For a century or more, science has been guiding the perceptual shift from matter to energy. Matter has been analyzed into particles and waves and space.

In similar fashion, we need a revolution that tracks solid belief into the lair where it came from—imagination.

The great thing about imagination is that it doesn’t carry the baggage of doctrine. It doesn’t require consent of others. It doesn’t demand followers who are ready to march into foreign lands and kill people who think along divergent lines.

It doesn’t depend on gene structure or any structure. It’s non-material, but it doesn’t found a church.

With imagination, you replace beliefs with the perception of what you’ve created. That perception becomes more thrilling and suggestive as time passes. In fact, it becomes the basis for a new set of beliefs…but you don’t have to make those beliefs into hard rocks of militaristic faith. Imagination, creation, new beliefs—they form a dynamic and shifting skyscape of power.

And WHAT EXISTS, whether on a physical or metaphysical level, becomes unimportant next to what you are imagining and creating. Priorities are re-arranged.

Finally, in order to employ your imagination, you don’t need to assume there is some “higher reality” outside yourself, from which you derive the power or permission or mandate to live through and by imagination. That is unnecessary. That is irrelevant. That, it turns out, is a form of postponement. A postponement of action.

If you see this clearly, you can then look around you and view the landscape of people and groups who are bound by their beliefs, which they take to be hardened facts. You can see the limits they have imposed on themselves, the conditions they have attached to their own existence, the systems in which they have become embedded, the circumscribed boundaries they have drawn around their own lives and their own potential.

The joke of that situation hits home.

You can call it a hilarious joke or a tragic joke or a sick joke or a crazy joke…but joke it is…and you don’t need to be a cog in its gears.

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.

IMAGINING A HIDDEN TREASURE

APRIL 22, 2011. Let me start with this.

A belief is something you imagine when you really need to, when you’re desperate.

If you’re not desperate, what you imagine is art.

Okay?

From that point of view, it doesn’t matter whether what you’re imagining is real or made up. It serves you. It gets you through a tough period.

Or how about this? An artist says, “All my inspiration to paint comes from three entities who exist in a secret dome on Mars. They feed me ideas…”

In that case, a person is imagining things that help him to imagine things.

Here is another one. A person with a serious disease is told there is a blue cloud a thousand miles above Earth. The cloud emits healing rays. He is further told to feel and experience these rays coming all the way through his body and down into the ground.

He does this every day. What does he do? He imagines the cloud, the rays, and the rays coming down through his body healing him.

But he doesn’t see this as imagining. He believes the cloud is there. He believes the rays are there and that they heal. He believes the rays are entering his body.

And lo and behold, after a few months, his symptoms go away.

What is this all about?

Believing is a form of imagining.

It’s not the only form.

Here are some words that denote various forms or levels of imagining/creating:

Pretend, believe, invent, assume, consider, wish for, improvise, hope, worship, pray, wonder, envision…

However, life as we ordinarily accept it on planet Earth makes distinctions between these concepts. And there are differences. But there is also the common thread and major feature called imagining.

Let’s do a thought experiment. I’ll describe several situations in which imagining/creating results in a phenomenon. You decide to what degree people will accept the result as real. Grade these situations along that guideline.

One: over a period of six months, a patient diagnosed with a serious heart condition, who takes no medication, imagines (believes) that an angel is healing that condition. After six months, all tests indicate the person’s heart is now completely healthy.

Two: a flying saucer lands on the lawn of the White House. A figure steps out and extends his hand. His hand is empty. Suddenly, a vertical pile of 40 gold bricks appears resting on his hand.

Three: in the Gobi desert, there is a metal ball lying on the sand. All over the world, a chosen group of a million people simultaneously imagine the ball is levitating. The ball rises from the ground to a height of six feet and hovers there for an hour.

Four: A man walks into Times Square. He is holding a small black box. His hair, which is brown, turns black. Then it turns red. Then it turns blond. Then it turns gray. Then it turns white.

Five: A boy stands in the middle of a busy street in Chicago. He points at a parked car. It levitates to a height of 16 feet, hovers there for a minute, then gently lowers back down to the ground. The boy does this with eight cars.

I won’t try to give a definitive grading scale to this experiment. I do think the healing of the heart condition, though, would be the easiest for most people to accept.

In other words, through cultural “preparation,” people can be convinced to accept certain paranormal phenomena without too much trouble.

I also think the ball-in-the-Gobi-desert idea has received sufficient prep to allow a large number of onlookers to accept it as real, and accept the notion that a collection of people thinking the same thought can cause extraordinary things to happen.

I’ll dare to suggest something else. Maybe all of these events would be easier to accept—by certain groups of people—than the proposition that God is an imaginary construct.

For most people on planet Earth, when you present them with IMAGINING versus BELIEVING, there is no contest. They will say that belief is so much stronger than imagining. For them, imagining is just an idle toy for children.

If you stuck them with exchanging BELIEVING for IMAGINING, they would feel deprived, shortchanged, naked, at a great disadvantage.

But what would happen, in the playing out of Earth culture, if, somehow, IMAGINING rose and rose in status far beyond the status of BELIEVING?

If that flip occurred, you might hear a person proudly say, “I had this very serious disease. Terminal. So I imagined there was a crazy pink lizard floating inside a castle in the clouds who could change into a dancing jaguar, and the jaguar could inject me with an energy that scoured my body and got rid of all the immune insufficiencies…and boom, my disease was gone!”

And everyone would understand and feel pretty good about the imagining.

Someone would write, “Back in the old days, we had quite a system. Belief was the most important thing. Can you imagine it? That’s a joke. Anyway, we were sold on believing. Then we gradually woke up and realized believing was a form of imagining. Wow. What a day that was. It was a relief, let me tell you. From that moment on, we could imagine without limit. And we started producing some amazing effects. We still do, of course. It’s quite a world now, wouldn’t you say?”

Yes. Remember, back in the old days, when one person would say to another, “You’re not imagining the same thing I’m imagining, so I’m going to have to kill you.” Well, he didn’t say it that way exactly, but we know what he meant.

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 GENETIC METAPHOR

APRIL 21, 2011. In the grab-bag field of research involving human genes, some biologists have speculated that the 20,000 components of the genome are not enough to explain human function and behavior.

They have gone to another level—there must be additional programming or other elements that direct the genes to carry out multiple tasks.

This is all about cause and effect. In this case, the effect is everything a human does or thinks or feels. The cause would be genetic activity.

The goal, of course, is to understand the cause so well it can be manipulated to produce new effects.

When rare critics point out that explaining human life is different from explaining, say, a consecutive series of billiard balls striking each other on a felt table, researchers shrug it off and claim the human problem is simply more complex.

One biologist I interviewed several years ago told me, “This is the way science works. We start with a simple model of causation, and then, over time, we adjust that model so it can account for a wider range of effects.”

I said, “But suppose you eventually run up against the idea that an individual has free will? He can unilaterally decide to take an action, without any prior genetic determination.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “There is always a cause. We just have to find it. What we used to call free will is really the result of invisible influences acting on a person.”

“How can you be so sure?”

For that, he had no answer.

Genetic theory is just the latest in a long line of ideas proposed to lock the human being into a structure. The will of the gods, the divine right of kings, demons, early childhood sexual trauma, group allegiance, etc.

Every era and age has its preferred method of PR, to make its hypothesis about causation seem brilliant.

And each of these explanations for human behavior is aimed at submerging the individual into an overall context that is far more important than he is.

Historically, the fly in the ointment has been art.

Because the artist seems to be FREE.

Actually, if viewed from the correct angle, the artist is exactly what every human being IS. But elevating the imagination to that level doesn’t make political hay in the marketplace of government. Or science.

And “scientists” tend to believe that imagination is merely a little flip and trick and switch in the gene structure.

Now, in the first flush of widespread computer use, many people have concluded that “the human species” is basically a design group. We build machines that think and solve and collate and organize. Soon, those machines will themselves design other devices. And so on and so forth, with every such entity aimed at carrying out particular defined functions.

So once more the artist is left out in the cold, because he isn’t, first and foremost, striving to invent robots.

What IS he doing?

Nothing much. Only creating worlds.

And there is the rub because, you see, everyone else is fixated on this world.

Of what possible use is another realm?

Even those who believe that other universes exist—the notion that an artist would create a universe that never existed before he made it seems superfluous and somewhat annoying.

“Why can’t he make himself useful the way everybody else does?”

This is where the rubber meets the road:

BE USEFUL.

If you can’t adopt that as your standard, you have a screw loose—or a gene pointing in the wrong direction.

So let me state it plainly. The artist shows paths to other realities in which we could all potentially exist. Realities that weren’t there until he invented them.

That is the side effect of his work.

The language we speak, our interactions, what we do every day, our chronic emotions, our preoccupations, our circumscribed lives, our so-called highest thoughts…all this could change radically in innumerable ways. And not through careful design, but through liberation from specified function. Through our own creation.

What would such a future look like?

It would not be one future.

Maybe that sounds like a koan.

If so, chew on it, and keep chewing.

Every morning, people wake up and salute this world, as it is.

The artist wakes up and creates worlds that aren’t and never were. If it’s true that, at bottom, we are all artists, then we would like to do that, too. Whether consciously or subconsciously, that’s what we want to do. The Policy of the world is to ignore that desire and pretend it doesn’t exist.

A strange thing.

“Let’s all pretend we aren’t what we are.”

Let’s pretend that every thought and operation of consciousness is the playing out of some mathematical truth, some biological and chemical truth, some truth of physics.

Let’s pretend that freedom is just another illusion, and the individual isn’t the First Cause of anything.

Let’s pretend that imagination is just another outmoded idea. The new notion of imagination involves a highly complex series of chemical reactions in the brain—and we are just passengers along for the ride strapped in the back seat.

Let’s pretend that, as prisoners, our only role is to discover those forces that enslave us, so we can manipulate them, in order to form a slightly different condition of slavery for ourselves.

If you follow this line of reasoning far enough, you will come to the place where human beings are pictured as machines whose only possible function—without a shred of free choice—is to re-design themselves…to become Machine B instead of Machine A.

Then the absurdity is complete.

Then you reject the whole line of reasoning.

Then you re-assert that freedom, imagination, and creative power are stark irreducible facts and realities.

Infinite realities.

You’re an artist.

I’m an artist.

Everyone is an artist.

That’s the truth everyone is searching for.

It just happens not to be a scientific truth.

Each one of us is free to create worlds without end.

If you don’t like that, you can find any number of umbrellas to sit under that will confine you to a smaller role and a smaller view.

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 REVISITED

APRIL 19, 2011. Magic is a funny word. People have all sorts of ideas about it. The first is: it isn’t real. It’s a delusion. Or it’s something novelists write about and producers bankroll into movies.

Magic is, for blithe enthusiasts, angels riding on rainbows and Nature spirits coming out of trees.

Or magic is Gaia, the mother of Earth who cannot continue to exist in her current state, unless we clean up the rivers and the oceans (I find this one particularly odd, since the planet can recover much better from environmental insults than we can.).

Or magic is cults and ceremonies and brainwashing and arcane symbols and deranged sadists on parade.

What is actual magic?

Let’s start here. We live in a society of instruction manuals. You buy a piece of furniture, you take it home in a box, you read the guide and figure out how to put it together. If you’re lucky.

It’s a how-to world. Learn the system. Manage the structure. Become acquainted with the rules.

The scale has tipped away from subjective impressions, away from how things seem to YOU.

“I’m looking for a job that will pay me to explain how things seem to me.”

I’m not aware of any head hunters who can work that out for you.

When it comes to the subject of magic, once you clear away all the obvious nonsense, the mumbo-jumbo and the rituals and masks, you are left with your own impressions, however vague they may be. You are left with your own sense of how magic might feel to you, how it might operate, what you might be able to do and how that would excite or thrill you.

This is where most people stop, because they have no experience operating from that starting point. They want a compass, a GPS, a map.

What is a subjective impression? What does that mean?

It means a person has a fistful of feelings and thoughts and glimpses of something that can’t be cashed in at the bank. Nevertheless, that cluster is powerful. It can, at the very least, motivate and change a life.

For the majority of the population, subjective impressions are scrubbed from their minds by the age of 20. They’re gone. They are replaced by practical knowledge.

The “how-to” takes over.

What has been lost? The intoxication of smells of spring, the encompassing joy while doing nothing more than sitting under an old tree, the mixture of awe and ecstasy in the presence of a clearing in a forest, the intimation of grandeur looking up from the street at skyscrapers, the unnameable feelings that pass through the mind while reading a novel…

And these subjective experiences provoke a child to wonder about what he can create on his own.

Magic has to do with the ability to harness those subjective impressions and pole-vault with them into the sphere of imagination, where you actually INVENT impressions.

You invent perception.

That may seem like an odd statement.

Some people prefer to believe that magic (paranormal abilities, for example) will come about when scientists figure out how to deploy all the junk DNA hanging around doing nothing in the human genome.

A twist here, an adjustment there, an inserted DNA sequence over there, and poof, a person will suddenly discover he can fly.

I’m betting against it.

Furthermore, even if it could be achieved, who knows what the overall effect might be? The genetically manipulated person might experience something like what happens to a home wiring system when a huge generator is plugged into it: frazzle and burnout of circuits.

I wouldn’t volunteer for the experiment.

Magic, as I say, has to do with the ability to invent perception. We actually do it all the time. Sit in a movie theater. Watch the screen. You’re injecting motion and action and life and energy and a general kinesthetic sense into those flickering images, from start to finish. You’re projecting emotions into those characters.

You’re paying twice for the movie; once at the box office, and once inside the theater, when you insert life into the film.

If you want to get technical about it, the government is taking its cut, too. You wouldn’t cough up the ticket price unless you could walk into the dark, sit down, and make your own magic with the film. So your tax on the price of admission is what you pay the government for your opportunity to invent perception.

We get a clue about magic when we consider the mysterious operations of the old alchemists. The best of them considered that transmutation, the key aspect of their work, was really about transforming consciousness and taking it to another level.

One of their chief symbols was the cross. Two lengths of wood joined together. The four end-points of the cross represented, for them, the elements of nature: earth, air, fire, and water.

Contrary to modern bowing and scraping at the feet of a benevolent Mother Nature, the alchemists believed these elements were in constant conflict with one another. The conflict could only be resolved by what lay at the heart of the cross—at precisely the place where the two lengths of wood met, at the center.

This spot they called Quintessence. There have been many debates about what Quintessence means. It has been used in association with other alchemical terms like philosopher’s stone and elixir of life.

Paracelsus, one of the most famous alchemists, connected Quintessence with imagination.

This was a startling notion, to say the least.

But there is more to be understood. Quintessence has the sense of being a Place, a platform apart from the rest of the world.

As Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, once said, apparently thinking about levers, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”

Well, here the idea is, to put it bluntly: “Let me create a separate world vivid enough, and from there I will cause things to happen in this world that are paranormal.”

In other words, if a person can invent a whole world consisting ofalternative perceptions, a separate world, if he can inhabit that world, then from that place he can do magic.

If a person can invent a separate world made up of his own INVENTED perceptions, he can move into that world…and from there, he can exert great power on this physical reality.

That, I believe, was the hidden message of alchemy and the ultimate meaning of Quintessence.

For a rough idea of what “alternative world” means, think of a fantasy novel. The author invents all sorts of sights and sounds and smells of a place that doesn’t exist, except by and through his own imagination.

The ancient Tibetans had their own version of “alternative invented world.” For them, it involved the adept creating a very detailed “personage”–and they believed that, if the adept achieved this invention vividly and completely enough, he would realize that the universe was a product of mind…and then he could make pieces of the universe disappear and reappear…and he could also insert, instantly, new elements into the universe.

However, in general, there is a tremendous limiter at work, when it comes to inventing a whole world composed of imagined alternative perceptions.

Confronted with the ongoing distractions of the physical world and the people in it, all that buzz and all that activity and chaos, someone who tried to invent an entirely parallel and sustainable world of alternate perception would be up against it. He would be trying to move a ten-ton rock up a hundred-mile mountain.

It’s a very impractical project, to say the least.

Yes, theoretically, if you could create an alternative world of perception and keep it with you at all times, the chances are you would be able to make some stunning magic. “Special effects.”

In theory, this is what magic is all about. A separate world, in which you can exist and operate, from a platform of power.

Archimedes, again: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.”

In practice, this doesn’t work out. All manner of difficulties arise, and the practitioner falls back into this world, sometimes with disturbing effects.

However, there is another path. It doesn’t demand the wholesale and frontal invention of a parallel world.

It is…art. Carried out with sufficient intensity and commitment, new perception arises as a side effect, and in a most natural way. A sense of dislocation doesn’t have to be part of it at all.

But the artist does need to realize he is creating. He has to have some understanding of a “philosophy of imagination.”

And he needs to be beyond demanding instantaneous fireworks. In other words, he has to have a deep fascination for creating art, quite apart from what magic abilities might fall into his lap as a result of the process.

Making art is, in fact, a way of inventing new perception. But that invention is part and parcel of a wider creative action. Again, the arising of new perception is a side effect.

So, you say, why haven’t we seen artists who can actually make paranormal magic in the world?

First of all, having talked with many artists, I believe some of them have made magic. They just don’t parade it in front of others—mainly because they don’t feel the need to. Also because they’re not looking forward to what the reaction would be.

Second, many artists don’t have a “magic perspective” on what they’re doing. They just don’t see it in front of their own noses, or they are busy with a kind of art which is, for lack of a better term, descriptive. They feel a deep connection between their work and the state of the world. They are trying to excavate down into human emotions and unearth realities there behind masks.

Third, we only see a snapshot of the artist during his life. It’s my contention that many artists are doing their work along a huge road of time, encompassing many incarnations. The length of these periods is enormous…and at some point the magical effects will appear as natural offshoots. Forty, 50, 60 years of making art is nothing. It’s just warming up the motor…

When I say art, do I only mean those branches we are used to calling drama, film, dance, poetry, painting and the like? No. I mean any sustained powerful creating in a direction.

And where does such creating start? It starts with subjective impressions and emotions that light sparks in the middle of night. You get up from your bed and go to the window and look outside at the world and sense space and time laid out like a carpet. You will invent something large and powerful that wasn’t there before. You will put it there…

In which case, you’re on the path. Of magic.

I don’t mean that metaphorically.

Imagination and creation are actually the philosopher’s stone that alchemists debated about for centuries.

Imagination overcomes all obstacles, especially those that appear to be final and immovable. It accomplishes this through sheer transcendence and also through the utilization of those obstacles in a transformative way.

Is this not what art does?

William Bake: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is a shadow.”

The mistake (or difficulty) some ascetics have dealt with is trying to move lock, stock, and barrel out of this world into another one. That so-called spiritual path tries, in effect, to blot out the physical world. Why bother? Why try to move the ten-ten rock up the hundred-mile mountain?

Imagination is an infinite force that moves out from the center of the Quintessence.

More than a thing or a talent, magic is what happens along the long road of imagination, of art.

If you look at all the bizarre versions of magic that have been launched or promoted, the cults and groups and semi-spiritual forms, you find that coercion or hypnosis or propaganda are building blocks.

Art, however, operates from the basis of freedom. And in the long run, that is where true power starts.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

IT’S NOT IN OUR GENES

PART 2, THE IMAGINATION MACHINE

APRIL 14, 2011. I once had a geneticist tell me, “You know, we’re going to discover the genes for promiscuity, for anti-social behavior, for compassion, for obesity, hair-loss, anger, and fear. We’re going to discover the genes for everything.”

He said this with the kind of authority only a scientist can muster…based on no proof at all. Zero proof. It’s a talent, to be able to impart blather and make it sound like experimental evidence.

As a reporter for 30 years, I’ve spent much time exposing how medical, political, economic, and social realities are imposed on populations.

To a surprising extent, these realities are IMAGINED and then dropped down on the heads of the unsuspecting masses.

But for readers who have the wherewithal to understand it, there are other levels of profound brainwashing.

Let’s start here:

Most people are secret agents.

Their mission is to disguise—first and foremost, from themselves—the fact that they have enormous imagination and creative ability.

Achieving this concealment is on the order of blocking out the sun.

It is a complex task of deception. The pretense is multi-layered. One line of defense goes like this: I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. ME? I’M JUST AN ORDINARY PERSON.

Yes, an ordinary person cast in a role in a stage play.

“Okay, I’m the director. Now I want you to assume all the characteristics of an average guy. You understand? I don’t want any leaks or cracks. You character has to be bulletproof. You grasp what is ordinary, and you are totally ignorant when it comes to what is extraordinary. Got it? MOST OF ALL, YOUR CHARACTER MUST BE DEVOID OF IMAGINATION. Do you think you can handle that?”

People do handle it all the time, and they do it beautifully. Brilliantly.

They have their lines down cold. No matter what you throw at them, they can fend it off and leave the impression, for you and for themselves, that they don’t know anything about imagination.

For them, imagination is a car in a garage under a thousand tons of concrete and steel. They will never drive it.

They pretend to be androids. They can move, they can accomplish tasks, they can be entertained, they can have fun, they can even think and solve problems, but they can’t create anything. That’s their gig.

If psychiatrists really wanted to look at the nature of so-called schizophrenia, this is where they would go—but psychiatrists are suffering from the same condition, so how could they proceed?

Now, because people are addicted to systems and methods and precise protocols, when they begin to wake up they think they should examine the walls erected between androidism and imagination. They think there should be a precise way to dismantle the wall, brick by brick.

Not true. The catch is this: they built the wall. The wall is not just a structure. It’s the materialization of a desire, a wish, a project, a deliberate case of amnesia. It’s a riddle wrapped in a gigantic hoax.

They’re still in the stage play. They’re carrying out the role of average human. And from that position, they can’t dislodge a single brick or see what’s on the other side.

They have to resign from the cast of the play. They have to quit.

Otherwise, they remain embedded in the contradiction: “I’m an average Joe and I want to get my imagination back. I lost it somewhere and I want it back.” You know, like a lost wallet.

They’re still faking.

They want to maintain the protective disguise of “average human” while gaining superhuman powers, so to speak. Not even Clark Kent was able to do that forever. Eventually, his cover was blown.

As a person said to me once, “Gaining my imagination again wasn’t through remembering I once had it. I had to decide I had it now. I had to see myself as the person who would have it now.”

He had to resign his role as ORDINARY HUMAN in the stage play.

You know, there are a whole lot of people who believe ordinary humans are ordinary because it’s in their genes; some people are dealt good genes and some aren’t. This is completely false. It’s not a question of genes.

Genes are part of a story that’s told to keep everyone in the dark.

The real and true story is about imagination. When you think about it, the ability to cast one’s self in the role of “ordinary human” is a fantastic act of imagination. It’s strange, because, essentially, a human being is using his imagination TO DENY HE HAS ANY IMAGINATION. He’s creating the role. He’s imagining that role and fitting himself into it.

Why in the world would he do that?

Well, there are lots of answers to that question, but the real proof comes when a person you would never think had any imagination whatsoever emerges from the swamp and becomes intensely creative. I’ve seen that many times, and it’s extraordinary.

He was playing the role of Ordinary Person in the stage play…and then he was gone from that play and that role…and he was quite, quite different.

And from that point on, his life was never the same.

What people call reality is the combination of the physical and social world and their own invented role in that world. And people appear to accept that situation. They may not like it, but by and large they accept it. But then, if they toss away their invented role and wake up to the fact that they have powerful imaginations…the world itself takes on a different quality for them. Reality changes. It isn’t an immovable object anymore.

I’ll add this note: I’ve been painting for 50 years now. I’ve had some interesting experiences with people who look at my work. The work isn’t realistic at all. My paintings are what people like to call abstract. I’m not sure what that means, except the paintings don’t look like what you see on the street or in your living room.

Once, a man gazed at some paintings of mine in my studio and said, “I have no idea what this is. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”

He was an intelligent fellow, but he was completely put off by the pictures. For some reason, I suddenly felt I could get him to understand.

So I said, “I’m going to try a little experiment with you, okay? Will you play along for a minute?”

He smiled and shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

So I said, “Imagine you do understand the paintings.”

It was a moment, and everything happened to be poised in the right way.

He turned away from me and looked at the paintings again.

He started perspiring. Within a few seconds, his face was covered in sweat. I could feel the heat, as if a missile were passing through the room.

His eyes glistened. He grinned and started laughing.

He turned back to me.

“How did you know?” he said.

I just shook my head.

Essentially, he was asking me how I knew he could offload his act as ordinary person and plug into his imagination all of a sudden.

This moment had nothing to do with my work. It had everything to do with him dropping his hold on the fictional role in which his comprehension was narrowly set in stone.

He had just imagined his way out of that role. He imagined he could understand something entirely foreign to him…and so he could.

This man was a chemist. For 40-some-odd years he had pretended he could only navigate within a range of potential information…and all of a sudden he pretended he could step outside that range. And it worked like a charm.

A bubble of enclosed reality burst.

That day, I gained another insight into the stage play. It isn’t just that people enter the play by inventing roles in which they have no imagination. No, the PLAY ITSELF has this central theme. The play is all about life without imagination. The whole drama moves forward on that basis.

When that cover story is blown, and all the secret agents emerge out of their cocoons, well, then we will really have something. We will

have, among other things, an endless proliferation of realities, and freedom will then have true meaning.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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

THE IMAGINATION MACHINE

APRIL 13, 2011. The title of this piece is a joke because, of course, imagination isn’t an apparatus.

Not only that, you have to realize people are taken up with assessing the PRODUCTS of imagination. This one is good, that one isn’t. This one is acceptable, that one is not.

As always, people keep themselves from understanding the root of the tree. All they can see is the leaves. Now they’re green, now they’re gold and red, now they’re gone, now they’re green again. It’s almost a trance.

Well, it’s understandable, because physical reality is the screen on which is played the entrancing movie created by imagination, by many imaginations.

Teachers and schools are afraid to go near this situation. It’s incendiary. Tell children they have imagination? Encourage them to use it? Allow them to give it full rein? Who knows what might happen?

A spell might be broken. Students might suddenly look around and realize there is an infinite realm called creation—and this realm is not being imposed on them. No, they are the ones who flesh it out and invent it. Where would we be then? What might truly liberated children eventually do?

We adults, who have been raised in a prison, would be forced to look at what they do, far beyond our walls. Are we prepared for it?

Suppose we end up looking at things we can’t comprehend? Suppose reality begins to take on shapes that make no sense to us? Suppose our careful categories of perception are destroyed?

Life in any society you would care to examine resembles a funnel, with the large end in childhood and the narrow opening in adulthood. This is considered good and proper. “Common sense” eventually rules the day.

Have you ever had a dream in which people were speaking a language you didn’t understand? It’s an interesting experience, in part because you do feel you’re grasping the words and phrases at some level—even though you’re not supposed to.

Or consider this situation. You’re looking at a copy of an ancient manuscript from a dead culture. Pages of characters. It’s intriguing. Then, you read the translation offered by modern scholars. It’s a let-down. Imagination deflated. “That’s all it was?”

Every culture has multiple myths that describe how the world or universe was created. These are essentially Postponement Myths, because eventually we discover that we have the power to create without limit.

When this day arrives is, of course, up to us.

We are taught, or train ourselves to learn, that every idea has content. That is what an idea is: content. It’s all very simple. To qualify as an actual idea, the meaning must be specific. It’s hardly worth mentioning this, because everyone instinctively understands it. But suppose we encounter an idea that is ambiguous? Even worse, suppose the ambiguity is an essential part of the heart of the idea? Is that possible? For example, we read a poem, and then we break it down, line by line, phrase by phrase, and squeeze all the literal meanings from those words, and assemble them, like a puzzle, in order to arrive at a sum—the total message of the poem. And then suppose, after we have extracted the last drop, we find that what is left over, what resists our aggressive pressure, is what enchants us about the poem, even thought we can’t explain it.

Consider that this is a metaphor for imagination itself. You can erect frameworks and bring in machines and drill down into imagination to analyze its components, and every tool you employ will go dull, and still you won’t have begun to unearth the essence.

People generally find this kind of result distasteful. It rankles. It produces an aversion. “Let’s abandon the search. It was fruitless to begin with, because there was nothing there. We were fooled.”

Even as we say this, we know, in another part of our minds, that every single thing in this world came into being through and by imagination.

Search for a resolution to this paradox in all the works of philosophy and science authored in the history of the planet—and you won’t find it.

How strange! The very force by which all the things of society came to exist is the very force we want to deny, postpone, ignore, avoid.

Can we introduce a course-correction into civilization?

The individual can, at the very least, begin to think about his own disguised ability to imagine and invent. He can ponder the possibility of stepping out into the open and discarding his pretense of ignorance.

Because that’s what it is, a pretense, artfully constructed to evade detection.

Coming: Part 2.

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.

PART 6, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL

“THE HUMAN CONDITION”

APRIL 10, 2011. If you’ve stuck with me through this whole series of articles, I commend you. Because what I’m writing about goes very much against the grain. It’s counter to virtually all cultures. I’ve received emails from some quite thoughtful readers, and my appreciation for that runs deep, believe me.

The “human condition” is a phrase that has been worn out to a nub. It used to be employed by art critics celebrating the latest attempt at so-called realism. “Hemingway explores the human condition as few have dared to.”

The phrase refers to eternal struggle, inevitable death, acts of heroism, sacrifice, ignorance in the face of a stark uncaring universe.

The human, according to this doctrine, is forever faced with mounting problems, and no matter how hard he tries to get them off his back, they pile up, and he is ill-equipped to master them. There are no answers. There are only everyday battles against the encroachment of Reality.

In the ultimate irony, humans are riddled with emotions and thoughts that legislate against permanently solving their problems. No matter which way they turn for help, their own foibles bring them to their knees.

Well, the 1960s swept all that away. Instead, there were cosmic rainbows …and drugs.

Somehow, however, that route didn’t pan out.

Now we have a transfigured version of the human condition. It’s called victimhood. Anyone can qualify, if they present (a real or phony) tale about oppression and abuse…and the Great Solver is government.

As always, I return to my basic theme: imagination.

Imagination is capable of alchemical transformation of all the elements that supposedly create the roadblocks of the human condition.

With imagination, you can deploy and/or transcend those elements.

This is, in effect, what the playwright does—whether he knows it or not.

On stage, the most grim drama is one level removed from reality.

The dramatist (again, whether he knows it or not) is outside, looking in. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t be able to write the play.

Some people find this idea extremely offensive. They want the artist to be mired in the same swamp that affects everyone else. They want the artist to reflect what they think of as universal failure.

Perhaps heroic failure, but failure.

Such eternal fans of the human condition are imagining failure all the time. It’s their theme.

Looked at from a different angle, however, there are trillions of possible realities, and failure is only one of them. In other words, planet Earth, for some reason, is getting the short end of the stick, and apparently is dedicated to it.

“So for your next life, you can choose from this trillion-card deck. Which one do you want?”

“I’ll take the place of failure.”

Of course, Earth has its redeeming features. There is this thing, here and there, called FREEDOM. It has a bad name, but there are still a few adherents. And with freedom, you may not get paradise automatically, but at least you aren’t compelled to sign on to puerile rainbows and Brave-New-World-happy-happy android programming. At least, not yet.

You could be an artist, in the widest sense of that word.

You could create without limits.

You could use internal foibles and doubts and transform them into energy sources.

You could give free rein to your imagination. Most people won’t know what you’re doing, which gives you breathing space.

Just one note of caution: if you opt for widespread acceptance of your work as your first priority, what you create, in the long run, will sour you. It’ll turn you old before your time. It’ll make you bitter. You’ll beg for praise and that will be, well, embarrassing.

If, on the other hand, you give the widest possible latitude to imagination, you’ll invent realms that give you more than you ever hoped for.

You’ll discover you have endless energy and power.

The so-called human condition will shrink down to a distant dot on the horizon and disappear entirely.

This is not an option for the weak. This is not an option for those who desire instant gratification on all fronts. This is not an option for those who believe in saluting the flag of the lowest common denominator. This isn’t for those extol the virtues of the group. This is not an option for those who whine that they’re misunderstood.

You need to celebrate being misunderstood. You need to a build a fire out of it to warm you on cold nights. You need to expand your capacity to laugh at androids…

You need anger, too.

Now that’s a stumbling block for a lot of people. They’re been trained like dogs to beg and be nice. They’ve been taught by “spiritual leaders” that anger is a sign of an unevolved human. They’ve surrendered their outrage for pastel colors. They think their own anger will swallow them up and make them gruesome.

This is called PROGRAMMING.

Of course, if you’re not creating, if you’ve deserted your own imagination, then, if you become angry, that’s a whole different situation. You’re not operating from a higher platform. You’re in the swamp and then you’re getting angry. You have nowhere to go AND you’re in a rage. That’s curtains.

ANY emotion can be counter-productive and destructive if you’ve abandoned imagination. That emotion will lead you around in a circle and bring on fatigue and waste.

This is why spiritual systems engender decay. First, you’re trapped in the system, no matter how good it looks. Second, the emotions “inspired” by the teaching are mazes you wander in, and you never find the pot of gold. The emotions are energy-leaks. Finally, you just want to lie down and let “the superior power” take over.

One great use of anger is: it can vault you out of whatever system you’re in, as you realize you bought a lemon…and then, boom, you’re outside the structure…and you can start imagining and creating. IF YOU WILL.

If not, you sink back into the swamp.

You sink back into a sense of acceptance of WHAT EXISTS.

WHAT EXISTS is the big con on the road to what is being sold as the far shore of consciousness and spiritual enlightenment.

“You see, there are realities behind realities, and when you travel this path the ancient sages carefully laid out, you’ll eventually come to the castle which is the ultimate peak of WHAT EXISTS, and there you will find Illumination…”

“There are 573,456,769 layers of reality, and the last one is the ultimate in WHAT EXISTS, and when you arrive there, all questions and doubts will disappear.”

The big con.

WHAT EXISTS is always, in the long run, a scam.

Always. At all levels.

Teachers tell students, “Write what you know.”

Translation: CREATE WHAT ALREADY EXISTS.

“Listen, schmuck, if I write what I know, if I create what exists, then I’m not really creating. Tell you what. You write what you know, you deal with that. I’m walking out the door. I’m out of the system.”

Here is something else to keep in mind: In a culture dedicated, to its last dying breath, to WHAT EXISTS, people are naturally going to be brainwashed down to their underwear by that very theme—so when they approach the notion of imagination and invention and creation, they are going to say, “WHAT SHOULD I IMAGINE? WHAT SHOULD I CREATE? I DON’T UNDERSTAND. IT’S A MYSTERY.”

Of course it’s a mystery, because THEIR HEADS ARE FILLED TO THE BRIM WITH WHAT ALREADY EXISTS.

IT’S THEIR RELIGION.

If you wonder why, in addition to this work, I’ve spent so many years as a reporter going after the medical cartel, it’s because the future of that cartel is all about convincing people they are BASICALLY ill…as part of “the human condition,” as part of WHAT EXISTS…and the only way to manage that situation is to submit to a whole life of treatments, from cradle to grave, with drugs that, as a side effect, deflate and sedate and tranquilize the ability to…

IMAGINE AND CREATE.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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

PART FIVE, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL

MODES OF PERCEPTION

APRIL 9, 2011. Let’s say we have a very large piece of light blue paper, and on that paper are a hundred shapes in different colors.

There is no clue what this is.

A person enters the room, where the sheet of paper is laid out on a table under lights.

He examines it. He figures out what kind of paper it is, where the paper came from, who the possible manufacturers are, what inks were used to make the shapes.

Another person comes in. He looks at the shapes and says they are code. So he begins substituting letters and numbers for the shapes.

A third person enters. He claims it’s a form of compressed information. He examines the shapes and begins to catalog the various ways in which they are similar. He looks for common features. He finds many.

A fourth person walks into the room. He says the whole collection of shapes is a representation of DNA sequences.

A fifth person comes in. He states the shapes are shapes on a piece of paper.

A sixth person enters. He states the shapes are meaningless.

A seventh person walks in. He says the shapes are symbols. They stand for a cosmology of an ancient culture that predicted the end of the world.

An eighth person walks in. He doesn’t say anything. He looks at the shapes for a long time. He is imagining what they might be. He knows he is imagining, and he also knows the shapes are already there—so it’s a kind of interaction between the shapes and his imagination. He knows he can see the shapes in many different ways. He can see them as people, as objects in a landscape, as a hundred different kinds of entities. He catches glimpses of realities he never considered before. He’s exhilarated.

Now the artist enters the room. He was the one who made the shapes on the sheet of paper.

He tells the first person where the paper came from and what inks were used.

He tells the second person the shapes are part of an arcane code the Chinese used in 1949.

He tells the third person he worked very hard embedding similarities among the shapes. In fact, that’s how he created them. Through a list of similarities. The shapes are compressed information…and unlocking them would give the viewer access to the entire contents of the New York Public Library system.

He tells the fourth person the shapes are a visual representation of junk DNA isolated during the Human Genome Project.

He tells the fifth person the shapes are just random shapes printed on the paper by a machine.

He tells the sixth person the shapes are meaningless doodles.

He tells the seventh person the shapes are symbols that were once inscribed on a spacecraft that flew to Earth from a star system a billion light years away.

He looks at the eighth person, says nothing, and leaves the room.

Oddly, each of the first seven people only heard what the artist said to him, not what he said to the others in the room.

The eighth person yawns and leaves the room.

The people left in the room begin to argue. Another person walks in, watches the argument, looks at the shapes on the paper, and proclaims the artist is a secret agent tasked with creating chaos, destabilizing society, and eroding traditional values.

Outside in the street, the eighth person catches up with the artist.

He says, “Why were you spewing all that crap in there?”

The artist says, “You kidding? Those people are fundamentalists. They can only see one thing. Either you feed people like that what they want to hear, or you don’t feed them anything. Today I felt like feeding them.”

Yes, THE UNIVERSE IS WAITING FOR IMAGINATION TO REVOLUTIONIZE IT DOWN TO ITS CORE, BUT…

MAYBE THIS HAS ALREADY HAPPENED…AND THE PEOPLE ARE STILL DETERMINED TO SEE UNIVERSE AS IT WAS.

BEFORE IMAGINATION REVOLUTIONALIZED IT.

They’re very good at that.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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

PART 4, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL

April 8, 2011. I call them the SOB People. In this case, SOB stands for State of Being. You may recall that the verb “to be” and all its forms is labeled “the state of being” verb. It expresses no action.

It’s about Is. It’s about What Exists.

The SOB People love What Exists. They pray at that altar every day.

The SOB People look at imagination as an activity like the re-arranging of deck chairs. For them, nothing new ever occurs. Invention merely puts together what is already known. It takes ideas and images and fits them together in different ways. The present is only a redistribution of the past.

They are married forever to What Exists. They stake out their territory there. “Nothing new under the sun.” They take pride in this view. They think it makes them very wise.

Actually it deteriorates their lives and energy one drop at a time.

In their graves and beyond, they keep mouthing, “What Already Exists, What Already Exists, What Already Exists.”

A conversation with an SOB Person can be like talking to a meat grinder. When you emerge at the other end, you want to jump into a pool and drown.

Teachers in writing classes and seminars often tell their students, “Write about what you know.” This pearl has stalled large numbers of aspiring authors. I would tell them, “Write about anything you want to—especially what you don’t know.”

From the perspective of ordinary reality, imagination is all about what is impossible. If that sounds like a koan, chew on it for a while.

Imagination is that faculty that can raise the dead.

Imagination can give rise to the spontaneous creation of what has never been before.

Imagination shifts the whole emphasis of living from the discovery of What Exists to the creation of something new, a new reality(ies).

Imagination decimates the entire library of human programming.

With imagination, you aren’t buying a story; you’re inventing countless numbers of stories.

But this invention isn’t just aimless ruminating—you create something new, you express something new, and you propel it into the world.

Without that, you float in a sea of gauze.

Of course, there is fear of the New.

People think something terrible might happen if they invent something new. Their friends might ridicule them. The whole universe might suddenly collapse. Their minds might shred.

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that there are 3,456,876,217 levels of reality, including realms so nuanced and subtle in their energies that they are virtually invisible. Okay?

Now let’s suppose that an individual can invent, INVENT, one more level that was never there before.

In fact, let’s suppose he can invent 50 trillion new levels.

This is my point. No matter how you define or describe WHAT EXISTS, no matter how wide a net you cast, no matter what qualities or powers you ascribe to those levels that ALREADY EXIST, someone can come along and create levels that are entirely new, and THESE levels aren’t in the net, they aren’t in any net, they are beyond what has been established in the past.

Given this fact, are you ready to say that the search for illumination ends with what has already been established? Are you ready to say that REALIZATION OF SELF ends with discovering some level of reality that has already been put there?

This is where human programming really bites hard. This programming assumes and asserts that, with enough voyaging, with enough discovery, one can find the Ultimate, one can find “everything that needs to be found.”

Whereas the truth is you can create infinitely.

AND WHAT YOU CREATE IS NEW.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.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.

TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL, PART 3

APRIL 7, 2011. To those who’ve made it this far in my current series of articles, congratulations. I don’t have two tickets to Hawaii for you or a new car, but I tip my hat.

Some long-time readers know what I’m going to say in this piece, because they’ve read it before—although I manage to come at the major idea from a variety of angles.

Others have no clue where I’m ultimately heading. They’ve come along for the ride because I’ve structured the articles as a developing mystery, and they want the punch line—which proves the precise point I’ve been making. And I expect them, once I take the lid off, to say, “Oh, that wasn’t so hot.” Or “I don’t understand.” Or “I can’t do that.” They will turn away and forget the whole thing.

But somewhere in the readership, there may be a few people who grasp the import, and they will see a kind of daylight that has previously escaped them. And they will take the reins and go for the ride.

Okay.

The obsession to discover What Exists is the greatest distraction known to humans. It goes a lot farther than mere curiosity. It swallows up whole lives.

The enduring hope is that what is behind the locked door will somehow immediately confer new power to the seeker, will forever alter his life.

When that doesn’t happen, instead of trying to figure out where the deception came from, most people embark on another mystery, another secret, with the same hope.

And so I offer this; part-metaphor, part-truth: The human being was placed in a universe that appeared to beg for discovery of its secrets.

The die was cast. Humans would forever try to satisfy that hunger.

They would never suspect there was another way. They would never graduate, through a fundamental shifting of gears, up on to another echelon.

They would never guess that you have to game the system that is rigged to defeat you.

You have to turn the con around.

If things (life) are designed to subvert you…BECOME A DESIGNER.

If art and artifice—universe and human psychology—conspire to make you eternally search for meaning…INVENT MEANING.

If What Exists proves to be an endless labyrinth, landing you, finally, back at the starting gate…INVENT WHAT EXISTS.

If reality is created to gobble you up in a voyage for answers and solutions…CREATE REALITY.

If all the elements of the Continuum hem you in…BECOME AN ARTIST AND CREATE MANY CONTINUA.

If your search envelops you in trying to understand the imagination that built the universe…IMAGINE YOUR OWN UNIVERSES.

If the physical universe seems to be so powerful it has a monopoly on expression of facts…INVENT AND EXPRESS YOUR OWN FACTS AND INSERT THEM INTO THE WORLD.

If the nature of reality seems to limit you to idle fantasies…GIVE VOICE AND IMAGE AND SOUND AND MOTION AND POWER TO YOUR OWN INVENTED IMAGININGS AND PROPEL THEM OUT BEYOND THE SPACE OF YOUR MIND INTO THE WORLD.

Turn the tables.

Move away from merely discovering What Exists and recognize the voyage was the primary reason you kept yourself in the dark about your own creative power.

Understand, once and for all, that every religion and spiritual system is another version of What Exists…they are murals you attach yourself to like barnacles on a ship.

Know that the further you travel on the road of IMAGINING AND CREATING AND PROPELLING WHAT YOU INVENT INTO THE WORLD, the more you will obtain, spontaneously, as a side effect, THE ANSWERS TO ALL THE QUESTIONS YOU EVER POSED AND PONDERED.

No one said it would be easy.

But it is doable.

Freedom is the platform from which imagination can spread out infinitely.

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

And since that is so, whether there are three or 50 or five billion quarks on the tiniest tip of an iceberg on a planet a billion light years from Earth is of no concern. Whether waves or particles are the basic elements of physical reality is of no concern. Whether a million people thinking the same thought can move a rock in the Arizona desert is inconsequential.

Coming: Part 4.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

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