SHAPESHIFTER

by Jon Rappoport

January 21, 2012

My phone buzzed. It was the president. He told me he needed me in his office. The revolution in Iraq was gathering steam, and an Islamist majority in parliament was likely after the next election.

I told him I’d be there in two hours.

“Where are you?” he said.

“New York. I had to fly up here. A few pieces of quick business. I’m almost done.”

Pushing through the late-afternoon winter crowds, crossing the line from Chinatown into Little Italy, I saw the faces change and I began to hear Italian, and I saw my man.

Just over six feet, compact muscle, wearing a black leather jacket. His eyes were closed. He was feeling his way between people. His bald head was shining under the sinking sun. His hands were large. He flexed them as he moved.

First came the brief sting of images: snake, lizard, dragon. Each with embroidery. Scrolled hieroglyphics, Chinese pictographs, Runes.

Next, nationalities: Dutch, Norwegian, finally German.

I glanced at molded propositions, a length of chain links he subconsciously deployed, the end of which was murder.

I caught the end of a red directional line and followed it. I turned from Mott to Canal to Broadway, knowing my map was scrambled, as it always was, because I was no longer, strictly speaking, walking the streets of New York.

In a small alley, there was a parked black Escalade. This place was also fantastical, and I would never find the actual one. I didn’t need to. I worked my end-game in an equivalent, which nevertheless carried its crucial moments into the waking world.

I had long since stopped trying to plumb the meaning of the change.

I was there, at the car, when he arrived. We were alone. He looked at me with open hatred, as if he knew I had been coming.

“Why are you photographing me?” he said.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” I said.

He opened his jacket. I observed transparent spheres containing gears within gears. I smelled burning ash. The sun, light blue, was overhead among clouds, floating in a lake of wandering corpuscles that orchestrated gusts of wind.

I was a 20-foot tall character in a children’s book. I raised a sledgehammer over my head and brought it down on the pavement next to him. The sidewalk shattered, and he fell silently into the hole.

I dropped the sledgehammer, walked over, and peered into it.

Twenty feet down, emitting a blue glow, a small stone castle stood on a carpet of moss. I couldn’t see him.

Suddenly, a welter of hot smoky emotion rolled up from the hole and struck me in the gut.

I was back in my cabin in the Andes. I heard running water from a stream, the chopping of wood, and farther away, the coughing of an old car laboring on a hill. I stood up straight and the pain was gone.

I looked around the dim room. The floor had gathered dust. My narrow bed was upended, and the mattress, lying a few feet away, had been cut into pieces.

Taped on the mirror above the bureau was a small rectangle of gray paper. Scrawled on the paper: “he was a terrorist.”

I had written it to remind myself where I had been.

I had cut the mattress apart, to alert myself that it was time to leave this place.

Then I was in rocky hills, jumping up to the summit, where I could see chunks of walking food. I spotted four of them. They all turned toward me and then ran.

I pursued one of them as it raced low to the ground, remembering the man in New York was dead, remembering I had taken my work seriously, remembering my father was living alone in a brownstone on West 90^th Street, off Central Park West.

The son he knew was a lowly janitor on the High-line, a walkway built over an old elevated subway between 14^th and 23^rd Street.

My job was sweeping the concrete, spearing food containers, and wiping down the railings.

My father wasn’t proud of me. He was bewildered about what I had made of my life.

I caught the small thing between my teeth, shook it three times, and broke its neck. I carried it to a place between rocks, lay down, and took a bite of flesh.

When I had finished my meal, I head a voice say, “Let’s kill that boy.”

It was coming from a car parked near the equivalent of the corner of 17^th Street and 10^th Avenue. I walked over to the car, rapped on the window, and held my policeman’s badge against it.

The window slid down. I didn’t wait to see the faces. I blew a breath of paralyzing amnesia into the car, turned, and walked away.

I passed a bookstore. Inside the huge window, ducks in a row, were hardbound volumes with the title: SHAPESHIFTER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. One of my names was listed as the author.

Probably a misstep. I make them.

I walked into the store, along an aisle of best sellers, and into a room where a hundred people were crowded, listening to a woman in a business suit. She was channeling an entity and doling out monotonous advice.

I tore away the veil of surmise, and suddenly everyone in the room realized the woman was inventing the Other.

After a minute, the listeners began getting up and filing out. Disappointed hurricane watchers; today’s storm didn’t make landfall.

After the room was empty, the woman in the business suit stared at me.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “But would you like to become an elephant? I could teach you how to switch back and forth.”

“Get out of here,” she said.

Then, she was an elephant poised on cheap electric-blue carpet.

I waited a moment.

“Would you like to come back?” I said.

She flicked her mottled trunk at me.

At that moment, several federal agents walked into the room.

I held up my badge.

“NYPD,” I said.

“That’s okay,” one of the agents said. “We’re after the elephant. It’s a shapeshifter.”

“Lot of that going around these days,” I said. “Have they passed a law against it yet?”

“National Security issue,” the agent said.

“Well, it would be. They’re upsetting the very foundations of our way of life.”

He glared at me.

“You making a joke, Officer?”

I spread my hands.

“Hell no. I mean it. We can’t let these creatures roam the streets.”

The elephant made her charge and thundered by me, her mud-stained eyes glowing with hellfire.

I was sitting in the Oval Office, across from the president at his desk.

“Before we get to the Iraq situation, sir, I can give you a list of the precise lies you need to tell to be reelected.”

He scratched the back of his head.

“How is your list different from my list?” he said.

“Well, we’ll have to compare them,” I said. “But I assure you mine is the result of a lifetime of careful research.”

“Yes,” he said. “But if I read your compilation and I’m not satisfied, what then?”

“Then,” I said, “I can turn you into another man who stands a better chance of winning.”

“And what do I do with the old me?”

“Oh, you’d still be the president, but you would have undergone a complete personality shift.”

He leaned forward.

“You think I need one?” he said.

“Have you ever considered becoming a ferret?”

“A what?”

“Or an owl?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I could give you the personality of a ferret or a porcupine. People respond to animals. Nixon was a weasel. Bush was a kangaroo. Obama was an undernourished whippet. What do you want to be?”

The president stared at me.

“You’re serious,” he said.

I nodded. “Of course I’m serious. Without an animal persona, you’re basically invisible.”

“Well, I’ve always liked mules,” he said.

“That won’t work. How about a copperhead? We haven’t had a copperhead since Woodrow Wilson.”

He shook his head. “No snakes. But perhaps an ant. An ant is a man of the people. Member of a group, a collective.”

When I poured honey on his desk, he bent over and began lapping at it.

From the walls of the Oval Office streamed thousands of ants. They came in files and ascended the desk and approached the honey. I heard a faint chittering as they procured their drops and turned and scaled down the legs of the desk. The whole operation was very orderly.

“Sir,” I said, “you’ll win in a landslide.”

He smiled horribly at me and went back to lapping the orange goo.

I spoke to him in low confidential tones.

“Mr. President, now that you’re in full possession of the hive-nest-colony consciousness, you realize your sacred duty to act against serious threats to the collective. Twenty years ago, it was discovered that pharmaceutical drugs kill 106,000 Americans every year. That’s over a million people per decade. Your own agency, the FDA, has certified every one of those drugs as safe and effective. No drug can be sold without such FDA approval. Surely, you see what you must do in this situation.”

He looked up at me. He was clearly shocked.

“Why yes,” he said. “How could I have overlooked this before? I’ve had the report on my desk for some time. I must have been distracted.”

I waited while he phoned his attorney general and instructed him to issue search warrants for FDA headquarters and arrest warrants for the top tier of agency executives.

Not all remedies are perfect. My adjustment of the president’s personality was an attempt to make the best of a bad situation.

As the president’s national security advisor, that is more or less the core of my job. I make changes quickly.

And now I have a confession to make. All these tricks I’ve been playing here and there, these on-the-fly adjustments and solutions, and yes, even these shape-shifts, are merely a sub-category of something else…and it is the something else that is truly important.

What I am able to do is generated out of my imagination, an infinite well of possibility.

Finally, my imagination itself is born out of my imagining it.

If you can find a spiritual tradition on planet Earth which declares THAT, you’re not on planet Earth, and you probably aren’t anywhere in this universe.

Jon Rappoport

For information about the upcoming Magic Theater workshop in San Diego, contact me directly.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

CASE AGAINST THE MAGICIAN

by Jon Rappoport

January 20, 2012

As some of you know, until last spring I was a professor of literature at Princemouth College, on the rim of the Milky Way, at which time I was fired for “reckless behavior.” When charges were brought against me by the College Integrity Commission, I was told by the Dean of Behavior:

“Violations of the College Code have been observed and verified. We aren’t at liberty to name those violations, because they might multiply the effects of your actions.”

Without the ability, therefore, to defend myself, I had no recourse.

But now, through the efforts of former students, the charges have been exposed. I am grateful for their help.

On the afternoon of April 12, in the Grove, on the east edge of campus, I performed a magic trick for several dozen sophomores who were meeting to discuss a proposed tuition hike.

I held out my hand and made an apple appear.

Later that day, one student told the Dean I had frightened him. He claimed there was no way I could have produced the apple through “stage trickery.” He stated I had actually “manifested” the apple. And this he found upsetting.

In a subsequent note he wrote to the president of the College, he reasoned: “If the Professor could do that (make the apple appear), then all current laws of motion and energy are suspended, and if this is possible, then what other unpredictable irregularities might I encounter here on campus? I came to the College to study science. Now, I am afraid. I have disturbing dreams at night. I’ve sought help at the campus clinic. I have been prescribed medication, and I’m receiving therapy three times a week. Frankly, my life is a shambles. My religious values have been shaken.”

On that basis, I was charged, found guilty, and expelled from my job.

Before I left for Earth, I was harassed by reporters who wanted to know whether I had broken the College Codes of Restricted Speech.

Now I live in San Diego, beyond the reach of College authorities.

And I can tell you:

I did, in fact, materialize the apple out of nothing.

I’m freely admitting this, because I want to discover whether it disturbs people sufficiently to make me conclude that your society, too, is living in a Dark Age.

If the answer turns out to be yes, I will make a stand, because the prospect of emigrating again is deeply unpleasant. And when I say make a stand, I mean I will perform other “tricks.”

But this time, I’ll do more than simply conjure an apple in my hand. I’ll erect an unbreakable psychological shield around the 1^st Amendment, and I believe this action will bring about a state of chaos in many of your sacred institutions.

I’ll also render visible a hole in space that already exists above the planet, at an altitude of 60 miles, where energy is pouring in from another universe. When that happens, and when its implications are digested, many scientists will see a way to channel and utilize this energy to replace your older inadequate forms of fuel.

That, too, will engender chaos.

Fed up with blindness and insanity, I’ll step out of the shadows and declare my independence.

When in the course of events, it becomes necessary to resign from “the old world,” it is best done in spectacular style, and with maximum impact.

There are further “tricks” coming. What if, for example, every person who currently is weaving a false story to convince others he is a chronic victim is suddenly and simultaneously exposed? What if his tale is instantly and widely perceived as a fraud, despite all protestations to the contrary? I assure you, such a revelation is possible. The bell hanging from the cat’s neck will ring.

Suppose I show a few hundred million fundamentalists of various stripes the god they have been worshiping all their lives does not exist, but was invented, long ago, by cynical priests?

Suppose millions of soldiers from dozens of nations suddenly understand they have been killing people for no reason?

Suppose, at the flick of a switch, hundreds of thousands of criminals and thugs begin confessing their crimes?

And if craven liars, who are self-appointed leaders of various groups, are viewed, from a correct angle, as panderers and sellers of hatred and poisonous divisiveness, what then?

I assure you, all this is as possible as snow falling on a winter afternoon.

These days, in order to watch and experience a faded imitation of such feats, you file into dark theaters and feel your adrenaline move and your brain graduate into a higher gear, as superhuman heroes enact justice.

Tomorrow, you will see it for real.

If, however, I am left alone to be what I fully am, then I will leave you alone. I will allow you to play out your dramas on a stage of your own choosing.

I have made no investment in your consensus. I haven’t walked in your shoes; nor do I care to.

I can tolerate you. I’m not sure whether you can tolerate me.

But all will be revealed soon enough.

There is nothing in the universe, or beyond it, that legislates we should all be the same. That may come as a shock to some of you—but I fully understand your “egalitarian attitude” is something you’ve invented to comfort you in a false haven.

This statement is my own declaration of independence.

Let the chips fall where they may.

My journey began on the afternoon I invented an apple out of nothing. But notice I didn’t follow through, as your oppressors did, by adding the garden and the tree and the snake and the guilt. I merely performed a trick. That’s the naked power that’s concealed behind the religions so many of you accept.

Which is probably why I’ll have to do more tricks. Because, while you elevate religion, you don’t like magic.

Oh…wait a minute. What was I saying? Ha-ha, it was only a joke. I went off there for a minute. I didn’t do any magic. Of course, we’re all small people living in a big world and we have to bow down to our superiors and submit to mysteries we’ll never understand. That’s the human condition. We have to make the best of it. We’re all in the same boat. Ha—I went nuts there for a minute. Don’t do anything that might possibly offend anyone else. Don’t stand out. Get along. My hopes and prayers are with you…

Jon Rappoport

For information concerning the upcoming March Magic Theater workshop in San Diego, contact me at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

TEMPORARY UNIVERSE

IMAGINATION AT WORK

by Jon Rappoport

January 17, 2012

You can read this article as fantasy, metaphor, crooked analogy, speculation…or something more. Many people will decide it’s an impossible fantasy. I can only say that, to me, it’s the next step in everything I’ve been writing for the past five years.

The essential question I tackle here is: how powerful is imagination?

What can it really do? What unobserved effects has it been creating since the dawn of time? How far-reaching are these effects?

Is it possible that imagination naturally leads to an unprecedented revolution in the very make-up and composition of the universe?

At the outset, I want it clearly understood that nothing I write here is meant to excuse people for doing nothing, for just hanging around hoping for miraculous deliverance. Imagination is an active force, not a passive one, and it is an individual attribute.

I want to tip my hat to my friend, artist Rick Dubov. Rick and I have been doing Magic Theater dialogues recently, and a few of the central ideas in this piece surfaced in those dialogues. I had been keeping them to myself, and finally aired them, and we took off from there.

Universe may not be what we think it is. It may be much LESS, in a way, than we think it is. It may be a fixation, by which we falsely define ourselves. More importantly, what if imagination has been having an enormous and direct (unseen) effect on universe “since the beginning?”

Over the past 15 years, it has occurred to me many times that imagination has been creating holes in the very universe we all accept as permanent and eternal.

Contrary to accepted science, these holes don’t suddenly cause horrific consequences, because although this universe is quite real, it is also an illusion, and as such it simply remains in place, even if pieces of its space have been deleted. Yes, I know, quite far out.

Okay. Here we go.

New York, over the decades, has seen artists migrating to lower-income neighborhoods, moving into lofts, and opening galleries.

The largest of these journeys moved from Greenwich Village to Soho to Chelsea. Presently, in the Chelsea area, bounded roughly by 29^th St., 17^th St., 10 Ave., and 11^th Ave., there are 350 art galleries.

It is certainly the densest concentration of galleries in the world.

These operations change their shows every 4-6 weeks, so the sheer amount of art moving through their doors is staggering.

Every time an art migration sets up shop, neighborhood property values rise, new retail operations open, and untold numbers of visitors appear.

In other words, the surroundings adjust to creative pioneers.

Or to put it another way, the environment adapts itself to imagination (art).

What if this pattern exists on a much, much broader level?

Painting, and in fact all the arts, invent their own spaces, times, and energies.

Up until now, we have, for the most part, been satisfied to say that works of imagination are decoration for, or additions to, the already existing space, time, and energy of this universe.

Because, as citizens of what is considered to be a more or less eternal continuum, we assume and claim to know that the energy, space, and time of the cosmos are primary, monopolistic, and all-encompassing.

I suggest something quite different:

The whole force of imagination and creative invention makes significant and deep changes in the so-called primary space, time, and energy of the universe.

Far from being mere decoration or “additive insertion,” the result of imagination in action is radical and real.

One might say it punches holes in the fabric of space, in the space/time/energy continuum.

That we have not seen these holes (unless we want to interpret inferences of black holes and wormholes as evidence) does not mean they don’t exist.

Our tendency is to deny anything before our eyes that doesn’t integrate with our interior picture of what reality must be.

We could take this principle further: even if we create new realities that supersede the familiar and the “eternal,” we quickly deny the implications of what we’ve invented.

As artists, we’re blind to the most radical effects of our own art.

Millions and millions of artists working over long periods of time establish new beachheads of time, space, and energy, against which the background of “old” physical space, time, and energy begins to fade and dissolve.

The so-called eternality of the continuum opens up gaps and loses its solidity in places.

Dean Radin, in his classic work, The Conscious Universe, argues that the totality of well-designed published laboratory studies of paranormal phenomena reveal a success rate greater than probability. In other words, statistical odds don’t rule the day. Something else is happening.

For example, a volunteer sits in front of a large glass case, which contains a funnel down which small balls are released. The balls end up falling into spaced holes to the left or right of vertical center. The apparatus is designed to yield the statistical probability: a 50-50 spread of balls (half to the left of center, half to the right.) The volunteer is told to try to influence the pattern of balls so they will move to the right or left.

A comprehensive analysis of the published literature indicates volunteers do, in fact, exert an overall paranormal influence beyond the 50-50 expectation.

What paranormal researchers so far fail to see is that this act of “influencing” is actually an action of imagination.

Imagination changes the laws of the space/time/energy continuum.

Art, which is a far more intense action of imagination than “mentally influencing balls,” does the same thing.

We aren’t living in a continuum-universe bounded by unalterable laws. This universe, from the most important point of view, is a default structure that exists AFTER the power of imagination has been subtracted.

And when it is added, the continuum changes.

One of the most radical changes would be a “fading effect,” as new realities (spaces, times, and energies) are invented in great profusion and with great power.

Consider New York City itself. If you transported a human from 1700, when the city was simply two rivers and forests, to 2011, his state of utter bewilderment would be overwhelming, as he stood in the middle of Times Square at night. He might actually think space and time themselves had been transformed.

Presently, millions of people believe that an observer affects matter at a sub-atomic level merely by the act of observing. This belief, however, is a version of re-arranging deck chairs. It doesn’t posit that new energy, space, and time are superseding and replacing the old. It clings to the old idea of universe.

It is patently obvious that, since the dawn of art, artists have been creating and introducing new energy into reality. The law of the conservation of energy is applicable, if at all, only in a narrow range that excludes the power of imagination. Well, if new energy can be created, why not new space and time?

And if this creative capability exists, and if its influence is strong enough, why shouldn’t art (imagination) begin to replace that other work of art called universe?

Why shouldn’t the overall force of art wake us up to the fact that the universe isn’t primary and never has been?

The old Tibetan magicians practiced creative exercises in which they imagined personae, and the announced objective of these techniques was the realization that UNIVERSE IS A PRODUCT OF MIND.

The magic was, in fact, the capacity of an individual to delete pieces of universe or spontaneously invent space/time/energy that had never existed before.

For some years now, Dean Radin and his colleagues have been conducting experiments with random number generators, placed at various positions around the planet. These devices continuously spit out random sequences of numbers. Radin has discovered that, just before momentous events (such as 9/11), the quality and degree of randomness produced by the machines significantly alters.

This has been taken to confirm collective precognition. Realizing that something shocking is about to happen, the consciousness of billions of people exerts an effect that is registered by these machines. A coherence previously not present comes into being.

That is a general hypothesis. Let’s consider translating it into another obvious format: billions of people, sensing a momentous event on the immediate horizon, CREATE AN ENERGY THAT HAS NEVER EXISTED, and this energy affects the random number generators.

New energy is created (imagined), and the environment adjusts to it.

A most profound transition is underway. How long it will take to become visible to everyone is speculation. But the outcome is: the work of art called universe will no longer be primary and “eternal.” Instead, imagination will engender millions and billions of works of art that supersede it.

Think of this transition in pedestrian terms—a painting that has hung in a room in a museum for centuries will be replaced by a series of new paintings.

My assertion is: this process, millimeter by millimeter, has been happening since “the beginning.” The idea of it was too radical to consider. It is no longer too radical.

The idea that, no matter how much we imagine and create, universe will always be universe, is just that: an idea. It has no intrinsic power, except for the power we attribute to it.

Lately, as I’ve engaged in a number of Magic Theater dialogues (see my blog archive here for many articles on the Magic Theater), I’ve begun to consider that the dialogues are, in fact, works of art that punch holes in universe.

The overwhelming sentiment among the populace is dedicated to rejecting the notion of such effects. Their whole program is a pledge of allegiance to normality. In other words, every situation, at bottom, is assessed by the proposition that universe is the ultimate reality, forever the same.

And yet, everywhere we look we see the results of imagination and invention. I’m taking it a step further. Universe is also the result of imagination and invention. And just as one style of art, which was acclaimed, in its time, as primary and final, was eventually placed on the shelf in favor of a new emerging style, universe, too, will be put in storage. It can be dragged out for conversations based on low-level consensus, but we will realize that something far more adventurous is in the ever-expanding foreground:

The individual…

IMAGINING

INVENTING

CREATING

IMPROVISING.

And then nothing will ever be the same.

Actually, it never was the same.

Universe was a children’s book we all read a long time ago. When we need to refer to the sentiments and delights and conflicts and push-pull emotions of that story, we can remember. We can bring it back and enjoy the moment. Otherwise, we’re each launched in expressing the unbounded force of our imaginations.

Until that day, people will staunchly defend universe-as-it-is, with all its rules and restrictions, while they take every opportunity to file into dark theaters and longingly watch fantastic personages break every one of those rules in paranormal fireworks.

I say universe has a beginning and an end, in the same way that a famous novel has its time in the sun and then fades from recognition. It was a long-running play, and then the audience dwindled and the performances closed down.

It was always that way, except that a trick was thrown into the mix. If people could be convinced to bow and scrape at the play, pay deep homage to it, even pray to it, hope for it to grant their wishes—then perhaps it might go on and on forever.

But it won’t.

Because other plays, more and more plays, are being written and performed in profusion.

I suggest that certain anomalies, puzzles, confusions, and mysteries in physics can be worked out by starting from the premise that imagination is superseding the illusory “permanent” effects of universe. And that fades and holes and other phenomena are opening up in universe as a result.

Imagination has no illusions. The universe does.

The primary laws of implicative logic are indeed applicable to the work of art called universe, and to all thought that attempts to operate within that field. But outside it, the force of imagination does not concern itself with those laws, and never did. To imagination, for example, the stricture against logical contradiction is a joke. And there is no pinnacle on which “the one and only work of art” sits. That’s the biggest joke of all.

Imagination hasn’t been powerless all these centuries. It has been changing universe and punching holes in space and introducing new energies and replacing sections of universe and even altering time. It’s been doing all sorts of things—all of which we’ve denied.

Now we are coming of age. And I don’t mean the New Age, in which people try to believe some external force will deliver all their dreams to them. No, I mean an age in which we, by the power of imagination, invent multiverses without limit or end.

The Tibetan magicians (who at one point dominated the spiritual path in their culture, before the priests took over), would probably agree with the main points in this article. For them, the idea that the universe is a product of mind was far more than just a fancy. All their techniques were geared to realizing this profoundly and permanently—and jumping off from the realization to launch what some people would now call paranormal feats. Such feats included deleting pieces of universe and creating space/time/energy of their own. There is, of course, debate about whether these practitioners were actually able to perform such acts.

I would highly recommend John Blofeld’s extraordinary book, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet, and any of Alexandra David-Neel’s books about her travels through Tibet. Blofeld’s description of what he calls “deity visualization” is a key to understanding the original practices of the Tibetan magicians.

Jon Rappoport

For information about the upcoming Magic Theater workshop in San Diego, in March, email me directly at qjrconsulting@gmail.com

INTERVIEWING JACK TRUE:

REFLEXIVE RESISTANCE

by Jon Rappoport

January 14, 2012

INTRODUCTION

Since I’ve written hundreds of articles that attempt to stimulate imagination, I’ve had to take into account the resistance—many people pretending they’re simply “the audience.” They watch. They keep their distance. They enjoy the show.

If they think I might be writing about them, they deflect the message like a matador.

In some strange way, the reflex to deflect keeps the universe in the condition of status quo.

Because, think about it. What would happen if a few billion people, on this planet alone, woke up one morning galvanized by their imaginations to such a degree that they began to create new realities at an unprecedented rate?

Life would never be the same.

To personify what I mean by status quo, it’s as if a deal were taking place, under the table, between humans and the universe. “We’ll pretend imagination doesn’t exist, and you, universe, keep us enchanted by things as they are.”

Hopefully, you understand that I’m talking about magic here—or the lack of it.

Almost all discussions of mind control, programming, operant conditioning never visit this territory, where the really big-time programming lives.

Well, what is this conditioning? What is its nature?

After many years of considering these questions, my answer is simple. It’s resistance. That’s the beginning and end of it.

I know, it sounds too simple.

There must be a complex structure involved. In fact, humans would be drawn to a structure like that. Fascinated, absorbed. They would sign up in droves to study it. Why? Because it would constitute yet another deflection. It would allow them to wriggle off the hook.

I’ll offer you another considered conclusion. Even if there were such a structure, whose purpose was to keep people from exercising their imaginations to the fullest, once that system was probed, understood, and eradicated, humans would remain in limbo. They would still be one step from creating new realities—just as they are now.

In another context, with a different implied meaning, TS Eliot famously wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration/and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Remove all the supposed programming, and we’re really where we started, but in this case we don’t know the place for the first time, we don’t know very much more than we did. We’re rather bewildered, like the institutionalized person who looks at the open door to his cell one day and doesn’t step beyond it.

Because the resistance is still there.

The word “will” has been pretty much removed from the modern vocabulary. “He doesn’t have the will to do the work.”

We’re taught there are layers and layers of social, psychological, and political factors that separate a person from acting on an idea. And all these factors must be addressed.

You want operant conditioning? There it is: the deleting of the idea of will behind an avalanche of fake knowledge.

To live through and by imagination is a choice, taken or not taken in freedom. That’s the short and long of it, and no amount of complaining will change the situation.

To put it another way, resistance is not a thing that sits in the mind like a solid object. It is a generalized description of a person saying NO. It really refers to a refusal to act.

People ask, “But why does the person say no. Why does he refuse?”

They hope to find a mechanism which, if corrected, will turn the no into a yes. In words, a revolution achieved passively.

“Sir, just sit here and we’ll insert this needle and remove the obstruction and then everything will change.”

Really?

It doesn’t work that way.

Here’s another picture. All the refusals, over time, tend to pile up into a glob. If you could peel them away, one by one, you wouldn’t have curtailed the ongoing decision to refuse, you would have merely taken off some incidental debris surrounding it.

TO IMAGINE OR NOT TO IMAGINE.

TO INVENT REALITY OR NOT TO INVENT REALITY.

Choice.

That’s the background for a conversation I had in the late 1980s with my friend and colleague, Jack True, the most innovative hypnotherapist I’ve ever encountered. In this interview, I touch on the beginnings of the Magic Theater:

Q (Rappoport): Just give me your response to this: a person can say YES or NO.

A (Jack): Yes isn’t necessarily better than no. It depends on the situation.

Q: Are they both pure choices?

A: What else could they be?

Q: The result of habit? The result of long chains of cause and effect?

A: Yeah, sure, you could analyze it that way, but then you’d miss the point.

Q: Which is?

A: Take this kind of thing. “Shah ousted. The president refuses to send troops to Iran.” People assume the president has a choice. They don’t say, “The president couldn’t send troops, because when he was a small boy, his father punished him for shooting a water pistol at a neighbor.” (laughs)

Q: He’s accountable for his decisions.

A: Yes. And he’s free to make those decisions either way. So is everyone.

Q: We have mountains of “psychological research” that deny that.

A: Yeah, well, we have mountains of research that say the universe started with an explosion. So?

Q: Freedom exists.

A: If not, what are we doing here?

Q: Why are we talking at all?

A: Right.

Q: You can lead a patient to water, but you can’t make him drink.

A: No. I make him drink.

Q: How?

A: I find an avenue that’s clear and I send him down that avenue.

Q: Not sure I understand.

A: I find a channel along which he can use his imagination, and I can get him to do it, because it’s fairly easy for him.

Q: You give him a taste of what’s that like.

A: Many tastes.

Q: Which takes ingenuity.

A: I have a fair amount of that.

Q: For instance, you have patients invent dreams.

A: They’re used to dreaming. They know what it is. So I can tip the scale a little and get them to create dreams they never had. But if I had a patient who told me he never dreamed, I’d find another way.

Q: Suppose you have a patient who digs in his heels and says he doesn’t want to use his imagination at all?

A: That’s the “no.” He makes his free choice.

Q: Why does he choose “no?”

A: Why? Because he prefers “no” in this case, just like he prefers to eat fish rather than spinach. He prefers the city to the country. I take him at his word.

Q: So if he doesn’t want to invent anything, you leave him alone?

A: Hell no. I trick him.

Q: How?

A: Maybe he makes furniture in his garage. So we talk about that, and I have him speculate about what kind of furniture he might make. New things. I get him going in that direction. And finally I say, “Well, suppose you were dreaming about furniture? What kind of crazy thing might you see in the dream? And he starts talking about a chair with six legs. Whatever. Or he has a problem with his boss. And I ask him what he’d really like to say to the boss and that develops into a little role playing.

Q: You play the boss and he plays himself.

A: Sure. I’ve done that. So he’s making it up. And I lead him into new places. As the boss, I’ll suddenly say, “You know, I have this project I want to get you involved with. I need you to spy on a few people who wormed their way into the company. They’re plants from our competitor.” And that might work. We’d be off and running. He says he doesn’t want to use his imagination, but he’s doing it. I play out that string as long as I can. I had a guy, we ended up talking about missions to another solar system, and he was the cook on the ship.

Q: Theater.

A: Yeah.

Q: Any roles are possible. I like it.

A: No limits on that.

Q: I could play a president and you could play the sap rising in a tree in March.

A: Why not?

Q: I’ve always admired Psychodrama. But I’ve wanted to extend the range of possible roles.

A: Well, with any psychologist, that range tends to be limited, because you’re thinking about direct therapy. You want to choose roles that seem relevant to the patient’s problems.

Q: But that’s not necessary. Maybe the wilder the roles, the better.

A: As long as the patients is imagining and inventing, why not?

Q: I once had a dream where I saw these poles in the ground. It was as if I was looking at the universe. It was a huge space with poles in the ground. That’s all it was. The poles were sunk very deep in the ground. The idea was, this is the pattern. This is where things are placed. It’s fixed. It doesn’t change its basic structure. That was the feeling.

A: But if you start playing all sorts of roles, the pattern does change.

Q: That’s right.

A: Well, that’s what I do with patients. They have a kind of fixed firmament. So instead of trying to pry one pole out of the ground so we can move it, I just have the patient invent. I get him to invent dreams he never had, and the pattern shifts. Things that were fixed become mobile. And when that happens, the system he has starts to disintegrate. It’s like moving an iceberg. Do you get behind it and push with your hands, or do you go to the root? The root is, a person has a pattern of ideas and feelings, and he keeps it in place. I have him imagine other things, and after a while the pattern moves. It breaks apart.

Q: How did you figure this out?

A: Well, partly through conversations you and I have had about painting. Also, from Psychodrama. And initially from old Tibetan techniques. They were all about imagination.

Q: This isn’t hypnotism.

A: It’s reverse hypnosis.

Q: Meaning?

A: I once had a patient, a business type. An executive. He was always falling asleep at his desk. It was like a sickness for him. That’s how he saw it. And I told him flat-out that he was trying to have a dream, and that was what was going on. He was trying to dream something, and he couldn’t get to it. We talked about that for a long time. But then it occurred to me that he was in a sort of waking trance. He was, every day, succumbing to a little bit of that trance. So I put him in a light trance, in my office, and I tried to find where that thing was coming from. I tried to locate the “state of hypnosis” he was in. And I couldn’t. So I had him invent a few dreams. And he was off like a rocket, making up dreams. It was pretty powerful. We did this for six or seven sessions, and after that he wasn’t falling asleep at work anymore. The change was quite remarkable.

Q: What conclusion did you come to?

A: He had been in a waking trance at work because he was in a basic trance, a more basic trance.

Q: I don’t get it.

A: He was in a trance “about imagination.” He was putting himself in a trance so he wouldn’t use his imagination.

Q: Oh.

A: That’s the granddaddy of all trances, you see? A person puts himself in a trance as a way of saying no to his own imagination. And in this patient’s case, he would literally fall asleep. So when I had him invent dreams, he went right with his imagination, and he woke up. He didn’t need that waking trance anymore.

Q: You’re saying everybody is in that trance.

A: You bet. That’s what we’re dealing with here. That’s planet Earth.

Q: So people–

A: Look, you talk to people about their imagination, and most of the time they draw a blank. They don’t think you’re talking about anything important. See? They say, “Yeah, well, that’s interesting, but I have to get back to folding napkins.” Or moving pieces of paper around on their desks. You could give that guy speed and he’d seem to wake up, but he wouldn’t really know what to do. He wouldn’t start imagining and inventing like crazy, because he’s still saying no to that.

A person pretends, on some level, that all this business about imagination doesn’t mean much at all. But actually it’s very, very big. The trance he’s in is all about not using his imagination. That’s how he says no. He falls asleep. He walks around, but he’s asleep. He’s asleep IN A PARTICULAR WAY. He asleep when it comes to imagination. Which means he’s asleep when it comes to the core of existence!

Q: Imagination.

A: Yeah. Reality is what’s left over when a person doesn’t use his imagination in a powerful way.

Q: So if you had him play the role of God and you played the role of Merlin, something might trigger him to wake up.

A: Theater is waking up if you do it right. I had a patient who wanted to be a choreographer in the worst way. She was a secretary but she wanted to be a choreographer. So with her, it was a straight line. I had her imagine all sorts of dances. You know, programs. Performances. Fragments of ballets. And eventually, she became a choreographer. I used desire as the way in. Her desire. Because it was right there, in the open. I used her desire to get her to use her imagination, and eventually all the barriers fell. See, other people would say I tapped into her desire to be something different in her life. But that wasn’t it. I used her desire to get her to use her imagination. And that was the key. Once she was rolling with that, she woke up. She woke up from the trance. She was saying no to her own imagination, and I helped her turn that no into a yes. Sounds corny, but that was it. It wasn’t faked. It was real.

Q: How long did it take?

A: Six months.

Q: But you didn’t undo any programming.

A: What programming? Her refusal to invent? I don’t give a damn about programming or conditioning. I’m not trying to undo anything. I’m not trying to do surgery. I’m not trying to pick things apart.

Q: Why not?

A: My boy, you and I could sit here and make up thousands of quite sophisticated patterns or systems of programming. We could invent all sorts of crap that supposedly resides in consciousness that keeps a person from imagining and inventing. We could speculate and assume and presume. We could play the roles of brain researchers or whatever. But in my experience, there’s NOTHING THERE. There isn’t any programming. Not really. Not when it comes to imagination. You either imagine or you don’t imagine. My job is to get people to imagine. I’m deviously clever about it. I’m a genius at getting people to go out on some road of imagining.

Q: If we wrote a book about the whole pattern of consciousness that keeps people from imagining–

A: If we did that, if we made it all up, we’d have people drooling to learn about it. They’d come out of the woodwork. They’d pay good money to learn all about why they’re screwed. People LOVE that. But it wouldn’t amount to anything. The whole idea is much simpler than that. You either imagine or you don’t. And my job is to get them to imagine.

Q: Not just in little drips and drops.

A: No. FOREVER.

End of interview

My second workshop of the Magic Theater is scheduled for March 3 and 4 in San Diego. For details, and to sign up, email me at qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

GOT YOUR MIND IN MY POCKET

by Jon Rappoport

January 13, 2012

I’ve been working on an invention for the past 15 years, and I finally have it perfected. It allows you to put your mind in my pocket and forget about it. Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it?

I can tell you, it was quite a challenge to come up with this, but I could see it was essential, because so many people are worrying about their minds.

And then I had to figure out what to do with lots of minds that came my way. A few colleagues and I worked out a system for separating the constituents and selling them for scrap. As you might know, the scrap biz these days is very big.

Anyway, the procedure for transfer is pretty simple. You don’t have to check into a hospital or a clinic. We handle it in the privacy of your own home. We set you up in a comfortable chair (you can even watch TV while this is all happening). The energy-suction machine is about the size of a cell phone. It locates the dimensions of your mind (not your brain, of course), and then it establishes a territory of about four feet by six in which it radiates a frequency of extreme pleasure. Your mind just pops out of its locale and comes scrambling over to the pleasure-field like a puppy and we pocket it. Bang. No problem.

Gone forever.

You should know how we define mind. It’s the totality of repetitious, aimless, and unproductive thinking. The useless stuff that goes around and around and gets nowhere. It’s the worrying and the globs of passive hand-wringing that never lead to action. It’s really the totality of the illusion that you only exist in one space. That’s what we take away. All the rest of your thoughts, whatever they may be, remain intact.

After the procedure, you’ll know you can create space(s). And that will alleviate the need to start thinking round and round in circles again.

In other words, you’ll know you’re an artist.

You’ll know you invent reality.

Disclaimer: How you handle your new echelon of existence is, of course, not our concern. We can’t hold your hand forever. Revelations about your new status might come as a shock to the system. You could engage in certain forms of chaotic behavior. You could try to attach blame to our service. That’s why we have this 60-page ironclad no-fault addendum, which you’ll have to sign in the presence of three witnesses. It exempts us from liability. It informs you that under no circumstances can your mind be replaced if you’re dissatisfied.

Of course, if you want to undertake the stripping of your illusions on your own, without our help, you could. That might involve a lengthy process. The results, naturally, aren’t guaranteed.

It’s the difference between being flown to a high castle by helicopter and climbing the trails and scaling the rocks yourself.

We prefer the easy way. It’s our specialty and our business.

If you feel you want to take advantage of our offer, but need the assurance of a “figure of authority,” we can provide a simulacrum of a “fully realized ancient spiritual master,” who will come to your home and cast our work in the light of a miracle, a moment of grace, a “deserved reward” for your lifetimes of suffering “on the wheel of Karma.” Or some such. We can perform those theatrics for you.

At the moment, we’re in the middle of negotiations with the federal government. If our funding grant comes through, we’ll be able to provide our service at no charge to those who can demonstrate some level of disability. We’ll have counselors on call who can help you navigate the relevant regulations.

Welcome to your new life!

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

TRADING UNIVERSES

by Jon Rappoport

January 12, 2012

See, I’ve got this universe here. I’ve got a whole bunch of others in a storage locker in Long Beach. This one I’m willing to trade, if you have one I’m interested in.

I don’t care what the rules are for yours. It could be an inside-out job with music, or a long skinny one with ladders and unlimited energy. But it has to have lots and lots and lots of painters, because I’m opening a gallery.

We could do a plus-cash deal as well. I might be willing to kick in some diamonds or gold bars.

But don’t, under any circumstances, try to pawn off the one we’re standing in right now, because it’s a lemon. Okay? Energy conservation law, an excess of machines, androids, wars, fundamentalists. I don’t want crowds of people screaming about God or gods or heaven or The Book or any of that stuff. And I don’t like some of the insects and animals. Baboons. I don’t like baboons at all. Whoever started that whole line should be put on a small asteroid and left there. And slugs. I’m not happy about slugs and snails. People eat snails. What further proof do you need that this universe is a whack-job?

Do you have one that’s populated by musicians as well as painters? I mean real musicians, not screamers with guitars and make-up. Improvised symphonies that span a whole galaxy and go on for a few hundred years at a time. That’s more to my liking.

But the very last thing I’m looking for is people who are unaware they’re living in just one cosmos out of trillions. Those people will tire you out faster than a big stack of rubber pancakes.

My cousin lives in one of those. He sends me messages about “the human condition” all the time. I have to tell you, although I’m not unsympathetic, this wears on a person. It’s so…parochial. And he thinks he’s on some kind of frontier of consciousness or something. Can you imagine? Babbling on and on about existential this and shrunken down that. Drives me bats! What am I supposed to say to the guy? He’s blind? I mean, he is, but he doesn’t react well to that sort of talk. He gets his fur up and goes on the attack. Pathetic.

Anyway, I’m up for a trade. If you get my voice mail, leave a detailed message. Remember—painters and musicians. Academics are okay, as long as they know their place. Throw in a few shrinks, just for laughs, and you might have a deal. All transfers are final. No refunds. No rebates. No discount coupons.

As you may have guessed, I don’t do God. If you’re thinking of trading me a universe where some guy’s playing God, forget it. First thing I’d do is fire him and his whole bureaucracy. But usually they have laws about that. You know, employment guarantees. With bonuses! I don’t want to get caught up in red tape. I say if you can’t fire a guy, you have to fire the system. I could be spending a few thousand years trying to engineer that.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE GOVERNMENT META-SPYING GAME

by Jon Rappoport

January 12, 2012

Reuters, the Atlantic Wire, and other outlets are running a story about the Dept. of Homeland Security monitoring websites and social networks.

A DHS document states this monitoring program is geared to keep the government tuned in to “situational awareness” and able to “establish a common operating picture.”

Which sounds like intentional gibberish. But these are technical terms. In its effort to track stories and traffic related to border security, terrorism, and bird flu (!), for example, DHS is trying to assess public perception of ongoing events.

With sites like Drudge, The NY Times, HuffPo at the top of the list, and FB, MySpace, and Twitter included, the government hopes to be able to estimate consensus reality, make no mistake about it.

What’s under the government’s magnifying glass here? Events? Not really. It’s the widespread PERCEPTION of events.

This is a form, if you will, of meta-spying.

DHS obviously has some kind of collating system and also algorithms to model the degree of consensus about a subject of interest.

What does the public think about border security at the moment?

What does the public think about bird flu right now?

I find this latter topic interesting, because for the past few months, I’ve had the sense the CDC might be getting ready to launch another phony epidemic—either a rerun of bird flu or a repeat of swine flu.

They were soundly defeated on the last swine flu go-around, largely because the internet (including this site) was alive with refutations of their nonsensical PR and invented case numbers.

In the wake of the defeat, they’ve been trying to figure out how to get another fake epidemic on the boards and make it seem much more real.

In order to do this, they need and want a system that can track and assess public opinion in tight increments of time, moving forward.

So here is the current game in a nutshell: there are events in the world (some of which are created or fabricated by governments); then there is the public perception of these events; then there is the government perceiving the public perception.

And now here I am perceiving the government.

It’s a perception-stack.

For instance, suppose next month the CDC gets up on its hind legs and announces there is an outbreak of a flu in, say, Arizona, and researchers have been dispatched to the area to carry out tests.

DHS would, day by day, or even hour by hour, monitor a huge amount of traffic and data on the Net, to gauge reaction, to gauge the level of belief, you might say.

Then the researchers announce it’s a mutated strain of bird flu, more dangerous than the last one. More monitoring of public reaction via the Net.

A rather high level of public disbelief? Carve out a new announcement. Try something a little more threatening, or bring in a politician who has a high level of credibility, and let him jump on the bandwagon. Then: how did that work out?

Getting the picture?

It’s the attempt to shape consensus reality through monitoring Net traffic and making adjustments.

With the enormous amount and speed of Facebook/Twitter data in the mix, DHS realizes they can keep updating consensus reality by the minute if they want to.

They can go a step further and set up FB/Twitter accounts and send out their own brands of data.

They can take this ball and run with it to the moon.

Of course, keep in mind that a significant slice of the US government has deceived ITSELF about the role Facebook/Twitter play in world events—like the fabled Arab Spring, which is really an op to put big chunks of the Middle East under Islamic control and jack up the price of oil and go green, “through necessity.”

Those marvelous intellectual students with iPhones sitting in cafes in Cairo running the revolution? I’ve got condos on Jupiter to sell you.

So you very well could get something like this—-

“I just got a text message that Chris Columbus landed in India,” said Queen Isabella. “Wow. We need to jack up the PR about those Hindus and Nehru jackets and ornate jewelry and so on.”

“Yes,” said her advisor. “And maybe we should have Chris disassemble a really big temple and bring it back here.”

“Wait a minute,” said the grand vizier. “Didn’t we float that Facebook post about India? I just heard a rumor he landed on some island in the Atlantic.”

“What!” said the queen. “What island?”

“I don’t know. Some of our citizens are confused. They’re wearing feathers on their heads. And leather britches.”

“They’ve gone crazy!”

“Nothing new there.”

No. Nothing new.

So if I write BIRD FLU HOAX BIRD FLOW HOAX BIRD FLU HOAX BIRD FLU HOAX BIRD FLU HOAX, does that interest anyone at DHS?

Have fun, fellas. You’re going to screw this up beyond belief. I know you are. By the time you’re through, you’re going to believe God just landed on Saturn in a spaceship with his mom and dad and a crew of Mormon singers.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE BEST THING ABOUT SANTA CLAUS

by Jon Rappoport

January 10, 2012

I didn’t do a Christmas post this year, so it’s really too late now, because everybody is glad the holiday is over. Too much dessert, weird presents, time to get back to work.

But what the hell. I like Santa Claus. Always have, always will. Mainly because, when you turn 10 or 11, you stop believing in him. This is a great thing. Think about it.

As a kid, you invest a tremendous amount of energy in the man, you wait for him to deliver the gifts, you love him…and then, one day, while you’re throwing snowballs at older kids, one of them comes up to you and says, “By the way, Santa isn’t real.”

And you get over it.

It’s a rite of passage.

“Honey, our son just figured out Santa doesn’t exist. Talk to him.”

“And say what? That we’ve been lying to him?”

But ultimately everybody’s cool. It was a good joke. A lovely joke. A nice thing.

And there were clues. Ten department stores, each with its own Santa. People shopping at Xmas. That’s a hard one to ignore, right? Why are they buying presents when Santa delivers them?

In December, every year, folks more or less all conspire to create Santa. Then they stop.

Religion should take a chapter out of that book.

“Let’s do Krishna. This week is Oobladee Krishna. We’ll make up tunes and go on hayrides. Next week, how about Buddha? The fat man with the enigmatic smile. Then maybe The Holy Ghost. Organ music, guilt, fear. Always dug the scary stuff.

But no. Pick a religion and you’re stuck with it. Or you rebel.

“Mom, I’m going to live in Oregon with the Church of the Cranberry Cult. I have to buy hip boots and a rake. You’ll probably never see me again.”

When I first heard about Buddha, I immediately thought of Santa. Both guys had girth. They obviously enjoyed a good meal. They weren’t trying to press their case too hard. It was a riff. You could pick it up and then lay it down. Nobody with a thumbscrew would knock on your door.

Not many people realize this, but Thomas Jefferson wanted each generation to write its own Constitution. Every 20 years or so, they’d sit down and dream up a new one. He was never trying to legislate a Forever.

“You don’t like a Republic? Try your own monarchy. Or something no one’s ever heard of. The point is, you decide. Otherwise, you’ll freeze yourself in marble. Get it? One of the primary freedoms is inventing new government.”

That never panned out.

Do I have explain why? Didn’t think so.

When we talk about Santa at Christmas, we smile and laugh. We all know it’s a joke. We’re making him up. It doesn’t seem to be a problem. No one turns angry. It’s the one imaginary celebration, and it works.

“This isn’t really happening…and yet it is.”

And underneath it all, that’s why we buy presents. Because we’re inventing the whole shooting match, and it feels good.

This is why I favor a state religion. If it’s the religion of Santa. The guy who doesn’t exist.

“And so my friends, as I stand here in this church, talking to you about our fundamental holiday, I must remind you we’re all writing script. Never forget that. We’re cranking it out by the ton. And next week, we’ll stop. These are the two pillars. It’s on and then it’s off.”

Amen. Oobladee. Dancer, Prancer. E=mc2. Except on Thursdays.

Happy New Year.

Another nice artifact.

Speaking of which, the next Magic Theater workshop is scheduled for Mar. 3 and 4 here in San Diego. If you’re interested, email me. Judging by the last workshop, this one is going to be a beauty.

Once you unlock “the secret of Santa,”and now we’re talking about the whole history of art, because artists freed us to see imagination in its fullest aspect, the field is wide open. Why take religion literally? Why take it as final, any more than you would take one symphony as final background music for the universe? Why take the universe as final?

Even if you wanted to pinpoint an author of the book called This Universe, should you worship him/her/it any more than you would worship the author of Moby Dick?

The whole point of Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf, from which comes the idea of the Magic Theater, is that the magician, Pablo, sees the universe as a joke, while the main character, Harry, can’t. He finds it so serious and oppressive that he walls himself off from other people.

Well, the universe, no matter how it presents itself, is nothing more than another Santa Claus.

And if we had any sense, we would institute holidays in which other universes are celebrated. If you think you can’t find any, walk into a museum.

As we see how central unlimited imagination is to the present and future, other people behind us are retrenching their own fundamentalist traditions, trying like crazy to reinvent the past. Their greatest fear is realizing that those traditions were imagined.

So what should we do? Argue over and over that the past, in some crucial way, is gone? Will that carry the day? No, we need to imagine and create and keep on doing it until it reaches flood proportions.

In doing so, appeals to authority won’t work, because there aren’t any. I don’t care where you want to locate them, how you want to dress them up, what wisdom you want to put in their mouths. Those authorities are, at best, characters in plays of invention. And guess who writes the plays.

When I was a kid, I found out we had a chimney that was blocked up with concrete. No one knew how it had happened. My father hired two guys to drop iron balls down it, and after several tries they gave up. That’s when I figured out Santa probably wasn’t real. The chimney was blocked! I mentioned this, and my parents looked at each other and shrugged. And that was that. Life moved on.

But I still dug the fat man in the red coat. He was magic, and magic never dies. Because we invent it. We find it. We’re a species of artists, whether we want to admit it or not.

In my role as prosecutor, I keep making that case, to squeeze out a confession. If you’ve been reading my pieces for any length of time, you know I’m pretty relentless.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MY CONTRARY VIEW

by Jon Rappoport

January 9, 2012

The great Buddha, who may or may not have existed, is supposed to have said, “As you think, so you are.” Actually, I prefer this: “As you think, so you create, unless you create first, in which case you can think anything you want to.”

But that’s not quite a slogan. It doesn’t have much appeal for the masses.

Let’s break it down.

How and what a person thinks becomes awfully, awfully important when that person isn’t creating. Because then, thinking is pretty much all he has going inside his mind. He chooses between thoughts like a cautious buyer with a tight wallet at a bazaar. You know, visit all the stalls, judiciously pick an item here, an item there.

And then, yes, the thoughts he highlights and turns into hardened ideas are going to affect his main actions and perceptions. QED.

But if he’s imagining and creating like mad, he can supersede this entire mechanism. He can decide what to create and then invent the thoughts that make it all work.

Of course, my position isn’t popular. It doesn’t ring bells from Nome to Tierra del Fuego.

People prefer the Buddhist formulation because it doesn’t require living a creative life. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you read through all the voluminous tracts and texts and commentaries of Buddhism, you’re going to find very little about imagination.

People with a modicum of intelligence are attracted to the Buddhist version of thought-affecting-Being, because they dimly apprehend that their own thoughts do seem to exert a powerful influence on them—and so they look for ways to replace one thought with another—as you’d try to replace an old car with a new one.

Or as you might try to replace one drop of water in the ocean with another drop. Good luck.

Buddha, if he existed, might have been a great guy. He might have been fun to talk to. Or not. But he didn’t seem to give much time to considering human creation along positive lines.

(Well, neither did any of the fabled prophets of the world’s premier religions.)

Too bad.

Since the great migration of Eastern spiritual thought to the West in the 1960s, I’ve been pondering, on and off, the reasons for this cut-rate sale. And I believe I’ve found a few good explanations—the most significant of which is people love having faith in ancient personages who knew everything worth knowing. What a concept. And add to that the idea of a lineage, a whole unbroken line of masters who have been transmitting wisdom and illumination of the highest possible order to regular folks for centuries, and you have a real winner.

It’s mysterious. It’s satisfying. It’s big. It’s hip. It’s reassuring. It’s metaphysics with a payoff. It’s goal-oriented without being crass.

And, for example, in the case of Buddha, a decent fellow who wasn’t claiming to be a god or a priest or a dictator, it’s a solution to suffering.

Wow. Escape suffering.

And there is a formula, the centerpiece of which is: desire produces pain; therefore, eliminate desire; attain wisdom.

In other words, if you’re suffering and you can’t get off that trolley no matter what you do, know that everyone else is on board, too. You have lots of company. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the structure of reality.

To ascend beyond reality, start by accepting that your desires cause the whole infernal game to play out, over and over. That’s all. So meditate in such a way that you quit desiring. And you’re out. You’re released from the struggle and the inevitable disappointment.

Voila.

Sound good?

(What about, as Henry Miller once wrote, the desire to eliminate desire?)

As all my readers know by now, I recommend a little thing called living through and by imagination. But if you’ve somehow managed to sit on and squelch all your desires, your interest in imagination is likely to hover around zero.

It’s a rarely considered fact that most, if not all, so-called major spiritual paths and religions downplay or ignore imagination. They prefer to imagine their own thin fairy tales and then impose them on their flocks. (I cover this point extensively in my book, now an e-book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies.)

Among those fairy tales are stories about “received wisdom.” You see, it comes to you from somewhere else. So you have to find a person or make a connection that can provide it to you. And of course, the “source” of the illumination is dressed up, mythologically speaking, to give it more juice and appeal. It wears robes, it flies, it speaks in stentorian tones, it is “all love,” it lives in a place called paradise, it hands down the highest possible information through intermediaries. It’s Important.

How do you compete with that? How can you yourself generate your own wisdom? You’re trapped in a web of your thoughts and desires. You must eliminate them, remove the filters, and then you’ll see. You’ll see and hear the call from the distant past. You’ll flourish as never before. Imagination? What’s that? What does that have to do with anything? How could it matter, when the masters are silent on the issue?

Spirituality, as it’s taught, is a fabulous con. A shell game. Eons old.

It’s one mildly interesting book in a library of 349623079654329086 volumes.

The whole notion of what spirituality IS has been hijacked. The caper was pulled off successfully because people are always ready to accept tales about “good things arriving” like presents under the tree at Xmas. If you start with that premise, you can sell all sorts of wild scenarios.

And the more complicated such scenarios are, the more they’ll appeal to the intellectual caste. Whereas, if you begin with the premise, YOU IMAGINE AND INVENT REALITY, you’re going to be marching uphill in a blizzard. How can you sell that, unless people really begin to follow the precept themselves? You can’t just sit there and say, “Hmm, very interesting. We each imagine and invent reality.” No, you have to do it.

But here’s the thing. If you DO do it, you’re off on the greatest adventure of your existence. And in the process, all the old fake spiritual dominoes fall, and what replaces them is a new spiritual view that transcends anything ever sold to the masses on planet Earth. A view that is uniquely your own.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE NEXT MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP!

JANUARY 2, 2012. The first workshop, held in San Diego last month, was a smashing success. So I’m scheduling another one for this March.

When: Saturday and Sunday, March 3 and 4.

Where: San Diego.

The 2 sessions: Saturday, 11:30AM-6PM. Sunday: 9:30AM-1PM.

To sign up, contact me directly at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

I suggest doing that soon; the workshop will fill up quickly; we need a fairly small group to make the dynamics work.

Here is a statement from Rick Dubov, who has participated in a number of Magic Theater dialogues:

“I came to my MACIC THEATER sessions with Jon with the feeling that many of you have had, I’m sure—namely that the reliable systems and ways of doing things are antiques by now. And furthermore they just don’t WORK!

“I have had two sessions with Jon and I will tell you that new worlds are being born by the second in me. We started our sessions with the theme of my fears and worries about money, and what I have discovered is astounding.

“But these sessions are not some pie-in-the-sky, passive writing down of affirmations. That approach is antique and weak. In these sessions YOU become the active creator of your life. Jon has stated this many times in his posts, but I am here to tell you that I am now living this, after only two sessions, and I look forward to many more of these sessions.

“In fact, the sessions have created an infinite thirst and hunger in me for more living in my creative imagination. This also is not just a fun holiday from the dreariness of daily routine, this is life transforming.

“I will close by saying that in just these two sessions, in which I have indulged most wildly in my imagination, I feel more solidly rooted in my life on numerous levels. And finally let me say this…even upon my first entry into the MAGIC THEATER. I was stunned and amazed, and remain so.”

For those readers who are encountering the idea of the Magic Theater for the first time, you can access this section of my blog archive at http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/category/magic-theater/ to learn more.

The Magic Theater is beginning to spread. As a result of the first workshop and my private clients, there are presently 3 separate groups operating. I’m sure more will follow.

Hope to see you in San Diego in March!

Jon

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com