JANUARY 21, 2010.  Many readers know my work as a medical reporter.  This work, which I’ve been engaged in for the past 25 years, dissects and describes fraud at every level of the medical cartel.

However, long before I became a reporter (1982), I was painting, and writing fiction and poetry.  With the great help of Bonnie Lange, head of the Truth Seeker, that work has expanded over the last ten years, and I have written many articles and delivered many lectures on the subject of imagination.

I also work with private clients, doing telephone sessions.  I call this Imagination Work.  It involves expanding creative power and freeing the imagination to improve health, well-being, and to achieve real goals in life. 

Imagination is a subject that fails to interest lots of people, because they think it is a toy that children use to fantasize about what never will be.

Why should anyone spend time talking or writing about imagination?  We live in an age of science, where progress is made by hard-headed researchers who build meticulously on the work of their predecessors.

How could imagination be a secret key to a more abundant and enlightening life?

And if it is, how can people access it?  Where is it?  In what closet does it hide?

How could imagination be a grand solution to the problems we face every day?  Isn’t it actually an escape from reality?

These are a few of the questions I’ve fielded over the years from people who study my work.

Imagination changed my life irrevocably 50 years ago.  I had been a student of philosophy, and after obtaining my degree, I realized that all my major questions remained unsolved.  In fact, studying what great thinkers wrote over the course of nine centuries had made matters worse.

Suddenly, I saw daylight, and I ran toward it.  Everything that had happened to me in my young life appeared as a prelude to making a grand leap…into imagination and the creative life.

I’ve never looked back. 

Since then, I’ve spoken with many people who work in diverse fields—the law, engineering, the arts, healing, teaching, office work, construction—and I’ve seen that those who are successful ALWAYS use imagination as their leading guide.  The rather amazing thing?  Most of them don’t realize it.        

In every field of endeavor, imagination wears the crown.  It throws off old habits and allows the seeker to create realities and solve problems that advance life in new and better directions.

Imagination operates according to abundance, in the sense that it is not limited by “what everyone accepts.”  And imagination expands.  It sees new possibilities where tradition only sees obstructions and roadblocks.

Like everyone else, I have often refused to explore these possibilities, preferring to remain in established channels.  But time and time again, I have been forced to realize that my own problems were being caused by my ingrained acceptance of a status quo. 

And then, I forged and jumped ahead.  Through imagination, I saw answers where, previously, there appeared to be none.

This, in fact, describes the kind of world we live in.  On one level, we feel we must circle around the same old ideas and practices—but we then recognize the world is full of “empty spaces” where new solutions can be enacted.

The New is always about imagination.

Imagination trumps all other cards.  It revels in new invention, new approach, and unexplored territory.  It enlightens.  In fact, imagination shatters the very notion of a problem and a matching solution.  It moves beyond that.  It elevates actions into innovative places where both the old problems and the old solutions give way to greater life.

It’s common to praise every scientific breakthrough as a structure built on the shoulders of the previous generation of researchers.

There is certainly merit and sense to this claim; however, there is also another factor, because in every breakthrough a person takes a leap.  In other words, the past doesn’t entirely dictate the future.

Edison and Tesla and Einstein weren’t inevitable.  For some people, that may be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s actually a glorious circumstance.

Einstein, in a sense, invented the universe the way he wanted it to be, and then found the mathematics to justify that invention.

Each one of us is standing on the threshold of his own imagination, and by taking the leap, something new is made manifest, where before there was nothing.

It is insufficient to say that the paintings of Cezanne were waiting to be made before the painter was born. I understand the merit of that statement, but in a larger sense, Cezanne made a leap of imagination.

He put something on the blank canvas.  Without his daring and creative action, the canvas would have remained empty, or would have been covered with the threads of the past.

The desire for the New is a kind of trigger that calls us. 

Often, a breakthrough is preceded by a period in which the inventor is grappling with a problem that resists solution.  Around and around he goes.  For a time, it was apparently that way with Tesla, the great physicist.  He was seeking to find new sources of energy, and in doing so, he was squeezing the scientific knowledge of the past like a piece of fruit.  But the juice that came forth was not enough.

So he took his great leap.  He engaged his own imagination and saw ways in which a whole new technology could not merely solve, but go beyond what was known and what was acceptable.

Too often we keep trying to tease out and solidify what we already know, when what we really need to do is invent something we don’t know.

This last may sound like a contradiction, but in fact it is what carries us into territory we’ve always longed for.  Territory we’ve glimpsed.

Imagination opens the gates to that place.

It’s the greatest adventure.  

In my work with private clients, I use techniques, exercises, and dialogue to open up this adventure and make imagination more available, more accessible.  This is a grand undertaking.  It is all about expanding life’s frontiers to explore new dimensions.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com
www.insolutions.info

 (If you’re interested in becoming a private client, email me at jonrappoport@nomorefakenews.com and write “Jon Rappoport consulting” in the subject line.)