—a fragment—
by Jon Rappoport
November 6, 2020
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Here is a fragment of my unpublished book, The Magician Awakes.
I realize this is not for everyone. So be it.
Become a functioning front for the apparatus. It’s easy.
Every generation invents its own unimpeachable authority. This generation invented “The Universe.”
A prophet appears friendly and exuberant, above the cares of the world, as if he were inexplicably hatched out of an egg. Wear his suit. Comb your hair the same way. Stand next to him. See what happens.
If you could investigate billions of people’s minds and find those thoughts on which the majority agrees, you would be at the farthest possible distance from magic.
Millions of people thinking the same thought at the same instant might be able to affect physical reality. They could move a table across a room. That is not magic. It’s the sacrifice of individuality.
At the beginning of the enterprise, there was a kernel: the real road is through massive proliferation of thought and language and poetry. Good luck with reduction.
The ceremonies, rituals, and symbols of any Magick are all lies. They are dead on arrival.
There is no inner anyone. There is, however, the invention of personae, characters.
Being receptive to What Is, on any level of “Is,” is a dead end.
‘You have your place; you need to find it.” You end up like a bumblebee on heroin.
All religions and spiritual movements engender the same outcome. Their followers, regardless of what actions they take, maintain a core of knockout sleep in the center of their consciousness.
One life isn’t enough time to get used to the scope of imagination. You might use 100,000 lives to really work into it.
When you live through and by imagination, you can never end anything, or you can do nothing but end things. You can make the middle the beginning or you can forget about beginnings and endings altogether.
Eventually, you can move mountains with a wave of your hand if you want to…
If you really want to wave your hand and move a mountain, you will. Today, tomorrow, a million years from now. That’s what imagination yields up over the long haul, whether you like it or not. Who cares how long the long haul is? Are you in a hurry?
The last Pharaoh was fed up with the ancient language. He began speaking in giant burning apricots on staircases. That was the end of the empire.
At the core of every philosophy and spiritual system and teaching is an unasked question: Suppose I imagine something else?
Every system explains What Is.
There is no church of imagination.
A spellbinding storyteller needs to spellbind himself and cut out the nonsense.
Magic is not about the group or what the group might think as “One Mind.”
The notion that we are somehow manufactured by space and time and energy is an interesting idea for children.
Magic is not about aligning one’s self with natural forces. It has nothing to do with aligning.
Arshile Gorky: “[Abstract art] is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.”
“Sometimes I’m working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to—because I like to change my mind. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.”
You can make a Zen sandwich out of anything. Most Zen teachers avoid the subject of imagination. They have no idea what to do with it.
The Garden of Eden is perhaps a page of lines of a poem. Freezing the page and then entombing it in a dank cathedral is the “critic’s review.” Every critic wants to be Pope.
The hunger for protocols always reveals a loss of desire.
Caterpillar in cocoon, but no rebirth. Another myth sold, the seller moves on.
You could create a blue square on a table. You could paint it there. And then you could paint a blue square over that blue square, and you could do it again and again. You could do it for ten years. Do you want to do it for ten years? If you do, you will. At some point, though, you could decide you want to paint something else. And then you would. What’s important, though, is that you’re painting. What happens while you paint, whether you keep painting the blue square—all that is up to you. What’s important is that you keep painting.
There is no such thing as the space-time continuum. It’s a myth. If you find that in no way comforting, you need hip boots and a shovel. You’re in too deep.
“The universe is running down. Energy is dissipating, it’s consigned to an inactive bullpen.” This is a fabrication. Entropy appeals to a certain kind of mind that wants grand failure.
Every audience wants to buy protection. It’s a soft spiritual mafia operation.
IS, in physical or metaphysical terms, is the most overrated idea in the world.
The notion of Final Scripted Reality sitting behind ordinary reality is about as important as a parking garage under the street at two in the morning.
Read the entire canon of philosophy from any region of the planet, starting from the earliest texts, and count the number of times you find any reference to imagination.
The history of Earth is the history of a spiritual shakedown.
Andre Breton: “To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery…is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.”
Harmony, symmetry, balance, perfection—these qualities have been worked out over and over, for centuries. You can do it in your sleep.
The universe is willing to wait around until imagination revolutionizes it down to its core. Imagination has less patience.
You are forever, whether you like it or not. Occasionally, the Hindus stated this succinctly. But there is no wheel of life, and no mandatory echelon of incarnations. That is another fairy tale. Believing it may provide interesting motivation, but so would believing you are made out of a substance that is attracted to one of 7000 magnets located in various parts of the galaxy.
Which is more unlikely? An artist named Jackson Pollock does a painting, “No.5, 1948,” and 58 years later it sells for $140 million, or Jackson Pollock, now living under a different name, on a distant planet, occasionally indulging in a sherry before dinner, driving carefully, continues to paint, as he has for several thousand years, and discovers he can move a mountain with a wave of his hand? I would say the odds are about the same. Give him another few million years, and he’ll be able to make a horse gallop across a tomato.
The artisan wants to produce a fine, finished chest of drawers. The singer wants to imitate Billie Holiday. The juggler wants to climb a rope while tossing five balls in the air. The Chinese artist wants to travel to the Dun Huang caves on the edge of the Gobi desert and execute a mural on one of the interior walls that will take a year to complete. It doesn’t matter. The artisan will change his mind and turn into a mime, the mime will change his mind and become a gymnast, the gymnast will turn into a prodigy who can knock off a Bach fugue at the age of three, the prodigy will turn into a stage director, the stage director will turn into an architect who designs asteroids, and so on and so forth, over the course of a few thousand years and a number of lives. How it begins and where it goes is none of our business. The artist lives on. He keeps creating. We see only a snapshot of him in mid-stride. We think we know all about him. He drinks, he doesn’t drink, he’s difficult, he’s buttoned down, he’s a marvelous fellow, he’s a nasty son of a bitch. We know very, very little about him.
e.e. cummings: “Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”
Looking for magic without imagination is like eating an empty plastic plate for dinner. Of course, you can become famous by doing that.
An old man with a long beard wearing an oversized elf’s hat sitting at a table next to a lit candle by a dusty volume inside a dark room with shadows dancing on the walls is a politician.
Somebody once said: religion is what happens when space slows down.
William Burroughs: “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”
Nature and the planet aren’t praying.
There is now a whole professional class of people who see an apple and say it’s holy.
The ancient Roman Empire was dying. Expansionism hadn’t worked out. Bread and circuses were a momentary diversion. So they doubled back and tried conquest by other means. Religion. The Roman Church. It was a brighter idea.
When a person decides being an artist won’t pan out, he goes into religion.
Colin Wilson: “Our misconceptions involve the passive fallacy and notion that consciousness is a plane mirror that cannot lie about the world it reflects.”
Vladimir Nabokov: “A genius is an African who dreams up snow.”
Paper, paint, and brushes are more powerful than trembling gods walking out of clouds.
Reductionism is the practice of shrinking down reality in the hope that you’ll be able to control it. It always works. That’s the problem.
Whether the universe is a giant clock or an explosive dynamic event or a complex of quantum entanglement has no bearing on magic.
If 50 tribal members sitting in a forest can change the direction in which birds are flying; if a billion people can change the pattern of a random number generator; if 400 church members can pray and cure an ill parishioner; this is gold. Fool’s gold. “This is what we have been searching for. This is what science has been studiously ignoring. This is the hidden secret of history.” The appeal will be enormous, because these phenomena are emanating from groups. “We always knew it was the group.” The magician ignores all this. He lets it pass by like stale wind from a factory.
Some day, a billion people will focus as One on a polished gold ball sitting in the Gobi desert, and the ball will rise three feet in the air. The event will be heralded as the start of a new millennium. Eventually, a Great Boredom will set in.
Prehistoric artists who painted animals on cave walls were probably threatened with death, at which point they claimed the paintings referred to the tribe’s religion.
The worship of a statue is an improvement over adoration for an invisible god. And Melville discovered that the people of the South Pacific broke and abandoned their statues if their prayers did not come true.
Limited government had a brief moment in the sun. The silence was too hard for the populace to take. If all the necessary noise could have been produced by a remote machine, things might have been different.
“What everybody wants” is a distraction in a card game. The player with a busted hand lifts the corner of his mouth and makes the rubes think he is holding aces.
Mondrian snapped his fingers and became Jackson Pollock.
Eric Satie sat in his living room with a shawl on his knees and dozed for a few seconds, during which he composed Rite of Spring.
Lies are not preposterous enough. When they are, you have theater replacing society.
Aristotle explained local theater as catharsis. He had no idea what he was doing. He was hoping to give a public face to a private story. Freud came along and tried to describe the private story. He also failed. A dream is an adventure. This fact seems to disturb many people.
In the territory of art, there are no initiations.
Norman O Brown: “The view only changes for the lead dog.”
If principles could be laid down for the production of magic, magicians would be somewhere else doing something that has no name.
Go to the Sistine Chapel, sit on one of the benches along a wall and look up at the ceiling. Michelangelo performed an episodic series of paintings on spaces defined and sliced up by the ugly framework of wooden partitions. In a few places, he gave it his all. In many, he produced cartoons and moved on. The whole commission was ill-conceived. The ceiling would have been better suited to a candy man like Tiepolo. The great churches of Italy have surprisingly little to offer in the way of painting. Making ads for the Roman Church fairy tale is a grinding occupation. There are no magicians in the Vatican.
Someone writes the word imagination and other people read it and understand it in the context of a Pekinese determined to find a superior eyeliner.
If you watch large schools of small fish, you see the perfect blooming of collective action. They balloon to the left, they all strike ahead to the right, the whole school suddenly contracts when an outsider attacks. It’s hypnotic to observe. Their communications system is blindingly fast. It’s a good example of the All as a longed-for spiritual goal. Scintillating absurdity.
Odilon Redon: “Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.”
The ultimate sideshow the universe provides: if you can position yourself and your mind and your eyes in certain ways, you can connect with magnetic circuits and hubs, and then you can do tricks. You can make a cloud change shape. You can tell a leaf to fall from a branch and it will. You can make rain. You can be in two locations at once. But these tricks are then the bloodless imitation of magic.
There is a School of Religion of Love of Nature. Across the street is a school dedicated to the religion of Love of Technology. Both schools hold chapel services every night, after which the students and parishioners pray for one another’s souls. Then from both sides of the street, they stride and climb into a huge vat of butter on a grill.
Shrugging off the harmony of the living dead.
Educated people want to read about failure.
All Western philosophy tried to explicate the universe or cosmos as a setting of the greatest importance. Then, in the 18th century, there was the onrush of the individual. But no one accorded him the size of the discredited cosmos. He was somehow still living in a giant tin can.
“The human condition” is a myth invented by addicts.
The cosmos is a forgery of the individual.
How would ridiculous evolutionists rate the survival chances of an ant colony in which the queen gives birth to a dog who plays the violin?
Sixty years ago, when I was 11, I argued with my mother and father and convinced them to let me take a walk alone in a hurricane. Today, a boy who did that might be tied down and given a shot of Thorazine.
There is another universe in which James Joyce wrote the Bible. In that place, a self-appointed God has been trying to undo the damage ever since. You think we live by slogans here? You should see the pressure there. All futile, of course.
People are worried by artists’ purported ideas. They are reading the work from the outside in. There’s a reason for that. It’s really the atmosphere and the flesh that disturb them. They don’t want to get near it. The flesh of Cocteau, the flesh of Walt Whitman, the flesh of Dostoevski.
To be struck dumb by a painting is not a bad thing. Better to run out on the street, to an empty theater, move up on the stage and begin telling the story of your life as it never was. The audience will trickle in, and then who knows how far it will go?
The windows are closing on civilization. Soon, everything will take place in a giant room. After that, it may require 5000 years to make the room into a genuine theater and establish dialogue among invented characters.
All dust is gold when filtered between the curving fingers of a man who has taken off his suit and put on a heavy robe. He lives, he dies, he comes back. He speaks to his lost son who is shipping out to the asteroid belt. It happens in the twinkling of an eye. The moon shuts down its motor; then turns it back on.
In the long run, non-structures are more important than structures.
Thinking and existing in small spaces, yearning for larger goals, people devised adventures that carried them into inflation of the same lives they were living. An arm that was three feet long grew to 3.2 feet.
One trip to paradise gives you new ideas. Five trips to the same paradise give you syphilis.
Piet Mondrian: “In art, the search for content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual.”
Renaissance art was based on the pretense that the artist was working for the Church or God. It was the ticket to the table; it wasn’t anything else; it wasn’t anything more. The painters and the sculptors were actually the gods. The Church was a fat man smoking a cigar. Goya eventually came along and painted him.
You spontaneously invent what you need, and then you supply that need.
They had left the springs on in the Wadlen Gardens by the 101. I walked through the cascades and wiped the red-rock dust away with my gloves. It was a fine April morning. The pines were threading the river. No one was there. I was alone. Then I saw a few people praying near the fountain. A goat was standing on a tether looking at them. His bell rang. I saw Sam sitting on a bench reading the Times. He folded up the paper and left it next to him. The day was cool. Off to the east, I watched a light rain falling out of purple clouds over Pasadena. It was wetting down the immense deck of white stone in the Hayward complex. The windows reflected copper. Showers to the north, too. They bathed the filaments out of the air and weighed them down on the soil of the corn fields. I heard a truck snorting its way up the delivery road. I drifted back down to the path and walked toward Sam. He was holding a plastic cup of coffee in his hand. The V-line of traffic on the 101 was thinning out. Police were removing the road blocks. A man outfitted with fake wings was taking a ride on the wires through the Mt. Washington lift. I peered all the way through Los Angeles to the orange groves of San Berdoo and smelled the blossoms coming into their own. A news kid on a bike tossed his papers on to the old porches. Bang. Bang. It was the morning I had dreamed of. It was here, all around me. Hello from the inside of the outside.
As we approached the city, we heard mumbling and smelled flesh. Support our men. Live for tomorrow. The mail has come. Brush your hair. The drones believed they were time. One entry wound after another. Slow and solid, cows in the field staring at the breeze. Put out to pasture without food or water. Bland brown eyes. Measured response. Think it all through. Check the books again.
I reached into the soft manual of one of them and took out stillborn pink cases. The drone dried before he could utter the word colonization. In the presence of the drones, anything could happen. Best to turn the flamethrowers on them. They had been sent as serial sequences of numbers from somewhere.
One of them on the side of the road went crazy. He stood up from his blanket and started spitting. He waved his arms, as if he was signaling to a car. A jeep stopped and a soldier got out. He said to me, “That man is my father.” “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s who you’re fighting for.”
A is the sonar fish. Born out of the Milky Way.
B is the running building. The stone building is running down the street. People are chasing it. C is several reddish brown partially flattened cylinders of stone held in the hand. D is the letter of portal. You find imperfections in it. Cracks, discolorations. F is a hundred thousand people making sounds of their own choosing, without direction or plan, at the same time in the same place. N is a bolt of lightning striking a pond toward which a herd of zebra is fleeing. O is a gold phantom passing through solid objects at will on his way to the last gasp of the universe. P is a large barge slowly moving out from the dock. Q is the mixed smells of food brought out to a long wooden table from a kitchen. These translations would become credible science.
No one survives Matisse. You live in his Saturdays and Sundays for a long time. Then you change your name and start a new life.
You don’t need to call something a divine miracle to escape calling it a machine.
The American Republic took five minutes to reject decentralization.
You’re a diplomat from Andromeda and you don’t speak the language. You drift, you gesture, you comply, you grimace, you assure, you consider, you deflect. You vaguely imply auto-fellatio. You finally sweep out of the room and write up a report which recounts events that never happened.
To the public, magicians are large pieces of exceptional cheese coming out of a vacuum.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.