IT’S NOT IN OUR GENES
PART 2, THE IMAGINATION MACHINE
APRIL 14, 2011. I once had a geneticist tell me, “You know, we’re going to discover the genes for promiscuity, for anti-social behavior, for compassion, for obesity, hair-loss, anger, and fear. We’re going to discover the genes for everything.”
He said this with the kind of authority only a scientist can muster…based on no proof at all. Zero proof. It’s a talent, to be able to impart blather and make it sound like experimental evidence.
As a reporter for 30 years, I’ve spent much time exposing how medical, political, economic, and social realities are imposed on populations.
To a surprising extent, these realities are IMAGINED and then dropped down on the heads of the unsuspecting masses.
But for readers who have the wherewithal to understand it, there are other levels of profound brainwashing.
Let’s start here:
Most people are secret agents.
Their mission is to disguise—first and foremost, from themselves—the fact that they have enormous imagination and creative ability.
Achieving this concealment is on the order of blocking out the sun.
It is a complex task of deception. The pretense is multi-layered. One line of defense goes like this: I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. ME? I’M JUST AN ORDINARY PERSON.
Yes, an ordinary person cast in a role in a stage play.
“Okay, I’m the director. Now I want you to assume all the characteristics of an average guy. You understand? I don’t want any leaks or cracks. You character has to be bulletproof. You grasp what is ordinary, and you are totally ignorant when it comes to what is extraordinary. Got it? MOST OF ALL, YOUR CHARACTER MUST BE DEVOID OF IMAGINATION. Do you think you can handle that?”
People do handle it all the time, and they do it beautifully. Brilliantly.
They have their lines down cold. No matter what you throw at them, they can fend it off and leave the impression, for you and for themselves, that they don’t know anything about imagination.
For them, imagination is a car in a garage under a thousand tons of concrete and steel. They will never drive it.
They pretend to be androids. They can move, they can accomplish tasks, they can be entertained, they can have fun, they can even think and solve problems, but they can’t create anything. That’s their gig.
If psychiatrists really wanted to look at the nature of so-called schizophrenia, this is where they would go—but psychiatrists are suffering from the same condition, so how could they proceed?
Now, because people are addicted to systems and methods and precise protocols, when they begin to wake up they think they should examine the walls erected between androidism and imagination. They think there should be a precise way to dismantle the wall, brick by brick.
Not true. The catch is this: they built the wall. The wall is not just a structure. It’s the materialization of a desire, a wish, a project, a deliberate case of amnesia. It’s a riddle wrapped in a gigantic hoax.
They’re still in the stage play. They’re carrying out the role of average human. And from that position, they can’t dislodge a single brick or see what’s on the other side.
They have to resign from the cast of the play. They have to quit.
Otherwise, they remain embedded in the contradiction: “I’m an average Joe and I want to get my imagination back. I lost it somewhere and I want it back.” You know, like a lost wallet.
They’re still faking.
They want to maintain the protective disguise of “average human” while gaining superhuman powers, so to speak. Not even Clark Kent was able to do that forever. Eventually, his cover was blown.
As a person said to me once, “Gaining my imagination again wasn’t through remembering I once had it. I had to decide I had it now. I had to see myself as the person who would have it now.”
He had to resign his role as ORDINARY HUMAN in the stage play.
You know, there are a whole lot of people who believe ordinary humans are ordinary because it’s in their genes; some people are dealt good genes and some aren’t. This is completely false. It’s not a question of genes.
Genes are part of a story that’s told to keep everyone in the dark.
The real and true story is about imagination. When you think about it, the ability to cast one’s self in the role of “ordinary human” is a fantastic act of imagination. It’s strange, because, essentially, a human being is using his imagination TO DENY HE HAS ANY IMAGINATION. He’s creating the role. He’s imagining that role and fitting himself into it.
Why in the world would he do that?
Well, there are lots of answers to that question, but the real proof comes when a person you would never think had any imagination whatsoever emerges from the swamp and becomes intensely creative. I’ve seen that many times, and it’s extraordinary.
He was playing the role of Ordinary Person in the stage play…and then he was gone from that play and that role…and he was quite, quite different.
And from that point on, his life was never the same.
What people call reality is the combination of the physical and social world and their own invented role in that world. And people appear to accept that situation. They may not like it, but by and large they accept it. But then, if they toss away their invented role and wake up to the fact that they have powerful imaginations…the world itself takes on a different quality for them. Reality changes. It isn’t an immovable object anymore.
I’ll add this note: I’ve been painting for 50 years now. I’ve had some interesting experiences with people who look at my work. The work isn’t realistic at all. My paintings are what people like to call abstract. I’m not sure what that means, except the paintings don’t look like what you see on the street or in your living room.
Once, a man gazed at some paintings of mine in my studio and said, “I have no idea what this is. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
He was an intelligent fellow, but he was completely put off by the pictures. For some reason, I suddenly felt I could get him to understand.
So I said, “I’m going to try a little experiment with you, okay? Will you play along for a minute?”
He smiled and shrugged, and said, “Sure.”
So I said, “Imagine you do understand the paintings.”
It was a moment, and everything happened to be poised in the right way.
He turned away from me and looked at the paintings again.
He started perspiring. Within a few seconds, his face was covered in sweat. I could feel the heat, as if a missile were passing through the room.
His eyes glistened. He grinned and started laughing.
He turned back to me.
“How did you know?” he said.
I just shook my head.
Essentially, he was asking me how I knew he could offload his act as ordinary person and plug into his imagination all of a sudden.
This moment had nothing to do with my work. It had everything to do with him dropping his hold on the fictional role in which his comprehension was narrowly set in stone.
He had just imagined his way out of that role. He imagined he could understand something entirely foreign to him…and so he could.
This man was a chemist. For 40-some-odd years he had pretended he could only navigate within a range of potential information…and all of a sudden he pretended he could step outside that range. And it worked like a charm.
A bubble of enclosed reality burst.
That day, I gained another insight into the stage play. It isn’t just that people enter the play by inventing roles in which they have no imagination. No, the PLAY ITSELF has this central theme. The play is all about life without imagination. The whole drama moves forward on that basis.
When that cover story is blown, and all the secret agents emerge out of their cocoons, well, then we will really have something. We will
have, among other things, an endless proliferation of realities, and freedom will then have true meaning.
JON RAPPOPORT
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