THE REAL PARADIGM
MAY 11, 2011. The word paradigm has been thrown around like a football at a picnic. In loose-knit spiritual communities, it signals any new musing on subjects ranging from Earth’s pole shifts to bowel movements.
Scientists who want greater recognition in the public arena will call their latest speculation a paradigm shift.
Real paradigm shifts involve changes of perception.
Suppose we came upon a fundamental factor that always changes perception of reality.
A factor that has been masked, buried, and hidden away.
Imagination.
Imagination, employed intensely.
Roughly 1600 years ago, the Tibetans, doubling down on the teachings of a few itinerant immigrants from India, decided that UNIVERSE WAS A PRODUCT OF MIND.
This extreme fact could be experienced, if a student imaginatively constructed what, in essence, was a piece of another universe.
Suddenly, the whole game would change.
Paranormal abilities could walk in the door as a side effect of the focused use of imagination.
John Blofeld explores this Tibetan practice in his 1970 book, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. I recommend the book.. Also, Alexandra David-Neel’s accounts of her journeys through Tibet.
But for artists and inventors, for anyone in any human field of endeavor who presses the use of imagination, perception of the world changes in various ways.
In which case, the way the world alters is less important than the driving force that made it happen.
I offer the following testimonial that touches on this phenomenon.
In 1961-2, in New York, I found myself with a little cash in the bank and no job. I had embarked on a small adventure, prompted by a sketchy friend I ran into, in Washington Square Park, a place where many borderline cases dwell.
Mike told me he had just landed a gig as the superintendent of an apartment building nearby. Free rent in exchange for a little work around the place. He hadn’t moved in yet. But he was leaving the country in a few days.
“Something just came up in Paris,” he said.
I knew better than to ask what.
“So,” he said, “the landlord of the building lives out of state and he’s never met me. If you say you’re me, you could walk into a nice little studio and take over as the super.”
I needed a place. I’d been up in Massachusetts for a while, and now I was sleeping on a friend’s couch in mid-town Manhattan.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
It turned out the landlord lived in New Jersey. I decided to pay him a visit. He was an old codger who owned several buildings. In his house, we sat and chatted. I realized he was quite out of his mind. He kept referring to “a pack of soldiers,” as if they lived on his property. He was probably under the influence of a few powerful meds. Looking back on it now, I’d guess Thorazine.
I told him I wasn’t Mike. I explained the situation to him, but it didn’t make an impact. He nodded sagely, but kept on calling me Mike. Finally, I gave up trying.
And so I became Mike. Just like that.
Three days later, I was ensconced in the studio, and I was sweeping hallways and collecting rents. I was the super.
A new idea occurred to me. Why didn’t I embroider my new ID with a few twists and stitches? (I wouldn’t use them on my friends, of course—just strangers.)
I spent an afternoon in Central Park mulling over the possibilities.
Gynecologist? Disbarred lawyer? Minor-league baseball player?
This is an experiment, I told myself. I’ll try it out for a month and see what happens.
I was painting small canvases in the studio. Perhaps something similar. I could say I was a sculptor. Not just a stone cutter. I needed a modern angle.
I could say I was looking for abandoned buildings. Spaces in those buildings where I could pound down walls and make new changes. Public art. That was supposed to be avant-garde. Of course, I’d never actually locate such a building. I would just be looking.
So for the next month, I wandered around Manhattan making a point of meeting new people, and I tried out my new role.
As I suspected, people ate it up. They were excited.
Would I need city permits? Was I going to become a squatter? Did I plan to stage events in the building?
A recently fired schoolteacher I ran into in a bar near Carnegie Hall introduced me to a friend who was a realtor. He loved my plan. He started phoning me every day with updates. We went and looked at buildings in the Bronx.
He, in turn, passed me along to a photographer who started shooting pictures of my “search” for abandoned spaces. The photographer was dating an ER doctor who had relatives in Connecticut. She drove us up to see her aunt and uncle, who lived on a farm that had a large empty barn. Why not shift from the bombed-out Bronx to pastoral settings?
In fact, the doctor said, why bother actually “sculpting” changes in buildings at all? I should, instead, figure out another reason for exploring abandoned structures—a whole series of photos could be taken, and there could be a gallery show. Sure, I said. Why not? I was flexible.
In fact, I was so flexible events began to feel like they were occurring on a stage where all the actors were improvising. What was going on, on stage, was realer than real. That was my sense of it.
Out in the countryside, the doc said, we could shoot pictures of animals who lived in barns and empty ruined houses. Mice, rats, maybe raccoons.
After a few driving expeditions into the hinterlands, she and the photographer lost interest. We weren’t finding lots of animals.
I didn’t care. I was having the time of my life. I noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. My eyesight seemed to have improved. As we trampled through woods and fields, I was seeing colors more sharply. Shades and distinctions of gray, green, brown.
Every morning, I was waking up with great energy and enthusiasm. As the super, I could fix things around the building. I had never been able to fix anything. But now a broken chair, a sagging couch, a fractured light fixture. Piece of cake.
One afternoon, on the spur of the moment, I walked into an art class in lower Manhattan and told the teacher I had studied with ____, a famous New York painter (I had never met). The teacher immediately got me a chair, easel, pad, and charcoal, and for the next hour, I drew the model who was posing on a platform. I sold one of those drawings to a woman who worked for an ad agency. She introduced me to a friend who was a collector, and I brought him down to my studio and sold him three small paintings.
Through this collector, I met several UN diplomats, and when a man named Richard Jenkins walked into a bookstore where I was temporarily stocking the shelves for a friend, I was able to drop those names—he knew people from the UN. They were his clients. Richard was an extraordinary healer. I wrote about him in my book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies. He helped change my life.
Richard had a dog and a cat. I made friends with the dog, Bill. I began taking him for walks in Central Park. I’d let him off his leash, wave my hand, and he would run off and play. Then, I would silently “reach out” to him 30 yards away, and he would suddenly turn around and race back to me. This was quite interesting.
One afternoon, the dog and I were outside a deli. We were just standing there, looking at the street. I started focusing on three brownstone apartments on Columbus Avenue. I began memorizing their architecture. I wanted to draw them later. After a minute, the buildings began communicating. It was as if they were announcing themselves. They were saying, “Here we are. This is what we look like. We’re always telling the people what we look like, but they don’t hear us…”
At that moment, the dog turned toward the buildings and barked. I decided “to return to normal.” To resume “average perception.” The buildings would just be buildings. The dog stopped barking. I pitched back up to “seeing the buildings as alive.” The dog started barking again. I tried this several times. Back and forth. Same result. The dog barked. He stopped barking.
I said, “Bill, you know you’re quite something.”
A man who was buying a newspaper at a stand turned and looked at me.
“Did you call me?” he said.
I shook my head and pointed to the dog.
He walked over.
“I’m Bill,” he said.
We talked for a few minutes.
I said I was a sculptor. I told him about my search for empty structures.
“Interesting,” he said. “Can you write?”
“Sure,” I said.
He walked with me. I took the dog back to Richard’s apartment and dropped him off. Outside, Bill told me he was putting together a report on the possibility of the reunification of Germany.
I asked him who he worked for.
“People at a bank.” He was intentionally vague.
That day, we made a deal. I would meet him at the 42nd Street Library the next afternoon, and he would show me his notes. I would sit there for a few hours and write up several pages of the report for him. A try-out.
That’s exactly what I did, and it turned into my first paying job as a writer.
One night near the end of my month-long experiment, Bill knocked on my door. I let him in. His face was pale and he was sweating.
He sat down and told me his doctor had just diagnosed him with “a very serious disease.” For some reason, he wouldn’t say what it was. He told me he was going to quit his job and leave the city.
I liked Bill. He had a devil-may-care attitude I enjoyed. I’d had several dinners with him and his wife at their apartment. They had a good marriage.
Suddenly, I felt very, very lucid.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I know there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine.”
He looked at me. Something happened. It was as if we were exchanging words on another level we both understood very well. As if we were dipping into the future. Bill saw it, he glimpsed it, and so he knew he’d be okay. He and I both saw him in the future. We knew.
He laughed.
He stood up and looked around the room.
There were tears in his eyes.
He nodded at me and walked out.
Over the next few days, I called him several times, but there was no answer.
Two weeks later, I found out he’d moved. No forwarding address.
Six months went by. I got a letter from him. He was in Arizona.
He wrote that he’d quit his job and moved his family to a place outside Phoenix.
“I never wanted that job in New York,” he wrote. “Now I’ve really got something. After the night we talked at your place, I floated down 5th Avenue like I was on a cloud. I don’t know what the hell it was, but I was free. I just had a checkup from a specialist here, and it’s all clear. But I already knew that. The world isn’t really what we think it is, is it?”
From a mutual friend, I found out the name of Bill’s doctor in New York. My new pal, the ER doc I’d gone barn hunting with in the country, visited the neurologist on the upper East Side. After a bit of wrangling, he told her he had indeed diagnosed Bill with a “serious neurological condition.”
After that month-long experiment, in which I’d imagined and invented my life from scratch, during which time, therefore, I saw reality in a new way (and still do), I decided to leave New York, too, and come to California.
Imagination/creation/invention. The hallmarks and the keys.
Sixteen years after Bill left New York, I ran into him in LA. He was healthy as a horse.
We had supper at a little restaurant in Santa Monica.
“You know,” he said, “that revelation I had in New York all those years ago, I’ve never forgotten it. It’s impossible to describe, but I’ve become more myself.”
The waiter came over with drinks. He said, “You two must really like the food.”
Bill looked at him.
“Why do you say that?”
The waiter said, “Last night, I was just going home and I saw you guys eating dinner here.”
I don’t know what the waiter saw, but as Bill wrote to me all those years ago, the world isn’t what we think it is, is it?
JON RAPPOPORT
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