CREATING REALITY (updated)
MAY 23, 2011. Creating reality presupposes that the status quo isn’t permanent. This sounds obvious, but when you expand the meaning and territory of status quo and realize it covers all aspects of life and even the universe itself, you have something worth considering and chewing on.
You have magic.
You have whatever qualities a human being possesses that would allow him to alter the status quo.
When a person steps out into this journey, one of the first mistakes he can make is to assume that whatever reality he creates must resemble, in all respects, physical reality. It must mirror physical reality.
In painting, this would be saying the artist has to paint a bowl that looks like a bowl and behaves like a bowl, and he has to put apples in it that look like apples—his success DEPENDS on his ability to paint apples that look like they could be picked right off a tree.
It would be like saying a slave, newly released, has to imitate his former master down to the last detail of form, habit, style, thought, and action.
It would be saying the son has to emulate the father.
There used to be a word that was quite popular. You don’t hear it used in the same way anymore. The word is REBEL. Not protester, rioter. Rebel. At one time, the word carried a sense, in some quarters, that the person had intelligence. He had some inkling of what he was doing and why. He had a spirit of struggle and determination. He wasn’t just saying no to something, he had something better in mind to replace what he was rebelling against.
I bring this up, because, in order to create reality and cast aside some aspect of the status quo, a person needs to have the spirit of a rebel. He can’t be a slave in his mind. He can’t be a know-nothing. He can’t be a fool.
The spirit of the rebel permits a new perspective about reality—how reality seeps in and puts people into a state of sleep. The rebel doesn’t want to go to sleep.
But these days, there is a culture of spiritual change in which the person is essentially passive. He looks to the rainbow to come down out of the sky and embrace him, without effort—and he believes that the Great Change will just descend on him like a pleasant and forever dream.
That person doesn’t create new realities.
That person certainly doesn’t see that this space-time continuum is merely one work of art among many. That person doesn’t entertain such an idea.
To get a little background on the depth of creating reality, let’s revisit the old idea of the labyrinth, a prominent piece of myth in the ancient world. I want to expand the meaning of it. The labyrinth, the maze is really all about THE FASCINATION WITH DISCOVERING THE MYSTERIES OF REALITY. That’s why it’s a labyrinth. It draws you in. You become increasingly attracted to solving mysteries and ironing out details.
Does this idea remind you of anything?
This is physics. Modern physics, and allied sciences. You go deeper and deeper into the universe and you try to figure out answers to all the questions.
You end up in the center of the universe and you realize you have no idea what’s going on at the most profound level.
To illustrate, here is a statement that has been attributed to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine:
“In my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps…”
Perfect. Reality, as it presents itself, becomes such an intriguing labyrinth that you journey further and further into the heart of it, seeking its answers, its ultimate answers, and finally you discover that the mysteries you were solving were not the mysteries you wanted to solve.
From this perspective, does it really matter whether, for example, the people who built the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids lined them up with astronomical events in the distant skies? Does it matter whether the Ark of Noah is buried somewhere in a mountain in Asia? Does it matter whether light is composed of particles or waves or both? The question is: what reality are you going to CREATE?
At one time, I seriously considered trying to raise funds for a creative center that would function, day to day, as a residence for students. Someday, I may pick up that project again. But meanwhile, this, this site and these emails have been my center.
The work continues.
In 2005, the Dalai Lama wrote, in The Universe is a Single Atom: “…if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterizes our individuality as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence. The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for all attachment, clinging and the development of numerous prejudices.”
I propose the original basis of Tibetan practice had quite a different view. First, the philosophy of emptiness was not really about “delusions of self.” In fact, self was rightly understood to be quite real and quite powerful, independent of anything going on in the world, in nature, in the universe. The emptiness, or void, was really a state of existence in which, BY CHOICE, an individual, a quite conscious individual who knew he was creating reality, decided to stop creating—as he most certainly could, and can.
One could say this is an experiment. The individual wants to experience what happens when he stops creating reality. And he finds out.
He is in a “nothing.” This nothing is not about the impermanence of things…it IS the state in which an individual simply ceases to generate reality. Period.
Of course, he can then decide to create reality again—as it is, as it was, or as he wants it to be.
The universe is not one collective atom. It is a movie, ultimately projected by the individual.
Magic is: the individual creating reality.
All philosophies which assert “vast and universal interdependence of everything” have, at this point, been co-opted and supported, to one degree or another, by elites who use them to promote an agenda which simultaneously de-emphasizes the individual and inflates the prospect of political collectivism—a condition in which interdependence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and humans become ciphers and units in the blueprint of Central Planning.
Magic is as far beyond this as Tesla was from an amoeba.
JON RAPPOPORT
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