A FEW NOTES ON LIBERATION
MAY 26, 2011. Liberation means freedom from closed systems.
It doesn’t mean entering into another closed system.
Freedom is the basic platform, from which new realities THAT HAVE NOT YET BEEN CONCEIVED can be imagined and created.
It’s a wide-open ballgame.
A person can never lose his imagination.
No matter what.
This is the wild card in every deck:
The potential for imagination.
There is no ultimate pattern of existence, no ultimate closed system.
So imagination isn’t reaching toward part or all of some Final Pattern. This is a major point.
Imagination is inventing something that’s never existed before.
There are infinities of things that have never existed before— IMAGINATION CREATES THEM…AND THEN AND ONLY THEN DO THEY EXIST.
We have no way of knowing what imagination will create.
This is non-system.
Imagination is individual. It isn’t collective.
When someone tries to explain “the ultimate reality,” he is inevitably looking at a product of imagination.
PAINTING:
Anyone can be a painter.
If someone denies that, he is clearly insane and shouldn’t be listened to. Period.
You begin. That’s the big secret. You begin.
You put paint on the paper or canvas.
I made this discovery in 1962, and it’s yours for only $49.95 and 2 boxtops from Quaker Oats and a cow.
You BEGIN.
Doesn’t matter what you do on the paper. You put on paint. See? You’ll have nothing to use but imagination.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time. There you are, brush in hand, paint on the brush, above the white space. Boom. You begin.
All the possible questions you could ask yourself to stall, including what seem to be the really sensible questions, are futile. Irrelevant. Born and bred of a culture that’s loony…so why bother.
Just paint. Go where you will with it. If you don’t like where you’re going, change directions. Change directions 50 times if you want to, just keep going.
And then on to the next sheet of paper. Keep painting.
There is no pattern in heaven or earth that’s relevant. You’re not only making up and inventing your painting, you’re making up (and changing) your aesthetic as you go along.
I predict that if you paint every day for 180 days, your life will change.
It’s all invention, creation, improvisation, imagination.
You’ll feel a liberation that’s very succulent and luscious and expansive.
Later on, you can try to find someone who shares your sense of liberation and can look at your work without preconceptions. But for now, JUST PAINT.
In a sense, when viewed from the angle I’m pursuing here, it doesn’t matter what system you teach people, if you’re going to teach. All systems are closed; they all share that property.
“Class, I have 12 systems here in a hat. I’m going to pick one out and teach it to you. I hope, as we go along, you’ll learn what a system is really like.”
The life cycle of a star; capillary blood flow; decimals; the function of the kidneys; tire repair.
It doesn’t matter.
(This why my audio seminars don’t present systems.)
Many people find it hard to believe anything exists outside of systems. Actually, most everything is outside systems.
If we, on Earth, ever enter a genuinely new era, this is one of the most important facts we’ll discover.
EXPERIMENT X:
Is this an experiment or a metaphor? So far—the latter. But it could become an experiment.
A teacher stands in front of a class of 50,000 students. He’s teaching them some sort of linguistics. Every student has a page of text in front of him.
The teacher says, “Okay, turn that page upside down.”
Then: “Pretend this is a language. Go home and write an essay on THAT.”
Of the students who turn in papers, some will suggest “trying to translate it.”
About 50 will try to translate it—whatever that means.
Of those 50, 49 will attempt to establish a system whereby it could be translated.
The remaining one student out of 50,000—if the teacher is lucky—will wing it. HE’LL MAKE UP A TRANSLATION.
He’ll invent something interesting.
This is a very informative result, although only one out of perhaps 100,000 people would think so. The other 99,999 people would ignore that one student who just imagined and invented a translation.
Actually, this is what education IS like.
Systems are taught. Exiting out of that environment, a tiny fraction of students emerge with the idea that the key is really imagination. And they are rarely noticed.
JON RAPPOPORT
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