MAGIC CREATES REALITY
JUNE 16, 2011. The religious devotees of science pretend they understand the processes that underlie reality. But when it comes to fathoming the fact that existence exists, they abandon the battlefield.
Approaching existence itself is one of the great lessons, because you come to understand that it is the tree falling in the forest, and without consciousness (which is non-material), existence becomes a fading nothing.
Existence is a production of magic.
Magic belongs to the individual.
Magic is imagination with power, great power.
And here is a bugaboo of modern society: INDIVIDUAL POWER.
Those little armies of termites who believe it is their mission in life to define what is correct and acceptable and moral and permissible and inescapable—they nibble and nibble and labor on behalf of the collective, the group.
Whereas, magic not only makes reality, it turns it on its head when it becomes nothing more than a consensual puppet show.
Very early in the 20th century, an art revolution called surrealism reared its head. It was born out of sheer boredom. But it is still in its nascent stages, because people are very, very stubborn about giving up their massive addiction to ordinary reality, serial time, and and juvenile rote versions of symmetry, harmony, and perfection.
In a primal sense, ordinary reality is a trance. It is especially a trance, because people use it to explain why they themselves don’t create/imagine radically different alternatives.
Surrealism explodes the consensus. It juxtaposes things that wouldn’t otherwise go together in a million years, and its messages aren’t literal. Surrealism doesn’t offer solutions to problems.
If approached head-on, surrealism provides a tremendous stimulus to create and imagine. It liberates imagination.
My work in the area of magic has taken three roads. One, describing what magic really is. Two, stimulating people to use their own imaginations. And three, in my audio seminars, providing exercises that lead you further and further into the living of real magic.
There are people in this world who want to partake of these three aspects.
There are also people who want to feel inspired, but don’t want to budge from their unadventurous lives. They want a little electricity on their marshmallow islands. A little kick. A little reminder about what could happen—the sort of thing you might get from a movie. For a few minutes.
After interviewing Clay Jenkinson last week on my radio show (and it was a very interesting conversation as he performed the role of Thomas Jefferson), I confirmed my conclusion that ALL politics, in the long run, ends up being about the group. That’s the bottom line. Whereas, I’m interested in the INDIVIDUAL, who is a source of, yes, life, existence, perception…and above all, imagination and creating and magic.
My work is not about routine or system. It’s not about ruminating on what might be. It’s not about the invention of fairy tales to explain why power should be limited.
It’s not about religious myths or the past.
There is an extraordinary amount of non-sense afloat on this planet, and there are very large numbers of people who spend their time promoting it. They promote it as good, necessary, and correct. If you want to understanding brainwashing and mind control, this is the place to start—with popular pictures of reality.
But knowing these are false pictures is merely the first step, and the celebration and the congratulations should be brief, quite brief. Because the next step is deciding what you want to create, and creating it.
ACTION.
Taken with POWER.
No hand wringing, no whining, no complaining, no excusing.
Whining is now a major industry, rivaling media and government and mega-corporate structures in size and scope. It’s meant to be huge, because a titanic amount of propaganda goes into encouraging it.
Magic, on the other hand, is the individual cut loose from all this.
Magic is IMAGINATION IN ACTION.
In that sense, a horse galloping across a tomato is more important than a stone building on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street.
A magician wants magic, and then he wants more magic. He doesn’t only want to make a better future. “A better future” all too often is translated down into cliches that have no bark or bite left in them. They’re dried stuffed products of taxidermy. They require no courage, no daring.
Is that all we were born for?
I think we were born for making art, however you want to define that.
Years ago, I spoke with a actor who had made a career out of doing one-woman shows. At the time, she was part of an ensemble cast, performing a play in a small repertory theater. I asked her about the shift, and how she felt about it. She told me it was wonderful to work with other actors, but she always kept in mind the fact that the play had been written by one person. Everything sprang from the imagination of that playwright. It inspired her to know it.
“One imagination above and beyond reality,” she said. “A new reality. Somebody made another world.”
She went on to say, “Every night, we [actors] experience telepathy with each other on stage. It’s extraordinary, but we accept it, because it happens so often. It’s magic. I wonder why it happens so infrequently in ordinary life. Maybe it’s because we lose the sense of imagination there. We think we’re ‘just living.’ But we’re not.”
She said she would never retire. For her, that would mean parking her imagination, and she didn’t see how she would ever want to do that.
“Being alive and creating go together,” she told me. “I can’t separate one from the other. And why would I want to?”
As we talked, the space around us brightened. Life itself became more.
JON RAPPOPORT