HIDDEN REALITIES
AND HUMAN POTENTIAL
SEPTEMBER 5, 2011. If you want to talk about Ultimates…
All metaphysics is a lie.
All theories of universe are lies.
All cosmologies are lies.
They are all A SUMMING UP of what exists at the highest and deepest levels. But there is no such thing as “the highest level,” because invention, creation, imagination, improvisation bring into existence what never existed before.
I continue to drive this point home, because it is our certainty about what exists that walls us off from our own creative potential.
What we can create is open, not yet formed, not fixed, not settled.
And that is where titanic energies are possible and that is where magic truly occurs.
Some people will do everything in their power not to understand this, because they have invested all their chips in being sure about what exists at the highest level.
I have no quarrel with this. I merely point out that reality, at any level, is astonishingly expandable and astonishingly create-able. It isn’t fixed, no matter how interesting or ultimate the fix might be.
Face it, most metaphysics ends up including the individual as PART OF SOMETHING LARGER. This approach is obsessive with humans. They love to consign themselves to a role in the play where the prime elements are towering above the individual.
This is how they diminish their own potential and power and imagination. It’s a fascinating piece of theater.
I once had a brilliant professor client who had written a tome about what he called Force X. He had composed a metaphysical tract that laid out a complex series of frequencies and entities, organically evolving, feeding into a universal force that radiated consciousness, arcane knowledge, and spawned “the energy of life,” pouring down into the physical universe.
He came to me because he felt he had reached the end of the line with his research. He was, in a way, stymied. He had achieved his goal. He wanted something else, but he didn’t quite know what it was.
He was very sure of himself. He could fence, intellectually, with the best of them. He rejected every approach that didn’t merge with his own explorations. He, in fact, made me promise I would never reveal the fact he had come to me, because that would indicate some deficit on his part. And he “knew” he had discovered the secret of life.
So, after some fruitless conversation, I convinced him to play the role of his Force X in a dialogue with me. I would play “a skeptical interviewer.” His job was to speak FROM the cosmic mind of Force X.
It took us three hours, and then the egg cracked. He finally got in touch with the immense power he had assigned to Force X. He felt it. It was no longer independent of him. He was embodying it—and then energy fireworks exploded all over the place.
The migraines he had been experiencing for years turned on and off like a light bulb. The pain went down into his belly and legs, and he reported it flowed out of his body like a long river. The chronic tightness in his shoulders and neck blew apart.
He began laughing—and he confessed he hadn’t laughed like that in a very long time. Color rushed into his cheeks.
And then we switched. I was now Force X and he was the skeptical interviewer. In this part of the dialogue, he challenged every principle he had built up in his own work. He attacked mercilessly. The more he drove home his points, the more serene I became.
Finally, he said, “Ultimate reality just took a hit.”
He was done.
He immediately wanted a good meal. We went out to a restaurant and ate. He was ravenous. He felt as if he’d been starving. He said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to write poetry.”
That night, he went home and wrote for ten hours. He told me it was the most cleansing experience of his life. He was launched in a new direction.
“You’re not going to tell me what to write, are you?” he said on the phone the next day.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s your world.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “I just had to make sure you weren’t going to come in with a kicker at the end of all of this and try to make me go somewhere…”
“I’ve got no agenda,” I said. “Just create. That’s my only advice. And you don’t need it because you’re already doing it.”
The whole experience was a perfect example of what happens when reality becomes consciously theatrical. Dialogue. Roles. Switches.
WHAT EXISTS is the obsession.
CREATING is the life without end.
What I learned from that client is: metaphysics and cosmology are theatrical, when you break through their webs of explanation. At the end of the road of WHAT EXISTS is theater, if you can frame it in terms of spontaneous dialogue.
As I’ve written before—and it should be clearer now—religion is a poem that froze in mid-stride, after which it was used as cosmology to recruit adherents. But it was really a poem.
And if it had continued, the poet would eventually have gone into all sorts of different spaces, none of which implied the settling of the question about “ultimate existence.”
If you want ultimate existence, look to the poet himself. He’s the one who is creating.
I have worked with many writers, and the common denominator of what is called “writer’s block” is some idea, conscious or subconscious, that sums up “the way it is.” With such an idea in tow, the writer stalls. He begins to believe he’s gone as far as he can, because he already knows what is at the end of the road. This is patently false, and the proof is in the fact that the writer moves on. He keeps writing. He keeps imagining and creating.
Focusing on the block isn’t the answer. It’s just a convenient way of postponing the act of creating. It’s a “complaint,” and complaints never end, until the writer simply takes off in a new direction and keeps on inventing.
One such writer and I engaged in a dialogue between “writer” and “publisher.” The character of the publisher was highly critical and snobbish and of an elite nature. We each took both roles in the piece of theater, and finally the wall split in a torrent of energy and the writer found a cache of buried power.
In this case, there was a lot of anger mixed in with the power.
Some people believe anger is a “negative.” Creatively speaking, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s just another face of energy and it plays its part. Fear of anger is a cultural artifact, nothing more. It’s part of the vague “new age” and pop psychology nonsense.
In the magic theater of reality, a creator reaches out in many directions and improvises. He becomes a riverboat gambler, shoving in all his chips on his work—and he eventually discovers he has an unlimited supply of chips.
Social reality is limited theater, a series of small stage plays. But that’s only the beginning of the story, because a person can crack through that format and find open waters.
LIFE IS AN IMPOSSIBLE DIALOGUE WAITING TO HAPPEN.
In the magic theater, it happens. A person plays a role and speaks as something that, under ordinary circumstances, we are quite sure cannot speak at all.
A table.
A painting.
A sky.
A weapon.
A minotaur.
God.
A dead relative.
A glass of ice.
A cave.
A wall.
A city.
A star system.
An ant.
A microorganism.
If questioned, a person could make a list of a million things that can’t speak. This is, in a real sense, how he defines (sets boundaries on) reality.
And then, in the magic theater, he speaks AS several of these things. Imagination and improvisation take over.
And then, everything changes.
Here’s another example. A person shows up and says he feels a vaguely ominous cloud of anxiety that moves with him through life. Okay. That’s his role: “cloud of anxiety.” That’s who he speaks AS. That’s his part in the magic-theater dialogue. And who am I? A radiant being of infinite magnitude who has achieved cosmic consciousness. That’s my part. And we talk from those characters to each other. And then after a time, we switch roles.
And something happens. Something happens in the magic theater. He breaks through and sees and feels a wider reality. He can’t put a name to it because it has no name. But he gets out of the space which formerly defined reality for him. He moves out of all the thinking he was doing that was relevant to that old space.
He now has new thoughts and new feelings and new energies. How did it happen? Through theater. Through dialogue.
Or a person shows up who says his feelings are boxed in. His role in the magic theater? That box. That’s who is he going to play. Not the repressed feelings, but the repression itself. The box. He will speak as the box. And who am I? The mighty ever-flowing Orinoco River. I will play and speak as the River. And after a time, we’ll switch.
That which doesn’t speak (because we assume it can’t) now speaks. Imagination makes it so, in the magic theater.
A person fervently believes in the ultimate merging of all consciousness into one grand cosmic Allness? Great. That’s his role. My role is the last holdout in the universe, the last man standing who is the rebel, who will not merge. And then we switch. You see, the metaphysics implicit in this is just the stage set, the premise. It’s the fulcrum upon which the dialogue starts. It’s nothing more. This isn’t about what ultimately exists. In the dialogue, we create. We invent. We improvise. We take part in theater.
What ultimately exists is CREATING. And that is a process, that is action, that is dynamic, that is endless. It’s not a structure. Structure looks like it is Answer, but it isn’t. Structure looks like it is the shape of existence, but it isn’t. It is THE SILENCE THAT NEEDS TO SPEAK.
And if our view of reality denies that possibility, then we are stuck with structure. We are stuck with description. We are stuck with boundaries that hem us in.
The key that unlocks the door, finally, is giving voice to what we had assumed could not speak.
And then we discover that reality per se is a lie. It is a prop in a play. It is a starting point from which the silence will be broken.
We animate the silence.
We enter the magic theater, where all things are possible, because we’re inventing it that way. And lo and behold, when we DO invent it that way, we find magic. Energy flows. Power arrives. The impossible is possible.
This is how and why reality is an illusion. This is how imagination creates reality.
That which is dead and neutral and motionless and abstract, it turns out, is that way because we have made it so. That is how we carved out the shape of existence—and then we said, “Well, this is just the way it is. And something somewhere else created it like this.”
But in the magic theater, we reverse all that. And we then experience the extent of our power.
I spoke with a psychologist about some of this material a few years ago. He said, “Are you claiming that a pink and purple monster walking down Broadway is REAL? Is that what you’re saying?”
I told him he was missing the point. I told him that if he played the role of that pink and purple monster in a dialogue with me, and I played a cop with a pair of handcuffs who wanted to arrest the monster—and if we carried on a spontaneous conversation, in an improvised play, and then if we switched roles…something would happen. He, the psychologist, would experience something that would take him out into wider realities he had never felt before.
Well, he said—and I saw a glint in his eye—I don’t know about the monster, but if I were to do something like that, I’d want to play Freud. Who would you play?
I told him I would play God, the Old Testament God, full of sound and fury, a God who thought Freud’s theories were despicable.
He grinned. He like that idea. He liked the idea of going up against the Old Testament God.
Of course, I said, then we would switch. I would play Freud, and he would play a vengeful God.
He laughed. I could see he REALLY wanted to play God and unleash some energy and power and fury.
I could see he felt, at some level, that his own power was bottled up and he loved the idea of finally being able to embody it and project it.
You know, he said, when I was a boy my parents dragged me to synagogue every Friday night, and I hated it. I felt it was unfair. I was being told who to worship, who to bow down to. I was told he, God, had all the cards in the deck and I had none.
In other words, as a child, this shrink had found himself believing he had less power and something called God had much greater power. He had set up an energy-and-power formula, and he was on the short end of it.
And that is exactly where the magic theater achieves it reversal. Not merely by thinking about things, but by inhabiting roles and speaking from them. Then the encased energy breaks out of its cocoon and the “deficit-days” are over.
Reality is defined and bounded by asserting what is impossible.
But, in the magic theater, embodying and inhabiting and speaking AS AND FROM the impossible moves us out into the great ocean of our own being.
Jon Rappoport