SPACE-TIME AND IMAGINATION
SEPTEMBER 18, 2011. In space, time passes.
That means, if you put a clock in a room, it will tick. If it’s digital, the read-outs will change.
Time is associated with change. In that room, a person walks around. A moth circles. Another person enters, then leaves. The shadows move. If you wait long enough, a light bulb will burn out.
In space, some objects remain stationary. Books on a shelf. Notebooks on a desk. Boxes piled in a corner. Shoes on the rug. But again, if you wait long enough, those objects change. They decay.
So convincing is this presentation, we assume all space is this way. And we assume physical space is all the space there is.
Whereas, if we begin talking about the space of imagination, most people would draw a blank. Imagination exists? Yes, maybe, I guess so. But it has a space or spaces? That’s going too far. That’s tantamount to setting up a “competitor” to the space we all recognize.
When I began painting in 1962, one of the first things I became aware of was I was finding and creating space on the canvas. And of course, much earlier, I had vivid sleeping dreams. What was that “thing” I was walking around in, in those dreams?
I once asked a physicist about this. He said: when you dream, you think you’re in space, but that’s just an illusion. As proof, he pointed out that he wouldn’t be able to measure what was happening in the space of my dreams, and for him, that was that.
When you’re inspired by a subjective vision of what you want to do to make your own future, and you stand at a window in the middle of the night and look out over a city, your experience of space is much different from what you experience while walking to your car in the morning to drive to work.
And even if you call “the visionary space” subjective, it can be a crucial factor in what you actually do to bring your future about. To make it happen in the world.
The energy exercises I offer in Mind Control, Mind Freedom, and The Transformations (audio seminars) are also about space. To project energy, you create space naturally. Otherwise, nothing happens.
Go back and watch Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil. Those films are all about created space and the arrangement/motion of people in space, and the angles from which they are shot. All film is about this, but Welles does it better.
From the viewpoint of imagination, space is being created all the time.
During the years, 1935-1960, in New York, the so-called action painters (De Kooning, Pollock, Gorky, Kline, etc.) discovered space as a primary workable “substance” for their explorations. They were quite forceful about it. It had nothing to do with Renaissance perspective or the illusion of intentionally drawn objects that mimicked how we see the world. In action painting, subjective space was pushed to the hilt, and it disturbed many people because it challenged the comfortable sensation that space was an entirely settled issue.
When you create space, you create power. Yours.
You’re no longer simply living in the automatically delivered space of the universe.
The transition from heaven-based religion to the worship of the universe itself occurred because, after the deconstruction of religious myths, the simplest course of action was to claim that the space we could see all around us, or through telescopes, was holy. It was easy. And holy space would give us all we needed, without any action on our part. Passivity.
The philosopher-poet, Giordano Bruno, was burned to death by the Roman Church because he suggested that every soul could extend his own space infinitely and yet remain in accord with other souls. This view challenged the Church at such a fundamental level it could not go unanswered.
Bruno, in a real sense, was talking about imagination—and once that door is opened in the discussion, institutions fall.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that every human has the right to pursue life, liberty, happiness, and the creation of space, time, and energy…”
Money is the commonly held method for creating space. If you have money, you can make space. Witness, for example, the man who works for 30 years to accumulate enough to retire and build his dream house or buy his boat, so he can sail the seas. Space.
If there is a revolution in store for us, it will come by reversing that formula, with enough power, so we can create the space first and then flesh it out in the world.
This is far more than an idle fantasy. But to make it so, people are needed who are ready and willing to go the distance.
I’m developing, teaching, and practicing techniques that can, in a considerable fashion, launch such an enterprise.
This is not a sedate undertaking. It isn’t a stroll in the park.
The space-time-energy of the universe could be looked at as a business deal. A guy sells you a coat. He says, “Put this on and you’ll have all the space, energy, and time you need. Why go to all the fuss of creating these things yourself? It’s like a toaster. Do you want to stand next to the stove and cook the bread on a stick over a flame, or just pop the bread in the machine, push the button, and voila…” Some day, with microwaves on the march, we may look back at stoves as religious superstitions.
I’m drawing attention to the fact that some sort of bargain has been struck, and no matter how you may want to mythologize it, the outcome has been framed—people believe they have always had the “toaster,” there was never a moment when they didn’t have the toaster, and therefore, the notion of creating space, time, and energy on their own seems vague, spurious, and out of reach.
Not so.
Artists prove this every day, which is one reason of many I stand up for them. They aren’t satisfied with accepting the space-time continuum as the end-all and be-all. They chafe at that prospect.
Underneath it all, this is why people regard artists with suspicion.
“Why are you creating your own space and time? We have plenty of it already. Can’t you just accept that and get on with your lives?”
Coincidentally, this is the underlying message of secret societies: let us build reality for you.
It’s rather amusing to see people delve into the inner workings of these groups and yet continue to abide by “the rules of the continuum.”
What’s wrong with that picture? Just about everything.
Bypassing all the nonsense and drivel about motivation, I call it the ultimate laziness. People look around and quickly realize they’re surrounded by space, time, and energy, and they conclude there isn’t reason to create their own—and if pressed, they’ll tell as many stories as necessary to explain away their inertia. But somehow, the stories don’t do the trick. Vis-a-vis imagination, you’re either active or passive.
For many years now, I’ve been pointing out the advantages of pushing the “active” button.
The whole red-pill blue-pill story in The Matrix is, in a way, a deflection from the main event, which is: to imagine or not to imagine, to invent or not to invent, to create or not to create.
If we had an actual entity called psychology, instead of a watered-down cultural artifact, it would hinge on that choice, and everything in its purview would bloom from that seed.
Suppose, hypothetically, you found a machine that manufactures all the public space, time, and energy there is in physical reality. Suppose you somehow knew that if you turned off the machine, the continuum would shut down and utterly disappear. Suppose, finally, you also knew that when you turned the machine back on, it would smoothly pick up from where it left off, and no one would recall the “the blank period.” Would you turn off the machine and then turn it back on?
Jon Rappoport
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