COAGULATING PERSONALITY, THE MAGIC THEATER, AND IMMORTAL LAUGHTER

by Jon Rappoport

December 14, 2011

A person who won’t play roles is left with the role he has. For various reasons, he’s so in love with it he doesn’t want to budge from it, even temporarily. For example, he fervently believes, in his present role, he knows everything worth knowing.

Or he’s playing a central role of victim, and he won’t vary from that because he envisions losing something important if he does.

Or he thinks reality is tough and nasty and he must have a role to match.

In any case, over time, his persona COAGULATES.

Like a clot.

It may be a beautiful wonderful clot, but it hardens. And there he is.

And when the Magic Theater comes through town, with

222356789456789023456432890 available roles to play, just for starters, he passes on it. He says NO.

Starving man at table. Feast. “Give me bread and water.”

Every person who’s ever had a drug experience or a spiritual insight or a big up of any kind comes back down—and he comes back down because he’s got his coagulated role waiting for him and he can’t be late.

But the thing is, if he’s played a few hundred roles for a few hundred hours, improvising them with other people who are doing the same (Magic Theater), when he comes back down he sees his central role with different eyes. It doesn’t look the same. He realizes he can go beyond it. He can branch out. He can kiss that hard coagulation goodbye.

One thing I learned at this past weekend’s first Magic Theater workshop—the people who show up want to play roles. The people who don’t, don’t. It’s an easy line.

It isn’t about knowing; it’s about doing. And the more you do in the Magic Theater, the more you end up knowing, but what you then know is made of stuff you never could have gotten to otherwise.

It’s instant knowing. Spontaneous. Direct.

I’ve spent enough of my life looking at the coagulation of other people. I’ve learned all I need to about that.

I’m riding out into new territory.

And like everybody else, I’ve experienced enough coagulation of my own, too. It doesn’t really matter what a person produces out of that coagulation of personality, because eventually he needs something else. It’s called freedom. Breathing new air.

Imagination. In the Magic Theater, it lights up all over the place.

Like a comedian with a million jokes, people have a million excuses for staying the same.

Or they can improvise their way to a million new surprises.

It’s an easy line.

Yeah, it’s called freedom.

The Magic Theater, as I’ve written before, is based on Psychodrama, but it’s really something new. It’s an endlessly flowering tree, a rope across a canyon, a rocket to the stars and beyond, a flip into different universes of one’s own making. It’s all created in the moment, in a dialogue between two or more people playing roles. Where it goes depends entirely on the imagination of the people involved.

I suppose you could have boring Magic Theater, if the people are dedicated to boredom. Hey, that might be fun for a half hour or so. Play the most boring creature in the cosmos. So boring the cosmos just folds up in his presence.

But really, Magic Theater is thrilling. It’s funny as hell. Once you pierce the usual strictures of subjects conversation is supposed to be about, it seems you do pretty much end up in comedy. It’s hard to avoid.

We’re all sitting on a joke, after all. We’re sitting on it day after day, and the expanse of that joke is enormous, and maybe it keeps getting bigger and bigger, the more weight we put on. Our sober attitudes are like struts and pillars and connectors and beams that hold the whole universe together in a stern pattern—and the secret is, when we start to play really interesting roles together, the whole tight structure falls apart.

Like Pablo in Hesse’s Steppenwolf (where the term Magic Theater came from), we laugh the whole System into oblivion, and if it still stands after that, it’s just the stage it was meant to be, where we do more and more theater, with more and more imagination.

Endless rich contrary imagination.

Does this ring some kind of bell with you?

Because after last weekend’s Magic Theater workshop, it makes perfect sense to me.

I’ll tell you this. The world is built to impose on us more and more and more deadened and leadened thought and feeling. We can try to solve that by fixing every wrong thing and detail on the planet, or we can come at it from the top and do so much Magic Theater that eventually, as an incidental side effect, the whole deadened and leadened business comes apart at the seams and we’re all holding royal flushes.

That’s the way I intend to go about it.

I’m starting to plan the next Magic Theater workshop. Let me know if you’re interested.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com