COACHING THE COACHES,
PART 23
by Jon Rappoport
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport
The decay of society can be traced to missed opportunities of imagination:
great projects and enterprises, born in imagination, but left on the drawing board.
Instead energies have been poured into programs that seek to cure a passivity which can, in the long run, only be alleviated by internally driven inspiration.
However you wish to diagram the course of civilization, the line eventually returns to this creative force: it is there or it is isn’t.
Technology, for example, points toward the stars. Whether we go depends on how we feel about the prospect of endless exploration. And how we feel comes back to the condition of our own imaginations.
Most people don’t care to take this long view. They prefer to search out comfortable niches for themselves and shield their minds from larger possibilities.
Reinvigoration falls to leaders. What are their visions, priorities, and ambitions? If they are reduced to promoting empty goals merely to stabilize their own positions, then the decay will continue.
Competing groups will attempt to siphon money and support from an establishment they profess to hate. All sorts of sour ironies will develop. While waving flags of various causes and claiming the highest ideals, people will work, undercover, for their own primacy.
At bottom, the principle is this: once people see how imagination in action can lead us to a new platform of existence in this world, they will respond. They will recognize the thrill of the New.
The basis for everything I’m mentioning here is the individual, and what the individual is willing to conceive.
Whether in the home, in school, in the workplace, in the media, if individuals are shown that the human race is drastically limited in what it can reasonably hope for, then there is no launching pad for a future of dreams.
Again, the very notion of limitation means: no imagination.
Ultimately, restricted limits aren’t based on boundaries of realistic expectations; they are based on what is failing to happen in the minds of individuals.
That is where it starts, or ends.
How do you choose?
What is your life all about?
Many years ago, I had several conversations with a renowned psychologist. He explained to me that the function of therapy was to restore a person’s ability to live within the framework of established society.
To fit in? I asked him.
Yes, he said. Any serious deviation from that norm was a clear sign of neurosis. To repair it was the goal.
He assured me that mental health was equivalent to “finding a place in the established order of things,” and it was this discovery that gave us a key to the future.
So, I said, everyone should be the same?
The same in his own way, he said.
At the time, I was astounded at this enormous piece of sophistry.
As time passed, I saw that his agenda was proceeding in much wider terms. But I always came back to the individual, because I never believed that external deception was sufficient to render people into a passive state.
There was, and is, always the possibility of a breakout. The individual can take back his own life, and he can take back his imagination, which exceeds by light years the territory of “normalcy.”
When imagination is left out of the formula of psychology, all resolutions of problems circle the drain and become debilitating roles in a play that shrinks in each succeeding scene and act—until finally a person is reduced to taking mechanical actions in a mechanical landscape.
We have never had a real philosophy of imagination.
In many articles, books, and lectures, I have made it my job to supply one.
–This is the final article in the Coaching the Coaches series. For now.
Jon Rappoport
A former candidate for a US Congressional seat in California, Jon has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. He has written articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. The author of The Ownership of All Life, Jon has maintained a consulting practice for the past 15 years. He has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, and creativity to audiences around the world.