COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 15

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

In our society, there is a rite of passage into adulthood. It’s quite simple.

A young person decides on a course of action that will considerably diminish his imagination.

It doesn’t matter what particular career path is chosen. The basic feature is: it requires “much less imagination.”

Every day, thousands of youngsters undergo this rite.

Years later, they wonder what happened.

But they don’t really think it’s in their best interests to remember what happened; because if they did, they would reawaken the most fundamental core of their consciousness, and they would probably abandon the careers they’ve so carefully crafted.

No, it’s better to forget and keep forgetting.

But now they’re experiencing problems, and they feel they need help, and they come to you, the coach.

That’s the situation.

So are you going to try to tinker with and fix “what’s wrong?”

Is that your mission in life?

“Hi. I’m the tinkerer. I’m here to adjust the lights and check the on-board computer.”

If so, how is that going?

The dynamic of the situation is obvious. The elephant in the room is not being addressed. On some level, the client realizes it. When he’s fed up, he goes elsewhere.

But again, we come back to the paradox. He wants to recover his imagination. But he doesn’t want to. He’d dedicated to living without imagination. But he realizes that’s what’s missing from his life. It doesn’t matter that this push-pull is operating at a subconscious level. It’s operating.

What are you going to do?

I’ve faced this question many times. I’ve tried all sorts of approaches. In the end, I realized why I was really doing the work: to reawaken imagination. That’s why I was there. The choice, then, became clear.

Fortunately, I had vast experience in the area of changing my own life, and that experience had to do with writing and painting. I had seen what happened when I began living through and by imagination. The mists cleared and the questions dissolved. The doubts faded. The energy came back and the thrill expanded. The future opened up.

So the notion of working with another person to wake up his imagination wasn’t just a shot in the dark. It made complete sense. It was a radical step, but it made sense.

Take that as a clue. What are doing with your imagination? How important is it to you?

Some of the greatest developments of the past 200 years have been based on organization, systems, and technology. Put together, they’re a formidable force. However, in the process, something has been lost, misplaced. And people feel that loss. They may not be able to pinpoint its nature, but they sense it.

A person looks out at the world and says, “Look at all the technology. Look at all the organization and the systems. In my life, am I going to fit myself into that nexus, or am I going to go with my imagination?”

What a no-brainer. In conventional terms, the person picks the winner. He joins the team. He enlists in the system.

And then he induces a layer of amnesia about his own creative power.

He’s surrendered something vital.

He’s made a “this or that” configuration, and he chose.

Now, as the coach, it’s your job, should you decide to accept it, to undo that.

Your odds of success may seem long. It might appear you’re trying to swim up a waterfall. But you see, if you think that way, that’s YOUR rationalization. That’s the story you tell YOURSELF.

Actually, we’re living in a vast sea of imagination, and we’re surrounded by products and outcomes of imagination. And the idea of relinquishing imagination is, from that point of view, preposterous.

But you have to know that. You have to know it in your bones.

If you do, your work becomes a fascinating challenge.

We live in a world that abounds in paradoxes: “I want this but I don’t want this. Things I really want tend to slip away. Things I don’t really want come to me. I’m in the right system, but the system doesn’t give me what I really need. I’m good at planning, but what I plan for doesn’t work out. I try hard. Maybe I need to try less.”

This wall of static is transcended and neutralized, to an astonishing degree, by graduating into a realm where IMAGINATION and CREATING are the motive forces, the modes of transportation.

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 14

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

I’d be remiss if I didn’t write a few words about conventional high-end business consulting. I’m talking about consultants who can easily demand $1000 an hour for their work.

This is the way it usually works, if the program is really serious. The consultant and his team meet with the CEO of a corporation (or his COO) and do an in-depth interview about all aspects and departments of the business. They analyze the company systems as well.

Then they draw up a master plan to correct and improve all phases of the operation, from accounting to production to sales to marketing. They find areas of waste and propose ways to eliminate it. They suggest specific upgrades in internal communications. They cover the waterfront.

Then they work with the CEO and his top executives to implement the plan, which has been broken down into a long series of steps.

It works. Yes, it certainly can work. To a degree.

But questions remain.

What are the key steps for improving advertising? What creative moves will make ads have real impact with consumers? It’s not just a matter of throwing more money at the problem.

How will the consulting team help improve relationships among company executives? After all, they are humans and they have to relate.

What about the company’s internal communications? Is upgrading it just a matter of selecting a better computer interface? Or is there a human factor there as well? And if so, what do you do about it?

In every company, there are people who shine and produce and carry the load and innovate and improvise. Without them, the business would experience a sudden downturn. How do you nurture these key players? Suppose they sometimes (or often) achieve their success by going outside the company’s inhibiting rules? Do you try to rein them in? What system, if any, can be applied to them?

Conversely, what do you about employees who know how to pretend they’re competent, but actually derail every major project by inaction and buck-passing? How do you detect these human roadblocks—and if you could, what would you do about them?

What about the company’s hiring policies? How do you actually find people who will somehow make the business move forward faster? Whom are you looking to employ? What happens when you discover that normal tests and scales and behavior profiles are actually counterproductive in evaluating a kind of talent you need? For example, how do you identify designers and engineers who can invent new products that exceed the current standards of the market?

And how do you train the bulk of your employees? Do you just give them the odd seminar now and then to make them feel as if you care? How do you train them to do their jobs? Do you want to teach them to become mechanical androids? If not, what are you aiming for?

In the area of customer relations, how do you train people who will talk to the people who buy your products? Are you simply looking for employees who follow company policy in this regard, or do you want employees who can show customers that the business actually cares about them? And if so, how do you find such customer-service people, and how do you train them to go the extra mile? Is going the extra mile a system?

When you add up all these factors that are often ignored or shortchanged by the consultant team, you discover you’re looking at the difference between succeeding and failing as a company, over the long haul. And in each case, better systems aren’t the answer. There is an X-factor.

If the CEO and his top executives, and the consultants they’ve brought in, are all systems people, how will they ever perceive what they’re missing? How will they even see the X-factor?

Over and above all this, suppose the CEO is a hard-driving type who made his bones by pushing, pushing, pushing—but now that his company has grown to a considerable size, he’s out of his depth. He doesn’t know how to manage the structure. He can’t deal with people in a way that will make them want to work better and more creatively. He has the opposite effect. What does the consultant team do about him?

Or: the CEO is a bean counter. He’s won his job by default, because his predecessors were sloppy and averse to handling details. But the bean counter is inherently cautious. He keeps such a tight lid on things the company falls behind in bringing new products to the market. And the products they do make are dull and unattractive, artless. How do you handle this type of CEO?

It turns out a real consultant or coach would have to be able to access his own imagination, in order to find these key factors I’m mentioning, and he would have to use an extraordinary amount of imagination to actually fix what he finds.

A whole raft of newer and better systems isn’t going to carry the day.

Many consultants are in the business of manufacturing the illusion that their systems are the full answer. That’s what they really do. That’s their skill. Selling the illusion.

And it isn’t that hard to sell, because businesspeople (the clients) tend to already believe, with full faith, in systems. That’s their background and training. That’s their predisposition. That’s their fall-back position. That’s what they think and hope a corporation is totally composed of.

But they’re wrong, and they pay the price for being wrong.

To return to an example I’ve used before, in the 1950s the American automobile industry was propelled by brilliant designers who were out on the edge, working from vision and imagination and trusting that what they were conceiving could be turned out on the assembly line. They were backed up by tremendous engineers, who saw their own task as a creative enterprise as well, and they invented technology that could carry the visionary load.

But soon enough, all that spirit, talent, imagination, passion, and futuristic thinking were dampened by a corporate sense that success had to be CONSOLIDATED. Essentially, rote formulas for success were inserted to replace the talent that had really created the victories in the first place—because the men in charge had a fatal blind spot. They couldn’t see imagination, because they had buried it deep within themselves. So they stood on their past and they stood on their profit margins, and they watched helplessly, as their companies went down the drain.

Try to consult and coach THAT with a system.

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 13

By Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

Living through your imagination allows you to discover profound desires you never knew you had.

Not living through imagination? You’ll never see those desires.

We’re really talking about a philosophy here. It’s based on the difference between What Exists and What Doesn’t But Could Exist.

As a coach, you certainly encounter clients who, in their lives, are covering the same ground over and over. They’re mired. They’re struggling to get out of What Already Exists.

They want to believe, many of them, that they can move over a few feet and suddenly discover something better that already exists.

This kind of hope is part of the problem. In a way, it’s the whole problem.

The greater the hope they can exit the swamp and find stable ground a few feet away, the more resistance they have to using their imagination.

Why? Because they basically want to trade one piece of What Already Exists for another piece of What already Exists. That’s their philosophy and their psychology.

I had a client who owned his own business. It wasn’t huge, but it had lots of moving parts. And every part was a mess. The disorganization was rampant. It was as if he’d set out to complicate and screw up every single thing he possibly could. And in the aftermath, there he was, standing in the middle of it.

He was very capable, though. He knew what needed to be corrected. He described every system and every employee, and he recited the solution to every problem he was facing. He was actually trying to fix all these problems. So he wasn’t inert.

He confided in me. He told me what he really wanted to do in life. And what he was doing in his business wasn’t even close. It was 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

But every time I brought up his true desire, he backed away from it. First, he said, he had to straighten out his company. I understood that.

However, as the weeks went by, I saw that he didn’t stand a very good chance of extricating himself, because the strength of his desire for future he really wanted was minimal. His energy was minimal. His enthusiasm was minimal.

Whenever I mentioned imagination, he said, “Are you talking about what I’m seeing?” And I would say, “No, I’m talking about what you can invent.”

I tried a few Magic Theater exercises. They basically went nowhere. He wouldn’t play roles. He’d stall and ask questions and resist. He wouldn’t do writing exercises.

Finally, one day, I said, “What does your wife think about you and your business?” He said, “She hates the business. She says it’s wearing me down. She’s very impatient.”

He was basically a man who was sunk up to his neck in What Exists, and what existed for him wasn’t pretty at all. But of course, he wasn’t willing to entertain other possibilities. He had made a stand in the middle of his problems, and if I let him, he would just complain on and on about them. That was his world. That was his universe. He was, in a way, trying to convince me that, for him, no other world could exist. He was determined to play that part and only that part, come hell or high water.

He was like an actor in a long-running play who had forgotten life could exist outside his role. He was essentially telling me, “This is it. Convince me there’s anything else.”

I figured, why not jump in the deep end?

So I began to talking from the point of view of his wife. No intro, no prelude, no explanation.

At first, I didn’t lay into him. I just spoke about my dissatisfaction with the way things were going.

He was silent.

Soon it became apparent to him I was speaking in the role of his wife. He still didn’t say anything.

I gradually increased the tempo and the emotion.

Still, nothing from him.

After maybe ten minutes, he started responding. He couldn’t hold himself back. He entered into the dialogue, as himself—because that was the only role he was willing to play.

So we argued. Back and forth, back and forth.

This went on for the better part of an hour.

He got on a roll. He poured out his frustrations. It was a cascade.

I continued to play the role of his wife. I said what I imagined she’d say.

Somewhere in the vicinity of an hour and a half, things slowed down.

So I flipped sides. Again, without any intro or explanation, I began to play the role of him. I argued my position from that point of view. He caught on immediately and jumped right into the role of his wife.

We kept on going. For another hour or so, we kept arguing.

Finally, he started laughing.

“My mind just blew up,” he said.

You’re a good actor,” I said.

He laughed some more.

By playing his wife, he was wrestling one leg out of the swamp, and he knew it.

It was a start.

That day was the turning point. Things began to go better. He saw there was some definite emotional value in using his imagination.

Eventually, he saw that imagination was his key to the real door he was trying to open in his life. And once he saw it, he responded with great commitment. He did all the exercises I gave him. He entered into the Magic Theater full-bore, playing many roles, even the most absurd ones.

He settled on a plan to fix the several biggest problems in his business and sell it. Which he did. He freed himself from the swamp. And then he went on pursue what he really wanted in life.

For a time, he kept looking for What Already Exists in various forms, but he dropped that, too, in a matter of months, realizing he could imagine and invent on a very wide scale.

This was his liberation.

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COACHING THE COACHES

PART 12

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

A general rule of imagination is: it’s easier to cut back from Big than expand from Little.

If a designer is working on a radically new automobile design, his chance of success is increased if he starts out with his most extreme version of what that car could look like, as opposed to drawing the current model and then adding features that would make it unique.

He can take his most extreme version and scale it back if he needs to. Adding new wrinkles to the old model is usually a flop.

This is rarely understood.

People like to think in terms of “incremental imagination.” That’s like saying, “Can I parachute out of this plane a little bit?”

Take the leap.

A client of mine, an architect, was commissioned to design a greenhouse on a large estate. The family wanted “something different.” Of course, the architect didn’t know what that was. He thought his best approach was to start with conventional drawings and add “interesting features.”

He tried that. The family wasn’t impressed.

So I assigned him the following: make five drawings of greenhouses that are so absurd, so crazy that no one would ever want them on their property, even at the point of a gun.

He struggled, but he did present me with the sketches. I could tell he wasn’t happy. So I told him to do five more.

This time it worked. In the process of drawing these five in the most bizarre ways he could imagine, he found “a few great ideas”popping into his head. He used those, and from scratch he came up with a quite beautiful and original design. The family took one look at it and approved it on the spot.

Another client of mine was a frustrated carpenter. A jack-of-all trades type. Lately, he was having trouble making a living, and he felt stifled in his work. He’d been in the profession 15 years, and it didn’t seem to interest him anymore.

We did some of the imagination exercises I’ve described in these articles, and one day he told me he had a new idea. What he really wanted to do was organize and lead tours to unusual out-of-the-way places, all over the world.

He began making notes and plans on how he would accomplish this. Meanwhile, we continued working together.

A month or so later, he told me he’d scrapped the tour idea, because something else had come up. Opening a restaurant. He’d always loved cooking, especially Middle Eastern food.

A week later, the restaurant idea was gone. He wanted to go back to school and get a degree in engineering.

I told him to make a long list of careers that didn’t exist.

He came up with quite an array of professions, from squirrel grooming, to building mile-high towers of snow, to cataloging stowaways on space cruisers, to setting up a publicly traded company that would advise politicians on how to embezzle campaign funds. There were more than a hundred professions on the list.

He told me he felt better about his future, although he had no idea why.

A week later, he said, for the first time in his life he felt he could do anything. He’d originally gone into carpentry because he was good at it. He’d never really chosen it with any enthusiasm.

We did a a dialogue, in which the two roles were: “soul on an astral plane,” and “salesman for a new life on Earth.” Part of the salesman’s job was to go over possible career choices. This morphed into “man who’d died in a small plane crash” and “extra-terrestrial guide in Limbo.” We each played both roles.

That night, he called to say he was going away to his cabin for a week.

When he came back, he looked quite refreshed, and not at all frustrated.

“The work we’ve been doing,” he said. “It’s been like peeling layers of an onion.” He laughed. “But not consecutive layers. I’ve been jumping around.”

He told me he’d come up with the most obvious answer to his problem. He didn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it sooner. He proceeded to talk about his childhood, when his stepfather had taken him on several long trips in his boat. He’d never felt freer than on those excursions.

So in the following few months, the carpenter found a partner, and they leased a large space in an industrial district, and he began building boats.

He calls it “the dream I never knew I had.”

I said, “So maybe the dream was hiding somewhere in your imagination.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But all those years I was doing routine carpentry, my imagination was dead.”

“But now you brought it back from the dead.”

He looked at me.

“So that’s what you were doing.”

“It works.”

“How did you know it would?” he said.

“I believe in imagination. And I’ve got a list of all the times it has worked.”

Asking a person what he wants is really asking what he wants to create.

And asking that to a person who professes to have no clue about his own imagination is far different from asking it to a person who can live through and by imagination.

Suppose the universe is there to test our imaginations? It’s like walking into a museum full of paintings. Are you inspired to paint, or do you just want to keep looking at the pictures forever? The universe is a work of art. We can keep looking at it and analyzing it forever, or we can imagine new realities and invent them.

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COACHING THE COACHES

PART 11

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

In the summer of 2011, I started the Magic Theater. It is a way to make imagination manifest in improvised dialogues between two people.

They take roles, and they speak to each from those roles. And then, after a time, they switch (reverse) roles and continue the conversation—which can go anywhere.

The precursor of this sort of theater is, most directly, Psychodrama, the brilliant invention of Jacob Levy Moreno.

I sometimes use Magic Theater dialogues in my consulting work.

The range of possible roles is unlimited. Any person, archetype, object, thing, process can be a role. Most importantly, a role that doesn’t exist can be a role. For example, “the gold phantom who owns a drug store on Mars”—who is talking to “the ant who runs the universe.”

Yes, yes, yes, it’s absurd. It’s absurd by the standards of ordinary reality. But if you think ordinary reality is an authoritative yardstick, you should think again. And again.

What happens when a person speaks from a role that “couldn’t possibly exist?” He relies completely on his imagination. He uses it. He lives in it for a short time.

And gradually, his own sense of reality changes and expands. His own experience of his imagination deepens.

Much earlier in this series, I remarked that innovators go outside the system they’re in and bring back new ideas and inventions. Innovators aren’t tied to a system. They can enter them and exit them.

Well, in the Magic Theater, you’re exiting and re-entering ordinary reality and ordinary status quo and ordinary categories of perception. Experientially. Not just intellectually.

You can play Magic Theater in fairly basic terms. A person is having a big problem with his boss at work. Okay, let’s do dialogue. I’ll play your boss, and you play you. Then after that conversation: now you play your boss and I’ll play you. Some interesting things can happen.

On a much more expanded level, we go to roles like “the manager of Galaxy 32-B” talking to “an ambitious shoe salesman.”

Imagination in action.

Having done these dialogues, I can say that one effect is: they tend to dissolve problems by placing them in a far different perspective. Either the problem doesn’t seem so important, or a new workable solution suddenly pops up out of nowhere.

In daily life, we tend to gear perception so that it covers a “standardized” view of people, places, and things. We’re happy with that. We operate within that framework. All is well until we run into a problem, an obstruction, a block—and then the gears don’t mesh comfortably anymore. As time passes, the gears become more clogged, and we develop new problems, and we don’t solve all of them.

But we continue to work within the context of the way we perceive both reality and our lives. Inside that framework, we keep trying to come up with solutions. And, in the process, we lose track of what we really want. We lose track of the direction we would really like to pursue.

In the Magic Theater, we experience using our imaginations in ways we’ve never used them before. As a result, our standardized perception changes. We’re no longer exclusively operating inside that old context. We’re freer.

We can then surpass those problems, and we can see where we most profoundly want to go in life.

Here is a very simple example. I worked with a woman who was a dedicated political reformer. For years, in her work, she had been chewing on a particular problem she couldn’t resolve. Other people had tried to solve the same problem, and they had failed, too. She knew all the strategies, all the approaches, all the angles. She was at a standstill.

So we did a dialogue. I played her, and she played “the person who already came up with the brilliant solution.”

So ridiculously simple, it seemed stupid.

It was very slow going for a half-hour, as we spoke from our roles to each other. Then, the energy began to flow as she really got into her part. In the next hour, she spoke from “the top of the mountain,” with great authority, as if she really had solved the problem—without mentioning how she had done it.

When we stopped, she felt much better, although she hadn’t come up with a concrete plan. Or a vague plan. Or any plan.

A week later, we spoke. She said, “I suddenly figured out a whole new way to approach this thing, instead of beating my head against the same wall.”

A few months later, she called to tell me she’d achieved a significant victory. In a subsequent note, she described her achievement: “It was as if I’d been trying to turn a corner on a street with a tremendous wind blowing right at me. So I went into a building, took an elevator up to the roof, called in a big helicopter, and we flew to the right destination. That’s how it felt. A detour. Instead of steps 1,2,3,4, it was 1,6,7,4. I don’t know why I didn’t see that before. I guess I was locked in. Then I wasn’t anymore. I was in a different space.”

A change of perception brought on by imagination.

The Magic Theater is part of an overall philosophy of imagination. Instead of viewing life and the universe as simply “sitting there,” we view them as an infinite number of potential roles we can play and speak from, in dialogue.

The old Tibetan magicians had exercises in which they would merge with elements in Nature: tree, flower, cloud, river, creature. Well, this is taking that approach from a different angle. You actually play the role of these elements and creatures.

Here’s another example. Working with an executive who was dealing with a company that was falling apart, I tried many roles. He and I played “perfect CEO,” “awful CEO,” “new deep-pockets investor,” “bankruptcy judge,” “brilliant planner.”

These dialogues loosened things up a bit, but no real breakthroughs occurred. So I went much farther out. We played “a talking river of gold under the earth,” “phony CEO of a solar system,” “Fort Knox,” “paranormal magician,” “android following directions.”

What in the world could these roles have to do with his failing company? The roles are absurd. They make no sense. They’re ridiculous. They have no basis in reality. Etc., etc.

But after a few sessions, this man said, “You know, at first, it was like pulling teeth. I felt like an idiot playing these parts. But when I got into it, I felt better. Lighter. And now I’m taking a step back and seeing my company with a lot more clarity. I don’t know why, but I am.”

Over the course of the next month or two, he experienced new ideas popping up all over the place. He started to approach the company with real imagination. Taking nothing for granted. His old categories of locked-in perception were fading away.

He ended up reorganizing the company from the ground up. He put it on a whole new basis. It didn’t look like the old company at all.

That’s how he saved it.

He told me that, a result of our sessions, he had gained new courage, along with greater imagination.

All because he and I did something completely and utterly absurd.

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COACHING THE COACHES

PART 10

By Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

You go to the author of a play who, after writing it for ten years, is dissatisfied with it—and you tell him to change a few commas and exclamation points.

How well will that work out?

There is only one reason he’s dissatisfied with the play. In an odd sense, he’s forgotten he imagined the whole thing. If he remembered, he’d realize he could make all the changes he wanted to and that would be that.

He needs to bring back the flexible, adventurous, wide-ranging, powerful, go-for-broke imagination he was originally using, and resurrect it.

There is no way to measure “the amount” of imagination that requires.

Fifty tons? An ounce? Two pounds?

When a person digs a hole for himself and jumps in, and that becomes his life, how deep is the hole?

Who knows?

Imagination is magic. Sometimes the faintest whiff of this elixir is enough to wake a person up.

I’ve seen it happen in an hour. I’ve seen it happen in a year.

Regardless, a person does need to bring “a great deal” of imagination back into his existence, in order to build a different future.

Imagination is a non-material capacity. It isn’t brain cells or electrical transmissions or circuits. It affects the brain, but it is a higher aspect.

What Already Exists is but a tiny, tiny fraction of What Is Possible. All we need to discover is to be found in What Already Exists?? No. That is a fundamental misconception.

Mythologically speaking, we need to replace “the treasure hunter” with “the artist.”

If you staged a horse race between perception and imagination, and you somehow opened up every possible channel of perception along every possible track, perception would still finish second.

Which is to say, imagination and invention can always go farther.

This opens up a new view of metaphysics.

Imagination always deals with what the conventional mind considers impossible.

This is why the exercises I design move a person into imagining “impossible” things. Or as some would say, absurd things.

Which brings me to this: if a person’s view of what he really desires in life is born out of a highly limited imagination, who knows what desires might lie on the other side of those limits?

This is yet another reason why immersing one’s self in imagination is so important. The process reveals desires-for-futures previously obscured.

This is the great adventure.

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com