MY CONTRARY VIEW
by Jon Rappoport
January 9, 2012
The great Buddha, who may or may not have existed, is supposed to have said, “As you think, so you are.” Actually, I prefer this: “As you think, so you create, unless you create first, in which case you can think anything you want to.”
But that’s not quite a slogan. It doesn’t have much appeal for the masses.
Let’s break it down.
How and what a person thinks becomes awfully, awfully important when that person isn’t creating. Because then, thinking is pretty much all he has going inside his mind. He chooses between thoughts like a cautious buyer with a tight wallet at a bazaar. You know, visit all the stalls, judiciously pick an item here, an item there.
And then, yes, the thoughts he highlights and turns into hardened ideas are going to affect his main actions and perceptions. QED.
But if he’s imagining and creating like mad, he can supersede this entire mechanism. He can decide what to create and then invent the thoughts that make it all work.
Of course, my position isn’t popular. It doesn’t ring bells from Nome to Tierra del Fuego.
People prefer the Buddhist formulation because it doesn’t require living a creative life. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you read through all the voluminous tracts and texts and commentaries of Buddhism, you’re going to find very little about imagination.
People with a modicum of intelligence are attracted to the Buddhist version of thought-affecting-Being, because they dimly apprehend that their own thoughts do seem to exert a powerful influence on them—and so they look for ways to replace one thought with another—as you’d try to replace an old car with a new one.
Or as you might try to replace one drop of water in the ocean with another drop. Good luck.
Buddha, if he existed, might have been a great guy. He might have been fun to talk to. Or not. But he didn’t seem to give much time to considering human creation along positive lines.
(Well, neither did any of the fabled prophets of the world’s premier religions.)
Too bad.
Since the great migration of Eastern spiritual thought to the West in the 1960s, I’ve been pondering, on and off, the reasons for this cut-rate sale. And I believe I’ve found a few good explanations—the most significant of which is people love having faith in ancient personages who knew everything worth knowing. What a concept. And add to that the idea of a lineage, a whole unbroken line of masters who have been transmitting wisdom and illumination of the highest possible order to regular folks for centuries, and you have a real winner.
It’s mysterious. It’s satisfying. It’s big. It’s hip. It’s reassuring. It’s metaphysics with a payoff. It’s goal-oriented without being crass.
And, for example, in the case of Buddha, a decent fellow who wasn’t claiming to be a god or a priest or a dictator, it’s a solution to suffering.
Wow. Escape suffering.
And there is a formula, the centerpiece of which is: desire produces pain; therefore, eliminate desire; attain wisdom.
In other words, if you’re suffering and you can’t get off that trolley no matter what you do, know that everyone else is on board, too. You have lots of company. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the structure of reality.
To ascend beyond reality, start by accepting that your desires cause the whole infernal game to play out, over and over. That’s all. So meditate in such a way that you quit desiring. And you’re out. You’re released from the struggle and the inevitable disappointment.
Voila.
Sound good?
(What about, as Henry Miller once wrote, the desire to eliminate desire?)
As all my readers know by now, I recommend a little thing called living through and by imagination. But if you’ve somehow managed to sit on and squelch all your desires, your interest in imagination is likely to hover around zero.
It’s a rarely considered fact that most, if not all, so-called major spiritual paths and religions downplay or ignore imagination. They prefer to imagine their own thin fairy tales and then impose them on their flocks. (I cover this point extensively in my book, now an e-book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies.)
Among those fairy tales are stories about “received wisdom.” You see, it comes to you from somewhere else. So you have to find a person or make a connection that can provide it to you. And of course, the “source” of the illumination is dressed up, mythologically speaking, to give it more juice and appeal. It wears robes, it flies, it speaks in stentorian tones, it is “all love,” it lives in a place called paradise, it hands down the highest possible information through intermediaries. It’s Important.
How do you compete with that? How can you yourself generate your own wisdom? You’re trapped in a web of your thoughts and desires. You must eliminate them, remove the filters, and then you’ll see. You’ll see and hear the call from the distant past. You’ll flourish as never before. Imagination? What’s that? What does that have to do with anything? How could it matter, when the masters are silent on the issue?
Spirituality, as it’s taught, is a fabulous con. A shell game. Eons old.
It’s one mildly interesting book in a library of 349623079654329086 volumes.
The whole notion of what spirituality IS has been hijacked. The caper was pulled off successfully because people are always ready to accept tales about “good things arriving” like presents under the tree at Xmas. If you start with that premise, you can sell all sorts of wild scenarios.
And the more complicated such scenarios are, the more they’ll appeal to the intellectual caste. Whereas, if you begin with the premise, YOU IMAGINE AND INVENT REALITY, you’re going to be marching uphill in a blizzard. How can you sell that, unless people really begin to follow the precept themselves? You can’t just sit there and say, “Hmm, very interesting. We each imagine and invent reality.” No, you have to do it.
But here’s the thing. If you DO do it, you’re off on the greatest adventure of your existence. And in the process, all the old fake spiritual dominoes fall, and what replaces them is a new spiritual view that transcends anything ever sold to the masses on planet Earth. A view that is uniquely your own.
Jon Rappoport