A VACCINE AGAINST MAGIC
MAGIC AND DEPRESSION
by Jon Rappoport
May 21, 2012
“The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.” — Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
“Those people who recognize that imagination is reality’s master we call ‘sages,’ and those act upon it, we call ‘artists.'” — Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
JUNE 11, 2011. No guts, no glory. Pursuers of any great goal can tell you that.
In the human psyche, from the moment a newborn baby emerges into the light of day, he/she has a desire for magic.
We are told this is an early fetish that fades away as the experience of the world sets in. As maturity evolves. As practical reality is better understood.
In most areas of psychology, sensible adjustment to practical reality is a great prize to be won by the patient. It marks the passage from child to adult. It is hailed as a therapeutic triumph.
In truth, the desire for magic never goes away, and the longer it is buried, the greater the price a person pays.
A vaccine against a disease can mask the visible signs of that disease, but under the surface, the immune system may be carrying on a low-level chronic war against toxic elements of the vaccine. And the effects of the war can manifest in odd forms.
So it is with the inoculation of reality aimed at suppressing magic.
One of the byproducts of the “reality shot” is depression.
The person feels cut off from the very feeling and urge he once considered a hallmark of life. Therefore, chronic sadness. And of course, one can explain that sadness in a variety of ways, none of which gets to the heart of the matter.
It is assumed that so-called primitive cultures placed magic front and center because they couldn’t do better. They couldn’t formulate a “true and rational” religion with a church and monks and collection plate and a European choir and an array of pedophiles. They couldn’t fathom what real science was.
Their impulse for magic had to be defamed and reduced and discredited. Why? Obviously, because the Westerners who were poking through ancient cultures like demented professors had already discredited magic in themselves—they had put it on a dusty shelf in a room in a cellar beyond the reach of their own memory. But they couldn’t leave it alone. They had to keep worrying it, scratching it, and so they journeyed thousands of miles to find it somewhere else—and then they scoffed at it.
And we wonder why, under the banner of organized religion, there has been so much killing. It’s because, at a deep level, the adherents know they’ve sold their souls and they’re depressed, angry, resentful, remorseful, and they want to assuage and expiate their guilt through violence.
The urge for magic is forever.
And yet the charade goes on. While paying homage and lip service to ordinary practical reality seasoned with a bit of fairy-tale organized religion, people actually want to change reality, they want to reveal their latent paranormal power, they want to get outside reality, they want to create realities that, by conventional standards, are deemed impossible.
They want to find and use their own magic.
In our modern culture, we’re taught that everything is learned as a system. That, you could say, is the underlying assumption of education. It has far-reaching consequences. It leads to the SYSTEMATIZING OF THE MIND. The mind is shaped to accommodate this premise.
“If I want to know something, I have to learn it. Somebody has to teach it to me. They will teach it as a system. I will learn the system. I will elevate the very notion of systems. EVERYTHING WILL BE A SYSTEM.
In the long run, that’s a heavy loser. That’ll get you a lump of coal in a sock, a spiritual cardboard box to live in.
As I reconstruct the legend of Merlin, one of my favorite guys, I put him in my sights as the one who taught himself magic by abandoning all systems. That was his genius. Don’t misunderstand. He didn’t turn himself into a blithering idiot. He just stepped outside systems. He went down roads based on his own naked desire to make magic.
To modern man, this makes no sense.
The intellectual enrolls at Harvard, he studies anthropology for six years, he flies to a jungle in South America, he digs up remnants of a lost culture, he infers they performed arcane ceremonies six times a week, he writes monographs—and he concludes they were a very picturesque society with fascinating customs and totems, and their brand of magic can best be understood as an inevitable consequence of their matriarchal organization, which itself was an accommodation to rainfall levels.
The anthropologist takes two Paxil and goes off to teach a class on the meaning of ancient eyebrow trimming in Tierra Del Fuego.
The rocket of real magic is still on the launching pad. It’s waiting.
“Last night, Wilmington police, aided by a SWAT team, invaded the house of John Q Jones. ‘We warned Mr. Jones,’ said Captain Frank Brock, ‘that he was still living his life enveloped by systems. We told him it was time for him to recognize his desire to make magic and begin that journey. Hopefully, our message got through.’”
Systems are wonderful things. They produce results. They take us into technological triumphs. They help us become more rational. But when they are overdone, when the mind itself becomes shaped like a system, it reaches a dead-end. Then the mind works against the unquenchable desire for magic. Then society is organized as a tighter and tighter system and turns into a madhouse.
And then people say, “Maybe machines can actually think and choose and decide. Maybe machines are alive. What would happen if we grafted computers on to our brains? It might be wonderful.”
People move in this direction after their own minds have been shaped, like putty, into systems. They don’t see much difference between themselves and machines.
When you have a world run by a million machine-systems, you encounter horrific problems. One of those problems stems from the fact that each system gets things a little bit wrong, each system is skewed to one side just a little bit—and when you add up all these little wrong bits, you get a real threat to basic survival; the whole ship of civilization is tilting dangerously in the water.
Far worse than that, the deep desire for magic in every individual is squelched. That’s the real problem. So the first order of business is the restoration of imagination, from which all magic flows. Imagination is sitting right there, always ready to go, waiting.
Imagination is saying, “The mind has been shaped into a system? I can undo that. I can liberate the mind and make it into an adventurous vessel. I can provide untold amounts of new energy.”
Life is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.
Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th 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.