PART 2, SEPARATING FROM THE MATRIX
by Jon Rappoport
July 14, 2012
This is a backgrounder. It is not a canned list of instructions. Its purpose is to stimulate your own thinking on the subject of separating from The Matrix.
ONE: IMAGINATION AND THE FIRE
Once upon a time, human beings lived in cultures where images were alive. What we now call superstitions were, to them, gods and demons and intermediary entities that transmitted or stole the juice and the energy and the power of life.
It’s nearly impossible to project ourselves into such an environment and experience the burgeoning passions that infused experience—because a great shift has occurred.
The West entered, with anticipation, a temple of the bald Sampson, where images disappeared, were swallowed up, were replaced by so-called rational faith.
This eventually precipitated a crisis. If you don’t have, or believe in, images that live and breathe and are intimately connected with life-force, how do you replace them? How do you avoid becoming pallid skeletons of science, whose productions never impart that same fire?
This crisis is reflected all around us every day.
We have become liberated, and in this liberation we are left with emptiness. On top of that, we have decided to assume that passions of the soul should be modulated, like elevator music, to somehow join with our advanced knowledge, in harmonic balance.
It’s no balance; it’s timidity, and this attitude makes us prey to an eerie tolerance of all opinion and custom and point of view and aspiration and stretched-out egalitarianism and even criminal action. Giving no offense, under any circumstances, for any reason, is now the coin of the realm.
You might say, with accurate assessment, that these are qualities of the successful salesman. And that is what so many of us have become: ambassadors of the vague and dessicated pulse of our “rational culture.”
We even think of it in religious terms. The message of this church is the honed and blown-dry embrace of Anything. As if this was the message of Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and other teachers of our blurry past.
To counterbalance this bleached present, many of us are drawn into dark theaters to watch suburban humans turned into bloodsucking harpooned-tooth neck fetishists and genetic mistakes and hair-sprouting wolves and irradiated monsters or heroes.
It’s the instant-coffee version of ancient Dionysian adventure. And the accompanying depiction of gym-sex on the screen wouldn’t stir the interest of a mouse in a barn.
Was this why and for what we abandoned the mysteries of the epoch of magic?
For freckled children in a British academy laboring through a paranormal costume drama, tricked out with the accoutrement of grottoes and dark halls?
The crisis on our hands now is not one that is going to go away. It is not going to recede as magic once receded. Because there WAS a reason we liberated ourselves from the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance—a reason beyond technology—and until we find it and face it and deeply accept the new struggle, we are going to see this simulacrum culture of ours make endless cartoons of itself in dried out oceans of concrete.
For what we need to do now, pharmaceuticals and brain research and genetic manipulation and cyber-affectation and instant global communication and worship (or desecration) of profit-making idols hold no answers.
Suppose what took us into the age of rationality was, in some way, connected to the realization that we were, all along, inventing our own demons and gods and demigods and entities of great life-force—and although that knowledge has been shoved into the background, as trivial and passe, while technology has soared, it is still with us, and it overshadows all our machines and their power.
Suppose this is the message: we are the majestic and wild creatures we built the temples to.
We are the makers; we are the architects of all the dreams—and not through some compensatory impulse, but because WE CREATE. That is our natural inclination and the source of our ecstasy. It is only civilization that seems to cast us in other roles.
Our societies and civilizations are arranged to make it seem as if imagination is a preposterous choice—when, in fact, that is what we are here for. That is what got us here.
Societies are actually in a satellite universe, and the prime universe is all imagination.
The underlying hidden and deeply buried cry of our age is: HOW CAN I CREATE?
The conclusion is: we will do anything to avoid it.
And the universal compliant is: I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
NEVERLESS, WE ARE THE ARTISTS AND THERE ARE NO LIMITS.
While, in the deep past, we sucked the marrow out of the bones of the gods we invented and thereby felt enormous passions, we knew there was a missing piece, and that piece was an abyss over which we were hanging. So we came all this way to find out that we authored the labyrinth. We built the paths that gave us joy and terror, and now we can consciously and spontaneously make new worlds without end. Not simply as engineers, but as artists.
Swallowing that stark truth may be hard, may be upsetting, but it IS why we made the voyage.
And then pulled our punches.
This is no archaic revival. It’s now, today and tomorrow.
The universe is waiting for imagination for revolutionize it down to its core.
TWO: THE REALITY SALESMAN CALLS
Step right up, folks. This is a deal you can’t afford to miss. You know that thing you cling to like a drowning man in a turbulent sea?
It’s called reality, and I represent the company that manufactures it. I’m proud to say I’ve held this job for over a hundred thousand years. So as far as product knowledge is concerned, you just aren’t going to find anybody like me.
Some folks believe reality is rocks and trees and desert and sun and rain, and brick and concrete and steel and glass, and the mountain ranges, the sky, the moon and the stars. They believe reality is a house and all the things in it, and the mementos you hold on to, to remind you of the past.
But I’m really selling…guess what? A little thing called perception. It sounds odd, but that’s what it is:
How you see things, and what you think about what you see.
Because to tell you the truth, no matter what time period you live in, whether on Earth or another planet, it all comes down to that. How you see what’s in front of you.
And believe it or not, perception comes in different forms. My company makes the perception that endures. It’s the package you’re living with right now. It’s the down-to-earth here-it-is straight-ahead common-sense type. We call it: IT IS WHAT IT IS. That’s trademarked, by the way. ISWIS. It is what it is.
ISWIS was invented by a very smart guy whose name has been long forgotten. He was a flaming genius, and he realized something great. People would go for ISWIS because it would lock them in.
People didn’t want a wobbling here-and-there kind of perception. Who wants to wake up on a Tuesday morning and suddenly see life in a completely different way? Who wants that kind of shock to the system?
ISWIS is the most popular perception package in the universe, bar none. Reliability. Consistency.
All those centuries and epochs ago, when I was a rookie training for this job, the guys let me try on a whole bunch of different perception packages, so I could see what kind of competition I was up against.
I saw things I wouldn’t want to describe to you. Horrible things. And when I was given ISWIS, our product, I felt like I was home.
ISWIS gives you the kind of stability you can count on for your whole life. And, believe me, that’s no small feat. We’ve built slow decay (SD) into the package, so things gradually deteriorate—because, think about it, do you really want that tree in your back yard to stay at one stage of growth forever? Do you? It might seem like a nice idea, but it would screw up the need for replacement, and then you’d get into the whole conundrum of THE BODY, too, and how long it should last. People like to think they want physical immortality, but if you give it to them (via some other package), they go crazy after a while. Because their problems, as well as their triumphs, never go away. I could show you a little planet where the inhabitants went for one of our competitor’s products. The suicide rate is over seventy percent! The place is a nuthouse!
ISWIS is time-tested. It’s as solid as solid can be made. It doesn’t break down.
But it does need boosters from time to time, and that’s why I’m here today talking to you.
Every twenty thousand years, we institute a planet-wide upgrade, just to make sure nothing goes wrong. And you’re all due.
Now, you could refuse, in which case you’ll have to take full responsibility for the ugly consequences, or you could do the right thing and just re-up. I have to tell you, our re-up rate is 99.859 percent. I’m proud of that figure.
By the way, the holdouts, the deniers, and the self-styled rebels? The governments of your planet keep track of you. I feel obligated to let you know that. They assume they need to. Without boosters, when your ISWIS breaks down, you’re going to fail to fit in. Most definitely you’re going to experience some things other people just won’t understand. And your governments will hunt you down and lock you up, or worse.
That’s not my doing, because I believe in the free market, but it’s part of my service to clue you into the whole picture.
But here is the good part. You can get your booster now, during our pre-op special, by simply signing for it and taking the pledge, and continuing to pay a mere sixty percent of of your annual income for the rest of your lives. Which when you think about it, is nothing for what you’re getting. Again, reliability, and consistency.
In the small print, the pledge lays out a few details concerning IMAGINATION. This is for your own protection—because if you take imagination too far (and who knows how far that is, until it’s too late), you’ll set up what we call an interference field, which means ISWIS will tend to malfunction. You don’t want that.
So here’s the contract and the pledge. Sign on the dotted line, and pay the fee, and we’re done.
Thank you very much.
I love you guys. Really, I do. I admire your tenacity and your willingness to stay with our perception package. Our company continues to prosper because of you. Visit the ISWIS website and Facebook page and find out about upcoming picnics and vacation tours. We’re hosting booster events at thousands of locations.
If you don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.
We’ve got you on our list.
THREE: BEYOND STRUCTURES
We are fascinated with structures and systems because they work, and because some of us feel an aesthetic attraction to them.
They work until you want to do something different.
Like magic.
Magic is non-system.
Which puts it out of the reach of most people.
Because most people want to grab a structure and pull it around them and sit there like a bird in a cage. They want to go from A to B to C and feel the satisfaction of knowing it works every time.
Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.
But go into a corporation and say you want to teach them creativity and they’ll say, “What’s the system?”
Once I told a personnel chief at a big company, “The system is to stand on your head.”
“Literally?” he said.
“No. That would be too easy. People would find a system for that. But figuratively, that’s what you want to get people to do.”
He scratched his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where we start. I say something and you don’t understand. Then we have a chance.”
“What are you?” he said. “Some kind of zen teacher?”
“No,” I said. “If I said I was, you’d pigeonhole me. I teach non-systems.”
He laughed in an uncomfortable way.
“We don’t operate on non-systems here.”
“No, but if you let three or four people do that, they might come up with a product you never dreamed of.”
That he could understand. Vaguely.
Here’s how things work at some very big corporations. The second-tier honchos decide it’s time for a new product. They call in the chief of production and ask him what could be done. He suggests a whiz-it 4, which is basically a whiz-it 3 with a few more bells and whistles.
The honchos give him the green light, and he goes to work. He sets up a structure, which means he basically triggers the structure he already has. He gets underlings to make sketches of whiz 4, and with those he assigns compartmentalized tasks to various departments under him. The timetable is eighteen months.
He appoints a project supervisor to oversee the whole thing.
The project supervisor pretty much knows what’s going to happen. The six departments in charge of bringing in the whiz 4 on time will do okay—except one key department will fail miserably, because three guys in that dept. are lazy bums. They find ways to delay operations. They ask meaningless questions. They let work pile up on their desks. They meddle in other people’s business.
Twelve times, the production supervisor has tried to get these idiots fired. No go.
So everybody settles down to grind of bringing in whiz 4 on time.
Structure.
Manuals, rules and regs.
DMV, IRS. Play it by the book.
This can make magic the way an ant can fly to the moon.
So long ago it was in another life, I taught private school in New York. There were six kids in my class, all boys. I was supposed to teach them math. They were all at different levels. They had no ambition to learn math. No matter what I did, they performed miserably. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, decimals, fractions—it didn’t matter. If they managed to learn something on Monday, they forgot it by Tuesday. It was rather extraordinary.
So I took them to an art museum one morning. They were as lost there as they were in the classroom. But I wasn’t. That was the key. I was already painting in a little studio downtown, and I was on fire.
So I began to talk about the paintings. The Raphael, the Vermeer, the Rembrandt. The De Kooning, the Pollock, the Gorky. I had no plan, no idea. I just talked about what they could see if they looked.
And then we walked back to school and I set them up with paints and paper and brushes and told them to go to work. I said I didn’t care what they painted. Just have a good time. Do something you like.
All of a sudden, they weren’t making trouble. They were painting. No more whining and complaining.
I walked around and watched them go at it. I pointed to this or that area and mentioned what I liked.
There was no way to measure or quantify or systematize what the kids were doing that day, but they were coming alive, out of their sloth and resentment.
Then we got back to math, and it was as if they’d all experienced an upward shift in IQ.
That night, back in my studio, I made a note in my notebook. It went something like this: Give them a non-structure, and then follow that with a structure, it works.
So that was that.
There used to be something in this culture called improvisation. People understood what it was, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves. Now the word has almost vanished. Same with the word spontaneity. The moment when eye, mind, and brush meet canvas. When mind meets the new. When the inventor suddenly gets up from his chair and trots over to his workbench and starts putting pieces together.
The old zen guys called it no-mind. That didn’t mean you were a robot, it meant you had a very sharp mind, actually, but you just transcended it, you skipped through it like a flat stone on water. Structureless.
This becomes magic when imagination jumps into the fray. When the inventive urge takes the foreground.
The trouble with all these Asian spiritual practices now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. That’s like throwing a heavy wrench into an engine. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now.
You need Now, which is dry tinder to the spark of imagination.
Levitation now isn’t what it was six or 12 or 20 centuries ago. Magic isn’t a return to the mystical past. Alchemy was what people did in the Middle Ages to give themselves a Now, on which they could inject the flame of their imagination.
It wasn’t a system. Not really.
But if you have enough history at your back and you stand away far enough, everything looks like pattern and structure and system. That’s the illusion. That’s the deception.
Magic doesn’t work that way.
The only problem magic has is: if you create it, who else will see it? That’s the only glitch—and that can be worked with.
You see, systems make people blind. If they can’t fold an event into a structure, then for them it isn’t there. This is very interesting. This is where all the myths of Hermes (aka Mercury) sprang from. He was the figure who flew and passed through walls and had no barriers in the space-time continuum—the tin can we call universe. So people pretended, at a deep level, that they were unable to comprehend him. In a real sense, he was invisible. His response to all this was to become a supreme joker. A trickster. He toppled idols of the hidebound, rule-bound, system-bound society.
If you read the myths of ancient Greece, you begin to see he ranked very high in the pantheon of the gods. There really was no reason he couldn’t be considered the king of the Olympians.
But he didn’t want the throne or the lineage. That was just another system, erected by his god-colleagues, who were bored out of their minds and desperately needed the entertainment and distraction it could provide.
Hermes was deep in the fire of his own imagination and speed and improvisation and spontaneous action.
Magic.
He didn’t need or want metaphysics, cosmology, ultimate truth, illumination, enlightenment, or Oneness and Bliss. He already embodied of all those things and much, much, much more.
The notion of shared, consonant, and structured reality as the final goal became an enormous joke.
The structure and system of life and society, from a certain live perspective, is a joke.
Many marriages become impossible because husband and wife find themselves trapped in a system, and they don’t know what to do. That’s the beginning and end of their problem. If they could move in and out of the system, while remaining married and loyal, they would realize everything is wonderful. It’s a magic trick.
To make it work, you need imagination, which is the thing that allows you to see structure as putty that can be moved around and reshaped at will. Imagination has all the creativity there is, and yet it is non-material, it’s outside the shapes people build to run their lives.
From the point of view of civilization, structure should be a sturdy platform, from which people can take off and create.
When I was 19, people thought I had a few problems, so I was sent to an office in New York to take a Rorschach Test. The specialist opened up a large notebook to a page of inkblots. He was a technician who did one thing in his job. He interpreted what people told him about those inkblots. He had a complex system that enabled him to categorize people according to various subtle shades and types of neuroses.
So he showed me an inkblot and said, “Tell me everything you see in it.”
“Everything?” I said.
“Yes.”
He was a stern neutral android, and he followed his playbook to the letter.
“Okay,” I said.
So 20 minutes later, I was still talking about that first inkblot. I think he had a dozen of those blots in his notebook, and he was supposed to show me every one.
But I was still chirping away on the first one. Birds, animals, planes, kitchen utensils, ancient symbols, articles of clothing, wars, interstellar collisions, underground caves, noses, beaches, leaves, insects, clouds, forests, gnomes, ships, streams, rivers, idols, chewing gum, coins…
I was cheating, of course. Which is to say, I was using my imagination. This was outside the rules, really.
The technician was sweating. He was squirming in his chair. Contemplating how many hours it would take to get through all the inkblots. We’d take a supper break and then come back for more, far into the night.
Finally he said, “That’s enough.”
“But there’s more,” I said.
“No,” he said. “That’s all right.”
He stared at me.
I stared at him.
Standoff at OK Corral.
In his system of universe, you could have two things. Normal and neurotic. I didn’t fit into either slot. He didn’t understand that. So to him, I was invisible.
As I left his office, I thought about my favorite radio show, The Shadow. Lamont Cranston renders himself invisible to the bad guys, and proceeds to torment them.
It was a good day.
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.