A vaccine against magic

Magic and depression

by Jon Rappoport

May 5, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“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 who act upon it, we call ‘artists.’” — Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

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 tried to crush it.

And we wonder why, under the banner of organized religion, there has been so much killing. 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.

But 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.


Exit From the Matrix


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.

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.

Since imagination is a wild card that technocrats can’t absorb in their systems, they pretend it a faculty produced by the action of atoms in the brain. They pretend it is a delusion that can be explained by demonstrating, for example, that a machine can turn out paintings. Or poems.

“You see? We don’t need humans to make art. Computers can do just as well. Imagination isn’t mysterious at all.”

Technocracy and transhumanism flow from the concept that the human being is just another machine. And any machine can be made to operate more efficiently. Of course, that operation must conform to overriding objectives that define what efficiency is geared for. Objectives like acceptance, surrender, group-integration.

The result? Society is organized to eliminate all outliers and rebels.

And many people believe that the system called civilization will give them security, protection. Hence, the willingness to go along with the Surveillance State.

“Well, I don’t commit crimes, so I’m okay. The system won’t punish me. It’ll guard me against all those other people…”

Meanwhile, imagination waits. It never vanishes. It stands by, just in case an individual decides to live a life that overflows with creative power.

If my work has any organized precedent, it is ancient Tibet where, 1500 years ago, before the priests took over with their interminable spiritual baggage of ritual, practitioners engaged in exercises that engaged imagination to the hilt.

The entire goal was revealing that the Universe was a product of mind.

This was not about ultimate worship. This was not about some deep substrate in the Universe that one could plug into, to guide his actions and thought. It was about liberating the individual from all systems. It was about endless creation.

The first teachers of this Way came from India, where they had been pushed out of the academies of orthodox religious instruction. They were rebels. They had offloaded the metaphysical labyrinths of control. They were, in a sense, artists. Artists of reality.

They were brilliant riverboat gamblers, and in Tibet, for a time, they found a home.

They found students who, as now, were tired of the preaching designed to make humans into sophisticated mind-machines.

These people wanted more. They wanted to awaken their own imaginations and exceed the illusory boundaries of space and time.

They wanted magic.

Despite every cynical ploy, that desire is still alive.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. 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. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

18 comments on “A vaccine against magic

  1. I find it strange…and then again not so strange, that you and I occupy the same/similar stream of consciousness a lot of times.

    Interesting that you should pick Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) as the study hall for Stanley the two Paxiled anthropologist. Sadly I have been thinking of Angela Loij the last full blooded Ona (Selk’nam) woman who died today in 1974. Her people, the ‘Ona’ occupied Tierra del Fuego. The area got its name from the rather large Bonfires the Ona built…it is Patagonia, the southern tip of South America and quite cool there, in spite of the heartiness of the half naked Ona.

    http://www.thereedfoundation.org/rism/chapman/angela.htm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ona_people

    The planned extermination of the Ona people was one of the first genocides of the twentieth century. It was by the Salesians who stole their soul, and most prominently ‘the modern conquistador Julius Popper who was working for Carmen Sylva of Romania. He was given a private army by the Chilean/Argentinian governments to go get the gold of Tierra Del Fuego… and there was a lot of it.
    Gold was completely useless to the Ona people. But they did like the taste of sheep that were brought in to graze on their wonderous land.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Popper

    A bounty of one pound (roughly $2.50) was put on the head of the Ona; one proved they had killed such an innocent by presentation of a set of obviously brown ears or hands. Needless to say their where a lot of earless and handless Ona running around…can’t have that…it is too repulsively visual, too obvious, especially when everyone gnows the reason why?…and it irritated those snobby white affluent Europeans, earless half naked savages …so the rules changed, a skull had to be produced in order to receive your one pound sterling and one had to have a government issued permit to hunt the Ona. Fixing the unsightly public images of those earless savages.And bringing some well needed order to the genocide.

    Julius Popper died mysteriously, in a hotel room in Buenos Aires a few years later; he was thirty-five years old. He never did get to spend any of the gold he stole from the Ona. No sign of struggle before his death, no sign of a wound on his body, or mark from a weapon. Just a look of fear on poor Julius’s face. A similarly mysterious stranger was seen leaving the hotel room prior to Jully’s death.

    I have been in that room a number of times in a dream…I was at an old convent that I own in Saskatchewan last weekend and I smoked an organically grown joint and had a very large bonfire for Angela. I remember you Loij.

    My friend was sitting beside me next to this great fire…it had been cloudy for a few days, really sucked in chem-trail cloudy. A failed daylight and cold. About late afternoon a hole appeared above our heads and blue sky started to peek through and finally take over the whole sky. My friend said “Look Michael, blue sky…” I replied “I know, why do you think I have be piling wood six feet high on this bonfire since this morning…to burn a hole in it.” He giggled and said “You really believe that, don’t you?” I said “Of course”.

    There is no cure for magic Jon, it is and has always been.

    POEM: MEMORY OF ANGELA
    A year ago tomorrow Angela Loij died.
    Tomorrow, one year.
    The solar-earth cycle completed.
    And then?
    Then the timeless space of time.
    Time without years time.
    After tomorrow I can no longer imagine,
    One year ago today… she was sitting at the table
    (in her wood frame house on the edge of town) looking
    out at the wind, toward the pebbled shore, at someone
    passing by.
    On year ago today… about noon she was walking down
    the street (wide and unpaved) which parallels
    Main Street, carrying her shopping bag.
    On year ago today… I hear her say “Anita”
    (my name in Spanish).
    She was the last of her people.
    The last of a tall powerful people.
    Who had worn their hair long.
    Who had dressed in animal skins.
    The women gathered purple berries.
    The men hunted with their long bows.
    They who sang to the red tinted dawn of winter.
    If only I could see into the phantomless space above me,
    perhaps I could see time.
    Time when they mourned their dead while playing
    with their infants.
    Infants do not mourn.
    Life time is born of death time.
    But now she and all her people are beyond time.
    Time beyond the clash of the great surf which batters
    the cliffs of her land.
    Time beyond the star full-nights of that land where America sinks
    into the south polar sea.
    Time beyond the split-off of a sphere or the solidification
    of vapours which became the earth.
    Time beyond all origins of known or existing galaxies.
    Time without existence is beyond time.
    Angela was her Spanish name.
    Angel- a, feminine for angel.
    The mystery is perhaps in the name,
    in naming,
    in speaking,
    in language.
    Loij was her Selk’nam name.
    It was her father’s name.
    It has no meaning, she told me.
    “It’s just a name, an ancient name.”
    The meaning was lost.
    But the word was not.
    Time beyond the ancient Indian name – Loij.
    Time beyond all that was ever named or spoken,
    all we name and speak today, tomorrow
    and a year from tomorrow.
    Time when we killed her people.
    Time of greed and hate,
    and pious voices behind iron bullets,
    which tear the flesh and bleed
    the heart until it stops.
    Time when Whitemen slaughtered others and themselves.
    Time of the White horror, when poetry must curse to be true.
    Time moving through enveloping the space of all that is
    and was or will.
    Time within, yet beyond.
    This time, Angela Loij and her people knew.
    A year ago tomorrow Angela became that beyond time
    which is within us.
    Paris, 27 May 1975 – Anne MacKaye Chapman

  2. J.R. says:

    Can we have a vaccine against religion? And stupidity? Please???

    The world is grossly overdue for a “reset” – from ignorance, superstition, stupidity and religious intolerance. It’s the 21st century!!!

    • Your very own magic can be the reset. We just need enough people to engage their imaginations.

    • SlackerSlayer says:

      Yes, it is exposing the fraud souce of the big three hebrew frauds known as judaism, christianity, and islam. They changed the original myths to have hebrewish sounding names and places, and the rest is hysterics history. “The devil is responsible,,,” when the reality is simple, scumbagish humans are doing it to other people. Gaza is the perfecxt example today. They claim that a god gave them the land. Yet they ignore the conditions their own religious script states for receiving that land. No messiah for the jews, no israel for the jews. That is a big condition that will never be met, yet they moved in anyway, killing those that lived there for centuries.

  3. johngre says:

    truly excellent work, thank you.
    J.

  4. **Edited: My “V” key seems to be acting up, perhaps it has a Vendeta. Here it is again with the v’s added.**

    After reading this very true to life article, it occured to me how it meshes so unilaterally with the art that I draw. I am an a surrealistic artist and have tried not to lose my sense of magic in life, in fact I live that magic on a daily basis. You have to see my art, and then you will know immediately how similarly our thought processes align. Here are the links to two of my works that fit so well with this, and you can see all of my work there as well. Thank you for sharing your point of view, BRAVO! http://ow.ly/wg2MK http://ow.ly/uPebL P.S. I would greatly enjoy your friendship on Facebook and would be pleased to cross promote your content.

  5. trudi jousson says:

    The inhabitants of the island of Hy-Brasil in the Irish Sea had no need for gold and it’s sole remaining survivor gave the last of it away to those who managed to venture onto its shores. It was a land of morality and integrity, of abundance, peace, and contentment. Eventually it became an imaginary island of paradise, submerged in ethers and only rising from them every seven years to captivate the imagination of those who searched for it. Found on some early maps, it is now lost to the mind of the common man and remains only in the memory of those who believe in its existence. This to me is what “keeping the faith” is all about for without it, the imagination dies along with the individual. It’s time to “image” a “nation” where there is no need for gold, where there is no concern but to live forever as part of a loving, ever evolving cosmos.

  6. Mr. Rappaport, you nailed this, absolutely, Kudos.

  7. Levantine says:

    This is one of the most compelling articles on the subject of liberation that you’ve written, from the around twenty such articles I’ve read, Jon.

    All of them share a pervasive weakness, though.

    What people call magic has its dark and tragic side, depicted in one can see it in The Ring of the Nibelung, in Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the old adventure films films. And one can see it in the crypt of JFK’s murder.

    There, the ego is put before liberty itself. Then, the ego sabotages its own liberty. Real freedom of imagination and real growth require you to see yourself as small in the universe of what can be imagined.

    I encourage you to write about it at some later point.

    http://christanduniversity.com/2014/03/24/against-magic-in-defense-of-beauty/

  8. marc hunter says:

    if you link to christ stuff on an article about magic, yo are missing the point. to levantine- i didnt even read your link. magic is not good or evil, its the way the material world is coordianted with the “metaphysical” realities that exist extradminesionally which is from the metaphysical literal definition “beyond the physical (perceivable to the 5 senses.) this whole article is an only slightly veiled reference to the basic principle of hermetics- the primary principle of Mentalism-the all is mind- the univrse is mental. the problem with almost all people is that theiir minds are infected by intentionally skewed paradigms created by societal systems of control to create and perpetuate ignorance of the spiritual sciences aka magic. a very simple program is capable of washing one’s mind of all the false paradigms by learning and applying the 7 hermetic principles to EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KnOW. without the 7 hermetic principles you cannot balance the mind. if the mind is unbalanced, whenever you get mere “glimpses of the end point or universal essential nature of any specific thing that exists, all the false paradigms morphs and contorts the perception exponentially. as i said the cure for this is learning and reassesing eveything you think you know via the 7 hermetic xioms- the first of which is the subject of this article-MENTALISM-theall is mind. As for the whole religious mindset, and jesus in paticular, i hate to break it to you but jesus is realy an exoteric, literalized, anthropmorphized and intentionally paradigmatic obfuscation from the priestly classes of christanity who are hiding in plain sight the secret they guard, the way and how they control you, AND YOU WORSHIP THAT THING S As LITERAL PErSON. jesus is besides being a representation of the sun astronomically and astrologically and also as representative of the SOLAR RA force. christ raised on the cross is the exorteric christian representation OF KUNDALINI. i wont go into specifically what kundalini is on many levels, you should figure that out for yourself. its always better to learn than have someone tell you. and if you dont have to believe me about jesus. but i gurantee leonardo da vinci was smarter than you so ask yourself why the last supper is picture about the sun and the 12 signs of the zodiac, or why he encoded metatron’s cube into his paintings. and as for evil of magic, wasnt moses a magician who turnd his staff into a snake and bested in magic all the pharaoh’s best magicians. ifyou learn hermetics then also learn tarot, hebrew as a alpha nmeric sytem ofsound and number correspondence. that will lead to to gematria where you will find in the hebrew language that serpent=nechesh is numerically identical to messiah=meshiach(nun chet shin=358 mem shin yod chet=358) also god told eve if she ate from the fruit of tree of knowledge she would die- but the serpent said ye will become like gods. anyway kundalini in sanskrit means coiled serpent. so what im saying is your religious systems have been telling you the only way to free the soul is by aligning with the essence of evil, when in fact they use the knowledge DAAT-hebrew to create a system that goes against th true divine will which one can experience and verify via kundalini circulation=buddha enlightenent/nirvana/moksha/ihsanthe halos over theheads of saints etcetcetc ad infinitum. according to hebrew language serpent=messiah, according to christinity the snake is the devil.

  9. Susan Causey says:

    You are my most honored teacher. I treasure you and your thinking — how you light the way forward. Thank you, Jon.

  10. kara says:

    Who do you think Willy Wanka/Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was made for? I always thought that the main message in that movie was about using Ones imagination… with consequences.

  11. Ame says:

    Phenomenal concept. One thing, why always Christianity, in particular, Catholicism used in your articles as focus of evil doers casting misery upon the world from their onset. Can you not think of a couple of “other” major religions used as smoke screens for control of the masses?

  12. Ame says:

    I think mythologist, Joseph Campbell came close.

  13. glacialtides says:

    Jon, You ran for Congress. What would they have done with you? You are amazing and having bookmarked you a long time ago and only just today have I now partaken the wine_I am set back by the audacity and the wonder of our common reality. dream. This will go on as it goes, but for one moment in time I am at a pause before mowing on this Mother’d Day _To mow or not to mow. Whose Mother’s day can I ruin_ not intentionally, but just by being noisy. I hope no one. The readers commenters here are amazing and fantastic and I think you are a giant piece of the gigantic cake of something so good for us_we just want more. You obviously know how big this is. Still even bigger than you know, but then that is the flip-side turned~around in there. What is the matrix thingy or else? Not to be scared.You have whittled it down to size. Everything is coming together. One way or another. Ulric (Seattle)

  14. Marshall says:

    Briliant words, but but all you thaugt here is only a moment of release.

    God exist, He is the truth. And set us free to decide and learn, besides He want us to follow him, cause He have the bridges when we´re stuck.

    I can´t accept the atthyst logic “religion fails, so God doesn´t exhists”.

    Just starting to know Rappoport´s work, wish I don´t find another insensate which beyhond doesn´t believe (which is compreensible) starts to create sophisticated theories do denie the undeniable: you can´t prove He exhists, but, can´t prove He don´t. Here faith needs to be put in practice.

    Oh, I can´t forget – He provides this and other kind of “magic” too, if it´s the case.

    Please don´t hate me or attack me only because of my beliefs, I just did read and wanted to say these words. But in this point, I´m right. Can´t prove, anyone can to himself.

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