Magic and depression
A vaccine against magic
by Jon Rappoport
July 8, 2015
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
“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
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. Of course, one explains 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 simply because “they couldn’t do better.” They didn’t have science, and 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.
Historically, the impulse for magic had to be defamed and reduced and discredited. Why? Obviously, because the Westerners who were poking through ancient cultures 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 power, 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 gets you a lump of coal in a sock, a spiritual cardboard box to live in.
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.
Back home, the anthropologist takes two Paxil and goes off to teach a class on the meaning of ancient eyebrow trimming in Tierra del Fuego.
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.
The desire for magic in every individual is squelched. So the first order of business is the restoration of imagination, from which all magic flows. Imagination is sitting there, always ready, 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.
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 in this area 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 ultimately 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 NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Speaking of Magic…here is my latest effort as a White Wizard. Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/As_0V9hUha0
Hi Jon-
Followed this link, looking for sources/footnotes..
Just attended Tibetan Bön retreat on DreamYoga.
This is one of the most exhilarating articles I’ve read in a long time, by anybody. Jon the world needs your perspective so badly. I read your articles everyday. Thank you for your service to humanity. Bless you!
what Ruth said!!
Exactly…no more to say.
Jon: you are full of magic and it is contagious!
Self murdered people. I had people around me, defending transhuman ideas. Me just saying “well you can have all augments you want but whole idea is just BS” was immediate reason for them to argue with me. Trying to convince me to all this is just the next natural step, like reinessance. I tried and think so much about how to explain these people, this is just a stupid idea and came up with this:
All electronic circuits are basicly about control of flow. A basic radio circuit, you control the way of electrons moving around which is electricity. Or image dissector for first television tube which is more complex but still same idea. A circuit is about control of flow, way of controlling flow of energy different ways makes strange devices. Opening-closing, dividing, multiplying ways..now what is CPU? Silicone transistors which are programmable, semiconductors that can be logically programmed on-the-fly. So softwares can be created, anything is possible without making circuit boards. Semiconductor: 1 and 0’s. Being able to create virtual circuit boards.
This is an illusion, a sub reality created by logic, using electricity and completely about experimenting. It’s like those those images “if you look at this pattern, you will see a dinosaur in a minute” kind of thing. It’s fun too but, the mentality people have quite different. This is like saying hey we got one up on the nature now, we beat it. Now we created something much more meaningful and true which is far from it.
When you look at a simple daisy, lets say popped out from pavement. You don’t see ones and zeroes. It’s not a cube or two dimensional illusion. Its a self created organized happened pattern and not so simple, you see this amazing geometry at middle or everywhere of this little thing. Fibonacci number or sequence, you see It there. Pretty complex for a little thing popped out from pavement. It has the pattern of infinity, this simple thing. And this beats ones and zeroes, this beats all that sub reality. Because this thing is self organizing, self creating. It comes out by itself. It is alive, compared to a thing, a machine or some circuit board this thing is alive. It has color, expression, you see that struggle it gone thru coming out of that pavement.
When I expressed this concept to my friend, said “wow I never thought like that”. I said “why not, you are It too, why thinking yourself as ones and zeroes?”
Is It reasonable to build better dams for infinite expressions of consciousness?
one-zero people / transhumanists are playing a funny game tho. good on them.
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
– Roald Dahl
You know what I just realized? I love this quote so much because, when I read powerful articles like this, and I feel sparks of inspiration, a yearning to create, my response is to “share” the article, or to find a quote like this and put it on my wall. I want to take all this feeling and neatly organize it into a box within the system I live in. Anything but real creative action. I am glad he has made his collections, I could use help to break free.
“…from the moment a newborn baby emerges into the light of day, he/she has a desire for magic.”
So very true! Whoever was bored as a kid? Endless exploring, awe & wonder, with an imagination that would not quit!
An admonition for us older, crusty folks…
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
•Matthew 18:3.
Got a laugh re “eyebrow trimming,” lol, & even “array of pedophiles.” As serious as that is, I laughed anyway. It must have been due to its unexpected placement in the sentence. 🙂
I know this is not what Gokmen had in mind but I couldn’t resist…
Gokmen wrote: “All electronic circuits are basicly about control of flow.”
Who wants to “control the flow” of our very nerves & cells? This is more deceptively evil than bombs (obvious, fast kill) whereas this is “hidden, slow kill”:
–“The Smart Grid will put everything in [your city] inside an electrical circuit. It is very dangerous…”
•Curtis Bennett, Electrician & Thermal Radiation Expert: ThermoGuy.com
Gokmen: “A basic radio circuit, you control the way of electrons moving around which is electricity.”
–“So how does the human body respond to this pulsing radiation? ‘Think of a magnet,’ explains Dave Stetzer, an electrical engineer and power supply expert in Blair, WI. ‘Opposite charges attract, and like charges repel. When a transient is going positive, the negatively charged electrons in your body move toward that positive charge. When the transient flips to negative, the body’s electrons are pushed back. Remember, these positive-negative shifts are occurring many thousands of times per second, so the electrons in your body are oscillating to that tune. Your body becomes charged up because you’re basically coupled to the transient’s electric field.'”
•1/18/10: “Is ‘electrosmog’ harming our health?” – NBC News: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34509513/ns/health-cancer/t/electrosmog-harming-our-health/
Gokmen: “A circuit is about control of flow, way of controlling flow of energy different ways makes strange devices. [Smart Grid Technology]. Opening-closing, dividing, multiplying ways…”
–“…electromagnetic radiation causes electrical induction, by polarizing and depolarizing of all nerves and muscles, forcibly overriding and coupling to the bioelectrical system of everything biological, and flipping on and off the switches of the body like a strobe light, literally billions of times a second, while shredding the DNA irreparably.”
•Curtis Bennett
On a brighter note, appreciated your Daisy description…
https://rosemarywashington.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/img_4209.jpg
It reminded me of this:
“Consider the lilies [or daisies!] of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
•Matthew 6:28.
Your prescription for more imagination and creativity is certainly a good one, but you seem to be under the spell that we don’t use magic anymore. On the contrary, magic is what got us out of the Great Depression, and what has primarily kept the country going for the last 35 years. Only our greatest magicians tend to congregate on Madison Avenue and Wall Street. They are called financial wizards for a reason. Their most common trick is creating money out of thin air, but their greatest trick was convincing us that not just colored pieces of paper but invisible bits in a computer were valuable enough to be giving up parts of our life for.
Right on the spot. That’s what I’ve always been saying. The Elites have a lot of imagination to create reality. But, unfortunately, they are the Black Magicians. It’s time for the White Magicians to wake-up and take over this planet.