by Jon Rappoport

December 26, 2015

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“Here is the symbol,” the old wizard said. “It doesn’t matter what it means. It only matters that you take it. Then I’ll tell you what it means. I’ll keep telling you until you fall into a trance, and then I’ll be able to help you. I’ll be able to cure you of whatever you have.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

This article has to do with the individual, his consciousness, and imagination.

Symbols are, for the most part, group-tactics—assigned meanings designed to achieve certain effects on a mass level.

We could be talking about the arcane symbols of a secret society or even consumer objects, which are given meanings to impart the sensation of status. The new car, the necklace, the ring, the dress, the house.

For a passive mind, the world takes on its shape as symbols mark out space.

A more active mind can analyze and reject the meanings of symbols.

But there is another level the individual never reaches or understands unless he is deploying his imagination. Why? Because imagination invents its own spaces and meanings, against which symbols pale by comparison. A creative person can even invent his own symbols, imbue them with meanings—and then turn around and give them new meanings or destroy them. He isn’t only rejecting mass symbols; he’s inventing realities that go light years beyond them.

Of course, his inventions may strike passive minds as strange, possibly incomprehensible, because passive people define their space and their lives through conventional signs. They view all incursions or exceptions with suspicion.

I’ll take this further. Large numbers of people view the universe as something “extra-special,” and therefore they consider certain symbols “embedded” in it as sacred, permanent, intrinsic, and cosmically authoritative. Let them do that. Sooner or later they may wake up to the fact that the universe is a work of art. No one would be tempted to say a symbol found in a painting by Chagall is, by virtue of its presence on the canvas, a forever-thing with a forever-meaning. In the same way, no object in the universe can lay legitimate claim to some sort of eternal authority.

Consider the following thought-experiment: a person draws hundreds of symbols. He makes them up by the truckload. For each one, he concocts a meaning out of thin air. If he keeps this up long enough, it will begin to dawn on him that symbols and their meanings are arbitrary.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, this fact did, indeed, start to become obvious at the edge of consciousness. But then, with alarm at the implications (“I’m inventing my own realities, I can invent them”), there was a hasty retreat. People began to look for already-established symbols and their meanings. They opted to fit into one firm consensus or another. They went into hiding. They deserted their own imaginations. This was a crucial revisionism.

Orthodoxies which had been on their way out returned. Energy and conviction were pumped back into them. It was basically a show, a pretension, but the new adherents blinded themselves to that.

When it comes to the arcane symbols of secret societies, people are sucked into a trap. They buy these referents as inherently powerful—which is exactly what the “manufacturers” are hoping for. All the absurd trappings of the secret groups are concocted to achieve that effect.

In the 20th century, advertising agencies exploded with their brand of art. By associating products with feelings, sensations, and status, they made the products over into symbolic representations of “the good life.” At the same time, PR agencies rose to a position of unprecedented power. They made certain people, groups, and institutions into symbols of authority, truth, and goodness.

Television networks spent enormous amounts of money promoting and shaping elite news anchors as sculptures of believability. “You want our messenger of truth in your home every night.”

It’s easy to see that, in order for all these machinations to work, the individual and his consciousness of his own imagination needed to be downplayed. The very notion of the individual had to be minimized. The program was: mass symbols for a mass reality.

To the degree that people could be convinced to believe that symbols had inherent and permanent meaning, the program would establish itself as the prime mover in society.

Lessons were learned from the long-running show called organized religion. After all, the controllers of that game had been winning the war of symbols for centuries. They could invent, revise, and distort history to their hearts’ delight, and substitute their own referential stories.

Initially scorned and derided, the profession of psychoanalysis formed itself into its own religion with its own pregnant symbols: the Oedipus complex, transference, and so on. Except it flew the new banner: science—itself a sign of unimpeachable accuracy.

Its nasty stepchild, psychiatry came to invent some 300 symbols, which were called “mental disorders.” The trick was, all 300 required drugging. “We want to do more than sell our concepts. We want to put toxic chemicals in your body.”

On the political front, leaders discovered they could peddle a war quicker than a rabbit could run down its hole. With the aid of media, and a bedazzled public, foreign leaders could be transformed from nobodies into incarnations of evil overnight. Gear up the troops! Attack! These days, by manipulating a cluster of symbols all at once, the public will believe: a leader must be overthrown; the rebels and freedom-fighters who are trying to accomplish that must be supported; those rebels are evil and must be destroyed. Absurd contradictions? Senseless gibberish? Who cares?

A whole civilization can chew and swallow its own tail, turn upside down while singing a catchy tune, go to war, and juggle a few hundred trillion dollars of debt, and it all seems to “make sense,” as long as the citizenry accepts designated symbolic references.

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(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

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Against this insanity stands the individual, with his untapped power of imagination, his capacity to invent realities and futures of his own choosing—if he will wake up to that truth.

The truth has always been there, not in the jingle-jangle jigsaw crazy world, but inside himself.

Here is a note I made as I began putting together my second collection, Exit From The Matrix:

“Society, civilization, the world may all try to legislate and propagandize against the individual and his power, but the individual can always rebel. However, he needs to remember that rejecting the hypnotic consensus is just the beginning. After he shakes off the tangles and webs, he needs to imagine something else, something different, something new, something close to his deepest desires, and he needs to build and create that in the world. This is the yes that follows after the no. This is the difference between despair and triumph.”

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 29^th 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.