by Jon Rappoport
April 21, 2011
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In the grab-bag field of research involving human genes, some biologists have speculated that the 20,000 components of the genome are not enough to explain human function and behavior.
They have gone to another level—there must be additional programming or other elements that direct the genes to carry out multiple tasks.
This is all about cause and effect. In this case, the effect is everything a human does or thinks or feels. The cause would be genetic activity.
The goal, of course, is to understand the cause so well it can be manipulated to produce new effects.
When rare critics point out that explaining human life is different from explaining, say, a consecutive series of billiard balls striking each other on a felt table, researchers shrug it off and claim the human problem is simply more complex.
One biologist I interviewed several years ago told me, “This is the way science works. We start with a simple model of causation, and then, over time, we adjust that model so it can account for a wider range of effects.”
I said, “But suppose you eventually run up against the idea that an individual has free will? He can unilaterally decide to take an action, without any prior genetic determination.”
“That’s impossible,” he said. “There is always a cause. We just have to find it. What we used to call free will is really the result of invisible influences acting on a person.”
“How can you be so sure?”
For that, he had no answer.
Genetic theory is just the latest in a long line of ideas proposed to lock the human being into a structure. The will of the gods, the divine right of kings, demons, early childhood sexual trauma, group allegiance, etc.
Every era and age has its preferred method of PR, to make its hypothesis about causation seem brilliant.
And each of these explanations for human behavior is aimed at submerging the individual into an overall context that is far more important than he is.
Historically, the fly in the ointment has been art.
Because the artist seems to be FREE.
Actually, if viewed from the correct angle, the artist is exactly what every human being IS. But elevating the imagination to that level doesn’t make political hay in the marketplace of government. Or science.
And “scientists” tend to believe that imagination is merely a little flip and trick and switch in the gene structure.
Now, in the first flush of widespread computer use, many people have concluded that “the human species” is basically a design group. We build machines that think and solve and collate and organize. Soon, those machines will themselves design other devices. And so on and so forth, with every such entity aimed at carrying out particular defined functions.
So once more the artist is left out in the cold, because he isn’t, first and foremost, striving to invent robots.
What IS he doing?
Nothing much. Only creating worlds.
And there is the rub because, you see, everyone else is fixated on this world.
Of what possible use is another realm?
Even those who believe that other universes exist—the notion that an artist would create a universe that never existed before he made it seems superfluous and somewhat annoying.
“Why can’t he make himself useful the way everybody else does?”
This is where the rubber meets the road:
BE USEFUL.
If you can’t adopt that as your standard, you have a screw loose—or a gene pointing in the wrong direction.
So let me state it plainly. The artist shows paths to other realities in which we could all potentially exist. Realities that weren’t there until he invented them.
That is the side effect of his work.
The language we speak, our interactions, what we do every day, our chronic emotions, our preoccupations, our circumscribed lives, our so-called highest thoughts…all this could change radically in innumerable ways. And not through careful design, but through liberation from specified function. Through our own creation.
What would such a future look like?
It would not be one future.
Maybe that sounds like a koan.
If so, chew on it, and keep chewing.
Every morning, people wake up and salute this world, as it is.
The artist wakes up and creates worlds that aren’t and never were. If it’s true that, at bottom, we are all artists, then we would like to do that, too. Whether consciously or subconsciously, that’s what we want to do. The Policy of the world is to ignore that desire and pretend it doesn’t exist.
A strange thing.
“Let’s all pretend we aren’t what we are.”
Let’s pretend that every thought and operation of consciousness is the playing out of some mathematical truth, some biological and chemical truth, some truth of physics.
Let’s pretend that freedom is just another illusion, and the individual isn’t the First Cause of anything.
Let’s pretend that imagination is just another outmoded idea. The new notion of imagination involves a highly complex series of chemical reactions in the brain—and we are just passengers along for the ride strapped in the back seat.
Let’s pretend that, as prisoners, our only role is to discover those forces that enslave us, so we can manipulate them, in order to form a slightly different condition of slavery for ourselves.
If you follow this line of reasoning far enough, you will come to the place where human beings are pictured as machines whose only possible function—without a shred of free choice—is to re-design themselves…to become Machine B instead of Machine A.
Then the absurdity is complete.
Then you reject the whole line of reasoning.
Then you re-assert that freedom, imagination, and creative power are stark irreducible facts and realities.
Infinite realities.
You’re an artist.
I’m an artist.
Everyone is an artist.
That’s the truth everyone is searching for.
It just happens not to be a scientific truth.
Each one of us is free to create worlds without end.
If you don’t like that, you can find any number of umbrellas to sit under that will confine you to a smaller role and a smaller view.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)
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.