WHY IMAGINATION EQUALS MAGIC
“Mountains, Bruce, mountains,” the manager said.
“Mountains, Bruce, mountains,” Bruce said and gazed.
“Echolia, Bruce, echolia,” the manager said. “Echolia, Bruce–”
“Okay, Bruce,” the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I’ll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won’t puzzle him.
Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly
MAY 27, 2011. Ordinary reality—and all those dedicated to living in it and propagating it—is the residue, the leftover, when imagination isn’t being employed with intensity.
Ordinary reality is organized with a minimum of imagination. That is its hallmark.
Ordinary reality is what people usually think is (might be) changed by magic.
Yet, ordinary reality is constructed as a network of interconnected parts, in order to exclude imagination.
“I’m ordinary reality. Try to change me through imagination.”
This can provoke much hitting-head-against-brick-wall.
Of course, there are many venues in which imagination can be deployed. The arts. Science. Invention. In fact, the closer you look, the more you realize imagination can be used universally.
However, when applied against ordinary reality, it often seems imagination produces little or no change.
That’s an illusion.
It turns out that ordinary reality was created BY imagination—but with a strange plan. “We’ll use imagination to make a reality that seems to resist imagination.”
In other words, it’s a trick.
It’s like saying, “I’ll create a labyrinth, so I can wander around in it and get lost.”
Or: “I’ll pretend I have no imagination, so I can need imagination.”
Or: “Let’s build the greatest wall there ever was. Let’s use our imagination to construct that wall around us, let’s make it out of steel and make it a hundred feet thick, so that when we’re finished, we’ll be trapped inside and we won’t be able to figure a way out, even though we want to get out.”
Or: “Let’s build ordinary reality so that it seems to resist magic in every way…and then let’s say we really want to make magic.”
Nice trick.
How about this for a solution? We grasp the full meaning of this self-defeating strategy…and then, boom, with that insight, we find we can walk through walls.
Doesn’t work.
How about this? Particle by particle, we dismantle ordinary reality and put all those particles out into space and then we’ll able to make magic? Doesn’t work.
What does work?
As I’ve been saying, live through and by imagination long enough and intensely enough, and magic will occur.
Seems too simple, too straightforward, too daunting. But it’s true.
Because this is how you really build ordinary reality: you use enough imagination to make it exist and make it seem to resist imagination…and then you build into that process an ever-encroaching loss of your imagination…so that, at the moment the walls are finished, you appear to possess less imagination than you need to walk through the walls. Time-release self-defeat.
It’s another illusion, because you never lose one iota of imagination…but you pretend you do.
The way beyond this ridiculous complexity is: you live through and by imagination long enough and intensely enough…and you’ll eventually—as a side effect—be able to do magic.
THE TOWER
The tower came crashing down in the storm, not like on the Tarot card, but in pieces, one on top of the other, some splitting out sideways in the rain, and bales of money broke open and the bills drifted in the wind until they became wet enough to fall like flat stones. The tower at the end of the world was gone. The station was gone. No more transmissions. No more information. The egregious lies stopped. There was only the sound of rain and wind. And the thought of what tomorrow could bring.
He came out of the cave with a harpoon looking for fish. Then suddenly, he realized how ridiculous this was. The sound of rain didn’t mean fish. Why had he thought, over and over, that it did? He dropped the spear and looked up at the sky. He floated up off the earth.
JON RAPPOPORT
If you’re receiving this as an email, scroll down a little and click on MARKETPLACE to check out my audio seminars.