OPEN-ENDED MAGIC
I’m sitting there at The Blue Scam having my second beer and thinking about how I can escape a teaching offer, when Jimmy Skimmy walks into the place high and hard with his fire-engine red sports jacket and matching fedora, a green parrot feather in the band, and kisses Marie on her heavily powdered cheek, coming away with a spot on the end of his long sharp nose.
He sees me, reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out two long tickets. He nods. We’re in.
The seasonal rains are pelting the metal roof of the place, and people are blabbing at tables and the speakers are playing a ride tune by Mars, the wall of pinball machines is shaking with explosions, and I think I’m screaming, but I can’t hear myself—tomorrow night, Jimmy and I are leaving.
Blowing this universe.
Finally.
(Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes)
JUNE 1, 2011. Consciousness itself wants improvisation.
That may sound like an odd statement.
But, backtracking, realize your consciousness is not a certain amount of “air or liquid” in a container for all time.
Unfortunately, some quasi-philosophies suggest that. They view consciousness the same way a soup manufacturer assesses his work: make the can hold so much volume and fill it up with soup.
Then, of course, we have cosmologies in which consciousness is a buttery sauce spread all over the cosmos, from which we take little sips.
Let’s start here:
Consciousness creates more consciousness.
That is its primary interest.
Not floating, not expanding, but creating. More of itself.
Itself? What does that mean?
Are we talking about molecules of the “same stuff?” Just more of them?
No.
Consciousness is diverse. It’s not stuff to begin with. It’s the capacity to be conscious. It’s being conscious. It’s non-material.
In a live way. Not in some dull fashion.
For example, if you knew what tomorrow was going to bring, you would be aware of MORE.
But there is another road that is much different. It’s best described by two words: spontaneity and improvisation.
These are VERY interesting words. Spontaneous comes from the late Latin, and means “of one’s own accord.” Improvise is from French and Latin—“not foreseen, unprepared.”
The French and Latin roots don’t begin to encompass all the modern meanings and implications.
Awareness is often about seeing patterns and systems and structures.
But consciousness wants more and wants DIFFERENT. Face it, seeing patterns, after a while, doesn’t turn on the adrenaline.
However, when you improvise, when you take an action that is spontaneous, you break out of old reality into something else, something that has no name.
Consciousness wants THAT.
It can’t catalog it, it can’t fit it into neat compartments, but it wants it.
In 1963, I was painting in a very small apartment in Santa Monica, California. A table, small sheets of paper, oil crayons. One night, I had a blank sheet in front of me. I was about to begin. All of a sudden, there was a shift. To describe it, it doesn’t seem like much. But I knew in a way I had never known before, that I had the freedom to make any shape on that paper. This wasn’t a dry obvious fact, it was an exhilarating magic. And yet, I had no shape in mind. This was all pre-painting. This was a tremendously elastic and flexible sense of freedom. It was warm. It was more real than real. It was a unique immersion in happiness.
All in a minute.
And then when I put the crayon to paper and began to make a shape, the feeling grew. This line, this shape, any line, any shape…it was so much more than I’d ever realized. Drawing.
Spontaneous, improvised.
I drank it in.
It was as if this was what I had been looking for, without knowing it, all my life.
Some truth about that moment has never left me. It confirmed suspicions and leanings I’d had previously, and it handed me, on a silver platter, something I truly wanted to know.
Under endless disguises and masks and apparatus, improvisation-from-nothing really exists.
So when I say magic isn’t a system or a manual or a structure, perhaps now you have a better idea of what I’m talking about.
When you feed consciousness a spoon of THIS, it has the party it’s been looking for.
Of course, you can’t chain yourself to the floor and remain in such a moment. “I had a spontaneous and ecstatic Q-3TY-7 and now I’m going to tie lead weights to my legs so I can continue to be in Q-3TY-7.”
Fortunately, CREATING and SPONTANEOUS and INVENTION and IMAGINATION and IMPROVISATION are all close cousins, and they all engender escalations out of old reality systems…no cover, no minimum, stay as late as you want to.
Free is free.
Magic is open-ended.
Imagination/creating are the open sky and the rocket and the infinity of possible paths, and that’s just for starters.
“…a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
When scientists try to talk about consciousness in terms of the flesh inside the human skull or twists of DNA, they are as far from the truth as the farthest universe is from a doll house in an attic in Pittsburgh.
JON RAPPOPORT