FULL SPECTRUM INSIGHT
“Watch television?” She was awake now.
“Well,” Rydell said, “Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.”
“God’s on television?”
“Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.”
“So they watch tv and pray, or what?”
“Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter intothem.”
(William Gibson, Virtual Light)
At a cocktail party, one oligarch says to another, “I commit crimes to help myself.”
The other oligarch replies, “So do I. But I mask them so it appears I’m helping others.”
A third oligarch stops by. “You know,” he says, “I follow a simple formula. Try to get people to forget they have imagination. After that, everything takes care of itself.”
A fourth oligarch strolls over. “I created a universe,” he says. “People live in it. They can’t get out. They think I’m…what do they call me…God. They sing songs and write poems to me. It’s really quite ridiculous. But I’m on the tennis court most of time, so who cares?”
“How’s your game these days?” says a voice coming from the air around them.
Hermes, the trickster, suddenly appears in the room. He’s holding a gray L-shaped piece of metal in his hand.
And that was that.
A few days later, a key opened the sky and all the people escaped.
Hermes stood on a plateau and watched.
“Easy come, easy go,” he said.
Tripping the light fantastic.
(Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes)
JUNE 4, 2011. Human perception can be likened to the light spectrum, which is only partially visible to the eye.
Through the use of instruments, we know the rest of the light is there, but we don’t access it under normal conditions.
In 1995, after a number of smaller experiments, I made a series of three paintings on large pieces of brown cardboard. They appeared to be “pages” of text…pictographs in an unknown language. After I finished the paintings, I leaned them against the wall of my studio and left them there for several weeks.
One afternoon, I was lying on my bed, and I glanced over at the paintings. I asked myself, “What if these pictographs really WERE from another language?”
And then they were.
A shower of meanings…
To describe them…it isn’t a matter of making a translation into English. The meanings were…shifts of sensation-in-motion. They were also additional pictographs—some of which were flying figures.
The sensations and the flying figures were…“elevating aesthetics.” A doorway had opened for me, through which I saw and felt “versions of beauty-in-action” that were unlike anything I had ever experienced…and yet it was somehow familiar.
I entered a wider realm of sensation/feeling.
I knew, of course, that my imagination was playing a role, but there was another X factor.
The message was: there are languages like this.
They don’t function in the usual way. They don’t give you words that have specific limited meanings. They give you strings of pictographs that trigger wide elevated sensations and images, the immediate impact of which is undeniable.
These languages transport you.
I could see and infer that such languages could be read and spoken.
And there would be no problem of “what do you mean by that?”
The point wouldn’t be to “inflict” specific meaning on the other person.
One set of pictographs, dealt to another person, would set off an explosion of aesthetic sensations/feelings/images, and then a new set of pictographs would go back the other way and return the favor.
The spectrum of meaning, like light, is only partially visible to us. In fact, the spectrum of meaning has no limit. It hasn’t been set or pre-established in a finite way—and can’t be.
What happens to consciousness in the process of speaking or reading these new languages is the realization of a deep desire.
Psychology generally assumes that what is repressed is “negative material.” But actually, the reverse is true. The much more important repression is all about wanting access to wider realms of meaning. Realms in which fantastic, wonderful, elevating sensations/feelings/images are revealed/invented AS PALPABLE MANIFEST REALITIES.
From a societal point of view, the repression of THIS causes all sorts of untoward events and circumstances. It’s like being chained to a fence—you can go a certain distance from the fence, but then the chain reaches its limit. The frustration builds.
Yet, somewhere down deep, people realize this is a false state of affairs. The fence and the chain are delusions.
For the most part, people operate within a context of consensus meaning. They get used to it. They forget there is anything else. They make the best of things. They take their pleasures where they can find them. I’m not saying this reality is a veil of tears. But the major aspect of the spectrum is invisible.
Part of what magic is, is the opening of the gate of meaning.
With more and expanded meaning comes greater freedom.
Religion, generally speaking, is the accommodation that is made to the chain and the fence. It offers a glint of light, a promise of escape and release, and a suggestion of expanded perception/meaning.
However, one discovers that each religion has its own cosmology, its own picture of the cosmos. Its own set of meanings.
Whereas, we have the capacity to transcend all cosmologies.
Entertainment media, beyond the simple strategies of selling a story the public will buy, and re-inventing an old plot a network will bankroll, continues to search for new meaning…but within the narrow context of what is familiar. So even in this restricted territory, there is the consciousness of “the rewards and pleasures” of invented meaning.
Human desire is, in some respects, a strange animal, by virtue of the fact that it has been tamed. It expresses hope and wish within acceptable contexts. And then people pursue these tamed desires, thinking their fulfillment will make them happy. When that doesn’t happen, confusion sets in.
“But this is what I wanted. Then I got it. So where is the continuing joy?”
It turns out that, through imagination, through exploration of a wider spectrum of meaning, untamed desires surface. THIS is what the spirit and psyche really want to pursue. And when they recognize that, and when the pursuit is launched, a new and deeper happiness and joy appear. No longer superficial gloss that lights up and then fades, this fierce joy keeps ringing bells and pushing clouds in a landscape that has never before been experienced, and yet is familiar…
JON RAPPOPORT