TRADING UNIVERSES

by Jon Rappoport

January 12, 2012

See, I’ve got this universe here. I’ve got a whole bunch of others in a storage locker in Long Beach. This one I’m willing to trade, if you have one I’m interested in.

I don’t care what the rules are for yours. It could be an inside-out job with music, or a long skinny one with ladders and unlimited energy. But it has to have lots and lots and lots of painters, because I’m opening a gallery.

We could do a plus-cash deal as well. I might be willing to kick in some diamonds or gold bars.

But don’t, under any circumstances, try to pawn off the one we’re standing in right now, because it’s a lemon. Okay? Energy conservation law, an excess of machines, androids, wars, fundamentalists. I don’t want crowds of people screaming about God or gods or heaven or The Book or any of that stuff. And I don’t like some of the insects and animals. Baboons. I don’t like baboons at all. Whoever started that whole line should be put on a small asteroid and left there. And slugs. I’m not happy about slugs and snails. People eat snails. What further proof do you need that this universe is a whack-job?

Do you have one that’s populated by musicians as well as painters? I mean real musicians, not screamers with guitars and make-up. Improvised symphonies that span a whole galaxy and go on for a few hundred years at a time. That’s more to my liking.

But the very last thing I’m looking for is people who are unaware they’re living in just one cosmos out of trillions. Those people will tire you out faster than a big stack of rubber pancakes.

My cousin lives in one of those. He sends me messages about “the human condition” all the time. I have to tell you, although I’m not unsympathetic, this wears on a person. It’s so…parochial. And he thinks he’s on some kind of frontier of consciousness or something. Can you imagine? Babbling on and on about existential this and shrunken down that. Drives me bats! What am I supposed to say to the guy? He’s blind? I mean, he is, but he doesn’t react well to that sort of talk. He gets his fur up and goes on the attack. Pathetic.

Anyway, I’m up for a trade. If you get my voice mail, leave a detailed message. Remember—painters and musicians. Academics are okay, as long as they know their place. Throw in a few shrinks, just for laughs, and you might have a deal. All transfers are final. No refunds. No rebates. No discount coupons.

As you may have guessed, I don’t do God. If you’re thinking of trading me a universe where some guy’s playing God, forget it. First thing I’d do is fire him and his whole bureaucracy. But usually they have laws about that. You know, employment guarantees. With bonuses! I don’t want to get caught up in red tape. I say if you can’t fire a guy, you have to fire the system. I could be spending a few thousand years trying to engineer that.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE GOVERNMENT META-SPYING GAME

by Jon Rappoport

January 12, 2012

Reuters, the Atlantic Wire, and other outlets are running a story about the Dept. of Homeland Security monitoring websites and social networks.

A DHS document states this monitoring program is geared to keep the government tuned in to “situational awareness” and able to “establish a common operating picture.”

Which sounds like intentional gibberish. But these are technical terms. In its effort to track stories and traffic related to border security, terrorism, and bird flu (!), for example, DHS is trying to assess public perception of ongoing events.

With sites like Drudge, The NY Times, HuffPo at the top of the list, and FB, MySpace, and Twitter included, the government hopes to be able to estimate consensus reality, make no mistake about it.

What’s under the government’s magnifying glass here? Events? Not really. It’s the widespread PERCEPTION of events.

This is a form, if you will, of meta-spying.

DHS obviously has some kind of collating system and also algorithms to model the degree of consensus about a subject of interest.

What does the public think about border security at the moment?

What does the public think about bird flu right now?

I find this latter topic interesting, because for the past few months, I’ve had the sense the CDC might be getting ready to launch another phony epidemic—either a rerun of bird flu or a repeat of swine flu.

They were soundly defeated on the last swine flu go-around, largely because the internet (including this site) was alive with refutations of their nonsensical PR and invented case numbers.

In the wake of the defeat, they’ve been trying to figure out how to get another fake epidemic on the boards and make it seem much more real.

In order to do this, they need and want a system that can track and assess public opinion in tight increments of time, moving forward.

So here is the current game in a nutshell: there are events in the world (some of which are created or fabricated by governments); then there is the public perception of these events; then there is the government perceiving the public perception.

And now here I am perceiving the government.

It’s a perception-stack.

For instance, suppose next month the CDC gets up on its hind legs and announces there is an outbreak of a flu in, say, Arizona, and researchers have been dispatched to the area to carry out tests.

DHS would, day by day, or even hour by hour, monitor a huge amount of traffic and data on the Net, to gauge reaction, to gauge the level of belief, you might say.

Then the researchers announce it’s a mutated strain of bird flu, more dangerous than the last one. More monitoring of public reaction via the Net.

A rather high level of public disbelief? Carve out a new announcement. Try something a little more threatening, or bring in a politician who has a high level of credibility, and let him jump on the bandwagon. Then: how did that work out?

Getting the picture?

It’s the attempt to shape consensus reality through monitoring Net traffic and making adjustments.

With the enormous amount and speed of Facebook/Twitter data in the mix, DHS realizes they can keep updating consensus reality by the minute if they want to.

They can go a step further and set up FB/Twitter accounts and send out their own brands of data.

They can take this ball and run with it to the moon.

Of course, keep in mind that a significant slice of the US government has deceived ITSELF about the role Facebook/Twitter play in world events—like the fabled Arab Spring, which is really an op to put big chunks of the Middle East under Islamic control and jack up the price of oil and go green, “through necessity.”

Those marvelous intellectual students with iPhones sitting in cafes in Cairo running the revolution? I’ve got condos on Jupiter to sell you.

So you very well could get something like this—-

“I just got a text message that Chris Columbus landed in India,” said Queen Isabella. “Wow. We need to jack up the PR about those Hindus and Nehru jackets and ornate jewelry and so on.”

“Yes,” said her advisor. “And maybe we should have Chris disassemble a really big temple and bring it back here.”

“Wait a minute,” said the grand vizier. “Didn’t we float that Facebook post about India? I just heard a rumor he landed on some island in the Atlantic.”

“What!” said the queen. “What island?”

“I don’t know. Some of our citizens are confused. They’re wearing feathers on their heads. And leather britches.”

“They’ve gone crazy!”

“Nothing new there.”

No. Nothing new.

So if I write BIRD FLU HOAX BIRD FLOW HOAX BIRD FLU HOAX BIRD FLU HOAX BIRD FLU HOAX, does that interest anyone at DHS?

Have fun, fellas. You’re going to screw this up beyond belief. I know you are. By the time you’re through, you’re going to believe God just landed on Saturn in a spaceship with his mom and dad and a crew of Mormon singers.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE BEST THING ABOUT SANTA CLAUS

by Jon Rappoport

January 10, 2012

I didn’t do a Christmas post this year, so it’s really too late now, because everybody is glad the holiday is over. Too much dessert, weird presents, time to get back to work.

But what the hell. I like Santa Claus. Always have, always will. Mainly because, when you turn 10 or 11, you stop believing in him. This is a great thing. Think about it.

As a kid, you invest a tremendous amount of energy in the man, you wait for him to deliver the gifts, you love him…and then, one day, while you’re throwing snowballs at older kids, one of them comes up to you and says, “By the way, Santa isn’t real.”

And you get over it.

It’s a rite of passage.

“Honey, our son just figured out Santa doesn’t exist. Talk to him.”

“And say what? That we’ve been lying to him?”

But ultimately everybody’s cool. It was a good joke. A lovely joke. A nice thing.

And there were clues. Ten department stores, each with its own Santa. People shopping at Xmas. That’s a hard one to ignore, right? Why are they buying presents when Santa delivers them?

In December, every year, folks more or less all conspire to create Santa. Then they stop.

Religion should take a chapter out of that book.

“Let’s do Krishna. This week is Oobladee Krishna. We’ll make up tunes and go on hayrides. Next week, how about Buddha? The fat man with the enigmatic smile. Then maybe The Holy Ghost. Organ music, guilt, fear. Always dug the scary stuff.

But no. Pick a religion and you’re stuck with it. Or you rebel.

“Mom, I’m going to live in Oregon with the Church of the Cranberry Cult. I have to buy hip boots and a rake. You’ll probably never see me again.”

When I first heard about Buddha, I immediately thought of Santa. Both guys had girth. They obviously enjoyed a good meal. They weren’t trying to press their case too hard. It was a riff. You could pick it up and then lay it down. Nobody with a thumbscrew would knock on your door.

Not many people realize this, but Thomas Jefferson wanted each generation to write its own Constitution. Every 20 years or so, they’d sit down and dream up a new one. He was never trying to legislate a Forever.

“You don’t like a Republic? Try your own monarchy. Or something no one’s ever heard of. The point is, you decide. Otherwise, you’ll freeze yourself in marble. Get it? One of the primary freedoms is inventing new government.”

That never panned out.

Do I have explain why? Didn’t think so.

When we talk about Santa at Christmas, we smile and laugh. We all know it’s a joke. We’re making him up. It doesn’t seem to be a problem. No one turns angry. It’s the one imaginary celebration, and it works.

“This isn’t really happening…and yet it is.”

And underneath it all, that’s why we buy presents. Because we’re inventing the whole shooting match, and it feels good.

This is why I favor a state religion. If it’s the religion of Santa. The guy who doesn’t exist.

“And so my friends, as I stand here in this church, talking to you about our fundamental holiday, I must remind you we’re all writing script. Never forget that. We’re cranking it out by the ton. And next week, we’ll stop. These are the two pillars. It’s on and then it’s off.”

Amen. Oobladee. Dancer, Prancer. E=mc2. Except on Thursdays.

Happy New Year.

Another nice artifact.

Speaking of which, the next Magic Theater workshop is scheduled for Mar. 3 and 4 here in San Diego. If you’re interested, email me. Judging by the last workshop, this one is going to be a beauty.

Once you unlock “the secret of Santa,”and now we’re talking about the whole history of art, because artists freed us to see imagination in its fullest aspect, the field is wide open. Why take religion literally? Why take it as final, any more than you would take one symphony as final background music for the universe? Why take the universe as final?

Even if you wanted to pinpoint an author of the book called This Universe, should you worship him/her/it any more than you would worship the author of Moby Dick?

The whole point of Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf, from which comes the idea of the Magic Theater, is that the magician, Pablo, sees the universe as a joke, while the main character, Harry, can’t. He finds it so serious and oppressive that he walls himself off from other people.

Well, the universe, no matter how it presents itself, is nothing more than another Santa Claus.

And if we had any sense, we would institute holidays in which other universes are celebrated. If you think you can’t find any, walk into a museum.

As we see how central unlimited imagination is to the present and future, other people behind us are retrenching their own fundamentalist traditions, trying like crazy to reinvent the past. Their greatest fear is realizing that those traditions were imagined.

So what should we do? Argue over and over that the past, in some crucial way, is gone? Will that carry the day? No, we need to imagine and create and keep on doing it until it reaches flood proportions.

In doing so, appeals to authority won’t work, because there aren’t any. I don’t care where you want to locate them, how you want to dress them up, what wisdom you want to put in their mouths. Those authorities are, at best, characters in plays of invention. And guess who writes the plays.

When I was a kid, I found out we had a chimney that was blocked up with concrete. No one knew how it had happened. My father hired two guys to drop iron balls down it, and after several tries they gave up. That’s when I figured out Santa probably wasn’t real. The chimney was blocked! I mentioned this, and my parents looked at each other and shrugged. And that was that. Life moved on.

But I still dug the fat man in the red coat. He was magic, and magic never dies. Because we invent it. We find it. We’re a species of artists, whether we want to admit it or not.

In my role as prosecutor, I keep making that case, to squeeze out a confession. If you’ve been reading my pieces for any length of time, you know I’m pretty relentless.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MY CONTRARY VIEW

by Jon Rappoport

January 9, 2012

The great Buddha, who may or may not have existed, is supposed to have said, “As you think, so you are.” Actually, I prefer this: “As you think, so you create, unless you create first, in which case you can think anything you want to.”

But that’s not quite a slogan. It doesn’t have much appeal for the masses.

Let’s break it down.

How and what a person thinks becomes awfully, awfully important when that person isn’t creating. Because then, thinking is pretty much all he has going inside his mind. He chooses between thoughts like a cautious buyer with a tight wallet at a bazaar. You know, visit all the stalls, judiciously pick an item here, an item there.

And then, yes, the thoughts he highlights and turns into hardened ideas are going to affect his main actions and perceptions. QED.

But if he’s imagining and creating like mad, he can supersede this entire mechanism. He can decide what to create and then invent the thoughts that make it all work.

Of course, my position isn’t popular. It doesn’t ring bells from Nome to Tierra del Fuego.

People prefer the Buddhist formulation because it doesn’t require living a creative life. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you read through all the voluminous tracts and texts and commentaries of Buddhism, you’re going to find very little about imagination.

People with a modicum of intelligence are attracted to the Buddhist version of thought-affecting-Being, because they dimly apprehend that their own thoughts do seem to exert a powerful influence on them—and so they look for ways to replace one thought with another—as you’d try to replace an old car with a new one.

Or as you might try to replace one drop of water in the ocean with another drop. Good luck.

Buddha, if he existed, might have been a great guy. He might have been fun to talk to. Or not. But he didn’t seem to give much time to considering human creation along positive lines.

(Well, neither did any of the fabled prophets of the world’s premier religions.)

Too bad.

Since the great migration of Eastern spiritual thought to the West in the 1960s, I’ve been pondering, on and off, the reasons for this cut-rate sale. And I believe I’ve found a few good explanations—the most significant of which is people love having faith in ancient personages who knew everything worth knowing. What a concept. And add to that the idea of a lineage, a whole unbroken line of masters who have been transmitting wisdom and illumination of the highest possible order to regular folks for centuries, and you have a real winner.

It’s mysterious. It’s satisfying. It’s big. It’s hip. It’s reassuring. It’s metaphysics with a payoff. It’s goal-oriented without being crass.

And, for example, in the case of Buddha, a decent fellow who wasn’t claiming to be a god or a priest or a dictator, it’s a solution to suffering.

Wow. Escape suffering.

And there is a formula, the centerpiece of which is: desire produces pain; therefore, eliminate desire; attain wisdom.

In other words, if you’re suffering and you can’t get off that trolley no matter what you do, know that everyone else is on board, too. You have lots of company. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the structure of reality.

To ascend beyond reality, start by accepting that your desires cause the whole infernal game to play out, over and over. That’s all. So meditate in such a way that you quit desiring. And you’re out. You’re released from the struggle and the inevitable disappointment.

Voila.

Sound good?

(What about, as Henry Miller once wrote, the desire to eliminate desire?)

As all my readers know by now, I recommend a little thing called living through and by imagination. But if you’ve somehow managed to sit on and squelch all your desires, your interest in imagination is likely to hover around zero.

It’s a rarely considered fact that most, if not all, so-called major spiritual paths and religions downplay or ignore imagination. They prefer to imagine their own thin fairy tales and then impose them on their flocks. (I cover this point extensively in my book, now an e-book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies.)

Among those fairy tales are stories about “received wisdom.” You see, it comes to you from somewhere else. So you have to find a person or make a connection that can provide it to you. And of course, the “source” of the illumination is dressed up, mythologically speaking, to give it more juice and appeal. It wears robes, it flies, it speaks in stentorian tones, it is “all love,” it lives in a place called paradise, it hands down the highest possible information through intermediaries. It’s Important.

How do you compete with that? How can you yourself generate your own wisdom? You’re trapped in a web of your thoughts and desires. You must eliminate them, remove the filters, and then you’ll see. You’ll see and hear the call from the distant past. You’ll flourish as never before. Imagination? What’s that? What does that have to do with anything? How could it matter, when the masters are silent on the issue?

Spirituality, as it’s taught, is a fabulous con. A shell game. Eons old.

It’s one mildly interesting book in a library of 349623079654329086 volumes.

The whole notion of what spirituality IS has been hijacked. The caper was pulled off successfully because people are always ready to accept tales about “good things arriving” like presents under the tree at Xmas. If you start with that premise, you can sell all sorts of wild scenarios.

And the more complicated such scenarios are, the more they’ll appeal to the intellectual caste. Whereas, if you begin with the premise, YOU IMAGINE AND INVENT REALITY, you’re going to be marching uphill in a blizzard. How can you sell that, unless people really begin to follow the precept themselves? You can’t just sit there and say, “Hmm, very interesting. We each imagine and invent reality.” No, you have to do it.

But here’s the thing. If you DO do it, you’re off on the greatest adventure of your existence. And in the process, all the old fake spiritual dominoes fall, and what replaces them is a new spiritual view that transcends anything ever sold to the masses on planet Earth. A view that is uniquely your own.

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com