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FRED MEETS GOD

May25

FRED MEETS GOD

THE EXTENT AND DEPTH OF HUMAN CONDITIONING

MAY 25, 2011. Here is a principle for you. To understand how deep human programming goes, you have to view the extreme possibilities in the opposite direction.

If you believe there are ten things in this universe, only ten, and most people are aware of three, then you can say they are minus-7. Their conditioning is keeping them from noticing 7 things. Get it?

But of course, there aren’t only ten things in the universe. You’ve missed the extreme possibilities. Let’s say, in truth, there are a quadrillion to the quadrillionth-power things in this universe—and you just found that out. If you know that now, then you say the people who are aware of only three things in the universe are programmed to an incredibly greater degree than you originally believed. Their blindness is their programming.

If you want to understand the depth of human programming, you need to be able to view the extreme possibilities in the opposite direction.

In the articles I’ve been writing about language in the last few months, I’ve been pointing out that many possible kinds of language exist, including those that haven’t been invented yet…and it is ingrained conditioning that prevents people from realizing this.

They’re programmed to communicate in subject-action verb-object sentences, or subject-being verb-adjective sentences.

I’ve suggested, for example, that languages can be invented in which nouns are also verbs…rays and streamers and energies of action radiate from them. These nouns are things and they are actions all rolled up into one.

I’ve further proposed that these nouns could, while having great impact, change their meanings radically, over and over.

I’ve suggested that it is the viewer, the reader (in the case of written text) who, THROUGH IMAGINATION, would find and attribute and invent these changing meanings.

A language of dynamic imagination…

Of course, in order for such languages to appear and be used, human beings would need to escalate their reliance on imagination. Which would create new dimensions and layers of consciousness.

And if we conceive of the radical possibilities of these invented languages (which I’ve been painting for the past year), and we compare them to the kind of language-awareness that’s prevalent in Earth cultures, we can see that the depth of the restrictive programming about language is much greater than we supposed.

I choose not to focus much on the conditioning side of the coin—I’m interested in the upward breakthroughs.

So in this piece, I want to try to give you an example.

Imagine that you’re looking at a shape on paper. It has four or five parts and they flow through and around each other. You begin to use your imagination on it. You begin to invent and therefore find meanings in this complex shape. All in all, you’re going to look at this shape for about ten minutes, and you’re going to imagine/invent what you can.

Well, let’s say that in the space of that ten minutes, for a second ortwo, you’re going to imagine a particular flash of ideas/images/meanings/sensations…..and in that second or two, EVERYTHING I write from now on in this piece, after this intro, is going to be that flash, conveyed to you through your own imagination, IN THOSE ONE OR TWO SECONDS, ZAP BOOM, ZOW.

Which is, of course, just a tiny fraction of what you’re going to invent/see in that shape in 10 minutes…just a tiny fraction, but it’s there, it’s indisputably there. Pretend that’s so.

Everything I’m going to write from now on in this article is going to be what flashes for you in two seconds of looking at that complex shape, in a language that has just been invented.

This is what I mean by EXTREME POSSIBILITIES.

This is what I mean by shaking off the doldrum of Earth culture.

And if you ask, is this complex shape you’re looking at a really cardinal shape in this new invented language, I’m going to say: no it isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the more ordinary shapes in that language which has 50 million different shapes.

Okay?

Ready?

Here we go.

Fred is a helluva guy. He’s made 50 universes I know about. They’re interesting places. He just dreams them up and pops them into existence. Bang. Like that.

He’s pretty cheerful, too. He has a place over by the river and the tigers. He doesn’t try to tame them. Couldn’t if he wanted to. They come running at him while he’s out for a walk, launch themselves at him, and he puts up his hand and stops them. But they stop him, too. It’s a standoff, everybody hanging in mid-air, until it’s time to fall down and out wheezing and sneezing and laughing. That’s our provincial version of a picnic.

Anyway, a few months ago, Fred was roaming around, a long way from here, and he came across this universe that had an entrance like a big mall. There was a glowing sign above the entrance:

MAGICAL WEIRD SECRET FANTASTIC ESOTERIC FABULOUS ILLUMINATING ENLIGHTENING ULTIMATE PLACE.

A guy in a tattered doorman’s uniform stood by the door.

“How much?” Fred said.

“Twelve bucks cover, two-drink minimum. The band doesn’t show up until eleven.”

Fred handed him a hundred. The guy blinked, smiled, stepped aside, and Fred walked through the door.

Inside it was ink black. Little holes in black cloth covered the ceiling. Gold glints showing through.

Fred walked into another dark room where there were all sorts of paintings on the walls and altars and tiny candles in long rows. He moved along into a blue dome, where men were standing around measuring things. Globes, plants, stuffed creatures. A inscribed plaque hung over a big blue cube. “Sacred Geometry.” Fred watched the men measuring things for a minute and then walked to the exit and into the nightclub, which was almost empty. A few people sat at the bar. At the end of the bar, he saw a blank door in the wall.

As he approached it, a big guy in a jump suit blocked his way.

“For employees only,” he said.

Fred nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to go inside. How about five hundred.”

Fred flashed his roll, peeled off five bills, and the big guy snatched them out of his hand.

“You get two minutes,” he said.

Fred stepped past him, opened the door and went in.

It was an old office with a light bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. Behind a battered desk, a man sat looking at big ledgers. He glanced up and waved Fred to a chair. Fred sat down.

The man looked up.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Just trying to get the lay of the land,” Fred said.

“Well,” the man said, “I’m the boss. God.”

“Really.”

“Right.”

“You own this place?”

The man smiled.

“I own everything,” he said.

“That’s a broad term.”

“Anything you can see, anywhere you go, it’s mine.”

Fred leaned back in his chair.

“So how do you play it?” he said.

The man looked at Fred for a few seconds.

“You some kind of hipster?” he said. “Basically, nobody leaves this universe. That’s the rule. And it’s a good rule, because there’s nowhere else to go.”

“But I came from somewhere else,” Fred said.

“You think you did,” the man said, “but if it’s real I own it. Get it?”

“I think I do,” Fred said.

“Of course,” the man said, “with somebody like you, which we don’t get too often, there are arrangements that can be made.”

“Sure,” Fred said.

“Make me an offer,” the man said.

“I won’t punch a big hole in space-time,” Fred said.

“What?”

Fred said it again.

“Wise guy, huh?” the man said.

Fred smiled.

“Just chewing the fat,” he said.

“I could call security and have you locked up.”

“Yeah,” Fred said. “but wherever you put me, I would still have access to space-time.”

Silence, as the man stared at Fred.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Let’s take it down a notch.”

“Good idea,” Fred said. “I’ll give you this.”

And he produced a high stack of gold bars standing on the floor.

“Real stuff?” the man said.

“Hundred percent pure,” Fred said.

“What’s your game?” the man said.

“Just nosing around,” Fred said. He paused. “I make you for a middle manager. Somebody put you in charge and they went off. You’re God by appointment. Interim. But you’ve been here a long time. And whoever gave you the job, the one who made this whole continuum…for him it was just a lark. He popped it, then needed a deputy. You’re running a protection racket. You collect skim. You probably have a few good hypnotists working for you. Some PR people. They try to keep things smooth.”

There was a long silence.

The man stood up.

“If it exists,” he said, “I made it and it’s mine.”

“Sure,” Fred said. “Play out the string.”

“You’re guilty.”

“Of what?”

“I could list fifty violations,” the man said. “It all comes down to denying I’m the one and only creator.”

“Yeah,” Fred said, “that would be it. I’ve heard it before. I was hoping this place would be a little more interesting, but…same old same old.”

The man’s face turned purple.

“I’m in the BOOK,” he said.

“Right,” Fred said. “I was in a place once where people wrote a book apout me. I laughed for a long time until they couldn’t stand listening to it, and they burned it.”

“Well,” the man said, trying to pull himself together. “That’s your problem. I’ve got mine.”

“You have no idea,” Fred said. “But eventually, I bet, you will.”

He turned to leave and felt a strong pulse at his back. It was one of those stay-where-you-are tentacles…he shrugged it off like a slow Thursday afternoon and disappeared.

Fred gets around. He brings my wife and me exotic little souvenirs from his trips, and we have them hanging on the wall of our living room. They’re usually geometric knick knacks. He tells us they represent what he calls “one-and only” places. People prop up some invisible celebrity who lives far away from them and claim he made their particular continuum. I don’t quite get it. It sounds crazy. If I needed that kind of thing, I’d vote for Fred—but he’d just start that laughing thing. Truth be told, my wife and I are getting a little tired of the decorations on the wall. It’s building up into a clutter. She’s almost ready for a trip to the Void. That’s where you stop creating anything for a while. It’s a zero state. Very refreshing.

We used to run a spa for it. That’s where we met Fred. He came in one day and we let him use a void-room for a few years. When he came out, he said, “You know, if they made bullshit into money, everybody in every universe would be a billionaire.” For that one we inscribed a sign, and it’s above the sink in the kitchen, next to the little two-inch coil that supplies all the energy we need in this continuum.

Once, three guys from somewhere showed up and tried to snatch it. My wife and I launched our striped selves at them, and there wasn’t much to clean up afterwards.

BOOM. Your two seconds are up. And that’s what you invented in two seconds of looking at one shape…which you’re going to keep looking at for ten minutes…and that shape is one of 50 million in that language.

Chew on it.

Think about it.

Imagine extreme possibilities.

JON RAPPOPORT

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ENGINEERING A COCKEYED CONTINUUM

May24

ENGINEERING A COCKEYED CONTINUUM

MAY 24, 2011. Well, we tried to build a universe, you know, a really big one, but it kept falling apart. They shipped in some seal they said was unbeatable, but that didn’t even begin to help close the cracks.

It must have been a design flaw, but the architects swore it wasn’t their fault. And the bio-labs were useless.

The engineers tried, but they were on patch-patch duty around the clock, and then big sections caved in and blew out through the wormholes.

It was a mess.

One guy, I don’t know, some kind of nomad on independent contract, just laughed and told us we were going about it the wrong way. He said all we needed to do was stand back and set up a really good movie projector. Something like that. Nobody paid any attention to him.

Then, finally, a domehead scholar showed up, and in three days he solved the whole problem.

Religion.

Going that way brought everything into focus.

Turned out it was the universal seal, and those huge drifting pieces came back together like filings drawn to a magnet.

Of course, you then convince the inhabitants they need to bow and scrape and believe in one creative force that lies outside themselves. You can sidestep the need to appoint actual deities by claiming they’re all invisible. That would be a tough sell for about five minutes, and then everybody would settle in.

Just a matter of transference (non-Freudian), through which the inhabitants yield up their native capacity to do magic to gods they’ll never see or know.

When, in the general population, symptoms of “magic-repression” rear their heads, you call it something else, and you distract everybody by inventing ceremonies and rituals.

Scriptures are nice. Particularly, if they’re said to have been found rather than concocted.

Eventually, people won’t even know what you mean by the word magic. They’ll claim they’re confused, it doesn’t makes sense, it must have happened in a distant past too obscure to reconstruct.

Centuries later, everybody is used to being inside the continuum. Permanently.

Of course, that wasn’t what the original designers had in mind when they started building the universe, but they were willing to make sacrifices to get the job done.

And that movie projector deal was apparently too far-out for them to grasp. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of time and suffering, if they’d caught on to the concept that reality can be manufactured whole-hog. Boom. It doesn’t need piecemeal construction at all.

You put one guy in the Void, which is to say, you ask him to stop creating altogether, and once he does that and gets used to the state of mind, he unrolls a whole universe from scratch, from nothing, in a few minutes, at most.

If you want to go into his continuum and see what’s it like when he’s done, you can. But there are no gods, there is no ritual, there are no hierarchies, and there is no contention of SACREDNESS about his art.

And the measurements of things? You know, the fact that a leaf on a nut tree is 5.1265 to the length of its 12.4902 branch…and that ratio is also found in the eye to the nose of a certain fish and the horn to the leg of a particular mammoth and the tooth to the jaw of a monkey…it was just the way it was. Interesting, but no big deal.

You can visit this universe whenever you want to. And leave, too. There aren’t any entrance or exit signs. You just hop in and hop out.

It might be fun, it might be thrilling, it might be ecstatic, it might be boring. Up to you to decide.

You don’t like this one, there are plenty of others to see.

One—that is to say, the illusion there is only one—is always a problem. The continuum that has Earth in it—they call it the physical universe. To a lot of people who look at it from the outside, it’s a joke, because, well, the illusion is operating there. All manner of weird things going on. The pride in living in the “only one,” the continuous manufacturing of humility, too, as the flip side of that coin. Those people are really bizarre. Even the scientists. They keep figuring out more and more about the construction details—which, of course, is okay, if that’s what they want to do—but what do they have in the end? What do they think is going to be the result of all that work? Seems like another twist on religion. You could just hand them a complete set of blueprints, but they’d probably make a Scripture out of it. I once knew a guy off the X-145 who tried to set himself up as a god in one of these continua. No, really. He’d come out on his balcony every morning in a multi-colored bathrobe and holding, what was it, a lamp in his hand. I forget what it was supposed to signify.

He could talk, I’ll give him that. And he’d draw small crowds. But they thought he was funny. They laughed and took pictures. The guy said he had created that continuum and therefore he was in charge of it. I mean, even if he had made it (which he hadn’t), so what? He could suddenly make up all sorts of rules? The only basic rule is, don’t punch a hole in a continuum somebody else created. That is, unless it’s one of those “only ones,” and the people there need a kick in the pants…

JON RAPPOPORT

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INVENTING REALITY

May24

CREATING REALITY (updated)

MAY 23, 2011. Creating reality presupposes that the status quo isn’t permanent. This sounds obvious, but when you expand the meaning and territory of status quo and realize it covers all aspects of life and even the universe itself, you have something worth considering and chewing on.

You have magic.

You have whatever qualities a human being possesses that would allow him to alter the status quo.

When a person steps out into this journey, one of the first mistakes he can make is to assume that whatever reality he creates must resemble, in all respects, physical reality. It must mirror physical reality.

In painting, this would be saying the artist has to paint a bowl that looks like a bowl and behaves like a bowl, and he has to put apples in it that look like apples—his success DEPENDS on his ability to paint apples that look like they could be picked right off a tree.

It would be like saying a slave, newly released, has to imitate his former master down to the last detail of form, habit, style, thought, and action.

It would be saying the son has to emulate the father.

There used to be a word that was quite popular. You don’t hear it used in the same way anymore. The word is REBEL. Not protester, rioter. Rebel. At one time, the word carried a sense, in some quarters, that the person had intelligence. He had some inkling of what he was doing and why. He had a spirit of struggle and determination. He wasn’t just saying no to something, he had something better in mind to replace what he was rebelling against.

I bring this up, because, in order to create reality and cast aside some aspect of the status quo, a person needs to have the spirit of a rebel. He can’t be a slave in his mind. He can’t be a know-nothing. He can’t be a fool.

The spirit of the rebel permits a new perspective about reality—how reality seeps in and puts people into a state of sleep. The rebel doesn’t want to go to sleep.

But these days, there is a culture of spiritual change in which the person is essentially passive. He looks to the rainbow to come down out of the sky and embrace him, without effort—and he believes that the Great Change will just descend on him like a pleasant and forever dream.

That person doesn’t create new realities.

That person certainly doesn’t see that this space-time continuum is merely one work of art among many. That person doesn’t entertain such an idea.

To get a little background on the depth of creating reality, let’s revisit the old idea of the labyrinth, a prominent piece of myth in the ancient world. I want to expand the meaning of it. The labyrinth, the maze is really all about THE FASCINATION WITH DISCOVERING THE MYSTERIES OF REALITY. That’s why it’s a labyrinth. It draws you in. You become increasingly attracted to solving mysteries and ironing out details.

Does this idea remind you of anything?

This is physics. Modern physics, and allied sciences. You go deeper and deeper into the universe and you try to figure out answers to all the questions.

You end up in the center of the universe and you realize you have no idea what’s going on at the most profound level.

To illustrate, here is a statement that has been attributed to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine:

“In my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps…”

Perfect. Reality, as it presents itself, becomes such an intriguing labyrinth that you journey further and further into the heart of it, seeking its answers, its ultimate answers, and finally you discover that the mysteries you were solving were not the mysteries you wanted to solve.

From this perspective, does it really matter whether, for example, the people who built the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids lined them up with astronomical events in the distant skies? Does it matter whether the Ark of Noah is buried somewhere in a mountain in Asia? Does it matter whether light is composed of particles or waves or both? The question is: what reality are you going to CREATE?

At one time, I seriously considered trying to raise funds for a creative center that would function, day to day, as a residence for students. Someday, I may pick up that project again. But meanwhile, this, this site and these emails have been my center.

The work continues.

In 2005, the Dalai Lama wrote, in The Universe is a Single Atom: “…if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterizes our individuality as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence. The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for all attachment, clinging and the development of numerous prejudices.”

I propose the original basis of Tibetan practice had quite a different view. First, the philosophy of emptiness was not really about “delusions of self.” In fact, self was rightly understood to be quite real and quite powerful, independent of anything going on in the world, in nature, in the universe. The emptiness, or void, was really a state of existence in which, BY CHOICE, an individual, a quite conscious individual who knew he was creating reality, decided to stop creating—as he most certainly could, and can.

One could say this is an experiment. The individual wants to experience what happens when he stops creating reality. And he finds out.

He is in a “nothing.” This nothing is not about the impermanence of things…it IS the state in which an individual simply ceases to generate reality. Period.

Of course, he can then decide to create reality again—as it is, as it was, or as he wants it to be.

The universe is not one collective atom. It is a movie, ultimately projected by the individual.

Magic is: the individual creating reality.

All philosophies which assert “vast and universal interdependence of everything” have, at this point, been co-opted and supported, to one degree or another, by elites who use them to promote an agenda which simultaneously de-emphasizes the individual and inflates the prospect of political collectivism—a condition in which interdependence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and humans become ciphers and units in the blueprint of Central Planning.

Magic is as far beyond this as Tesla was from an amoeba.

JON RAPPOPORT

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MAGIC AND EGO

May23

MAGIC AND EGO

MAY 22, 2011. There is much baloney that needs to be swept off the magic table. Who could be interested in the subject with so many cheap substitutes sitting there in piles?

A few words on EGO. Which is from the Latin and means: “I.” That’s what it means. It’s a pronoun. You know: I, me, you, he, him, she, her…

One of the biggest globs of nonsense floating around is the notion that ego is intrinsically bad. Part of this, of course, comes from a semantic distortion many centuries in the making.

Ego is now supposed to be associated with boastfulness, lack of concern about others, lying and trampling to move one’s own status forward, and so on. That’s how it comes down to us.

Humility, on the other hand, is a virtue. This is what we’re told. Well, when you get in there and look at it, it usually translates into, “I’m not important, I only serve others, I’m non-self-inflating. I’m kind, generous, and loyal. Please give me a gold star. I’m a model citizen, but somehow I can’t catch a ride on the trolley.”

It’s an act. It’s a role. It’s theater with a quite low transmission level.

Let’s get it straight. You can be creative and powerful without trampling on other people. Okay? And you can be generous without wearing an old robe and going up the hill to catch your water in a storm drain every morning.

Both these terms, EGO and HUMILITY, are useless. They’ve been walked on so much that no one can find a clue in them anymore. They’re misdirections. Mechanisms for social control.

But people still love to play with them. Goody-two-shoes types really work them. It’s a twisted morality game that comes straight out of religion. I don’t know about you, but I was never raised to be egotistical or humble. That wasn’t part of the dinner conversation.

“So, Jon, what did you do today? Did you help an old lady across the street and then bow down to her and make three prostrations? Or did you stand on the hill looking over the school and raise a bullhorn to your mouth and shout your name a hundred times and pound your chest?”

Can’t remember such a conversation in my sallow youth.

Magic has absolutely nothing to do with humility. Or Ego.

NOTHING.

You take a word, EGO, and in Latin it means “I.” That’s all it means. Then, centuries later, it means “a terrible person who only cares about himself and uses other people and deceives them and harms them, in order to advance his own power.”

Hmm. Is there a clue here?

Somebody wanted to erode and mangle the sense of self by loading it up with abhorrent qualities. Gee, who would do that? Religion? The Church? In the effort to control the individual?

Let’s check that out. The myth starts with eternal guilt. Well, yes. Adam and Eve ate an apple and destroyed the future of the human race in four seconds. It wasn’t even apple sauce or cobbler. One bite. Boom. Guilty. Bad boy! Bad girl! Sin of pride. “I’m more important than God.” “He told me not to take the Porsche to the dance, but I stole the key and crashed it into a lamppost.”

Then fast forward…if I’m not mistaken, there were people all over Europe who were doing some kind of conga line with whips, flagellating each other and themselves. Seems to convey an attempt to arrive at HUMILITY.

Eat the apple and destroy humanity or beat myself with the whip? Any other options? No? Well, okay, give me that nine-tails. Can I put on some cream first?

Keep in mind, as well, that the Roman Church controlled the Latin language, was its central keeper in Europe after the fall of Rome. Ego is Latin. Want to twist a word? Helps if you control the language of which it’s a piece. Might be something there.

…And then, down the road, when psychology enters the scene, EGO gains new meanings and contexts. For example, and this is a beauty, “ego defense mechanisms.” Hello? Excuse me, but when you break this down, doesn’t it simply mean a person will try to ward off external threats? But that doesn’t sound like “science.” Ego defense mechanisms. The implication is: people set up defenses against imaginary threats because they’re insecure…and to one degree or another, everybody operates this way. More erosion of the simple notion of “I” and “ego.”

Hey, I was just saying “I” and all of a sudden I ate an apple and was guilty forever and so I beat myself for a few centuries and now I’m insecure and trying to defend myself by making up imaginary paranoid threats? I was just going to say, “I think I’ll go to the store.”

But wait, there’s more!

In the 1960s, the US began to import various Asian spiritual philosophies. Of course, the few really good parts were left in Asia. The stuff America (and other countries) got was all about, how shall I put this, NO-SELF. In several forms. Stay poor, if you can. Forget about your power, you don’t really have any, that was just a delusion. Do nothing for self and everything for others. Otherwise, you’ll just be pushing your own EGO, which is terrible, terrible, very naughty.

The artificial polarity. It’s either EGO or HUMBLE. Take your pick. Of course, either way, you’re screwed.

And if you don’t think variations on this perverse ego-humility theme survived, with twists and turns, into the 70s and 80s and right up to the present day, I have a time shares on Pluto I’d really love to stick you with.

Magic is about power. Can’t skirt it or walk around it or build a detour or pretend it’s all coming from some collective goo of consciousness in the waa waa of the daa daa.

But you see, power has been hooked in with ego and humility, through social programming, and that leaves lots of people confused, helpless, and beached. Because they went to the 99-cent store and bought the program and plugged it into their heads.

Magic is basically the power to create extraordinary realities. Ultimately, without limit.

People who don’t want to cross the line from non-magic to magic think that ordinary reality is peachy-keen and quite enough for a lifetime or a hundred lifetimes.

They’re right about one thing. Ordinary reality, in its own way, is quite astonishing.

How did it get here? Who let it in the door? Was it the result of a fire sale? Did they empty out the stables and the castles and the junkyards of stars from some other universe and dump all the leftovers here?

“Well, we don’t need this gizmo, what’s it called? Law of the Conservation of Energy? Give it to them. See what they can do with it.”

People are touchy. You start talking about magic and they want to tread a narrow space. They may hear a sentence or two they like, and it’s all good…and then you say something that pushes them off a cliff. At least, that’s what they think is happening.

You say, “Suppose I could turn ten minutes into six hours. Would you come to my house?”

And over the cliff they go.

“I can compress an hour into four seconds.”

“No thanks. Look, Ihave to see my orthodontist.”

But some day soon, when they invent a machine you attach to your ear, and a movie streams into your head in 30 seconds, a whole two-hour film, people will buy it. They’ll hook up the earpiece and play the movie, and after the 30 seconds is over they won’t have the slightest idea what it was about, but they’ll feel as if they do. They’ll feel something enormous happened, and they’ll be happy with that. Because it was a machine. So the earpiece did shrink time, and that was okay.

A machine can be magic, but a human can’t.

There is a set of rules about that. Tinkering with time, au naturel, is a felonious act. By definition. And that’s all it is, a definition.

Let’s get real about this. You have seven or eight billion people on the planet who ALREADY believe in magic. Only they call it religion.

They shove their religion into a non-theatrical context where they have an arrow that leads straight up to heaven. They’re sold on it. They’re operating out of a change that happened somewhere in the 4^th century, when a few people decided that religion in the West should become rational.

That was the cover story. “Oh yes, we have rational religion now. It’s different. See? It’s all founded on a solid basis. We know where to go for the official information. The depot. They have it there in a book.”

And the witches of the Middle Ages were different. They were the outsiders, the heretics, because they were looking at other books. Instead of going into Barnes and Noble, they were frequenting little independent operations, and that was that. Heretics. Besides, they were actually trying out manifestation and direct healing, which was supposed to be property of the Roman Church.

Property? What? Somebody suddenly owns magic and has a monopoly on it? No anti-trust laws? No law suits?

The Church eventually decided their own rudimentary attempts at magic weren’t worth the effort. They had a business to run. They were sending salesmen out into the field. They were building franchises in some pretty tough places. They needed to screw their minds in tight and concentrate on the bottom line. Numbers of adherents. Collection plates. Taxes. Treaties and deals with monarchs. Cost-risk assessments of missionaries skewered on spits versus new members signed up for the duration.

Very rational.

They had St. Thomas Aquinas, who was recycling Aristotle to prove there had to be a God, and even though his argument had holes in it you could drive an 18-wheeler through, it was a good imitation of rationality.

They had stern people with pinched faces talking about redemption and absolution and, quietly, bribes.

“We can get you into heaven, but it’s going to cost you. Joey here will be around next Tuesday to collect the silverware. Put it in a bag.”

Redemption? From what? I was eating an apple in the back yard, and three guys in crazy hats walked through the gate and asked to see some ID.

JON RAPPOPORT

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RAPPOPORT INTERVIEWS DEAD PEOPLE

May22

RAPPOPORT INTERVIEWS DEAD PEOPLE

ORSON WELLES

MAY 21, 2011. This may or not develop into a series. I already had a head-to-head with Einstein the other day. We resolved the question of free will, so that was nice. I thought we would. AE was a little confused on the point, and I managed to straighten him out.

Someone somewhere will surely think this is “channeling,” so allow me to set the record straight. This is reverse-channeling. If anything comes through to me from the other side, I carefully place it on my work table and then—suddenly—pound it with a hammer until it breaks. Like a coconut. Then I put the chips in a pot, add water, and make soup for the cat. I drive around the block while he’s slurping, and I have hazmat people come in to dispose of the leftovers.

In this interview with Orson Welles, we consider matters he’s been keeping bottled up for a long time, ever since Hollywood more or less cast him aside. For some reason, he seems to agree with my views on many points.

Q (Rappoport): I’m not interested in talking about your work as a stage magician or your appearances on Johnny Carson or the documentaries or your wives, or why you put on so much weight or the possibility that Randolph Hearst had you exiled from Hollywood because you made Citizen Kane and portrayed Marion Davies in an unflattering light. I’m not interested in your views on history, either.

A (Welles): Thank God.

Q: So you make Citizen Kane and you’re 24 years old.

A: It was a gargantuan act of ego.

Q: That’s why it’s endured.

A: Yes, I would say so.

Q: So in your case, it’s beneficent ego.

A: Well, not all the time. I once threw a man off a bridge.

Q: That’s a new one.

A: It was at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. He attacked me. He said The Magnificent Ambersons was a drawing-room drama. In retrospect, he probably had been briefed by an idiot. He didn’t speak English, and he was reading from a sheet phonetically. But still.

Q: Did he die?

A: Oh no. The bridge was four feet above a narrow river. They fished him out and we all went and had a drink. People have the wrong idea about ego. Big is not a problem. Small is the problem. And if you stay in the middle ground, you experience the worst case. Then you’re torn to pieces. Attrition and gnawing from all quarters. Beyond a certain point, more ego is a balloon and you float up off the ground. If you can hold on and allow the ride, you develop spontaneous resources.

Q: Ego is a medium, like paint or film.

A: You can use it if you want to. But there is no such thing as ego in art. It’s impossible.

Q: But people then assume art means humility.

A: People assume God is waiting for them in a city built on clouds, where they’ll melt like butter into a piece of cosmic toast. Humility is a delusion. An ideal of sheer pretension. Amateur’s role in a doomed play.

Q: Ego as a social behavior is buffoonery.

A: That’s why Citizen Kane is a comedy.

Q: And the reason why it’s not seen as that?

A: Large looming sets, and camera angles slanted upward from low positions. You can have a gloomy comedy. I may have invented the form.

Q: A Touch of Evil—they say, every frame a galvanizing photograph.

A: Why else make a movie? I was like the poet who realizes languageis the flight from the ground into the air, or the descent below the surface. In film, you build the architecture to photograph it, and you choose the angles that make the photo. Frankly, If I can’t invent every frame so it has original architecture, then I’m lazy. I’m letting the extraordinary slip by. I may as well be home getting drunk. But you see, I forced the issue. I didn’t sit back and hope. I didn’t wait for every marvelous accident. I was up on the beat, up on one, and I stayed there. Before Keats, you had poets who would ride on their ideas for a few lines or stanzas, and then they would rivet you in place with the words themselves, the sound and the metaphor—the real stuff. Well, I didn’t stall. I hit you with image after image. That was the point.

Q: You were the troll under the bridge.

A: The troll waits for years, for even centuries. But once he starts to move, he doesn’t stop.

Q: At what point did you realize the plot of Citizen Kane was a throwaway?

A: Oh, I knew that from the beginning. Stories are everywhere. Grab one. Think of one. Don’t give it much concern. One understands, of course, the audience is a sucker for stories, so that’s what they’ll focus on. You can’t help that. But the Rosebud business, the whole career of Kane, his whole life, drawn in episodes. Who cares? It’s just the occasion for doing what I wanted to do. I never put stock in it. I may have said I did, but that was a lie or a momentary fascination. I wanted big space, so I chose a big man. Stories are a rank addiction. How will things turn out? Who will prove to be the winner? What’s the missing clue? It’s religion. The whole business is religion. Find the right story that touches all the bases, and you can sell it. But I was destroying stories. Understand? If my films had a theme, that was it. Story disintegrates. It has no foundation.

Q: Take the caste system.

A: You mean in Hollywood, or India?

Q: Either one.

A: India. Drivel. People see through it, of course, and they think they’re smarter than the Hindus, but meanwhile, every country has its own. It’s based on obligation. You must be a messenger for theprevailing story. That’s the beginning and end of it. Wisdom is supposedly choosing the right story, but that’s sheer nonsense. Crap. Every story is a lie. You come to the end of it, and you feel unhappy. I knew that when I was 16. That’s why I had a hard time with studio executives. They’re sucking on the teat of their own religion. They see themselves as priests. They’re selling story to the public. A to B. You begin the fairy tale at A and wind up at B. No switchbacks. No irony.

Q: What about, for example, traveling into outer space? That story.

A: Yes, well, it would seem to be an exception, but when you break it down, the tale of each mission fades in the glow of unending exploration, which is the context that gives each episode power. “We’re going into space.” Bang! Without that exhilarating blood and air, you’ve got nothing. An artist creates in such a way that people know that’s what he’s doing. Concealing it never made sense to me. I’m not trying to hide the weapon in the desk drawer until the last scene. I’m injecting invention in every frame, so it spills over the edges. The foam shooting over the rim of the glass. That’s what I want. It’s the same with any world. You want to bring sheer abundance to it. Even in the desert, you have an abundance, an over-abundance of space. That’s what I’m aiming for. Over-abundance. On Earth, you have ridiculous, ludicrous jungles. They just keep on twisting toward the horizon.. They lean over the banks of the rivers, trying to swallow up the water, and the water won’t be stopped, either. You have black jaguars, some of the greatest hunting machines anyone could devise. They’re bursting at the seams. Look at their modeling. And lions. And if that gets to be a bit much, you scale back and invent cloudy leopards, pure and sufficient and heartbreaking beauty. You make many types. Let’s not diddle around with this. Not just a piece of decoration. Universe. The people who made this place, Earth, do you think they held back? Do you think they were wearing lab coats and saluting genes? What immortal hand or eye couldframe thy fearful symmetry?

Q: Joseph Calleia in Touch of Evil.

A: Poor old Joe. He could make that sadness sing. He was quite good at comedy, you know. But he pulled on the cloak of sadness, and his elevator would take you down three or four levels, and there would be a bottom. He would die at the bottom. You knew he had to. There was a collection of caricatures in that film. Not exactly caricatures, because I was inventing, how do I say it, a special kind of type. Not a cartoon. Not tripping falling farce. Not quite naturalism. Perhaps a mixture. They call it grim noir, but that was a comedy, too, that film. You had Ray Collins doing his special brand of flapdoodle. The DA. Coat and hat, barking like a dog. One second he’s three dimensions, the next second he’s flat. And Akim Tamiroff. Farce. But he’ll shoot you. Entrances and exits. The characters appear, flare, flatten out, and disappear. Cardboard town. Cardboard and oil. A collapsible universe.

Q: It has different rules and regs.

A: Yes, the rules of, say, GK Chesterton. Reality as facade. But in Touch of Evil, if you put your hand through a wall, you feel you might get bit by something on the other side. The characters aren’t trapped by their natures. Not really. I trap them. That’s part of letting the audience see I’m doing the inventing. They see it going on. Just enough. Same with Citizen Kane.

Q: Reminds me a little of Pablo in Steppenwolf.

A: Yes. He can fold up the bar and the people in it into a toy and put it all in his pocket. He doesn’t do it. Maybe once, to drive home a point. But he could. So could I. Obviously, I don’t. But the fact that I could is part of the overall atmosphere.

Q: Collapsible universe.

A: Magic Theater. It’s a decision you make, and the earlier the better. Will you pose yourself in reality and then mingle with it? Is that your main thrust? Or will you punch holes with your fingers in balls of clay and find velocity and manufacture the worlds you want? You might discover one or two cultures in the history of the planet that, at their beginning, opted for the second alternative. Briefly.

Q: Snapshots of artists.

A: Caught, for an instant, on the run. So the story of the artist becomes the watchword. His tribulations. The fact that he’s a fool in his personal life or he’s desperate or he’s rich or he’s this or that. Maybe 20 years out of trillions of his years are captured in a highly suspect snapshot. He’s somewhere else now, still working. He’s exponentially increasing his power. As an incidental effect, his impact on reality, any already-existing reality, is growing. Somewhere out on the rim of a place we’ve never seen, he’s made vanish a few square parsecs of space and invented his own territory to replace it.

Q: Maybe casting a film.

A: Casting comes last. He’s drawing up camera angles, building sets.

Q: Huge houses?

A: Maybe. Maybe pillars and towers and looming sky. Maybe a cardboard town sinking in leftover oil. If it’s Tuesday, one, if it’s Wednesday, the other.

Q: Just out of curiosity—everything you’re saying here, did you know it at the time or only now?

A: Oh, I knew it all along. But people want to hear about other things. And I was willing to give them what they wanted, except in my work. In intelligence operations, why would you blow your cover stories? The world of humans is built on cover stories, one after another, in stratified layers.

Q: The Third Man. You and Joseph Cotten.

A: Well, that was all atmosphere. We didn’t have anything else. Atmosphere wrapping a mystery. And when it’s solved, it’s a throwaway, of course. Who cares? But with the crooked streets and lighting and pace, you make your own little religion. An altar sitting somewhere ahead, in the fog.

Q: And who’s God?

A: No one. That’s the point. You say, “Look, suppose there’s no God? That might not be a bad thing.” It might not be a disappointment, after all. No-God can turn out to be an interesting story. If you play your cards right, it could be exciting. You worm your way through the mystery and you find it all folds up in your pocket and you walk away laughing. You leave that sadness behind, a hat blowing across the street. I used to stumble out of the theater after watching Ingmar Bergman, and I’d be choking on laughter. The Seventh Seal. One of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Wild Strawberries. Hysterical. Gunnar Bjornstrand, a man at the end of his tether, staring nothing in the face. Do you remember the scene where he’s sitting in the car talking to Ingrid Thulin? Well, tragedy for me has always had a tinge of laughter about to break out. You move over one inch from where you are, and the tears magically dry up and you’re feeling wonderful, as if you’ve just had a good breakfast. You look around and wonder what happened.

Q: Improvisation helps.

A: You might be right. You can always throw a howling cat into a funeral. As people approach the open coffin, the cat runs in chasing a rat. Emotions are mercurial. Of course, in a film, you can saddle them with iron weights, if you want to. But I never thought that was necessary. Why bother with it? It’s a waste of time. Something else is going to happen next, anyway. You have the noble, beautiful, suffering widow standing at the coffin, where her husband is lying in his suit with a flower in his buttonhole, and she glances to her left and sees a man staring down her dress. And she starts to smile. Just a little. Of course, what is she doing with cleavage at the funeral?

Q: Is that a metaphysical question?

A: Well, it could be. Because that’s what you find out. You’re ready for the emotion to lay its card on the table, the emotion that will sum up your experience and confirm the absolute and final significance of it in the overall scheme of things…and then a leaf blows in the window and it doesn’t really matter. Now you have that emotion and the leaf, and as a director, what are you going to do with it? You begin to discover that improvisation is one of the great stable centers behind any universe.

Q: The planning department will hate that.

A: Sure. They pretend they’re working out all the details. They’re going to launch Universe X-B tomorrow, and they’re putting the final touches on the last few sub-sub-sub anomalies. Meanwhile, they’re just the front office. What’s going on behind the scenes is the real main event. Somebody like me is back there, and I’m talking to the tiger. The tiger with wings. I want to see whether he’s ready to burn bright in the forests of the night. Whether he doesn’t care about me, the man who made him. I want him to forget all about me and go on his way. He and I, the two of us, are back there. And yes, I can see, his ferocity is intact. He’s his own man. And just as he brushes by me, padding out the door, he gives me a little smile. Just for a second. That’s all I want. That’s all I need.

JON RAPPOPORT

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CLONING A HUMAN

May22

CLONING A HUMAN

WHERE METAPHYSICS MEETS SCIENCE

MAY 21, 2011. I apologize in advance for carelessly spraying around pronouns in this piece. When you’re talking about cloning, it gets confusing. Who is he and who is him? Who is I and who is me?

There is a popular notion that, if you cloned yourself, there would be another you.

What exactly does this mean?

In 2002, researchers at Texas A&M announced the birth of Cc, a cloned cat. However, the coat of the calico kitten did not match her genetic mother’s. This was explained as: changes occur in the womb (of the surrogate mother).

The point? Why would you say you’re a new you if the new you doesn’t look like you?

In science fiction, there are brain transplants to make the case. I clone myself, and then to cement the deal, I have my brain placed into the (scoured out) skull of the clone.

Then I’m him.

Really?

Here are few phrases extant in the English language:

“inhabiting the body”;

“you should take care of your body;”

“you’ve got to push your body through these two-a-day drills, if you want to get to the Super Bowl.”

Are these merely figures of speech?

The overwhelming chorus from scientists and modern philosophers is Yes.

The linguistic construction of you-plus-body is an archaic error founded on superstition, much like “may the gods protect you on your journey.”

We, with far more wisdom, realize there is the body and nothing but the body, and therefore…

It would appear that a successful cloning, along with the brain transplant, would produce YOU. It would be like moving into a new house, one that in every way was identical to the old one. A house next door.

Really?

Is your brain you?

Has anyone offered evidence for that, aside from saying, “It’s ridiculous to imagine otherwise”?

This is where the rubber meets the road, and the arguments on either side cease being academic.

At the moment when your brain is planted into your clone, are you there? Do you open your eyes and say, “Yeah, it’s still Fred. It’s me. I played high school football when I was sixteen and hurt my knee and had to drop out. Three days later, I was arrested for a DUI in Knoxville. I’d had seven beers. I live at 124 Green Street, and my bedroom, ha-ha, still has pictures of Playboy Playmates on the wall across from my bed. I majored in Communications at the U of Kentucky and went to work for my uncle in the waste management business. I can do a little algebra…”

Is that what happens?

You see, cloning you and cloning Dolly the sheep is a little different. Dolly can’t talk. She can’t say, “Well, they took my brain and put it here, but it’s still me.”

Of course, if Fred isn’t Fred anymore when they move his brain, they can cover that up if they want to. “Well, Fred is still disoriented. You have to realize this was an overwhelming traumatic experience for him. He has amnesia.”

But what’s the truth?

Did Fred move next door or is he gone?

Scientists and semi-quasi-scientists and pundits and other major blabbers step into the breach.

“The ‘you-ness’ is simply an impression ladled out by the brain.”

“The brain seeks to present a coalesced ‘I’.”

“You think you’re you, but really you’re just sub-atomic particles in motion. So whether, after the brain transplant, you think you’re you…it’s an illusion anyway. You were never you.”

“We are, in the infinite dance of particles, all One. Put a few coins in the collection plate.”

“Brain stores a holographic you-ness which may or may not transfer when the brain is moved. We need more funds for further research.”

And then we have this:

“Look, you guys said you could move me to another body, this perfect clone. But now that I’m here, I know I’m not me. I’m somebody else. This is supposed to be about IMMORTALITY, you morons! The continuation of me on and on and on. But I’m not me.”

The suit was thrown out of court on the grounds that whoever the plaintiff was, he wasn’t the aggrieved party, who for all practical purposes, was now missing in action. The wife could have sued, but she was satisfied with the copy…

I would be interested in this reaction: “Okay, you attempted to transfer Fred to this body, my body, by moving his brain. I’m not Fred. I have a whole set of memories which are clearly Fred’s, but they’re not mine. I inherited them. They’re of no use to me. It’s like lugging a whole bunch of comic books around. I’m…I don’t have a name yet. Call me Ishmael. You did a nice job with the wiring, and I feel reasonably healthy, but I’m not happy.”

A variation on that: the mysterious stranger, who did, in fact, inherit Fred’s memories, can’t talk. He’s in and out of coma. He’s sensationally messed up. He came into this world expecting, though not looking forward to, being born out of a womb as a baby. He was resigned to it. He’d been through it before. But instead, he missed a left turn and ended up in an infernal clone body. He has a whole load of memories that don’t belong to him.

This is where the smart money in Vegas is sitting. On that outcome.

Brain is not you.

You are non-material.

The ancient Hindus played around with this. Half the time they articulated it correctly, and half the time they lapsed into nonsense—the Big All, of which we are mere drops of energy. That sort of bad deli baloney.

The Tibetans, before their priests moved in and took over and installed the endless prayer wheel and the 100,000 prostrations and the mind-numbing candlelight suppers and the slave apprenticeships and the streams and streams of mandalas—before all that, they had it nailed. They knew.

They weren’t devotees of Universe, you see. They didn’t fall for that slippery jive. They elucidated the bottom line: universe is energy and universe is a product of consciousness, your non-material consciousness. Therefore, you can, in the long run, make pieces of it vanish and invent new pieces—instantly. You can move out of universe with all your bags and set up shop in the Void, if you want to, and from there you can travel to, or invent, whole-hog, other universes.

They weren’t playing around. They shoved in all their chips and didn’t care what anybody else thought. They called it like it was and is.

So, “Yes dear, we have to move your beloved husband Fred into a new body, his clone, and then all will be well,” is just whining cloying organ music in a funeral home.

Fred got the hell out.

He’s over the hill and into the trees, and judging by his life, it may take him some time to figure out what’s going on.

Maybe another few billion incarnations.

Or maybe he’ll be back as a psychiatrist, doling out the latest souped-up versions of Paxil and Prozac to unsuspecting teens.

But that’s another story, and by the way, it isn’t named karma…

Karma was the daughter of two hippies who lived in Mill Valley in 1969.

JON RAPPOPORT

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CRADLE TO GRAVE, BABY

May21

CRADLE TO GRAVE, BABY

QUICK HITTER

MAY 21, 2011. Much talk these days about phony victims seeking freebies and making up stories to qualify for them. It’s all tied in, of course, to political correctness, whose ultimate goal is inventing so many oppressed people that anyone who laughs must be offending somebody—and will be fined and fired from work for it.

But all this pales by comparison with the agenda of the medical cartel.

Now we’re talking about real heavyweights.

Don’t have a disease or disorder? They’ll invent three or four for you. And cash in on the drugs you use.

The ultimate goal is cradle to grave “care” for everyone. Official “patient” status from the womb to the cemetery—and if they could figure out a way to diagnose and treat you after death, they’d have MDs walking on clouds with butterfly nets.

Permanent patient status isn’t just a device emanating from the cartel. People, millions and millions and millions of them, want it. Want it badly.

For the perks, but also as proud talking points that last a lifetime.

“So what do you have?”

“Well, ADHD, depression, Restless Leg Syndrome, and Social Anxiety Disorder. I mean, that’s pretty standard stuff. But my doctor recently ran a battery of tests and discovered I’ve got a rare endocrine disease. My thyroid is talking to my ass, and it interferes with sleep.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. They say one in ten million people develops it after forty. It can be fatal if it isn’t treated. Early diagnosis is crucial.”

“That’s exciting. Is there a vaccine for it?”

“They’re working on one. So far, they’ve only tested it in mice. But the mice eat each other. It’s a genetic vaccine. It replaces a DNA sequence in the so-called junk area. I’m on the list when they start doing clinical trials in humans.”

“That’s very brave of you.”

“Well, I feel I need to give back. You know? For all the care I’ve had. My cousin, who had a preventive double mastectomy when she was four, donated a kidney to me last spring. The California State Public Health Commission awarded her a medal at a ceremony in Beverly Hills. What’s that badge you’re wearing?”

“Oh. That? Partial brain transplant patient. There are six of us, so far, in the US.”

“Wow. Fantastic.”

“Right now, it’s experimental, but hopefully next year by waiting for levers on the buttons taking less carrots in the garden…”

“Hey, you okay?”

“Sure. I wink in and out once or twice a day. It’s nothing. I have a permanent port in my spine. On Thursdays, I sit in my doctor’s office for six hours and they pump in neurotransmitters…”

“Maybe you’d like to have dinner with us this weekend. My wife and I—she’s just recovering from her fourth bypass—usually have a few friends over for barbecue. I’m sure they’d like to hear about your transplant.”

Proud. Strong. Medical.

It’s a social system. A substitute for living.

Bringing everyone on the planet under this umbrella would achieve a level of control dictators can only dream about.

If the drugs don’t kill you, surely the soppy goo of the public relations flacks pushing this share-and-care ideal will drown you.

And the thing is, you’ll be tempted to side with the latest account of some heroic medical procedure that “saved a child’s life.”

“Doctors today at the Mayo on Rye Clinic performed a 19-hour operation to attach nine-year-old Jimmy Jones’ eyes to the back of his head, when it was discovered his case of sunstroke had escalated into life-threatening Dry Neuron Syndrome.

“The really difficult part of the surgery involved re-routing the optic nerve through Jimmy’s cerebellum,” said Dr. Michael Boodnogger, chief surgeon at the Thomas Edison Memorial Children’s Hospital.

“To avoid several more hours under anesthesia, the patient’s eyelids were left in place, on his face. But grafts quickly taken from the boy’s knees, last week, were sculpted into ‘hard awnings’ and fixed above the eyes at the back of the head. A small motorized prosthetic, to automatically raise and lower the awnings, is inserted in Jimmy’s spine.

“We’re just happy our son isn’t blind and escaped cognitive impairment,” said his father, a kindergarten teacher in the Indianapolis school system. “Now he can pursue his dream of becoming an air traffic controller.”

I’m waiting for elite shrinks to come up with a mental disorder called Freedom Disease (FD). Which of course centers around “the discredited belief that an individual has choice.” It’s a schizoid paranoid hallucination brought on by a genetic mutation, and the treatment is, again, heroic. Doctors blast thousands of random DNA sequences into the body through a sophisticated “shotgun.”

Side effects include “the formation of a weevily hardtack odiferous coating encapsulating both thighs, withering genital paralysis, gradual evaporation of the legs, cruciferous vegetable roots hanging from the ears, the excretion of cow’s milk from skin pores, and with the diminution of IQ to insectoid levels, relentlessly attempting to obtain PhDs right up to the time of death from old age.”

But not to worry, it’s all covered by insurance.

JON RAPPOPORT

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HORROR, VAMPIRES, ALIENS

May21

HORROR, VAMPIRES, ALIENS

THE MEANING OF WHAT’S HAPPENING ON THE SCREEN

MAY 20, 2011. Whatever else they do, movies allow people to sit in the dark and experience, from just enough safe distance, the lives of characters they would never inhabit on that other screen called Reality.

People want to feel what it’s like to be all sorts of strange creatures.

Ghosts, monsters, demons, vampires, aliens, trolls, androids, wizards, lizards, space gods, tyrants, machines…

People want to feel that.

Objections are made about the effect on the culture. I’m not here, in this article, to argue about that.

I’m focusing on the brilliance of virtual experience.

The audience as actor, living out on the edge, investing tonnage of emotion, stepping into the shoes of weird desires that can’t be played out on the street.

This is theater.

Why do they have to get their juice from movies?

They want to be active and passive at the same time.

You could call this fear, but the fact remains: people want it both ways, simultaneously. There is a kick to it.

“I am and I’m not.” In the same moment.

This is not an aspect of human behavior that has been co-opted and classified by the pseudo-science of psychology. Not yet.

“I am, and I’m not.”

This is actually a state of being.

“I’m sucking the blood from the neck of some naïve idiot, and I’m also sitting in front of my flat-screen chewing a Snickers.”

O joy. O paradise.

How about this as a translation of that dual passive-active state?

I CAN IMAGINE, NO I CAN’T.

I CAN INHABIT ANOTHER LIFE, NO I CAN’T.

I’M AN ACTOR, NO I’M NOT.

The jolt of a car that bounces off three walls and then plunges out over a cliff into a ravine—I’m in the car screaming and dying, I’m the car itself, waiting for the first big crash on the way down, I’m the guy who was originally chasing the car shooting at it—what could be better?

Eventually, for a veteran fan of horror films, the inflicting of neck wounds and the drinking of blood and the burning of suburban homes is what he believes is the best thing he could imagine on his own, if the movies didn’t exist. When ten or 20 average annoying people are crushed under the foot of a giant toaster oven with the face of a medieval gargoyle, it’s a religious moment.

I’m buried in the movie, I’m killing idiots, and I’m eating Milk Duds, honey-clustered peanuts, and naturally, I’m taking my Ritalin. It’s heaven.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, movies have to keep upping the ante, to drag people into the theater. The killings have to be more grisly and sudden, the explosions have to be more intense, and now the glasses have to be 3-D. We’ve got IMAX 3-D. I guess in-the-round holograms are next.

“In the 1930s, in a movie, if you had an actress in a wheelchair and pushed her down a flight of stairs, people thought it was funny. Now it has to be a real woman really falling down stairs.”

Groucho Marx

I’ll take it a stepfurther. Horror movies are a rebellion against reality itself. Social, political, cultural, economic, and physical reality. And being able to play that out, even in virtual terms, is very satisfying to some people. Lots of people.

Taken to the full extreme…if millions of monsters and gargoyles and werewolves and vampires actually roamed the Earth, and if a hundred-year war ensued between them and population of the planet, and if the humans lost, what would be the upshot?

The monsters wold attack one another.

Why? For what?

What are they looking for?

They’re looking for whatever would remain after all reality was destroyed.

That’s their payday.

Not really control, not mastery over slaves, not manipulation.

They believe reality is a basic affront, and they want to wipe it out.

And they’re motivated.

What they couldn’t possibly realize in a million years is the creative version of what they’re feeling: reality is a ultimately product of mind, one work of art among an infinite possible number of works of art. This is the true spiritual tradition of planet Earth, the one that has been twisted and buried and concealed.

It’s not an accident that the most highly controlled large society on Earth, China, has sought to eradicate Tibet, the place where this tradition flourished for a brief time. The bottom-line reason for waging war against Tibet is subconsciously held, of course.

Why do humans find so many ways to refuse the power of their own imagination, which can make new worlds and supersede all rules and regulations that underpin this universe?

Because LOSING has its own attractions. It’s a mode of perception and feeling, and it’s another kind of art.

When people become profoundly sick and tired of that art, but are still addicted to it, they side with the monster. They want to smash every apparatus and system and marker of reality they can find.

Put that on the screen and they’ll love you for it. Set down a gorgeous white blank canvas in front of them, and they’ll do nothing. They’ll think about taking a blowtorch to it.

The world is a suspension bridge held up by the two ends: creation and destruction. All the people are milling around in the middle of the concrete road. They’re telling and listening to stories. Occasionally, a small number of people feel drawn to one end of the bridge or the other. Mostly, though, they tell and listen to stories. The ends of the bridge are covered in vines, which are religion’s attempt to obscure the naked forces.

Occasionally, someone in the middle of the bridge sets off a bomb. But it hasn’t disturbed the structure. Then stories about the bomber proliferate and morph. Large numbers of people sit entranced and listen to those stories. They feel there is something fundamentally wrong about the bridge, and so the prospect of blowing it up is appealing. And they’re right. Something about the bridge is a lie.

The two ends are actually attached, by giant cables, to something that floats in the sky.

Imagination.

One of its minor inventions was the pylons of creation and destruction. A whim on a summer afternoon.

JON RAPPOPORT