The shining star

by Jon Rappoport

February 17, 2016

These passages are excerpts from an ongoing work, The Magician Awakes. They are also notes I prepared while assembling my second collection, Exit From The Matrix. I recommend reading more about Exit here. If you are an adventurous soul, it’s for you.

“There is a form of mind control in which very workable patterns are taken too far. They become obsessions. They become filters through which a person sees everything. Then the fire of life cools and goes out. Then the intelligence of a person works against him. My work is about showing people there is something beyond these patterns. What people are hoping for and wishing for is beyond these mind-patterns, whether they know it or not. I don’t care whether they live in America, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, India, Peru, or the North Pole. They’re hoping for a kind of spontaneity and energy that transforms dead and repetitive days and nights into burning joy.”

“There is a shining star that hangs in the sky over every home. It is called Imagination. It is the portal into a space and a future that has never been created before. It is a space for you, in which you can bring into being your deepest dreams. This space can be called upon at any moment. It never dies. It never fades. When all the other lamps go out, this shining space remains.”

“Realism is a joke. Unfortunately, it is a joke we have to deal with. After a certain point, it takes the dew off the rose and the dawn out of the horizon. So we need renewal. We need a new dose of faith in that symphony that rests in our souls. Music that never ends. Hearing it is not enough. We must play it. We must compose it. As we do, we remember images that come flashing back to us like lithe animals on the move in the forest, where all things begin. Where invention begins. Where we create what has never been created before.”

“We are the artists of reality. We may have forgotten the fact, but that doesn’t matter. Reality is tired of itself. It is asking us to paint it a new and unprecedented way. It is always asking. It doesn’t want a return to former times. It wants future that surpasses every dimension. It wants spontaneity in the same way that plants want water and sun. It wants dreams to overcome solid shapes that pretend to be eternal. It wants us to rise from the sleep of acceptance and strike out on a great adventure.”

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Collective consciousness as propaganda: the individual is gone

Feb11

Collective consciousness as propaganda: the individual is gone

by Jon Rappoport

February 11, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

“In the middle of all the brain-research going on, from one end of the planet to the other, there is the assumption that the individual doesn’t really exist. He’s a fiction. There is only the motion of particles in the brain. Therefore, nothing is inviolate, nothing is protected. Make the brain do A, make it do B; it doesn’t matter. What matters is harmonizing these tiny particles, in order to build a collective consensus, in order to force a science of behavior.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Individual power. Your power.

It stands as the essence of what the founding documents of the American Republic are all about, once you scratch below the surface a millimeter or so.

Therefore, it stands to reason that colleges and universities would be teaching courses in INDIVIDUAL POWER.

As soon as I write that, though, we all fall down laughing, because we understand the absurdity of such a proposition. Can you imagine Harvard endowing a chair in Individual Power?

Students would tear down the building in which such courses were taught. They’ve been carefully instructed that the individual is the greatest living threat to the planet.

If you can’t see that as mind control, visit your local optometrist and get a prescription for glasses.

So we have this astonishing situation: the very basis of freedom has no reflection in the educational system.

You can say “individual” within certain limited contexts. You can say “power,” if you’re talking about nuclear plants, or if you’re accusing someone of a crime, but if you put “individual” and “power” together and attribute a positive quality to the combination, you’re way, way outside the consensus. You’re crazy. You’re committing some kind of treason.

In order to spot the deepest versions of educational brainwashing, YOU HAVE TO HAVE SOME STANDARD AGAINST WHICH YOU CAN COMPARE WHAT IS COMING DOWN THE PIPELINE INTO THE MINDS OF STUDENTS.

If you lack that standard, you miss most of the action.

If you lack that standard, you have already been worked over by the system.

And in this case, the standard is INDIVIDUAL POWER.

Clean it off, hose off the dirt, polish it, look at it, think about it, remember it.

Then you’ll see some Grade-A prime mind control. Everywhere. Because schools either don’t mention it, or they discredit it.

Back in the days when I was writing on assignment for newspapers and magazines, I pitched a story about individual power to an editor. I wanted to trace its history as an idea over the past ten years.

He looked at me for a few seconds. He looked at me as if I’d just dropped some cow flop on his desk. He knew I wasn’t kidding and I had something I could write and turn in to him, but that made it worse. He began to squirm in his chair.

He laughed nervously.

Then he stopped laughing

He said, “This isn’t what we do.”

For him, I was suddenly radioactive.

I had a similar experience with a high-school history teacher in California. We were having lunch in a cafe in Santa Monica, and I said, “You should teach a course in individual power. The positive aspects. No group stuff. Just the individual.”

He frowned a deep intellectual frown, as if I’d just opened my jacket and exposed a few sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest. As if he was thinking about which agency of the government to report me to.

Now, for the schizoid part. The movies. Television. Video games. Comics. Graphic novels. They are filled to the brim, they are overflowing with individual heroes who have considerable power. These entertainment businesses bank billions of dollars, because people want to immerse themselves in that universe where the individual is supreme. They want it badly.

But when it comes to “real” life, power stops at the front door and no one answers the bell.

Suddenly, the hero, the person with power is anathema. He’s left holding the bag. So he adjusts. He waits. He wonders. He settles for less, far less. He stifles his hopes. He shrinks. He forgets. He develops “problems” and tries to solve them within an impossibly narrow context. He redefines success and victory down to meet limited expectations. He strives for the normal and the average. For his efforts, he receives tidbits, like a dog looking up at his master.

If that isn’t mind control, nothing is.

Once we enter a world where the individual no longer has credibility, a world where “greatest good for the greatest number” is the overriding principle, and where that principle is defined by the elite few, the term “mind control” will have a positive connotation. It will be accepted as the obvious strategy for achieving “peace in our time.”

At a job interview, a candidate will say, “Yes, I received my PhD in Mind Control at Yale, and then I did three years of post-doc work in Cooperative Learning Studies at MIT. My PhD thesis? It was titled, ‘Coordination Strategies in the Classroom for Eliminating the Concept of the Individual.’”

From Wikipedia, “Cooperative Learning”:

“Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another’s resources and skills…Furthermore, the teacher’s role changes from giving information to facilitating students’ learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.”

That is a towering assembly of bullshit.

Jon Rappoport

Art, investigation, imagination, power

Feb9

Art, investigation, imagination, power

by Jon Rappoport

February 9, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)

These are notes that were written in preparation for my first collection, The Matrix Revealed:

“All deep investigations eventually reach a point where the issue is mind control: why is the mind acting as it does? You’re no longer only dealing with external facts. You’re looking at the mind’s mechanisms of acceptance and rejection, at yes and no. You’re looking at patterns whose purpose is to express inevitability.”

“Consciousness isn’t attachment to an idea. It isn’t confirming, over and over again, what you already believe. It isn’t borrowing an idea. Consciousness starts with you knowing you’re reading these words right now. Your brain doesn’t know that. Your brain doesn’t know anything. You do.”

“For an artist, even imagining what he is going to create next—imagining just a glimpse of it—is enough to propel him into a new state, is enough to rearrange the output of his endocrine system, is enough to inject energy into his organs and his cells.”

“The Matrix depends on a person believing his state of consciousness is a given. Like a rose found in a garden. Like a star appearing in the sky. Like a garbage can falling over in an alley. Spiritual systems, without knowing it, speak about replacing one given state of mind with a higher given state of mind. That’s a losing proposition. Givens aren’t the answer. Suppose a person walks into a store that sells coats. Suppose he looks at every coat on every rack and he decides he wants one that isn’t there, isn’t a given? Suppose, instead of the store, he explores the whole universe and decides that what he wants isn’t there?”

“Actual information is always an enemy of entrenched power. That’s why, when you have it, you need to be relentless with it. You earn no cosmic points by being nice. Delivering the truth without compromise helps create peace of mind.”

“Magic is consciousness creating more of itself.”

“Magic is knowing beyond the five senses without becoming unbalanced by that knowing.”

“Magic is intuition that turns out to be right. It isn’t making up a story afterwards about being right.”

“The Matrix is the embrace between a reality someone else invented and the mind’s acceptance of it. The Matrix is the lock-and-key fit.”

“The Matrix is subconsciously hypnotic, as if the embrace were love and comfort. It isn’t.”

“Consciously inventing dreams that couldn’t occur in the world starts to tear apart the Matrix.”

“All the corrupt worldly power taken together produces not a drop of determining influence on imagination.”

“Having the creative power to make and unmake realities has nothing to do with being a god. A whole host of myths have been launched with polarities and dichotomies, in order to limit what a person believes he can and should do with his mind.”

Jon Rappoport

Who I write for (updated)

Jan21

Who I write for (updated)

by Jon Rappoport

January 21, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

I have published this piece before. It stands as my best description of why I do what I do. And now I’m adding a new introduction:

When I began writing seriously, in the summer of 1959, the idea that I would focus on The Individual was the farthest thing from my mind.

I assumed everyone was an individual. Case closed. Why bother to mention it? Why bother to think about it?

Even then, though, a massive propaganda operation was underway. It was aimed at replacing the individual with the group. Some people call this cultural Marxism. It’s much larger than that. It’s Collectivism at every possible level. It aims to eradicate the individual’s awareness that he is an individual. Why? Because if he truly knows what he is, then he also knows that society and civilization are opposing him. They are dedicated to the creation and sustenance of groups. Groups are manageable. Individuals aren’t.

Needless to say, much has happened since that time.

Skipping ahead, by the late 1990s it had become apparent to me that many people were falling by the wayside. Their “universal tolerance” was a form of self-sabotage. They were sacrificing themselves on the soft buttery altar of “doing good.” It was obvious to me, for example, that the notion of repairing all past injustices of society was a well with no bottom. It was a covert op. It was an attempt to entangle minds in a case of amnesia about individual power. Rather than trying to raise people up, it was a plan to victimize a permanent (and ever expanding) underclass.

I wasn’t sure my message about all this would reach many readers. I wasn’t sure what their reaction would be. But I didn’t care. I was motivated to make my case. So I did. So I do.

And lo and behold, people have responded. Over and above the nonsensical static of trolls and self-appointed victims, a wave of confirmation reached me. People were still there—as individuals. They knew it. They were seeing the demise of society around them.

Beyond confirmation, though, what I was aiming at was (and is) expansion of individual power. Not just an acknowledgment of it.

Power. Creative power. The power of imagination. The capacity of the individual to conceive of his deepest desires, pursue them, and turn them into visible fact in the world. (This is shorthand for what I cover extensively in my collection, Exit From The Matrix.)

Since I was a child and read great sea-adventure novels and science fiction novels, I assumed that fleshing out a vision of what one wants for his future was the obvious and standard enterprise for every person. Of course, I was grossly overestimating the situation. But I never lost that fundamental understanding. And never will.

Societal reality, consensus reality, “world reality,” is basically a gigantic covert op. It’s designed to keep the individual inside a set framework of response and consent. It is hugely destructive. As a reporter for the past 30 years, I’ve investigated many cases and angles of this op, and I’ve published my findings without compromise.

But always, above and beyond that, I’ve been referring to the individual and his capacity to create and build better realities of his own choosing. Gorgeous, free, open, wild, unfettered, majestic realities.

That’s my introduction, for the moment. Here is the article, Who I write for:

Consciousness.

Freedom.

Power.

The individual.

Imagination. Creating new realities.

Society and civilization as a potential force for helping to liberate the individual.

Underneath all my articles, all my investigations into corruption and crime at the highest levels, these above factors have been my motivation,

Who do I write for?

I write for people who recognize they can do something for themselves and others, who can improve their lives and consciousness and power.

I write for people who want to increase their own power.

I’ve been at this for 33 years. I recognize there are people out there who dig down and discover massive chunks of corruption, crime, and conspiracy in the world—and then they twist that knowledge to say: “See, this is why I can’t make any progress in life. This is why I’m blocked. This is why I’m having trouble. This is why I can’t do anything.”

I’m not writing for those people.

They’re using their hard-won knowledge to doom themselves to a life they don’t want. They jumped out of one box and put themselves in another one.

Regardless of how bad things are in this world, there is always something a person can do. For himself, and for others.

In doing that, in moving toward the life he wants most profoundly, in taking creative action, he becomes more alive, more conscious, more powerful.

He is the person I’m writing for.

I’m writing for those men and women.

There is the Personal and the Planetary. They can’t be entirely separated and walled off from each other.

But that doesn’t mean one sphere should be absorbed in the other.

You can’t eliminate personal desire from the equation and expect to find all the life you want. It doesn’t work.

I write for people who have at least glimpsed the power of their own imaginations, and want to increase that power.

I write for people who, becoming aware of how fake realities are built, cross over and realize they can invent better realities and futures.

I write for people who can wake up to that.

I write for people who want to understand the details of how corrupt and deceptive realities are built. My investigative articles serve that purpose.

I write for the individual.

I write for myself.

I write to expose corruption to the light of day, because I want to.

I write for people who understand they can become more alive.

I write for people who are willing to consider something new, who aren’t trapped by the belief that everything important is ancient.

I write for people who hunger for adventure.

I write for people who know they have the strength to make something happen.

I write for people who suspect they have latent capabilities that can come to the surface.

I write for people who realize answers and solutions to their own lives come from themselves.

I write for people who refuse to relinquish their individuality.

I write for people who want to increase the power and range and scope of their own imaginations, in order to discover and invent new startling enterprises and adventures.

I write for people who are on a spiritual road that isn’t clouded by convenient slogans, who know their journey is unique to them, and not part of a system.

I write for people who’ve taken hold of their own freedom and want more freedom.

I write for people who can follow a train of thought.

I write for people who have done their best to make their way through life, who sense there is something more, who want knowledge that will be liberating, not entrapping.

I write for people who, acknowledging that systems and structures can be quite useful, reject the idea that all of life is encompassed by a system.

I write for people who want more power to think, do, create—rather than being told what to think and create.

I write for people who, understanding conspiracies, don’t fold up, but rather, as my friend Catherine Austin Fitts says, want to start their own (good) conspiracy.

I write for all these reasons and more.

I write for people who, when they discover how much corruption abounds, refrain from demanding that others tell them what to do about it—but rather discover/invent for themselves what actions they can take.

I write for people who don’t give up.

I write for people who have already found some answers and some success, and want more.

I write for pleasure and enjoyment.

I write for people who want to read.

I write for people who want to consider ideas that reach miles and miles past the borders of consensus reality.

I write for people who are sick and tired of how this world is being run, and want to do something about it, want to discover the creativity within themselves that will provide answers.

I write for people who never give up.

I write for people who want to make a better world, by their own definition, and will work toward that end.

I write for people who have thrown away this formula: a) blaming others for their own shortcomings; and b) using that blame to build their own personal prisons of despair.

I write as part of the business I run, the sole proprietorship called NoMoreFakeNews.com. On that site, I sell my products. I’m an entrepreneur. I believe in giving value for value. Since I started NoMoreFakeNews.com in 2001, I’ve written a stream of articles people can, in fact, read for nothing.

I write for people who can follow this train of thought: a) discover the nuts and bolts of how elites invent reality for rest of us (The Matrix Revealed); b) instead, extend the power of their own imaginations and invent better realities (Exit From The Matrix); and c) attain the power to operate inside and outside the Matrix (Power Outside The Matrix). Yes, that’s a plug for my three Matrix collections.

I write for people who aren’t afraid of having power.

I write for people who know the difference between belonging to a group that ultimately asks them to surrender their own individuality, and a group composed of true individuals.

I write for people who do their best to weather every storm.

I write for people born into a place that has been taken over by corrupt fascists.

I write to rise as high as I can.

I write to expose every restraint of freedom I can perceive.

I write to say this space-time box is not the only place there is.

I write to say every individual who inhabits a physical form is immortal, whether he likes it or not…and it’s better to face the truth than deny it.

I write to promote both logic and imagination—each in its own sphere of action.

I hope I write for you.

Jon Rappoport

Migration, Globalism, traditional cultures, and the individual

Jan19

Migration, Globalism, traditional cultures, and the individual

Dialectic history and the third force

Time is very long

by Jon Rappoport

January 19, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

In preparing my first collection, The Matrix Revealed, I made the following side-note:

“In the dialectical view of history, you have a force that gives rise to its opposite. The two forces then compete, thus creating a third new force—which gives rise to its opposite and competes with it, giving birth to yet a new force, and so forth, on and on, as the process continues. You could visualize it as a series of triangles piled on top of each other. This dialectical analysis has merit, either as a picture of how history operates, or as a portrait of how history is intentionally manipulated by elites. However, it is incomplete. It doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s a kind of shorthand. What it leaves out is the most important thing of all.”

Globalism fully intends to create one integrated planet under a top-down, locked-down political and economic management system, backed up by coercion.

In order to achieve this goal, as I’ve written before, the notion of separate nations must be eradicated.

The primary goal of the provoked chaos in the Middle East and parts of Africa is: redraw that whole territory and push waves of immigrants into the West, primarily Europe.

Re-work the population-demographics of Europe so no nation looks as it once did. Flood the continent with immigrants. Drown traditional cultures and ethnic identities. Eventually, make it easy to have a nationless Europe, broken from its past.

Consider this Globalist operation a dialectical force. What it gives rise to—its opposite—is a reborn resistance of groups formed around national and ethnic identities, traditional and even ancient cultures. You can see this happening in Europe now.

Whether you like it or don’t like it, it’s taking place. This is the coming struggle of two forces. What they will give rise to—the new force—is open to analysis and speculation.

But for many centuries, something else has been happening in Europe. Something vitally important. Its progress has not been even. There have been severe setbacks. The “upward trend” has been anything but smooth. You can trace part of it by studying the declining power of kings and the rise of “rights of the people.” This movement has not been a church. It hasn’t been a single unified group at all. It flared up in England, France, Germany, and other countries, died down, and was resuscitated again, in stronger forms.

It eventually took on clearer features.

Its substance and goal was the emancipation of the individual.

Freedom, liberty, choice, power—at the level of the single human being, not the group.

And along with that freedom was the tacit and necessary conclusion that the individual could create his own future and existence, apart not only from a ruling force, but also apart from any tradition he did not choose to adhere to.

This was heady material, to say the least. It was revolutionary on every level. And it wasn’t popular with any government, or any group that looked to the past for its identity.

Nevertheless, the “movement” advanced. In many cases, artists paved the way. So did certain philosophers.

—The free and independent and creative individual—

By the dawn of the 20th century, that idea was firmly entrenched.

The problem was, most people couldn’t handle it. Particularly the creative aspect. The implication was rather staggering on a metaphysical level: the individual invents reality.

This concept wasn’t backed by any establishment. It didn’t rely on ancient myths of cultures. It didn’t merge with religions. In fact, it stood against the unthinking Group.

The concept continued, and continues, to exist on the margins of society. It is not part of the ongoing dialectic.

Its power is considerable, however, since it derives from the fact that the individual is, at his invisible core, all these things: free, independent, creative, and powerful. Come hell or high water.

Understood in this light, he does not enter into the dialectical process. He does not automatically give rise to his opposite. He doesn’t dive into the machine-like production of history.

The individual endures.

He can and does form relationships, of course, but not at the expense of his own mind, spirit, psyche, intelligence, imagination, and creative power. These are not auctioned away.

So it stands to reason that his dreams and solutions and answers and enterprises and battles are not bound by predictable patterns. He is the ultimate wild card.

Time is very long. As the dialectic plays out, struggles, and transforms, the individual will, as always, stand at the center.

After all, the machinations of opposition are, unconsciously, about him. He, in his free state, is the goal. He is where history goes, and departs from, with its waves of avoidance and embrace.

Each time the wave breaks on the shore and sweeps away, it leaves a few more free individuals, who have awakened from the trance.

The social creature called Man concocts more and more reasons to forget his essential nature, but the individual, stripped of amnesia and fear, returns to himself.

Taking stock of his capacity, he embarks on a voyage of creation. Reality and history, such as they are, provide a mere perspective, out of which he emerges.

If there are great myths, they are of his own invention. He is the poet of his own consciousness.

This is the signal of an authentic new dawn.

There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.

This lone word makes them see something majestic and untamed and astonishing.

They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

They suddenly know why they are alive.

99% of the world has been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they’re ready to cuddle up and take it all in.

Maybe you once saw something truly free that didn’t care about consequences, and it blew you away and turned on your soul’s electricity for an hour.

CREATE is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the smug boredom of the soul.

CREATE is about what the individual does when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

CREATE is about the end of mindless postponement. It’s about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It’s about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.

People come to the brink, and then say, “I’m waiting for orders. I’m looking for a sign. I want the signal that it’s okay to proceed.”

People pretend they don’t know anything about imagination, about how “it operates” (as if it were a machine), about what it can do, about where it can go, about how it can take them into new territory. They feign ignorance.

“I want to stay the same, and I’ll do anything to maintain that.”

It’s a test of loyalty. Do you want to remain faithful to an idea that is just a small piece of what you can be, or do you want to take the greater adventure?

The propaganda machines of society relentlessly turn out images and messages that ultimately say: YOU MUST BELONG TO THE GROUP.

Day after day after day, year after year, the media celebrate heroes. They inevitably interview these people to drag out of them the same old familiar stories. Have you EVER, even once, seen a hero who told an interviewer in no uncertain terms: “I got to where I am by denying the power of the group”?

Have you ever heard that kind of uncompromising statement?

I didn’t think so.

Why not?

Because it’s not part of the BELONGING PROGRAM, the program that society runs on to stay away from the transforming power of IMAGINATION.

The individual and his imagination are beyond any dialectic.

Jon Rappoport

The formula of war vs. a pandemic of freedom

Jan15

The formula of war vs. a pandemic of freedom

Notes on the exit from titanic boredom and failure.

Follow the bouncing ball all the way to the end, which is a beginning

by Jon Rappoport

January 15, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Making war makes money. Winning a war makes more money.

The desire to keep making war requires building up and maintaining a standing army.

When many nations are pursuing this general course, the “threat-need” for maintaining a standing army rises to a new level.

The “need, for the sake of defense and preparedness,” to strengthen armies is exactly what war makers exploit.

Dismantling this whole operation, by scaling back foreign military bases, withdrawing troops, and setting boundaries and no-go zones is anathema to war makers.

If JFK, as a few scholars suggest, was planning to get out of Vietnam, and if he was also in the process of planning space missions with Russia, these would have been ample reasons for his assassination.

Everyone has his favorite reason for JFK’s murder—he wanted to take money-creation out of the hands of the Federal Reserve; he was about to blow the whistle on UFO secrets; he was on the verge of destroying the CIA; he signed the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty with Russia; he and his brother were trying to destroy the Mafia; JFK was about to lay taxes on multi-billion-dollar Liberian shipping operations; anti-Castro Cubans hated him because he failed to back the Bay of Pigs invasion; he was determined to push forward an ocean-turbine technology for the generation of electricity. Everyone who has a reason for JFK’s murder is quite sure it is the primary or only reason.

If withdrawal from Vietnam was one reason, it speaks to the “sensitivity” of the war machine and its allied industries.

If international peace broke out, what would happen to the US economy? To be more precise, what would happen to those corporations who depend on the largest government military contracts? To be even more precise, what would happen to these corporations, who depend on government taxes and money invented out of thin air by elite government-backed banks?

Those corporations would imagine new enterprises or crash.

And?

The nation would have to find another way to have an economy. Would this signal, beyond the chaos, the end of the world? No.

Along a similar front, if gangs were wiped out, along with drug cartels, and if the main terrorist groups were isolated, attacked, and defunded (cut off from drug money, diverted government tax money and elite invented money), other sectors of the economy would take a hit, but again, the world would not end.

Along a similar front, if corporations who manufacture and sell poison (e.g., drug companies, pesticide companies) were punished to the full extent of the law, and even disbanded, the economy would take another hit, but again, the world would not end.

Along a similar front, if cheating, lying, and thieving banks and allied Wall St. firms were punished to the full extent of the law, and even disbanded, the world would not end.

What would the new emerging economy look like? That would depend on the imagination, and challenging work, done by individuals (not governments) who see new possibilities. That would depend on people who attempt to wake up a population muddled in passive acceptance of whatever consumer products are shoved down their throats.

Yes, I know all this speculation sounds like dreaming impossible dreams. But while I’m at it, here is another one: what would happen if everything I’ve written so far in this article became the subject of reasoned debate in colleges? I’m talking about serious lengthy debate about a new economy.

Several things would happen. First, it would come to light that the overwhelming number of students are intellectually incapable of carrying on such a dialogue. That in itself would rank as an inconvenient truth.

Students don’t learn how to think in a rational fashion. They know next to nothing about logic. Most of them aren’t even aware of what a line of reasoning looks like. They can’t follow such a line.

Second, it would become obvious that the overwhelming number of students are incapable of conceiving a new economy that is not spearheaded and controlled by government.

Students are brainwashed into thinking that all significant change must come from above. It must be planned. It must be designed to produce some vague outcome called “equality.”

This preference for central government control and planning is sustained even though, with a little thought, it’s clear that government has been the driving (and permissive) criminal force that protects the very economy that is causing all the trouble.

Third, it would become obvious that the faculties of colleges are also intellectually incapable of carrying on this debate. They, too, have been trained to ignore logic. They’ve also been trained to push a values-laden agenda that celebrates centrally planned collectivist economies.

Fourth, the idea that free and independent and creative individuals could spearhead a new economy seems outrageous, preposterous, and even illegal to the mass of students and professors. For them, all non-group-associated individuals, viewed in any light, are, a priori, greedy criminals.

So actually, this article isn’t about creating a new economy. It’s about the barriers to a rational, extensive, lengthy dialogue and debate about the creation of a new economy. A dialogue, by the way, that goes beyond what might be contained in cell phone texting or tweeting. How shocking.

Here is just one idea that might spring up in the kind of dialogue I’m talking about. Urban farms. They already exist, of course. In each case, they began as an idea in the mind of one individual. They didn’t spring to life, originally, when six people, walking down the street, suddenly turned to each other and said, “Urban farms.”

These are very large operations that grow food crops for residents of cities, especially those who can’t afford good food. The people themselves learn to grow the crops.

What would happen, what would be the consequence of, say, 10,000 urban farms across America? What would this do for the health and morale of people in cities? How would profit be made? And, peripherally, why is it that local, state, and federal government haven’t backed such an idea—for an infinitesimal fraction of the money they spend on alleviating poverty; money that, by the way, seems to make things worse.

Again, peripherally, what would happen if thousands of college students, who matriculate on privileged campuses and yap endlessly about their lack of privilege, instead turned their victimhood-energies to starting urban farms and working in them? Would the world end? Would the sky fall? The same questions could be asked about the students’ professors, many of whom are merely paid propagandists of the State.

There are all sorts of interesting questions that could arise in a real debate/dialogue. Here’s another one: what would a world without Monsanto or Merck actually look like? Or: what would America look like with an army dedicated only to defense of the nation?

Such a dialogue could lead to action. Many separate actions. What a thought. Would the world end? Would the sky fall?

You want more? Pay particular and close attention to this one. What would happen, if one state in the union decided that anyone could offer health advice and non-harmful, non-toxic treatment to another person, for any ailment or illness, without control from above, without the need for government licensing? Suppose this arrangement, between consenting adults, was done by contract, not license? Suppose both parties asserted that no liability or blame would be attached to the outcome of such advice or treatment? In other words, God forbid, the citizens would actually take responsibility for themselves. Do you think many citizens and practitioners might flock to such a state? Do you think an economic bonanza might explode in that state? Do you think the outbreak of freedom might raise the morale in that area? Do you think improved health might result? Do you think other states might follow suit, merely by removing, at no cost, their grotesque rules and licensing/enforcement bureaus? Would you be afraid of such an arrangement, understanding the fact that current orthodox medicine, as licensed and practiced throughout the land, results in widespread pharmaceutical devastation? Shown a projection of the foreseeable economic bonanza from the new arrangement I just outlined, do you think there is at least one state in the US that might throw irrational caution to the winds and enact this program of health freedom?

In the kind of extended dialogue I’m talking about here, individuals come up with lots of interesting ideas—ideas that could very well lead to action. And in the process, the nightmare zombie cloud of government control and meddling takes major hits. All its operations aimed at interfering with freedom are exposed. The crud washes off. The unconscionable dreck drains away.

People start actually thinking again. They start imagining again. They feel their chains slipping away. They come out of the collective dream. They experience cascades of new energy. They think about entrepreneurship in a new way. They think about morality and ethics in a new way. They re-find themselves.

Does the sky fall? Does the world end?

No. It begins.

Perhaps (miracle of miracles) the quantity of self-invented victims begins to diminish. Perhaps untold numbers of people floating along in a New Age daze (because they see no way out of the dilemmas and conflicts of our time) rise up from their plastic lotus pads, sensing a genuine impulse of hope and desire for the first time in many years. Their own hope. Their own desire. Perhaps millions of people trapped in dead-end robotic work feel a creak in the psychological and spiritual machinery that surrounds them, as it begins to malfunction and split apart. Perhaps moon-blown, full-bore, doctrinal collectivist freaks feel a few pin pricks in the purple bloated corpse of their one-size-fits-all planetary vision.

Who knows what might happen if a true ongoing dialogue about a new economy persisted long enough?

If a person is dead inside and doesn’t want to be dead inside, he has to ask himself (paraphrasing Clint Eastwood) this question: Did he fire six shots into his psyche or only five? If only five, can he fire that last bullet into the passive trance that keeps him in thrall to Control Central?

Waking up may be hard to do, but it’s also contagious. If a college dared to offer a four-year course which consisted entirely of the dialogue/debate I’m proposing, carried out along respectful lines, omitting and barring the screaming opponents of free speech, who knows what might happen?

As William Blake wrote, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” As the dialogue proceeds, all sorts of foolish ideas would come to light and unravel, and turn into other ideas, and those ideas would transmute into useful ideas, out of which would be born a few brilliant ideas…and on it would go.

And the process itself would act as a catalyst for every person within listening range. His own imagination would rev up. He would discover his own future path.

Would that be a calamity? Would the sky fall? Would the world end?

Or would the dawn finally break?

It’s instructive to read what authors wrote about core values a hundred or two hundred years ago, because then you can appreciate what has happened to the culture of a nation. You can grasp the enormous influence of planned propaganda, which changes minds, builds new consensus, and exiles certain disruptive thinkers to the margins of society. You can see what has been painted over, with great intent, in order to promote tyranny that proclaims a greater good for all.

Here are several statements about the individual, written in 19th century America. The authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper were prominent figures. Emerson, in his time, was the most famous.

“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.” — James Fenimore Cooper

“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of [by] formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” — Henry David Thoreau

“They [conformists] think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members….Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist…. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you imagine, today, any of these statements gaining traction in the public mind, much less the mainstream media?

In the public mind? Yes, I can.

The world, as it is presented to us, is a shrunken mural in which the individual must carve down his energies, in order to fit in. If he reverses that process, he finds a new world that didn’t seem to be there before.

But now it is.

It most definitely is.

Jon Rappoport

The creative fire of Australia: forgotten films

Jan13

The creative fire of Australia: forgotten films

How I fell in love with Australia

by Jon Rappoport

January 13, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

Hightide (1987): “Story about a backup singer for an Elvis impersonator who re-enters her past when she leaves a tour in a small town and finds her daughter in a mobile home park.” (IMDb)

“Movies are made from the outside in, the inside out, every which way. But then you have the actor. If all of a sudden he gives you something so startling and illuminating it throws the whole movie out the window, ideally the director has to find a new movie in the old one.” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

“The Hollywood culture has developed its own subconscious ideas about what emotion is and what it isn’t. Some emotions are permitted to exist; others aren’t. Audiences don’t realize this kind of exclusion, for obvious reasons. They don’t see the censored outpouring of feeling; it isn’t on the screen.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Yes, we have fine Australian actors like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman, and the unstoppable Russell Crowe of LA Confidential.

But for my money, put Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush down anywhere, in a café, on the street, turn on a camera and just let them talk and walk and move in and out of pretending they’re other people for six or seven hours; and I’m there. They’re Australian immortals. And perhaps the two greatest film actors in the world.

Judy Davis was hatched in a different galaxy, the Australia of the 1980s, when filmmakers were young and free and precocious, and knew in their bones, with no shame or embarrassment, what life-force was.

In the early 1960s, I haunted the Thalia Theater in New York, and watched dozens of foreign films. I was struck by actors who revealed what were, to me, alien (non-American) “energies.” Gunnar Bjornstrand in The Seventh Seal. Monica Vitti in L’Avventura. Alastair Sim in The Green Man.

Years later, while living in Los Angeles, I experienced the same strange phenomenon, while watching three Australian films: Winter of Our Dreams (1981); Heatwave (1982); and Hightide (1987).

Judy Davis starred in all of them. See them yourself. She comes alive in a way that American actors rarely achieve—if they even grasp the possibility of her raw emotional recklessness (that somehow reaches blowtorch focus). It occurred to me there had to be something Australian about her performances…some kind of power Australians could recognize as their own (during a period before the country would turn into a caricature of itself).

Particularly in Hightide, as she comes upon her long-abandoned daughter in a bleak coastal town and struggles with that shock, Davis takes you into feelings, if you’re an American, that seem to be coming from another planet, a place you want to say is completely foreign and impossible…but you know it’s the fuse and force of pre-modern society, when there was no taboo against emotion pouring and striking from the electric core of a human out into the landscape.

You suddenly say, because you can’t stop yourself, “Well, this is what I’ve always known. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Davis doesn’t let down for a moment. There are no gaps, no resting places. Who knows how director Gillian Armstrong achieved that victory? And while you’re riveted on Davis, Jan Adele, who plays Davis’ mother-in-law in the film, poleaxes you with a volcanic mother/protector performance from another vector that is so seamless you absolutely know she couldn’t be acting at all—and maybe she isn’t. Maybe a few Australian actors in those days had some mysterious hybrid version of performance which, in the American vocabulary, has no name. I don’t have the filmography to prove it, but I suspect Adele would be on a par with Davis and Geoffrey Rush, had she been given the necessary roles during her career.

Heatwave, a Judy Davis film from 1982, directed by Phillip Noyce, is described this way: “A planned housing development in Sydney’s Kings Cross in the mid 70s…becomes the centre of controversy as tenants and squatters in the doomed, older houses refuse to move. Their most outspoken member is Kate Dean (Judy Davis), who works with the publisher of a small but vocal local paper, Mary Ford (Carole Skinner) – whose relentless rabble rousing against the development is silenced only with her disappearance. Kate searches for Mary…The union bans work on the site, but a well timed fire changes the dynamics of the dispute – but leads to tragedy.” (urban cinefile)

In the film, Davis makes solo activism an irresistible wrecking-ball life. Even when her own emotions have burned out into ashes, she keeps making war. At first, you don’t know what you’re seeing. You can’t believe what you’re seeing. She’s so much more than a movie, in a movie. It’s as if you finally and embarrassingly begin to understand, for the first time (how could this be?), what tragic means. Not in the classical sense, but as it comes to the surface in a single human being. It was always there, waiting to be unearthed; and then it is. In that respect, I know of no other film that touches on what Davis is doing in Heatwave.

Modern society reflexively closes the door on everything I’m alluding to in this piece. “Don’t play with fire.” “Don’t explore this.” The depth and the free flow of natural emotions are ruled out, because we now have a better system. Our world is devoted to the good of everyone. In order to bring it into being, sacrifices must be made. An area of the soul has to be excised. Amnesia about the psyche must be induced. For the sake of “equality,” humans must be redrawn on a smaller map.

A cosmic fire department is pressed into service. And for the sake of efficiency, the department’s main function is prevention. Don’t let the flames find incendiary material. Recognize sparks and snuff them out.

Re-channel energies into acceptable boulevards. Hold up the correct leaders, so others may follow them.

From this perspective, you could say the early Australian films are strange historical documents. They reveal a time that is now retired as a lost landscape. They remember a possibility that (we’re assured) was once too real to be real.

Except for this—what is covered over and buried is never fully extinguished. You can decorate an artist with a blooming bar of effects and embroideries, in an effort to obscure him, but he can eventually break out. And if he does, if he stands against the artifact of the landscape, he can even disturb the blind in their beds.

Re the great ones from Australia: never let their films disappear.

Coda: If I could transport one American actor back to the Australia of the 1980s, to work with Gillian Armstrong or Phillip Noyce, it would be Ellen Barkin. In America, she’s had one basic problem: she’s bigger than every film in which she’s performed. She spills over the edges of the scripts and the story lines. She jumps out of the screen. (Watch her opening scene in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law.) Why waste time—build a film around her. Understand that she can project emotional fire power beyond the unwritten rules of American movie production. It would be a genuine revelation to see her finally go all-out and take over. Despite her acknowledged “powerful” roles (Sea of Love, Switch), she has as-yet uncalled-for bundles of dynamite waiting for a director with a match, a director who is hell bent on exploding her full range. Revisit her American films. There are always “pull-back” moments, where she’s forced to retract some of her unapologetic force. The Americans just can’t conceive of her otherwise. She’s too strong. Without restraints, she would make a tattered shamble of the script, she would present a character who is beyond the audience’s comprehension. Well, there are always such characters—until they actually come to life on the screen. And then all bets are off. Then audiences discover what they’ve been unconsciously waiting and yearning for. But Hollywood and its adjuncts operate on fear. “Maybe this is too much. Maybe it’ll flop. Maybe she’ll walk right off the screen and yell Fire and drive the audience out of the theater. Maybe we should confine ‘power’ to crashes on the freeway and heavy weapons. Maybe the whole area of pure emotion is too hot to handle. Because we ourselves are afraid of it…”

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it?

Go back and watch two American films that were supposed to be iconic “emotional breakthroughs,” A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Yes, it’s unfair to pull these films out of their historical context, but Streetcar is a highly stylized version of emotional and physical violence, couched in Tennessee Williams’ sweet sticky prose, the “inevitable” conclusion of which is rape; and Waterfront gives us “the loser who becomes a winner,” even though the mob still controls the New York docks. In neither case is the Brando character allowed to propel his emotions into a true victory (or tragedy).

For that, watch Hightide and Heatwave. The adequate scripts are permitted to melt, because Judy Davis burns them up, just as she should. Because she could.

I predict that no American or Australian actor who happens to read this article will like it. These days, everyone has made his adjustments and compromises; everyone has awakened fully to the way things are; everyone knows the score. Everyone has tailored his conception of what movies are about. Everyone has accepted a simulacrum of acting, within the structure. Everyone has bought the script of scripts dictating how emotion can be expressed and how it can’t be expressed. Everyone has bought The Cartoon as an imitation of life—which involves forgetting what life is or could be.

As I suggested earlier, however, death is never final for the artist. Try as he might to maintain occupancy in a zone of prepackaged accommodation, something will come along and give him the chance to escape. And then another something. And then another. These little unasked for moments arrow into his psyche.

He can keep trying to refuse, but—

The artist is forever.

“Wait! I didn’t sign up for that!”

Yes, actually, you did.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Jon Rappoport

The individual is not the group

Jan8

The individual is not the group

by Jon Rappoport

January 8, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

“Exercises and techniques for accessing and deploying imagination…these would be essential. Exercises that allow the individual to reinstate his basic creative position in his own life, his own future. Exercises that allow the individual to use his imagination in many different ways. Ramping up power.” (Preliminary notes for Exit From the Matrix, Jon Rappoport)

There are many ways I could launch from the headline of this article.

In this case, I want to point out that all life is not composed of groups trying to solve the problems created by other groups.

This may come as revelation to some.

In the long, long, long run, the struggle pitting one group against another fails, because, swallowed up in the process is the individual.

He sacrifices what he is and what he can be for the sake of a cause. It may be a just cause, a good cause, a foolish cause, a crazy cause—but the outcome is the same. In the long run.

The best version of a free Republic, whether it was actually envisioned that way by its founders, is: the organized State exists to allow the greatest possible latitude to the individual.

This, in case there is any doubt, is not a prefabricated utopia. Far from it.

What does the individual have to offer? He has everything he is capable of doing, when he liberates himself from petty ideas and limitations about what he is. That journey of liberation is his own. It isn’t anybody else’s.

It is, as I’ve pointed out many times, a journey of imagination.

Here are preliminary notes I made as I was putting together my second collection, Exit From The Matrix:

Imagination lets a person know what could exist but doesn’t now exist. Imagination lets a person know what could be invented. Imagination lets a person know that, despite claims to the contrary, the future is open and unwritten.

Imagination lets a person know that he can think thoughts that have never been thought before.

The journey of individual liberation is, therefore, much more than discovering what already exists in one’s own mind.

The world as it is, things as they are—this is eventually the sensation of depleted imagination. Of course, imagination never diminishes, it just waits. For you.

The deployment of imagination unlocks hidden energies. A power, sought after and never found in other endeavors, appears.

Psychological tests are tests of imagination. The less you have, the more normal you are. If you have none, you’re perfect. Then they put you in a field and call you a rock.

Tiny imagination is just part of this absurd culture. You don’t have to go along with it. You don’t have to think the leading frontier of imagination is about finding a spray that will make your hair look like a shellacked rabbit.

Imagination is larger than any universe. It needs no sanction from the world or from other worlds. It is not some secret form of physics. It is not religion. It is not cosmology. It is not any one picture of anything. It’s what you invent.

The group does not have imagination. It poaches on individuals with imagination.

The group is a graveyard where imagination has been downgraded and forgotten.

The group is the rationalization for people who have lost the thread of their own imaginations.

The group is the feel-good place where people can console each other about the loss of their own imaginations.

The group sometimes acts to liberate the individual, but then the group forgets what it’s been doing and moves forward for its own sake, for its collective power. And that power opposes what the individual can be.

The group is a locus for discussion that eventually leads to a zero effect. Anyone who wakes up to his own imagination would leave the group.

The group is a place where people are invited to forget they are individuals.

The group is promoted by people who are afraid of their own imaginations and the implication that they create their own futures.

The group is promoted by people who want to leave their own individuality in the dust.

The group is for people who demand: “We must all agree on something.”

The group may have temporary value, but it never disbands. It becomes a fungus. It seeks more territory.

Imagination soars. It is the individual at the edge of his own exploration.

Imagination was the source for the building of modern civilization. But then civilization became dedicated to itself and the group.

The individual never goes away, and neither does his imagination.

Imagination can light up a room, a house, a city, a nation, a planet, a galaxy, a universe.

Jon Rappoport

Interview with a dead Orson Welles

Jan5

Interview with a dead Orson Welles

~revised and updated~

by Jon Rappoport

January 5, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)

Someone somewhere will surely think this is “channeling,” so allow me to set the record straight. It isn’t. It’s fiction. However, as well all know, fiction often makes more sense than fact. Enough said on that point.

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): You’re a comedian. Would you agree?

A (Welles): Of course. That’s not all I am, but yes. Comedy has effervescence. It spills over the sides of the container. The container is “things as they are.” When you keep pouring new material into it and let it flood over the sides, you’re going to run into laughter, eventually.

Q: The container itself is a joke.

A: It’s a joke that can kill you, but sure. When you’ve been around theater as long as I have, you understand that the whole construction called ordinary reality is just another piece of theater—except it’s posing as the only show in town. That’s the joke.

Q: How old were you when you figured this out?

A: I think I’ve always known it. People take on roles and they act them out.

Q: Why?

A: That’s a hell of a question. I guess it’s because they don’t see an alternative. There is a psychological fixation on One. One role, one idea, one answer, one ultimate objective, one cure, one ending. It represents a hunger for limits. I never liked that.

Q: You never like to come to the end of things.

A: No. My endings were usually tricks. You know, a way of arriving at the conclusion of a story. But actually, I could have gone on forever. I could have extended every movie I ever made out to infinity. Why not? It’s more interesting. You just keep inventing.

Q: So reality is infinite?

A: It could be. There’s no rule against it. This is another aspect of comedy. At some point, as you keep extending things, it’s funny. Your characters, in a movie, break out of their confines. The seams split. You can make that serious and horrible, but if you keep going long enough, it turns into comedy. Because the roles disintegrate. The limits crack. You’re in new spaces. Freedom takes over.

Q: Immortality.

A: Well, yes. I mean, I’m dead, but I’m not. Death is just one way of ending the story, but you don’t have to tell or live a story that way. You just go on. You move on.

Q: In your later years, you gained an enormous amount of weight.

A: That was the result of boredom. And the boredom came out of the fact that I wasn’t ingenious enough to assemble everything I needed to make the films I really wanted to make. You see, after Citizen Kane, which I made in my 20s, I saw where it could all go. I saw I could make movies that no one had ever thought of. This may sound odd, but Kane was really a movie about making movies. That’s what I discovered. On a higher level, let’s say, it was a movie about shadows and light and camera angles and the emotion coming out of characters on the screen, all rolled up into moving paintings. It was quite beautiful to me. I was struck by it. I loved it. I wanted to take off from there and fly into the wild blue yonder. The possibilities were endless.

Q: You had the energy—

A: You have no idea. It was titanic. It was radiating out of every cell in my body.

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: He attacked me. He said The Magnificent Ambersons was a drawing-room drama.

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.

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. It’s an 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: Touch of Evil—they say, every frame is a galvanizing photograph.

A: Why else make a movie? I was like the poet who realizes language is 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, and I stayed there. 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? 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: You’re supposed to be obligated to telling a story.

A: Drivel. 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. It’s sheer stupidity. 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 it. 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 cloudy leopards, pure and sufficient and heartbreaking beauty. You make many types. Let’s not diddle around. 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 could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Q: Joseph Calleia in Touch of Evil.

A: Poor old Joe. He could make that sadness sing. Abundantly. 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 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: With different rules.

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 in it 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: This society we live in provides us with snapshots of artists.

A: Caught, for an instant, on the run. So the life 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 his endless trillions of immortal years are captured in a highly suspect snapshot. But 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 he’s 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, it’s 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. The individual is immortal. 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 temporary 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.

Q: Okay, let’s take a short break here. I want to present a quote from William Burroughs (Naked Lunch):

“A bureau takes root anywhere in the state…always reproducing more of its kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised…A bureau operates on…principles of inventing needs to justify its existence. Bureaucracy is wrong as cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action.”

And I want to recall an old recording session you did. It was a voiceover for an ad—Findus Foods. You were the spokesman. You were doing takes on cod, peas, beef. The recording engineer kept the outtakes. Here are a few of your comments:

“That [what the producers want Welles to say] doesn’t make any sense. Sorry…” “You don’t know what I’m up against. ‘Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp…coating’…I think, no…” “‘We know a little place in American Far West where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie beef and tastes…’ This is a lot of shit, you know that!” “It isn’t worth it. No money is worth this…” [Welles walks out]

A: Yes, I remember that. I could have used the money, but the script was such a load. I couldn’t do it.

Q: One of the predictable effects of the Internet is the need for information over fiction. Beyond a certain point, it becomes a disease. It confirms the robot part of the mind. People shrug off fiction as unnecessary. It’s fluff. Why bother, when the truth is so much more riveting? Well, there is a reason people think that. They have no experience with their own imagination. Information structures have one job: deliver. And the people on the other end of that wire, the audience, are set up to eat what’s brought. It’s a giant Domino’s operation. Or look at it as a see-saw. On one end (information) is a 100000000-ton steel ball, and on the other end (fiction), a grainy pebble. Theoretically, it could have been the other way around. A million short stories for every factoid. But that won’t work, because again, people have very little conscious experience of their own imaginations. It’s a hell of a lot easier to sit back and take in the flow of info—good, bad, or indifferent. And then react. People think magic is a talent, like being able, at the age of six, to draw a cowboy with his six-gun in the holster. Actually, magic is all about imagination, and if a person has no experience with it and no inclination to gain the experience, then he can kiss magic goodbye. Of course, he can remember that, much earlier in his life, he did live through imagination, and he did run and play right in the center of it. Then he might change his mind about a lot of things. He might decide, for instance, that an unending torrent of information reaches a limit, beyond which it does no one any good…Let’s pick up again with any one of your films…

A: Take Touch of Evil. The story line is interesting, but it doesn’t knock you out of your chair. And the role I play, the corrupt sheriff, that’s old hat. Of course, the casting was delicious, because I was able to use Charlton Heston as the earnest lawman, and that fit perfectly. He knew I was doing that, letting his innate sincerity come through, and he saw the ironies that multiplied out of it. But everything was the staging, the atmosphere, the angles, the shots.

Q: What many people would dismiss as inessential.

A: That’s the way the modern world works. Strip things down. Reduce them to their lowest common denominator.

Q: Like machines. One goal, one plan, one strategy, one action to reach the end of line.

A: I was always moving in the opposite direction. Inventing multiple new ways of seeing things. You see, for many people, that is a waste of time. They want their messages simple. They want simple over and over again.

Q: I say it’s a disease.

A: Well, yes. If I’d had to stick to that code, I would have given up making films. I would have written novels. At least there, you’re alone. You can invent whatever you want to. Take the expression “the bottom line.” This has been extended from business and accounting, where it originated, to the idea that you should take the shortest path between two points. You should arrive as quickly as possible at the conclusion. And the conclusion should tell you how to sell something. Or buy it. Or believe it. Or reject it.

Q: When you talk to people about imagination and magic, they tend to look for that same approach.

A: Of course. They’ve been trained that way. They’ve succumbed to the spirit of the times. In Touch of Evil, although the plot itself was fairly tight, I was really using the opportunity to stage a series of scenes in which the characters alternated between being human and being caricature—that shuttling back and forth between realism and facade, between the natural and the bizarre, between the obvious and the esoteric. Esoteric in the sense that people tend to play out roles in life, and when they do, and when you see it, reality itself begins to look different, begins to take on odd qualities. What I’m doing is showing the audience a different kind of reality, one that at first glance looks like the world, but after a little while looks like someone looking at the world. That’s what I’m really revealing—how I can look at the world. Only instead of explaining it, I’m showing it as drama, I’m populating my point of view with characters, and I’m letting you know that’s what I’m doing. I’m not hiding it. I’m enjoying it. Celebrating it.

Q: It’s as if you’re saying to the audience, “I’m dreaming, and here is my dream, only I’m having it while I’m wide awake, and I’m INVENTING the dream as I go along and I’m happy to admit that’s the case.”

A: Yes, that’s right. It’s, you might say, another level of art. Laid out there at a time when we already know so much about art of the past, after we’ve digested so many conventions and traditions of art, after we’ve woken up to the fact that these habits of art are just that—we’ve seen through so much about how artists create reality in traditional ways and forms—and now it’s time to go further.

Q: When you look at how certain so-called classical novels were written, with the all-knowing and all-seeing eye of the third-person narrative looking down from a higher plateau…

A: That’s also, of course, the style of religion. It’s the style of religious discourse and narrative, and people in that venue still buy it. They want the calm and steady hand of the authority. They want that narrator to come across that way. It’s old and worn out and rather absurd, but people cling to it. It’s a cousin, I’d say, to the manual.

Q: The manual?

A: Yes, the instruction book that tells you how to do something, how something works. That calm voice, that assurance.

Q: I see. Yes. And people feel, in the absence of it, they’re lost. They don’t know where to turn.

A: Well, this goes back to your statement that people don’t have the conscious experience of their own imagination. Instead, they look for the steady guiding hand from somewhere else. They think there are only two possibilities. The calm authoritative voice, or chaos. It’s a joke. Imagination tells us there are an infinity of ways of presenting realities, not two. Not one. People watch Citizen Kane and they think it’s about the corruption of the human spirit. That’s the hook for them. It’s one of those “big themes” they’re familiar with and can plug into. Let me tell you something. If I were making a film about corruption of the spirit, it would have looked nothing like Citizen Kane. Nothing. Kane was a movie about the possibilities of film. It was a series of episodes in which the visual language itself was expanding and I was showing people what could be done with space. With dimension. With emotion shot through these larger dimensions. I was talking in a new language. I was introducing the idea that new language could have great impact.

Q: That was the magic.

A: What else could it have been? A return to older techniques? A re-hashing of hackneyed ways of describing reality? People are terribly confused. When you talk to them in a new language, they keep looking for the OBJECTS of what you’re talking about. They keep looking for the old objects embedded in the old language. If they don’t find them, they throw up their hands in dismay. Where are the old things? But you’re not presenting old things. And even worse, you’re not talking to them in the language that would convey those old things. You want them to hear and see and feel the new language, the process of that language unfolding, but they search after familiar themes and ideas and stories.

Q: As if some official minister of information will present them.

A: Yes. That reassuring floating sound from above that tells them everything will always be as it once was. You know, when you assume that voice and use it, it doesn’t really matter what you say. You could be talking about new discoveries or lies or breakthroughs or the most outrageous nonsense—it doesn’t matter. They’ll buy what you’re selling. But if you change the voice and the language, they don’t know what to do.

Q: So they thought you were an egoist.

A: And I was and am—but not in the obvious sense. I was creating a different language, with power, from my mind and imagination. And I had no desire to dampen the power, because it was an inherent part of what I was inventing. I was launching out radiance and I was in a state of radiance at the same time. Joyous…and celebrating this new language and celebrating the fact that I was doing it. Why not?

Q: In the bureaucratic world of our times, what you did could be looked at as some sort of condition that might be diagnosed.

A: These petty pernicious little grasping bureaucratic minds, who have no existence except an official one, need to be destroyed. And destroyed in only one way: through a mass exodus away from them. Leave them in their seat of influence. Let them stew there and write their papers and reports. Let them win in a complete vacuum. Treat them as morons who are deranged beyond rescue. Go away and create something entirely different. For heaven’s sake, CREATE SOMETHING.

Q: The voice of calm authority you speak of…it’s a form of hypnotism.

A: I know something about that subject. One thing I know is this. In the long run, it doesn’t matter what’s coming from that voice. The most important thing to know is that the CONTEXT, the space, is hypnotic. And that’s where the whole lie is. That’s what makes the entire performance a lie. WAKE UP to that. Walk away. Invent your own voice. One of the functions of art is the stimulation of imagination in the audience. Then, for those who have the desire, they become artists, too. They catch the glimpse in themselves. It’s always been that way. A real artist isn’t hanging around hoping for information. He’s inventing something much more powerful.

Jon Rappoport

Maps of consciousness, ancient Tibet, and a new psychology

Jan4

by Jon Rappoport

January 4, 2016

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“For the most part, today’s individual wants his spirituality to sit there like a plum on a tree. He doesn’t want it to be highly dynamic. He certainly doesn’t want to make it intensely personal and unique to himself.” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Readers who have been with me for a while notice that I work against the grain.

This is my natural tendency, but it’s also the result of 30-plus years of research into a number of “sacred cows.” The findings of my research have shown me that civilization supports numerous false realities, and this extends to so-called mental, spiritual, and metaphysical foundations.

There are wide cracks and leaks and large holes.

I have enormous faith, long-term, in the individual. Not in the group. I see the individual as the future, no matter how long it takes, no matter how deep his potential is buried under a mass of propaganda and misdirection.

Over the years, I have written several articles describing the underpinning for my 3 Matrix collections.

This is another one, based on my investigations of: Tibet, modern “consciousness writing,” and the role of psychology in a controlled society.

To begin with, psychology, in theory and therapeutic practice, has a way, over time, of “settling in” to the society around it. With some exceptions, it more and more mirrors the values of society.

Mainline psychology considers the individual as having key relationships, and seeks to strengthen, repair, and normalize them.

This is all very well for the patient who already considers himself to be living inside fairly conventional boundaries. But when the boundaries themselves are the issue, psychology tends to waver, wobble, tap dance, and even cast doubt on the mental health of the patient, as if his challenging the limits were somehow a sign of “inner imbalance” or neurosis or misperception.

The “playing field” of society is taken as the fundamental ground of operation, and the person who is walking outside those lines, looking in, assessing what is going on, is suspect. He may “require help.”

You won’t get a psychologist to admit what I’m pointing out here, but this conformist aspect of his work has come all the way down from the early, wide-ranging, fantastical ramblings of Freud, to a comfortable and even smug, small narrative.

Why? Because psychology has been determined to establish itself as an institution within the context of society. Smallness of conception is the fate of all such efforts.

For the past 75 years or so, a counter to psychology has emerged and gained popularity. I call it “consciousness mapping.” It begins by acknowledging that normal and average perception is grossly limited, and then moves on to offer an alternative.

However, the emphasis has been placed on explaining a structure or an ultimate object which consciousness, in its elevated state, would apprehend: a pot of gold; a cosmic entity; a universal connectivity.

“This is where you will arrive, and this is what it looks like, and this is what you will know.”

The Big It.

Well, this is attractive, because many people want to hold on to a Big It. They want to know what lies at the end of the road before they step foot on the road for the first time.

The metaphysical calculus of religion is transferred to consciousness itself.

In my search for a different approach to the power of individual consciousness, I came upon the history of early Tibet, before the society hardened into a theocracy.

Several sources were particularly helpful. The work of author John Blofeld (The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet), the writings of the intrepid explorer, Alexandra David-Neel, and a quite unconventional healer, Richard Jenkins, with whom I worked in the early 1960s in New York.

Jenkins once wrote to me: “There are people who want to tell us what consciousness should perceive. They’re blind to the electric, alive, and free nature of awareness. They’re wrapped up in content and addicted to it. Their biggest mistake is omitting the creative nature of human beings…”

That creative nature was the intense focus of the early Tibetans.

These practitioners, teachers, and students, some 1500 years ago, realized that most people viewed consciousness as an accumulator of knowledge. A searching tool, or a receiving apparatus.

Instead, the Tibetans embarked on a far more adventurous course.

Their many images (e.g., mandalas) weren’t meant as depictions of what finally exists in higher realms. Those realms were just as provisional and changeable as the physical world. You might call the multiple locales and dimensions representations of “what humans in certain Asian cultures would expect to encounter in their journeys of spirit.”

In other words, the Tibetans consciously treated their pantheons of gods and semi-gods as convincing illusions.

Several of their key exercises and techniques were all about having students mentally create these illusions in voluminous and meticulous detail. That was difficult enough, to be sure. Far more difficult was the next aspect of their practice: get rid of these creations.

Put them there; take them away.

The Tibetans were committed to living life on the level of imagination, with all that implied.

And what does it imply?

A new psychology. A psychology of unlimited possibility:

A person’s past, his history, his problems, his relationships are all framed against the wider context of what he can imagine and then invent, create, in the world.

Living through and by imagination long enough, the individual discovers that his prior relationships are transformed. They no longer set themselves up as questions or problems.

He is operating from a platform that affords an utterly different, original, and unexpected outcome.

A psychology of possibility not only looks forward to the future, it has a reason to do so. Bringing electricity back into life depends, initially, on viewing possibilities in the space of one’s own imagination.

It may strike you at this point that our current civilization is bent on lowering possibilities; and that is true. That is the psychology of the psyop.

There is a good reason for this programming, as well as the staging of events that seem to give the programming validity. Those who aim to control the destiny of humankind want to shrink the “size of humans.” That is their intent.

A psychology of possibility would reverse that trend and expose it.

To the casual observer, the weight of this civilization and all its accoutrement seems enormous. But the creative potential of the individual outstrips that structure by light years.

How does the individual realize that fact? What is the spark that ignites his understanding? It all begins in imagination, which is the home of possibility.

If you truly wanted to gain insight into the basis of a person’s problems, you would find it in an area of his imagination where he stored all those things he considered impossible.

Over the years, the “impossibles” build up. And so the future diminishes.

Shrinks.

He carves down the size of his journey. He even turns around and tracks backward, revisiting the places he has already inhabited.

What will he find? Basically, what he already knows.

He becomes like the painter who repeats the same theme over and over.

Whereas the blank canvas actually stands for unlimited open space, unlimited possibility.

In the arena of The Group, we see all manner of problems presented along with their solutions. Replace the free market with government control. Conduct a religious revival to wean populations away from their consumerist addictions. Eliminate money altogether, in favor a more “equitable” plan. Provide monetary compensation for every group who has ever been wronged in the past. Achieve better education by reducing it to a Pavlovian series of stimuli and responses. Track and observe every human, 24/7, in order to curb anti-social behavior. Hook all brains up to a super-computer which has trillions of important data. Genetically alter humans, to make them more talented and healthy. And so on.

Each and every solution winds around and ends up against a brick wall, where the outcome is worse than the original dilemma, where suffering is compounded.

If only we were smarter. If only we were more ingenious. If only we had a better plan. But no, I’m afraid that isn’t the difficulty. The difficulty stems from considering humans as groups in the first place.

The secret to the labyrinth is at the beginning, where the individual surrendered to the idea of the group. It was all downhill from there.

As the future of society plays out over the next few hundred years, there will be a return to the individual.

And then he will decide what happens next.

He will decide whether he should remove the filter, through which he sees all remedies as collective and mass remedies.

He will decide whether to breathe life back into his infinite imagination.

He will decide whether to take his own power as seriously as he now takes centralized spirituality.

But why wait for hundreds of years to pass? Why not now?

Jon Rappoport

Jon Rappoport's Blog

NoMoreFakeNews.com

Category Archives: Energy & Imagination

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Maps of consciousness, ancient Tibet, and a new psychology