Beyond all structures

by Jon Rappoport

June 23, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

We are fascinated with structures and systems because they work, and because some of us feel an aesthetic attraction to them.

They work until you want to do something different.

Many people want to grab a structure and pull it around them and sit there like a bird in a cage. They want to go from A to B to C and feel the satisfaction of knowing it works every time.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.

But go into a corporation and say you want to teach them creativity and they’ll say, “What’s the system?”

Once, at a party, I told a personnel chief at a company, “The system is to stand on your head.”

“Literally?” he said.

“No. That would be too easy. People would find a system for that. But figuratively, that’s what you want to get people to do.”

He scratched his head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where we start. I say something and you don’t understand. Then we have a chance.”

“What are you?” he said. “Some kind of Zen teacher?”

“No,” I said. “If I said I was, you’d pigeonhole me. I teach non-systems.”

He laughed in an uncomfortable way.

“We don’t operate on non-systems at the company.”

“No, but if you let three or four people do that, they might come up with a product you never dreamed of.”

That he could understand. Vaguely.

Here’s how things work at some companies. The second-tier honchos decide it’s time for a new product. They call in the chief of production and ask him what could be done. He suggests a whiz-it 4, which is basically a whiz-it 3 with a few more bells and whistles.

The honchos give him the green light, and he goes to work. He triggers the structure he already has. He gets underlings to make sketches of whiz 4, and with those he assigns compartmentalized tasks to various departments under him. The timetable is eighteen months.

He appoints a project supervisor to oversee the whole thing.

The project supervisor pretty much knows what’s going to happen. The six departments in charge of bringing in the whiz 4 on time will do okay—except one key department will fail miserably, because three guys in that dept. are lazy. They find ways to delay operations. They ask meaningless questions. They let work pile up on their desks. They meddle in other people’s business.

Twelve times, the production supervisor has tried to get these idiots fired. No go.

So everybody settles down to grind of bringing in whiz 4 on time.

Structure.

Manuals, rules and regs.

This can make magic the way an ant can fly to the moon.

So long ago it was in another life, I taught private school in New York. There were six kids in my class, all boys. I was supposed to teach them math. They were all at different levels. They had no ambition to learn math. No matter what I did, they performed miserably. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, decimals, fractions—it didn’t matter. If they managed to learn something on Monday, they forgot it by Tuesday. It was rather extraordinary.

So I took them to an art museum one morning. They were as lost there as they were in the classroom. But I wasn’t. That was the key. I was already painting in a little studio downtown, and I was on fire.

So I began to talk about the paintings. The Raphael, the Vermeer, the Rembrandt. The De Kooning, the Pollock, the Gorky. I had no plan, no idea. I just talked about what they could see if they looked.

And then we walked back to school and I set them up with paints and paper and brushes and told them to go to work. I said I didn’t care what they painted. Just have a good time. Do something you like.

All of a sudden, they weren’t making trouble. They were painting. No more whining and complaining.

I walked around and watched them go at it. I pointed to this or that area and mentioned what I liked.

There was no way to measure or quantify or systematize what the kids were doing that day, but they were coming alive, out of their sloth and resentment.

Then we got back to math, and it was as if they’d all experienced an upward shift in IQ.

That night, back in my studio, I made a note in my notebook. It went something like this: Give them a non-structure, and then follow that with logic; it works.

So that was that.

There used to be something in this culture called improvisation. People understood what it was, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves. Now the word has almost vanished. Same with the word spontaneity. The moment when eye, mind, and brush meet canvas. When mind meets the new. When the inventor suddenly gets up from his chair and trots over to his workbench and starts putting pieces together.

This becomes magic because imagination jumps into the fray. The urge to invent takes the foreground.

The trouble with all these imported Asian spiritual systems now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now.

You need Now, which is dry tinder to the spark of imagination.

Magic isn’t really a return to the mystical past. Alchemy was what people did in the Middle Ages to give themselves a Now, on which they could inject the flame of their imagination.

At its highest levels, it wasn’t a system. Not really.

But if you have enough history at your back and you stand away far enough, everything looks like pattern and structure and system. That’s the illusion. That’s the deception.

Systems allow people to see and also make them blind. If they can’t fold an event into a structure, then for them it isn’t there. This is very interesting. This is where all the myths of Hermes (aka Mercury) sprang from. He was the figure who flew and passed through walls and had no barriers in the space-time continuum—the tin can we call universe. So people pretended, at a deep level, that they were unable to comprehend him. He was invisible to them. He was a trickster. He toppled idols of the hidebound, rule-bound, system-bound society.

Mythologically, he ranked very high in the pantheon of the gods. There really was no reason he couldn’t be considered the king of the Olympians.

But he didn’t want the throne or the lineage. That was just another structure, erected by his god-colleagues, who were bored out of their minds and desperately needed the entertainment and distraction it could provide.

Hermes lived deep in the fire of his own imagination and speed and improvisation and spontaneous action.

He didn’t need metaphysics or cosmology. He already embodied them, and much, much more.

To him, the notion of shared, consonant, and brick-by-brick reality as the longed-for ultimate goal became an enormous joke.

The word “art,” across the full range of its meanings, is what happens when, from a platform of structure, a person takes off and discovers that consciousness doesn’t particularly want to wait around a railroad station looking at What Is forever. Consciousness wants to invent what isn’t there.

So it does.

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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

The artist on trial against the State

by Jon Rappoport

April 4, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

June 9, 2061, Ohio 27-b: the region designated as the seat of all hearings and trials of artists accused of crimes against the State.

No jury, no attorneys.

On this day, His Honorable and Sacred Hayakawa L. Schwartzbaum, Magistrate of Federal Dispensations, on loan from The CIA-Harvard University, sat behind his table. He was an expert in the history of history.

In shackles, an artist was led into the room by three federal policemen wearing the gray high-buttoned uniforms of the Motherland-Fatherland Department of Internal Security and Distribution of Goods and Services for the Benefit of All.

One of the policemen rolled in a large object covered by a shroud.

Judge Schwarzbaum looked down at a file and rapped his gavel on a plaque displaying the universal symbol of a hermaphrodite eagle.

“Order,” he declared.

The prisoner, in a tattered red jumpsuit, stood before him.

“Well,” the Judge said, “looks like another case of free expression. Uncontrolled display of a gobbledegook idea. No license to practice art. No prior approval for a work. No plan submitted to the State. No established source of funding. No preliminary scan by the Council of Art for the Benefit of All. No declaration of philosophic position. Status: renegade. Such status is explicitly listed in DOD Manual 347 as a precursor to terrorist activity. Surveillance data reveals the artist is a smoker, grows his own vegetables, brews teas which have never undergone approval by the FDA. How do you plead?”

The artist nodded.

“Your Honor, I would like to submit one item of evidence. The work itself.”

The Judge said, “Were it not for the Artist Act of 2040, I would deny the request. But since I am bound by law, submission approved.”

The guard who had rolled in the shrouded object uncovered it.

It was a brass sculpture standing six feet tall. It was a series of twisted interlocking shapes.

“Yes,” the Judge said. “Incomprehensible. Who in his right mind could fathom the sense of this?”

“Look a little closer, Your Honor,” the artist said. “If you would.”

The Judge put on a pair of glasses and stared at the object.

“Meaningless,” he said. “That’s the last time I’ll deign to acknowledge it.”

“Meaningless? Then what is the problem? What harm could it cause?” the artist asked.

The Judge smiled.

“We must have meaning,” he said. “Because then we can judge its quality. Otherwise, we lose control of the situation. We must know, and be able to assess, the significance of the work. This piece of nonsense does not rise to that level. All you offer are…curving masses.”

“The piece has meaning for me,” the artist said.

“Perhaps, given your state of mind, that is true. But art is public. It is a social undertaking. It gives something to the community.”

“Your Honor,” the artist replied, “I believe you’re missing an opportunity here. If, as you say, my work is meaningless, consider its effect on the public, were it to be installed in a heavily-trafficked venue. People would be confused and bewildered. Isn’t the induction of such a state of mind a forerunner to mind control?”

The Judge rubbed his chin and stared at the ceiling.

“Are you suggesting,” he said, “that you could go to work for us?”

The artist nodded.

“Yes, sir. I could execute many sculptures of this kind. I want exposure. You want MKULTRA. We’re on the same side, in a strange way.”

“Amusing, possibly interesting,” the Judge said.

“You see,” the artist said, “there are two ways to look at mind control. On the one hand, you attack aggressively, with propaganda, to plant specific messages. But on the other hand, you prepare consciousness by placing it in a state of extreme puzzlement. If you would, sir, look at the work again.”

The Judge frowned and shook his head. But he gazed at the brass sculpture. This time, something else happened.

He saw a twisted tree. It had been burned by a fire during the riots of 2036, but it still stood. It put out a sprinkling of new leaves every spring. One day, when he was a small boy, he was taken to it and he climbed out along the dark branches to the buds, which smelled sweet to him. He sat in the tree and looked at the sky. For the only time in his life, he experienced ecstasy. He felt as if he were rising into the sky and moving among the clouds, like an animal, striding through banks of thick white cumulus to a secret destination, a place beyond—as he thought, much later in life—a place beyond all the rules that defined order and the State. He soared in those clouds. He had no need to explain himself to anyone.

The Judge blinked. He looked at the prisoner.

“How…did you know?” he said.

The prisoner said, “You told me the story of the tree many times. I’m your son.”

The Judge let loose a howl. The room wobbled, hazy and distant.

The policemen rushed forward to him.

They lifted him from his chair.

One of the policemen shouted, “Look!”

There in the center of the room, the prisoner was gone.

The sculpture was gone.

Instead, in a small grove, the bent and burned and twisted tree held new green leaves. Out along one of its dark branches, a leopard was stretched out on his belly, looking at the policemen.

Court was recessed for the day.

The Judge was sedated and flown to the Danny Thomas Center for the Treatment of Mental Disorders Among Government Officials.

Even after three rounds of anti-psychotic sleep drugs, electromagnetic microwave reprogramming, insulin shock therapy, and a partial lobotomy, he kept shouting for his son.

The doctors knew the Judge was still in a grave condition, because there were no records of him having a son.

Many years ago, calling in every marker he possessed, the Judge had seen to it that those records were destroyed.

At the time, he’d said to a colleague, “My offspring an artist? Going out into the world and doing any damn thing he pleases, with no conscience and no sense of propriety? I’d rather destroy myself—or erase his existence. I took the more convenient choice.”

And so he had. Until that day.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Who produced the movie called Reality?

By Jon Rappoport

April 2, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

This question would strike most people as strange, to say the least.

But it’s strange only because most people don’t grasp the idea that they can invent reality themselves.

For them, reality sits there like an old plate of scrambled eggs, day after day, year after year. Wake up in the morning: yup, there’s that old plate of eggs.

The analogy breaks down, because they don’t eat the eggs and move on. They just look at them.

Artists, however, about whom I write much in these pages, take a different approach. They never got the memo about the unchanging nature of things.

Nor were they informed that change always comes from Someplace Else.

While I’m at it, here’s another message artists haven’t fully signed on to: “the patterns inscribed in the universe are so stunning, they should be worshiped on bended knee.”

Fractal this, sacred geometry that? All right, sure, quite interesting, but every work of art can be analyzed and found to contain patterns, even if the artist didn’t think they were particularly important, even if he didn’t put them there.

And the universe (the movie) is just that, a work of art.

The movie called Reality is one production out of a possible infinity of films. Whichever studio produced it was, as all studios do, hoping for boffo box office—and they got it. This universe is a hit.

People line up around the block every day, waiting to get in.

But as we all know, commercial success is a deeply fallible indicator of value. You can get a few million people to watch a video of a singer who can’t sing singing a song a composer who can’t compose, composed.

Whichever studio produced the movie called Reality was committed to enduring appeal, in the same way that people behind a soap opera design it to hook in audiences and addict them.

Taking this a step further, many people build their own lives as works of art that will addict them. As in: I’m hooked on my own life.

And not in a good way. Rather, these people construct their lives so they’re filled with just the right amount of sentimental chaos, demanding their undivided attention. Today’s crisis blends into tomorrow’s faux tragedy.

The movie called Reality (this universe) is injected with the illusion of “forever and everywhere.” In other words, it seems never to end and it seems to occupy space wherever space is available.

And then there are the rules. One: there will be no new space. Two: every event will appear to be the result of a long, long chain of previous causes and effects.

Therefore, if a person does something that jumps outside the chain, he is informed that he is nuts. And representatives (paid and unpaid), who are defenders of the movie, reassure one and all that the links of cause and effect are intact and can never be disturbed.

These reps are actually claiming (though not publicly) that everything, including people, inside the movie are nothing more than waves of tiny, tiny predetermined particles in motion. Which means: there is no such thing as freedom.

But this doesn’t sell well to the majority of the audience. So, at the same time, freedom is promoted as a feature of the movie. An obvious contradiction.

Did I fail to mention that the movie called Reality is displayed so that everyone in the audience is also in the movie? Yes, this is certainly a key factor.

It’s holographic. Watch it, exist inside it.

I should also lay out a few other strategies of the movie producers. They enlist artists to produce other work that, while appearing to be original, actually promotes the notion that the central movie is the end-all and be-all. This is called Realism.

They also fund various “spiritual” groups to devise complex systems that pay homage to the movie—as if it is a sacred object worthy of genuflecting worship.

“I’m waiting for the universe to tell me what to do. The universe is the source of wisdom. If it’s meant to be (by the universe), it’ll happen. If not, it won’t. We’re all ultimately connected in the universe.”

Meaning: you can’t walk out on the movie.

Lesser forms of this command abound: you can’t walk out on the government, you can’t walk out on the money system or the medical system or the energy grid or the surveillance state or the consensus culture or religion or the corporate empire or the approved sources of information.

Mostly, you can’t walk out on the space-time of the movie called Reality. You can’t walk out, come back, walk out, come back, and walk out at your pleasure.

If you could, that would be magic.

And there’s no such thing as magic.

So say the movie producers, who want a monopoly on that quality.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

The poet on trial

by Jon Rappoport

March 27, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” (George Orwell, 1984)

The judges in the room, behind their table, were gray, but the poet in the dock appeared to be refreshed.

The charge against him was, as usual, incitement. This time the statement read, “…he has used words outside their legal meanings, and in so doing has risked the security of the State. His poems suggest another language, another form of expression, which would introduce disorder, since they are never defined. The State trains the citizenry to make it unified and literal, because without precise shared ideas expressed simply and beyond the possibility of misinterpretation, the Common Cause is undermined.”

The poet spoke in his defense:

“You can put a hat on a word, and a coat, and shoes, too. You can make it walk in the rain, you can force it to fight and die and come back to life again. You can strip it naked and reduce it down to the size of an atom, and you can pump it full of ashes and circle it around the sun, a dead planet.

“You can turn it inside out, cut it. You can surround it with fog and have people walk past it without ever knowing it exists.

“What you can’t do is define it narrowly forever. Sooner or later, it will take on new meanings, rough approximations of itself, it will become relative and comparative, it will grow lopsided. It will refer to other words, go silent for a thousands years and then incarnate.

“Like a human being.

“Fascisms rise and fall. Their unit of measure is the human being, who remains, despite all appearances, incalculable.

“The State tries everything in its power to defeat the individual, and can’t achieve it. Force, seduction, bribe, they all eventually fail.

“Every effort at unification is a glue that hardens and then disintegrates.

“Try to capture a word in a net, and it burns through the cords, though it seems no one lit the flame.

“You sit in judgment, hoping to snuff out a spontaneous creation of a spontaneous poet. Your verdict is refrigerated, mine is coming out of a hot undersea vent. I walk down the street and see a thousand things that have no numerical significance whatsoever. I see an angel who invented herself out of nothing. You see a dank cathedral whose petty bureaucrats impose order.

“You worship ideals that, in their implementation, turned your hearts into dead machines. You, sitting there in a row, are a little grove of petrified components.

“You’re at the end of the line. I’m just getting started.”

The sun shone through the windows of the room. Its rays fell on the judges, who were silent. The poet stepped out of the dock, walked over to them, and pinched their faces. There was no reaction.

They had sat in judgment of thousands of accused criminals. Now there was nothing left. They crumbled in their chairs and the dust fell to the floor.

The poet nodded and walked out of the room.

On the crowded street, he looked at a giant calendar on the side of a building. The year and the day were gone. He sensed it had taken several thousand years to arrive at this moment, but it didn’t matter. The State was in the process of disappearing.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com