Category Archives: Individual Freedom

The taboo against paranormal experience is a taboo against freedom

by Jon Rappoport

September 27, 2018

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For those who want to examine a rigorous presentation of the paranormal, based on a long history of laboratory experiments, I recommend Dean Radin’s classic, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. (HarperCollins, 1997)

This article is not about that.

It’s about a taboo.

On the one side, we have people who denigrate the possibility of the paranormal. On the other side, we have people who, ungrounded in the physical world, try to stage what amounts to a paranormal escape operation, only to fall back into their increasingly chaotic circumstances.

In the middle are persons who have genuinely experienced the paranormal, know it, feel no obsession to shout it from the rooftops, and go on with their lives.

With the rapid decay of organized religion throughout the 20th century, huge numbers of people felt a need to attach themselves to new and old ideologies proclaiming The Extraordinary was at hand. Assertions of paranormal import accompanied this faux revolution.

At the same time, 20th-century life was shaping up in a world of National Security States, and was all about citizen behaviorism, repression, operant conditioning, and various forms of mind control—aimed at curtailing the freedom to experience whatever might lie beyond the prescriptions and slogans of governments.

What exists outside a psychic prison defined by rabid consumerism, limited and false science, and pressure from peers to accept idealized and cartoonish middle-class imagery without question, without deviation?

What is paranormal?

Is it, in childhood, an ecstatic hour’s walk through a park on a summer afternoon, when every leaf, flower, and cloud is irresistible? When space itself is so present that every shred and iota of anxiety or confusion disappears?

Is it the foreshadowing moment when you know what a person is going to say next, how he is going to say it, how he is going to move, how he is going to look as he says it?

Is it the sudden realization that the entire realm and round of emotions you have been experiencing has vanished, leaving in its place an escalating joy that can’t be contained?

Is it in standing at a window, late at night, looking out at a city, possessed of a vision of what you most profoundly want to do for the rest of your life, realizing that you will, in fact, do it?

Is it in standing in a room, where a researcher is showing you a pack of photos, one of which a person, in another room, six miles away, has just tried to send you, telepathically—and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt which photo it is?

Is it in getting out of bed in the morning and becoming aware that you, non-material you, exist forever?

Is it in watching a cat walk away from you, across a carpet, sending him a silent message to roll over, and watching him do it?

Is it in the easy and majestic silence you feel, after sitting on the floor and breathing in and out for a half-hour?

Is it in your child’s face?

The truth is, paranormal experiences are everywhere, and people have them. The experiences exceed the ordinary boundaries material reality.

They tend to lead to a new view about life, and they certainly go beyond societal tenets about what one is supposed to know and feel.

And yes, the waters are muddied by people who feel compelled to chime in and report experiences they only wish they had, hoping for badges of honor. But no matter.

In certain respects, this is, in fact a prison planet. Through upbringing, education, peer pressure, training, indoctrination, propaganda, citizens are expected to maintain “normal status.”

Steady-state normal.

No leaking of fuel, no blowing of gaskets.

Functional.

People condition themselves with the goal of fitting in.

It’s a grand stage play, and one picks a role and lives it out.

But one day something happens, and if you admit it, everything has changed.

What then? Do you continue to obey and subscribe to the taboo?

Or confess that the true normal is paranormal?

Do you tighten your grip on the card that identifies you as a citizen of the realm? Or do you drop it in a waste basket?

Do you cling to the old? Or do you opt for possibilities wider than you previously imagined and shove in all your chips on a new life?

The taboo against the non-ordinary is as old as the hills. In many cases, the establishment was a State religion, and the priest-class labeled paranormal experiences heretical witchery. Why? Because, of course, free consciousness, unburdened of church doctrine, was a threat to priestly power.

Modern science, with ridicule as its primary method, attacks the paranormal because it cuts too close to home. It tends to expose what science cannot explain.

For example: freedom.

Nowhere in the lexicon of conventional physics is there room for such a concept. The predetermined and inexorable flow of tiny particles is assumed to be everywhere at all times, even in the composition of the brain…and therefore, all thought and feeling and action, which stem from the brain, are predetermined and inexorable as well.

No choice. No freedom.

The absurdity of this notion is plain to anyone who can think.

If the brain and the body are just another collection of sub-atomic particles, then the capacity to make a free and independent choice about anything is null and void—unless the entity doing the choosing, YOU, is beyond those particles, beyond matter and energy.

When I say paranormal experience is everywhere, this is what I mean. Freedom exists. Freedom is paranormal. It always was.

It takes a severely limited state of affairs not to recognize it.

It takes a long, long history of repressive societies not to recognize it.

It takes a considerable amount of indoctrination and mind control not to recognize it.

The notion that various key political documents established freedom is extremely short-sighted. Heroic though the efforts were, they only uncovered what was already there in a natural state.

That natural state is anything but normal. It speaks of the human ability to move out of the chain of cause and effect and make choices.

Changing lives, changing futures.

For most people, most of the time, the sense of their own freedom is a rather dull given. There is nothing thrilling about it. They choose A or B within a grossly limited context.

This fact is, in itself, an indication that a monitor has been placed on their own experience, on their own emotions.

If, however, this cover is blown, a transformation occurs; and then they know, in an entirely different way, that freedom is, and is supposed to be, the most natural kind of ecstasy in the world.

Paranormal.

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

The first cave painter and freedom from mind control

by Jon Rappoport

September 26, 2018

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Note: Consider this an opening to a much larger presentation. I’ve already made forays in past articles; in my work posted at Outside The Reality Machine; and, in much greater detail, I’ve covered the brilliant work of hypnotherapist Jack True in my collection, The Matrix Revealed.

We’ll never know who he was, but the moment he scratched out an animal on the wall of a cave, everything changed.

As yet, there was no formalized religion among his clan. The animal was not a symbol. It was later that the obsession for symbols developed. And of course the obsession continues to this day. Everything is supposed to mean something else.

But when the first cave painter made his first drawing, he was simply expressing a desire to go beyond the physical world. It was not enough to see a tiger in the forest. The painter wanted to move past that.

This fact is still not acknowledged. Millions of people pass through art museums every year and hunt for work that reminds them of objects they already know—and the closer the paintings resemble those objects, the more satisfied they feel.

But the first cave painter was doing something else. He was using a rock wall as a new space. He was seeing the wall as a potential space that went beyond the physical world.

Who knows what happened to him? Perhaps his clan were so awed they appointed him a god on Earth. Perhaps they were so disturbed by his presumption they killed him.

In either case, they were unable and unwilling to acknowledge that “the one and only space and time” was a fraud, a deception.

If you want to understand an underlying principle of “reality as prison,” know we are looking at the selling of one continuum as the only one.

As my long-time readers know, as well as those who have my collection, The Matrix Revealed, I worked closely, in the late 1980s, with a brilliant hypnotherapist named Jack True. I interviewed Jack many times.

During one of our first formal interviews, he had this to say about the space-time continuum, based on his experience with clients:

“Under hypnosis, people will give you extraordinary information if you can ask them the right questions, if you can go past the ordinary sort of material that is usually requested. It turns out that people, below their ordinary state of waking consciousness, perceive different times and spaces.

“They see and can deal with what I call islands of space and time. Separate islands. Each locale has its own continuum, and these continua are not the same. I’m talking about multiple spaces and multiple times.

“Their waking lives, their daily lives are a reduction, a social artifact in which one moving arrow of time and one space are assumed to be all there is.

“If an artist creates a few hundred paintings, each one has its own space and sense of time. This is not trivial observation. I’m not employing a metaphor. The painter is at ease with what he’s doing. It’s not a problem for him. Why would he make only one painting with one space and time and then stop forever? That would be absurd.

“Here is the interesting part for me as a therapist. When I have a patient, under hypnosis, open up his perception of time and space, when I have him branch out, so to speak, and when he becomes familiar with this process, a great deal of his anxiety vanishes.

“This indicates that the habit of his waking life, his absolute dedication to one space and time, operates like putting a lid on a pot of heating water. Pressure builds up under the lid.

“Release that pressure and everything is different. In his waking life, he can function quite well with one space and time—better than he did before—but he has this reservoir of truth: He’s experienced, many times, his own deeper level of perception. And as a result, he becomes more creative in the world…”

Jack and I often discussed how various systems are built to sustain and force “the one and only space-time.” This obsessive and unconscious mind control goes light years beyond the usual types of brainwashing people are familiar with.

Modern physics does little more than dip a toe in the water, when it comes to conceiving other continua. You would find out a great deal more by looking at the work of early 20th-century painters—who were, unsurprisingly, attacked, as they cut up and multiplied space and even time.

Rigid traditionalists, who still long for some grand human unification (under a banner of their own choosing), are too late to the party. The cat is out of the bag. It remains for humans to catch up to what they already perceive below their every-day consciousness: many dimensions.

the matrix revealed

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 29th 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.

Bill Gates vs. freedom

by Jon Rappoport

September 25, 2018

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“Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

“From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: ‘What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.’ He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

A thought-form is a picture-plus concept in the mind that tends to guide behavior.

A dominant thought-form in Earth civilization today is: universal rule through gigantic, highly organized structures; e.g., mega-corporations that owe no allegiance to any nation.

Imagine a few thousand such corporations with interlocking boards and directorates; colluding with super-regional governments and their honeycombed bureaucracies; combined with regional armies, intelligence agencies and technological elites; hooked to a global surveillance operation; in control of media; cooperating with the largest organized religions on Earth.

Imagine all this as essentially one organization—and you see the thought-form in its wide-screen version.

Top-down as top-down has never been before.

Functions and compartments defined and specialized at every level, and coordinated in order to carry out policy decisions.

As to why such a thought-form should come to dominate human affairs, the simplest explanation is: because it works.

But beneath that answer, for those who can see, there is much, much more.

Individuals come to think that “effective” and “instrumental” and “efficient” are more important than any other issues.

Keep building, keep expanding, keep consolidating gains—and above all else, keep organizing.

Such notions and thought-forms replace life itself.

The Machine has come to the fore. All questions are now about how the individual sees himself fitting into the structure and function of The Machine.

Are human beings becoming social constructs?

Populations are undergoing a quiet revolution. We can cite some of the reasons: television; education; job training and employment requirements; the Surveillance State; government organizations who follow a “zero tolerance” policy; inundation with advertising.

Yes, it’s all geared to produce people who are artificial constructs.

And this is just the beginning. There are a number of companies (see, for example, affectiva.com) who are dedicated to measuring “audience response” to ads and other public messages. I’m talking about electronic measuring. The use of bracelets, for instance, that record students’ emotional responses to teachers in classrooms, in real time. (Bill Gates shoveled grant money into several of these studies.)

Then there is facial recognition geared to the task of revealing how people are reacting when they sit at their computers.

Push-pull, ring the bell, watch the dog drool for his food. Stimulus-response.

It’s not much of a stretch to envision, up the road a few years, whole populations more than willing to volunteer for this kind of mass experimentation. But further than that, we could see society itself embrace, culturally, the ongoing measurement of stimuli and responses.

“Yes, I want to live like this. I want to be inside the system. I want to be analyzed. I want to be evaluated. I want to accept the results. I want to be part of the new culture. Put bracelets on me. Measure my eye movements, my throat twitches that indicate what I’m thinking, and my brain waves. Going to a movie should include the experience of wearing electrodes that record my second-to-second reactions to what’s happening on the screen. I like that. I look forward to it…”

In such a culture, “Surveillance State” would take on a whole new dimension.

“Sir, I want to report a malfunction in my television set. I notice the monitoring equipment that tracks my responses to programs has gone on the blink. I want it reattached as soon as possible. Can you fix it remotely, or do you need to send a repair person out to the house? I’ll be here all day…”

People will take pride in their ongoing role as social constructs, just as they now take pride in owning a quality brand of car.

The thought process behind this, in so far as any thought at all takes place, goes something like: “If I’m really a bundle of responses to stimuli and nothing more, then I want to be inside a system that champions that fact and records it…I don’t want to be left out in the cold.”

Here is a sample school situation of the near future: for six months, Mr. Jones, the teacher, has been video recorded, moment by moment, as he instructs his class in English. All the students have been wearing electronic bracelets [apple watches], and their real time emotional responses (interest, boredom, aversion) have also been recorded. A team of specialists has analyzed the six months of video, matching it up, second by second, to the students’ responses. The teacher is called in for a conference.

“Mr. Jones, we now know what you’re doing that works and what you’re doing that doesn’t work. We know exactly what students are positively reacting to, and what bores them. Therefore, we’re going to put you into a re-ed seminar, where you’ll learn precisely how to teach your classes from now on, to maximize your effectiveness. We’ll show you how to move your hands, what tone of voice to use, how to stand, when to make eye contact, and so on…”

Mr. Jones is now a quacking duck. He will be trained how to quack “for the greater good.” He is now a machine toy. Whatever is left of his passion, his intelligence, his free will, his spontaneous insights, his drive to make students actually understand what they’re learning…all subordinated for the sake of supposed efficiency.

Think this is an extreme fantasy? See the Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2012, “Biosensors to monitor students’ attentiveness”:

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $4 billion into efforts to transform public education in the U.S., is pushing to develop an ‘engagement pedometer.’ Biometric devices wrapped around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments excite and interest them — and which fall flat.”

“The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall [2012].”

“The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.”

“Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.”

“Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, ‘only get us so far,’ said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, ‘we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments’ such as the biosensors.”

“The Gates Foundation has spent two years videotaping 20,000 classroom lessons and breaking them down, minute by minute, to analyze how each teacher presents material and how those techniques affect student test scores.”

“Clemson received about $500,000 in Gates funding. Another $620,000 will support an MIT scientist, John Gabrieli, who aims to develop a scale to measure degrees of student engagement by comparing biosensor data to functional MRI brain scans [!] (using college students as subjects).”

When you boil it down, the world-view represented here has nothing to do with “caring about students.” It has everything to do with the Pavlovian view of humans as biological machines.

What input yields what response? How can people be shaped into predictable constructs?

As far as Gates is concerned, the underlying theme, as always, is: control.

In this new world, the process of thinking and comparing and independently judging, and the freedom to make individual choices…well, for whatever that was worth, we can’t encourage it for a whole society. It’s too unpredictable. We don’t have time for that sort of thing. No, we have to achieve reduction. We have to seek out lowest common denominators.

This is what universal surveillance is all about; the observation of those denominators and the variances from them—the outlying and therefore dangerous departures from the norm.

“Well, we’ve tracked Mr. Jones’ classroom for a year now, and we’ve collated all the measurements of reactions from the students. It was a wonderful study. But we did notice one thing. All the students showed similar patterns of reactions over time…except two students. We couldn’t fit them into the algorithms. They seemed to be responding oppositely. It was almost as if they were intentionally defecting from the group. This signals some kind of disorder. We need a name for it. Is it Oppositional Defiance Disorder, or is it new? We recommend attaching electrodes to those two students’ skulls, so we can get a better readout of their brain activity in real time.”

You see, everything must be analyzed on the basis of stimulus response. Those two students are suffering from a brain problem. They must be. Because if they aren’t, if they have the ability to choose and decide how to respond, then they have free will, and that can’t be measured. Much deeper, that also suggests an X-factor in humans, wherein the flow of chemicals and atoms and quarks and mesons and photons don’t tell the whole story. The rest of the story would imply the existence of something that is…non-material…above and beyond push-pull cause and effect.

The gatekeepers of this world are obsessed with ruling that out. They guard Reality itself, which is to say, their conception of Reality. They are willing to spend untold amounts of money to make that Pavlovian conception universally accepted and universally loved.

Because they own that conception. They are the self-appointed title holders. They are the kings of that domain.

I feel obligated to inform them that their domain is much, much smaller than they think it is. And in the fullness of time, which is very long, the domain is going to fall and crack and collapse and disintegrate. And all their horses and all their men won’t be able to put it back together.

Eventually, a man like Bill Gates will be forgotten. He’ll be a small footnote on a dusty page in a crumbling book in a dark room on a remote island.

A morbid venal fool who chased, for a brief moment, fool’s gold.

There is an irreducible thing. It’s called freedom. It is native to every individual.

Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes.

And he asks himself: what is my freedom for?

And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze.

If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth.

Pavlov wrote: “Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object…”

Basically, Pavlov was promoting the idea that whatever an individual perceives and feels about his own experience is a confused mess and an obstruction.

Rather, the individual should ignore all that tripe, and instead, allow himself to be a “natural object,” see himself as a clean and simple response mechanism, as planned inputs cause him to behave in various ways.

In other words, then he will have no life.

Bill Gates and other elite planners are working toward this end.

When Ray Kurzweil talks about hooking brains up to super-computers, he is envisioning a process of downloading that goes beyond choice. Somehow, automatically, the brain and the individual (he apparently believes they are the same thing) will receive inputs that translate into knowledge and even talent. This is another fatuous version of Pavlov.

In Brave New World, Huxley wrote: “Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner[s] and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. ‘We condition them to thrive on heat’, concluded Mr. Foster. ‘Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it’.”

Stimulus-response.

If researchers developed this technology, who could doubt that elite planners would push it forward? It would be the culmination of their dream.

The freedom of the individual, his innate capacity to make wide-ranging choices, is the monkey wrench in the program. It is anti-stimulus-response.

This is why you would have to search far and wide to find, in one school, anywhere, on any level, a course that examines and promotes individual freedom.

It is anathema to the plan.

It is the silver bullet for the vampire.

Freedom comes from Within the individual, not from Without.

On the level of political control, freedom emerged and broke through during centuries of struggle.

Now, and in the future, every individual carries that torch.

So it is incumbent on the individual to understand the scope and meaning and power of his own freedom, and to decide for himself what his freedom is FOR.

What will he choose to launch from that great space?

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

Modern Zen

by Jon Rappoport

August 28, 2018

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One thing I’ve learned from giving lectures to audiences over the years: never meet expectations.

“Expectations” is a large container waiting to be filled up. People have these containers. They lug them around with them. They want them to be filled up.

For example, if they expect shocking information from the speaker, and they get it, their expectations are met.

Audiences train themselves to be audiences, and their expectation-containers are ready when they sit down to listen.

There is something missing. Something monumental.

The present moment. The present now. The alive moment. Because, for all its fanfare and interest, the event is not really in the present.

This is by design. No one wants the moment. People’s whole lives are devoted to avoiding the moment, because it is spontaneous. That’s what a moment is. Spontaneous.

“Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become ‘stage-worthy.’” (Viola Spolin)

No one is used to spontaneity. No one is prepared for it.

No one knows what they would do or how they would react in the spontaneous moment. That’s why it is avoided.

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves.” (Viola Spolin)

Yet, the paradox is: people yearn for the spontaneous moment. They yearn for that freedom. It’s not freedom as an idea or concept, but freedom as a living thing.

I bring all this up because passivity is the universal effect of living for most people. In that state, they still have expectations and those big containers, but the way they receive information—they certainly don’t intend to climb up out of their own passivity. That’s the last thing they would do.

“It [spontaneity] creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.” (Viola Spolin)

So when I speak to audiences at live events, I find a way to remind them that we’re in a kind of false relationship. It’s interesting and false at the same time. There we are in a room, and I’m the speaker and they’re the audience. I’m active and they’re passive.

Those are our roles. Those are our functions. It’s accepted, but it’s unworkable. It’s self-defeating, unless we all want to be existing in a dead space outside the living present moment. And I don’t.

This means I have to readjust things. I have to let people know that I know they’re there. Right now. I know they’re listening, and I know they’re absorbing, and I know that beyond a certain point (10-15 minutes), they’re going to shift down into passive mode.
Finding a way, an interesting way to let them know is a challenge.

It’s really a challenge that extends to the whole world.

Are we alive or are we doing it by the numbers?

Look at any set-up, which is “the way things are supposed to be,” and “the parts that people are supposed to play,” and you can see light. The light is what could happen to upset that situation and turn it into something else. Something that would bring people in from the cold, into the moment itself.

Spontaneity means everything is created now.

That’s why I keep writing about imagination, because imagination will change a life. It won’t only change the content. It’ll change the way life happens.

Here’s something I can guarantee anywhere in the universe where beings populate planets, where they think, plan, strategize. They’re not living in the moment, but they claim they are. They’ll say, “How could I be anywhere else? We’re all in the present. That’s all there is.”

But they’re wrong. Their big containers are in the moment, and they’re waiting outside to accept the flow of information from the containers.

If a person (usually a hard-headed realist) thinks he’s already in the moment, have him go up on a stage with another person and take on the role of a galactic cop on patrol, questioning a suspect who is accused of stealing a planet. If the realist can eventually improvise and do it, he’ll experience being in the moment in a way he never has before.

Likewise, if he painted 200 paintings, something different would happen to him. He would come to the edge of what he already knows (which he’s expressing in the paintings), and then he would step off. He would do something on the paper or canvas which is not what he knows. It would arise spontaneously, and he would feel a new space, a new energy, a new now.

Imagination. Alive imagination. That’s the key. The key to the door that leads out of the Matrix.

What’s wrong with Zen?

Nothing is wrong with Zen, except the people who practice it.

That’s a joke. Sort of.

In the modern style, especially in America, Zen is mostly meditation, and more meditation, and more meditation, and the point of it seems to be to get to a zero point, where you can watch your own mind, your own thoughts, and finally, without effort, stay separate from them, separate from all that radio static, and separate also from your own unbidden parade of emotions that swing by with tooting horns and crashing cymbals and clacking drums and gawking dancing clowns.

A laudable goal.

But on the whole, how many people who do this wind up becoming passive? That’s the thing. People tend to opt for quietness.

Whereas, the whole idea ought to be: launch a tremendous amount of dynamic action from the platform of zero-stillness.

Because stillness as a way of life sooner or later begins to disintegrate.

In original Zen, there were ordeals. The teacher gave the student things to do, tasks which eventually became absurd, without discernible purpose. The teacher spoke to the student in riddles and wisecracks. The teacher drove the student into a state of desperation, because the student’s rational faculties, which were obsessively involved in systems, couldn’t supply answers to questions which defied logic.

The teacher did whatever he had to do to bring the student out over the edge of the cliff, where in mid-air, there were no foundations…and the student felt terror. But the teacher persisted.

And then, in one explosive moment, the student found himself floating in the air. He saw there was no need to explain his existence. There was no need to place a veil between himself and the present moment. He didn’t die. He was, finally, alive.

Who knows how this radical approach actually worked out in the many cloisters and huts and cottages where it was practiced, where the stories grew and expanded in their retelling.

Those old teachers were tough characters. They weren’t merely meditation instructors.

There was another aspect of Zen, which survives to this day. It could be summarized as: “become the other.” The archer becomes the target. He becomes the bow, the arrow, and the target.

The runner becomes the road and the air and the sky and the clouds. The artist becomes the canvas.

The theater of merging with the other.

And as in any theatrical setting, the actor can, by choice, merge with, and un-merge from, his role.

But again, in these times, the main thrust of Zen teaching seems to be meditation, and the culture of stillness, quietude, and passive acceptance.

I’m not saying the meditation is easy to do. It isn’t. But somehow, its environment has become circumscribed.

This is unsurprising in America, where every philosophic and spiritual import from Asia has been distorted and watered down for the seeker-consumer. The overriding intent has been to create The Quiet Person.

The world of action has been painted as too disturbing to the “student seeking inner peace.” Therefore, retreat. Therefore, set up a buffer zone within which all is harmonized and balanced.

Where is the Zen now that sends people out into the world to revolutionize it down to its core, that stimulates the desire to find and invent a Voice that will shatter delusions and create new realities that have never been seen before?

If the moment of insight, satori, doesn’t instigate this, what good is it?

How can satori be “seeing into one’s true nature,” if the result is a wan gaze out on a uniform landscape of soft-boiled bupkis?

The answer is obvious. Breaking apart, exploding the primary illusions and fears that hold an individual in check is not the goal of most Zen as it is now practiced. That objective has been replaced with the false promise that some ultimate “consciousness” will reconcile the soul with itself.

The way this promise is offered and the way it is taught and the way its surrounding social culture is embroidered is a dud. Dead on arrival.

It’s time for a few new koans.

What is the real sound of David Rockefeller? What does Henry Kissinger say when somebody finally puts him in a small bottle with a cork on it? How does an android disguise himself as a human?

If I need a Zen teacher, I’ll go to Henny Youngman: “A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.”

In the beginning, the whole point of Zen was to shake things up, not calm them down.

The master assumed a new student was an annoying clod. But that doesn’t comfortably mesh with today’s “tolerant culture.” Today, annoying clods are a special interest group.

Silence, as a key Zen feature, isn’t only about a desired inner condition now. It’s about a synthetic attitude. So show me a temple where the meditation room is outfitted with a few dozen giant TV screens. The students do their meditation while CNN, Christingle Matthews, Sean Hannity, Oprah, news-boy-on-a bike Brian Williams, Hawaii Five-O, the Shopping Channel, Pawn Stars, Jimmy Fallon and his screaming pubescent audience, and four or five Spanish soaps are going full blast.

That would be a start.

Or throw on 20 or 30 TED lectures simultaneously—prancing grasshoppers extolling the future of technology.

I submit that if the one of the ancient Zen teachers walked into a modern American Zen cloister today, that’s exactly what he’d do. Turn on a few hundred TV sets, computers, and mobile devices and say, “Okay, try being quiet in the middle of this!”

Zen is sacred? What? When was it ever sacred? Soft bells, empty halls?

No, you must have Zen confused with a funeral home.

Every age has its massive collection of heavily loaded apple carts, and the job of Zen is to overturn them. When up is down, and insanity is called normal, that’s where you begin…

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

Getting in the creative flow

My 3 Matrix Collections at a deeper level

by Jon Rappoport

“Life as it’s usually lived features a movie in which the mind operates like an ox pulling along a huge cart full of conflicts…” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

—One of my main purposes has been developing exercises that induce FLOW, a condition that is both internal and external. It happens in the body, in the mind and in the world.

—When you’re in the FLOW, your creative impulse is heightened, and your response to events and people is more direct and natural. Problems tend to melt.

Over time, my imagination exercises in Exit From The Matrix can help achieve more FLOW.

In general, as I put together my collections, I wanted to provide a PhD experience where none existed—knowledge AN INDIVIDUAL could deploy to ascend to greater heights in his life. Greater heights of creativity and power…

To invent the future he truly wants.

That is always my goal.

My 3 Matrix collections—The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, Power Outside The Matrix—are not a brush-off. They’re meant to be studied and worked with over a long period of time. With many payoffs along the way.

My original inspiration was the ancient Tibetan practitioners, who existed long before the priest class moved in and tried to codify society and spiritual experience. The original magicians were working with raw Space and Time, doing exercises which demonstrated that these two basic qualities of the Universe were malleable and elastic. The Subjective and Objective levels of living were actually One Whole.

And in that Whole the FLOW was pre-eminent and even ecstatic.

Among their Tibetan realizations: a piece of work, an enterprise, and even a civilization could be built on an anticipatory sense of WHAT COMES NEXT. And with their imagination techniques under their belt, some of these magicians knew what came next. They were in that FLOW.

What I’m talking about here connects Zen, Tao, and other ancient practices that also ignore or give short shrift to creative force. When one is in the FLOW, he feels what is coming next, but at the same time he chooses what to create next. This paradox resolves by itself. He creates what he wants to, and he does it in such a way that it INSERTS into existing situations and realities, despite it being brand new.

FLOW. Creative flow. For the individual, this is a new world.

It replaces the world elites design for us, in which we fit in without the experience of FLOW…

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

Censorship and the decline of civilization

by Jon Rappoport

August 27, 2018

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—We can understand why leaders and rulers want to censor certain ideas and views. But why do large chunks of the citizenry want to go along with it? How do you comprehend their ignorance?

Censorship is made possible when the majority of people live by what they like and don’t like—“I like this, I don’t like him, I like her, I don’t like them…”

When those preferences become the paramount elements of life, then censorship is a minor concern. Grasping the essence of the 1st Amendment and free speech requires a different level of mind. It requires defending free speech for those one doesn’t like. Such an idea is entirely foreign to the person who asserts: “WHY WOULD I POSSIBLY CARE ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF SOMEONE I DON’T LIKE?”

Exactly. That’s what separates a political moron from an aware citizen.

There are now large numbers of people who think they’re making a political advance, even a breakthrough, by demanding the censorship of those individuals they don’t like, when in fact, they’re moving backwards into a more primitive political climate.

There is another vital factor which permits people to register no objection to censorship. The factor is: vast frustration with their own lives. This is usually concealed, as if it were a secret not to be shared. The frustration, at the core, has to do with a perceived lack of freedom.

In which case, the actions of life take on a mechanical character, which becomes the heavy cover, the lid over the flame of frustration—and in that state of being, a person actually wants others who speak out and go against the grain to be silenced and censored.

Stop him! Keep him from speaking and writing!

Yes, keep the free individual from reminding the mechanical liver of life that he is not free.

The Mechanical Person wants to bury all signals that carry a flavor of originality. He wants the constant hum that tells him routine and repetition are firmly in place as the guidance system of existence.

The Mechanical Person often goes to work for a Destroyer—as I described in a poem I wrote in 1962, published in The Massachusetts Review (1966):

Burned flowers of the field
My noon is over, growing old,
Everything I love is finally sold;
Sewed designs for men with money
Thinking it was duty,
To watch them lead the world to war
From my little field of beauty.

Interesting that, 20 years later, one of the first pieces I wrote as a journalist involved PR man Bill Perry, who quit his plum job at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where they design nuclear weapons. One day, Perry told me, a researcher was complaining to him about the need for more budget money, and Bill said, “We already have enough weapons to blow up the whole world four times, why do you need more money?” To which the scientist replied: “You don’t understand. This is a PHYSICS PROBLEM.”

Yes it is, in the frozen rigid river of anti-life…

Where rebels are just machines that need to be turned off.

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

The “dependent victim” psyop

by Jon Rappoport

August 21, 2018

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ANY person who exits an “officially designated victim-group”…and then succeeds in life on his own…and then goes one step further and refuses to identify his entire existence with his former group…but instead stands as a unique individual…why, that person, at the very least, must be a criminal, if not a terrorist, right?

That’s the crux of the issue: never leave your group.

That’s how society, civilization, and culture are promoted these days.

“Groups have needs, agendas, and problems, and the solution will come from government.” That’s the all-embracing formula.

The fake appearance is: victim groups are fighting for recognition and special status, and the government is pushing back—but that’s now a ruse. That’s a cover story. In fact, victim groups and government have the same goal: a relationship based on dependence. One side depends and the other side gives and protects.

The individual is out of the equation. He is portrayed as the greed-obsessed reason these victim groups exist and need help in the first place.

Banks, Wall Street, and mega-corporations are depicted as the end result of individualism.

In fact, government, banks, Wall Street, and mega-corporations are joined at the hip. They brush each other’s teeth first thing every morning.

Political correctness and the burgeoning movement to outlaw “offensive language” are merely tactics to: preserve groups’ separate identities; foment conflict between them; and ultimately foster their dependence on government authority.

The truth is, you can’t get free individuals to depend on government. Only “besieged groups” can be relied on for that purpose.

In the State’s eyes, a perfect society would be composed of groups who have entirely forgotten the concept of the individual, as if it never existed.

For example, Peter Collero, of the department of sociology, Western Oregon University, has written a book titled: The Myth of Individualism: How Social Forces Shape Our Lives:

“Most people today believe that an individual is a person with an independent and distinct identification. This, however, is a myth.”

When Callero writes “identification,” he isn’t talking about ID cards and Social Security numbers. He’s asserting an absence of any uniqueness from person to person. He’s claiming there is no significant distinction between any two people. There aren’t two individuals to begin with. They’re a group.

This downgrading of the individual human spirit is far from accidental. It’s launched as a sustained propaganda campaign, the ultimate purpose of which is top-down control over billions of people organized into groups.

Here are several remarks, meant to defame the individual, from people I would call high-IQ idiots (at best):

“The cold truth is that the individualist creed of everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost is principally responsible for the distress in which Western civilization finds itself — with investment racketeering at one end and labor racketeering at the other. Whatever merits the [individualist] creed may have had in the days of primitive agriculture and industry, it is not applicable in an age of technology, science, and rationalized economy. Once useful, it has become a danger to society.” (Charles Beard, 1931)

Beard, a celebrated historian, sees no difference between individual racketeering and the individual freely choosing and living his own life. In making this judgment, he becomes an intellectual/propaganda racketeer of the highest order.

“British empiricist philosophy is individualist. And it is of course clear that if the only criterion of true and false which a man accepts is that man’s, then he has no base for social agreement. The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.” (Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values, 1956).

Bronowski is quite sure that hearing other people’s evidence and then keeping one’s own counsel is wrong. One has to accept that evidence on its face. This is sheer idiocy. Individuals are capable of deciding, on their own, what social agreements to enter into.

The State and its allies are real oppressors who contribute mightily to creating real victims; but what I’m talking about here is growing numbers of people who voluntarily take on the victim-mantle and seek comfort in nests of self-promoting groups who exaggerate and distort their own claims to special status.

The State needs these people. The State wants these people. Increasingly, the State employs these people.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, wrote: “It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.”

Bernays understood that the basis of successful propaganda is a mass audience, an audience composed of groups, not individuals.

When a group assigns itself solid “victim-status,” it creates one basic rule: a member must not leave the group. Why? Because if he does, he’s claiming he is no longer a victim—and that assertion is a betrayal.

Nice and neat. A prison.

“I’m a free individual.”

“You’re crazy. There is no such thing. Now get back in the group where you belong.”

Down at the root, betrayal begins as self-betrayal. The individual gives up the ghost. From that point on, his politics don’t matter. He forgets what he could have been. He defines himself by race and religion and country and rank ideology and group. He finds words and feeling through which he can express his role in a stage play that decays him from the inside out.

Eventually, if lunatics have their way, every person on planet Earth will be designated a victim. That will be the group of groups.

It won’t matter why and how everyone supposedly turns out to be a victim. The reasons will be forgotten. People will “instinctively” sign on to the agenda.

And the management team running the world will put another check mark on their sheet of objectives:

“Earth is beginning to resemble one giant hospital/mental institution. Break out the champagne.”

There is only one problem. That plan is fraying at the edges. People are waking up and swimming to the surface through layers of deception. They’re returning to themselves. They’re recognizing group-ism for what it is: a meltdown into self-sabotage.

The artifact is the collective. The self is real.

Power, choice, and freedom never go away.

They may hide, but they can be resurrected.

Then the whole fake game crumbles.

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

Beyond an artificial world

by Jon Rappoport

August 16, 2018

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Futurists are inclined to predict a world in which AI (artificial intelligence) will take over a major portion of what is now human activity.

In a matter of decades, for example, they say one computer will have more capacity than all the human brains on the planet put together.

Then, the prediction goes, AI will be virtually human, or more than human.

However, just because AI has greater computational skills than any person or group of persons, where is the quality that makes it human?

In order to answer that, you have to perform a little trick. You have to downgrade your assessment of humans. You have to say that humans are really only high-class machines.

Many pundits have no difficulty with this.

Consider their genes-cause-everything hypothesis: Since all existence is assumed to take place on a material level, on a physical level, it’s only a matter of time until we figure out which genes create which human qualities; eventually, we’ll have a complete map.

To change humans, we just fiddle with the genes.

Of course, this style of reasoning can be used to justify external control of Earth’s population. The assumption is: we are already living in a closed system of cause and effect, and that system IS controlling all human behavior. Gene tinkering and handing over immense decision-power to advanced computers is nothing more than re-arranging the closed system. It was closed and it is closed and it will be closed. No problem.

Right now, the system appears to dictate wars and pain and suffering, so won’t it be much better when the gene-reconfiguration and the AI computers-in-charge eliminate that aspect of things?

Believe me, many scientists are thinking along these lines, and they are serious about their goals.

They consider themselves humanitarians.

I bring all this up, because there is really only one way to defeat this kind of thinking.

YOU NEED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT A PRIME ASPECT OF EXISTENCE IS NON-MATERIAL.

Non-material means: without a rigid cause-and-effect structure.

To put it another way, the individual human being has freedom, and he also has imagination and creative power. These qualities are not material or physical in nature, they are not generated by the brain or by genes.

In all societies, past and present, those people who agree that these non-physical capacities are quite real explain them by opting for ORGANIZED religion, promoting one church or another.

Only a tiny number of people state that such non-material qualities and abilities are INHERENT in the human being and need no explanation or embroidery.

Believe me, this inability to put all life under the umbrella of science is frustrating to obsessed rationalists. They refuse to allow the possibility that imagination and freedom are outside the boundaries of physical cause-and-effect…and if they have to, they will try to prove their position by imposing one system after another on humans, in order to wipe out the freedom they claim doesn’t exist in the first place.

In every technological society, power is thought of as physical, and the greatest power is produced by machines. To say that human power is ultimately a non-material capacity, and is equal to or greater than what a machine can do…this is considered the height of absurdity.

Yet there are thousands, perhaps millions of artists all over the world who’ve glimpsed, or know deeply, what I’m talking about in this article. They know they’re creating beyond any closed system of cause and effect. Their problem, if they have one, stems from believing they have to be psychological underdogs, in order to invent their art. This is a cultural artifact, this belief, and it can be cast aside by nakedly comprehending the unlimited power of imagination they possess.

Imagination creates reality.

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

The American destiny

The American destiny

The creative force at the dawn of a new future

by Jon Rappoport

August 14, 2018

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Whenever a breakthrough occurs for the individual, there is a stepping back, a retrenching, a delay, an attempt to reset the clock and push the breakthrough away. This delay tactic can last a week, a month, or, historically, a hundred years.

We are in the middle of such a delay, after serial revelations that erupted in the latter part of the 19th century.

Individual artists (and a few philosophers) became aware that: imagination gives birth to ideas that in turn shape personal reality.

Therefore, reality is very elastic and changeable.

America—and indeed, the world—stood on the brink of a great internal revolution.

The creative IS the spiritual.

America’s love affair with the idea of individuals reinventing themselves was about more than immigrants “becoming American.” It was about imagination as the core of transforming self and future.

Such a radical realization was too much for many people to absorb, so a backing away occurred. The wave was stilled for a hundred years or so—but now it is beginning to move again.

The attempt to take over America, by Globalist forces, on a behalf of a controlled world order, is really an attempt to quell the individual creative force. That is the secret inside the master plan. And that Globalist effort is in trouble. More and more people are realizing it is a massive fraud based on instituting an imprisoned Collectivist Hive Mind.

Whereas the promise of America was always the intensely creative individual. And what does he do? He takes frozen realities and injects life into them so they move and shed their encrusted energies.

He rejects all formulas that instruct people about how they must live their lives and guard their words and fit in.

On a spiritual level, America was and is about transformation of energy into greater living shapes and forms and flows, through imagination.

It is about building a new and higher “plane of experience,” so to speak.

The fact that this aim has been sidelined and throttled to a significant degree doesn’t change one iota of America’s destiny. It’s still there, and the individual is the core.

He is the shaper.

Yes, you could say “America was made” for many criminal undertakings, but the other side of the coin is the most powerful: America is the house of the individual soul and that soul is creative.

That soul is an artist of reality.

Dawn of a new day.

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.

Illiteracy leads to censorship

by Jon Rappoport

July 24, 2018

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“…intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice.” (George Orwell, 1953)

When those who control public discourse, in a nation, see that they are losing to upstarts, that their flimsy ideas are being supplanted by much stronger ideas, the shocked controllers turn to the more direct strategy of censorship.

In terms of substance, and even popularity, the ministers of truth are losing; so they abandon reasoned discourse altogether. They desert this fertile, competitive, and NECESSARY territory. They no longer debate. They ban.

Among their supporters are crowds of illiterates.

There are many people who, because their education was a vaporous thing, have no interest in the written or spoken word.

The reason is obvious: they can’t read.

Their natural impulse is to make excuses. “Who needs books?” “People who write books are showing their privilege.”

For these excuse-makers, book burning would mean NOTHING. All that matters is: what slogans should I shout?

For the illiterate, a book is a mystery. How could anyone put all the words together and write one? Somehow, the author must have a secret method of downloading the book from an elite source, a cloud, a machine, their DNA.

A book, a report, an article, a study, an essay—millions of people in “advanced societies” don’t have a clue. When censorship tightens, who cares? It’s just words.

IT’S JUST WORDS.

Elite societal players welcome illiteracy. They love it. It’s one of their cherished goals. Ignorance is good. More than that, illiterate people are easy to convince that repressive censorship isn’t a problem. It’s just something that “happens.”

If you don’t have “the right ideas,” you should be censored.

IT’S JUST WORDS.

Words are useless “things” like tacks and marbles and crayons and paper clips. Who cares?

“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. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (George Orwell, “1984”)

At its root, illiteracy becomes a form of reductionism. What can be comprehended, discussed, debated, or reasoned shrinks.

IT’S JUST WORDS.

Illiteracy is more effective than political correctness. Untold numbers of people can’t understand the sentences that are floating and flying by them every day. They register this by building up anger. Unfocused anger. They are perfect fodder for know-nothing social and political movements that requite violence and repression. After all, they were repressed, weren’t they? Weren’t they left hanging out in the wind by their education, their schooling? Now is the time for revenge.

They were limited in what they learned; therefore, limit everyone else. Why not?

IT’S JUST WORDS.

There is a sub-text percolating in many, many schools: “All right, you students, this is your education. We’re going to keep you from learning the language. We’re going to hold it back from you. At the same time, we’re going to praise you and push you ahead from grade to grade. You’ll know something is wrong. But you’ll accept what we do to you. It’s easier. You’ll take a ride through school, and then we’ll dump you out into the world. We’re making rebels wholesale. Ignorant rebels. Rebels without the tools for THINKING. You’ll have to find a place where thinking isn’t important. Good luck. Here’s a suggestion. Find a group where all you have to do is yell and throw rocks. Learn what to yell. Demand your right to get EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING. That is all.”

Do you want a piece of interesting news? I can offer it, based on my experience of the past 17 years writing online. The declining system of education creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum, writers who do value language step forward, and they do present actual ideas. This is a large vacuum, so it can accommodate many writers.

They are creating new realities.

And readers show up.

Miracle of miracles.

These writers and readers are the “replacement team.” They are standing in for the colleges and universities and the sloganeers.

They are not censoring themselves or anyone else.

They are proliferating language, not reducing it.

Here is the secret: the history of humans reveals that language does, in fact, expand. It doesn’t lie down and die. It doesn’t wait for know-nothings to catch up. It doesn’t wait for anyone. Poets and novelists and playwrights and essayists find and invent new branches of word and thought.

They are making the future every day.

And as far as pure ideas go, no matter how hard some people have tried, Jefferson and Madison and Tom Paine and John Adams are not dead yet. Their shaped principles embedded in sentences live on.

If at some point, the entire population of the planet were illiterate, except for four writers, those four would invent a new ocean that couldn’t be contained—and somehow, readers would show up.

Perhaps you think I’m describing a kind of magic, and maybe I am, but I’m also giving you ironclad fact. It has always been so.

The Internet may have been invented with machine language, but the writers who have appeared on it are multiplying their own language.

They are outdistancing the machine.

They always will.

Exit From the Matrix

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

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 29th 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.