SHAPESHIFTER

 

by Jon Rappoport

January 21, 2012

 

My phone buzzed. It was the president. He told me he needed me in his office. The revolution in Iraq was gathering steam, and an Islamist majority in parliament was likely after the next election.

 

I told him I’d be there in two hours.

 

“Where are you?” he said.

 

“New York. I had to fly up here. A few pieces of quick business. I’m almost done.”

 

 

Pushing through the late-afternoon winter crowds, crossing the line from Chinatown into Little Italy, I saw the faces change and I began to hear Italian, and I saw my man.

 

Just over six feet, compact muscle, wearing a black leather jacket. His eyes were closed. He was feeling his way between people. His bald head was shining under the sinking sun. His hands were large. He flexed them as he moved.

 

First came the brief sting of images: snake, lizard, dragon. Each with embroidery. Scrolled hieroglyphics, Chinese pictographs, Runes.

 

Next, nationalities: Dutch, Norwegian, finally German.

 

I glanced at molded propositions, a length of chain links he subconsciously deployed, the end of which was murder.

 

I caught the end of a red directional line and followed it. I turned from Mott to Canal to Broadway, knowing my map was scrambled, as it always was, because I was no longer, strictly speaking, walking the streets of New York.

 

In a small alley, there was a parked black Escalade. This place was also fantastical, and I would never find the actual one. I didn’t need to. I worked my end-game in an equivalent, which nevertheless carried its crucial moments into the waking world.

 

I had long since stopped trying to plumb the meaning of the change.

 

I was there, at the car, when he arrived. We were alone. He looked at me with open hatred, as if he knew I had been coming.

 

“Why are you photographing me?” he said.

 

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” I said.

 

He opened his jacket. I observed transparent spheres containing gears within gears. I smelled burning ash. The sun, light blue, was overhead among clouds, floating in a lake of wandering corpuscles that orchestrated gusts of wind.

 

I was a 20-foot tall character in a children’s book. I raised a sledgehammer over my head and brought it down on the pavement next to him. The sidewalk shattered, and he fell silently into the hole.

 

I dropped the sledgehammer, walked over, and peered into it.

 

Twenty feet down, emitting a blue glow, a small stone castle stood on a carpet of moss. I couldn’t see him.

 

Suddenly, a welter of hot smoky emotion rolled up from the hole and struck me in the gut.

 

I was back in my cabin in the Andes. I heard running water from a stream, the chopping of wood, and farther away, the coughing of an old car laboring on a hill. I stood up straight and the pain was gone.

 

I looked around the dim room. The floor had gathered dust. My narrow bed was upended, and the mattress, lying a few feet away, had been cut into pieces.

 

Taped on the mirror above the bureau was a small rectangle of gray paper. Scrawled on the paper: “he was a terrorist.”

 

I had written it to remind myself where I had been.

 

I had cut the mattress apart, to alert myself that it was time to leave this place.

 

Then I was in rocky hills, jumping up to the summit, where I could see chunks of walking food. I spotted four of them. They all turned toward me and then ran.

 

I pursued one of them as it raced low to the ground, remembering the man in New York was dead, remembering I had taken my work seriously, remembering my father was living alone in a brownstone on West 90^th Street, off Central Park West.

 

The son he knew was a lowly janitor on the High-line, a walkway built over an old elevated subway between 14^th and 23^rd Street.

 

My job was sweeping the concrete, spearing food containers, and wiping down the railings.

 

My father wasn’t proud of me. He was bewildered about what I had made of my life.

 

I caught the small thing between my teeth, shook it three times, and broke its neck. I carried it to a place between rocks, lay down, and took a bite of flesh.

 

When I had finished my meal, I head a voice say, “Let’s kill that boy.”

 

It was coming from a car parked near the equivalent of the corner of 17^th Street and 10^th Avenue. I walked over to the car, rapped on the window, and held my policeman’s badge against it.

 

The window slid down. I didn’t wait to see the faces. I blew a breath of paralyzing amnesia into the car, turned, and walked away.

 

I passed a bookstore. Inside the huge window, ducks in a row, were hardbound volumes with the title: SHAPESHIFTER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. One of my names was listed as the author.

 

Probably a misstep. I make them.

 

I walked into the store, along an aisle of best sellers, and into a room where a hundred people were crowded, listening to a woman in a business suit. She was channeling an entity and doling out monotonous advice.

 

I tore away the veil of surmise, and suddenly everyone in the room realized the woman was inventing the Other.

 

After a minute, the listeners began getting up and filing out. Disappointed hurricane watchers; today’s storm didn’t make landfall.

 

After the room was empty, the woman in the business suit stared at me.

 

“What do you want?” she said.

 

“Nothing,” I said. “But would you like to become an elephant? I could teach you how to switch back and forth.”

 

“Get out of here,” she said.

 

Then, she was an elephant poised on cheap electric-blue carpet.

 

I waited a moment.

 

“Would you like to come back?” I said.

 

She flicked her mottled trunk at me.

 

At that moment, several federal agents walked into the room.

 

I held up my badge.

 

“NYPD,” I said.

 

“That’s okay,” one of the agents said. “We’re after the elephant. It’s a shapeshifter.”

 

“Lot of that going around these days,” I said. “Have they passed a law against it yet?”

 

“National Security issue,” the agent said.

 

“Well, it would be. They’re upsetting the very foundations of our way of life.”

 

He glared at me.

 

“You making a joke, Officer?”

 

I spread my hands.

 

“Hell no. I mean it. We can’t let these creatures roam the streets.”

 

The elephant made her charge and thundered by me, her mud-stained eyes glowing with hellfire.

 

I was sitting in the Oval Office, across from the president at his desk.

 

“Before we get to the Iraq situation, sir, I can give you a list of the precise lies you need to tell to be reelected.”

 

He scratched the back of his head.

 

“How is your list different from my list?” he said.

 

“Well, we’ll have to compare them,” I said. “But I assure you mine is the result of a lifetime of careful research.”

 

“Yes,” he said. “But if I read your compilation and I’m not satisfied, what then?”

 

“Then,” I said, “I can turn you into another man who stands a better chance of winning.”

 

“And what do I do with the old me?”

 

“Oh, you’d still be the president, but you would have undergone a complete personality shift.”

 

He leaned forward.

 

“You think I need one?” he said.

 

“Have you ever considered becoming a ferret?”

 

“A what?”

 

“Or an owl?”

 

“Are you out of your mind?”

 

“I could give you the personality of a ferret or a porcupine. People respond to animals. Nixon was a weasel. Bush was a kangaroo. Obama was an undernourished whippet. What do you want to be?”

 

The president stared at me.

 

“You’re serious,” he said.

 

I nodded. “Of course I’m serious. Without an animal persona, you’re basically invisible.”

 

“Well, I’ve always liked mules,” he said.

 

“That won’t work. How about a copperhead? We haven’t had a copperhead since Woodrow Wilson.”

 

He shook his head. “No snakes. But perhaps an ant. An ant is a man of the people. Member of a group, a collective.”

 

When I poured honey on his desk, he bent over and began lapping at it.

 

From the walls of the Oval Office streamed thousands of ants. They came in files and ascended the desk and approached the honey. I heard a faint chittering as they procured their drops and turned and scaled down the legs of the desk. The whole operation was very orderly.

 

“Sir,” I said, “you’ll win in a landslide.”

 

He smiled horribly at me and went back to lapping the orange goo.

 

I spoke to him in low confidential tones.

 

“Mr. President, now that you’re in full possession of the hive-nest-colony consciousness, you realize your sacred duty to act against serious threats to the collective. Twenty years ago, it was discovered that pharmaceutical drugs kill 106,000 Americans every year. That’s over a million people per decade. Your own agency, the FDA, has certified every one of those drugs as safe and effective. No drug can be sold without such FDA approval. Surely, you see what you must do in this situation.”

 

He looked up at me. He was clearly shocked.

 

“Why yes,” he said. “How could I have overlooked this before? I’ve had the report on my desk for some time. I must have been distracted.”

 

I waited while he phoned his attorney general and instructed him to issue search warrants for FDA headquarters and arrest warrants for the top tier of agency executives.

 

Not all remedies are perfect. My adjustment of the president’s personality was an attempt to make the best of a bad situation.

 

As the president’s national security advisor, that is more or less the core of my job. I make changes quickly.

 

And now I have a confession to make. All these tricks I’ve been playing here and there, these on-the-fly adjustments and solutions, and yes, even these shape-shifts, are merely a sub-category of something else…and it is the something else that is truly important.

 

What I am able to do is generated out of my imagination, an infinite well of possibility.

 

Finally, my imagination itself is born out of my imagining it.

 

If you can find a spiritual tradition on planet Earth which declares THAT, you’re not on planet Earth, and you probably aren’t anywhere in this universe.

 

 

Jon Rappoport

For information about the upcoming Magic Theater workshop in San Diego, contact me directly.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

TEMPORARY UNIVERSE

 

IMAGINATION AT WORK

 

by Jon Rappoport

January 17, 2012

 

You can read this article as fantasy, metaphor, crooked analogy, speculation…or something more. Many people will decide it’s an impossible fantasy. I can only say that, to me, it’s the next step in everything I’ve been writing for the past five years.

 

The essential question I tackle here is: how powerful is imagination?

 

What can it really do? What unobserved effects has it been creating since the dawn of time? How far-reaching are these effects?

 

Is it possible that imagination naturally leads to an unprecedented revolution in the very make-up and composition of the universe?

 

At the outset, I want it clearly understood that nothing I write here is meant to excuse people for doing nothing, for just hanging around hoping for miraculous deliverance. Imagination is an active force, not a passive one, and it is an individual attribute.

 

I want to tip my hat to my friend, artist Rick Dubov. Rick and I have been doing Magic Theater dialogues recently, and a few of the central ideas in this piece surfaced in those dialogues. I had been keeping them to myself, and finally aired them, and we took off from there.

 

Universe may not be what we think it is. It may be much LESS, in a way, than we think it is. It may be a fixation, by which we falsely define ourselves. More importantly, what if imagination has been having an enormous and direct (unseen) effect on universe “since the beginning?”

 

Over the past 15 years, it has occurred to me many times that imagination has been creating holes in the very universe we all accept as permanent and eternal.

 

Contrary to accepted science, these holes don’t suddenly cause horrific consequences, because although this universe is quite real, it is also an illusion, and as such it simply remains in place, even if pieces of its space have been deleted. Yes, I know, quite far out.

 

Okay. Here we go.

 

New York, over the decades, has seen artists migrating to lower-income neighborhoods, moving into lofts, and opening galleries.

 

The largest of these journeys moved from Greenwich Village to Soho to Chelsea. Presently, in the Chelsea area, bounded roughly by 29^th St., 17^th St., 10 Ave., and 11^th Ave., there are 350 art galleries.

 

It is certainly the densest concentration of galleries in the world.

 

These operations change their shows every 4-6 weeks, so the sheer amount of art moving through their doors is staggering.

 

Every time an art migration sets up shop, neighborhood property values rise, new retail operations open, and untold numbers of visitors appear.

 

In other words, the surroundings adjust to creative pioneers.

 

Or to put it another way, the environment adapts itself to imagination (art).

 

What if this pattern exists on a much, much broader level?

 

Painting, and in fact all the arts, invent their own spaces, times, and energies.

 

Up until now, we have, for the most part, been satisfied to say that works of imagination are decoration for, or additions to, the already existing space, time, and energy of this universe.

 

Because, as citizens of what is considered to be a more or less eternal continuum, we assume and claim to know that the energy, space, and time of the cosmos are primary, monopolistic, and all-encompassing.

 

I suggest something quite different:

 

The whole force of imagination and creative invention makes significant and deep changes in the so-called primary space, time, and energy of the universe.

 

Far from being mere decoration or “additive insertion,” the result of imagination in action is radical and real.

 

One might say it punches holes in the fabric of space, in the space/time/energy continuum.

 

That we have not seen these holes (unless we want to interpret inferences of black holes and wormholes as evidence) does not mean they don’t exist.

 

Our tendency is to deny anything before our eyes that doesn’t integrate with our interior picture of what reality must be.

 

We could take this principle further: even if we create new realities that supersede the familiar and the “eternal,” we quickly deny the implications of what we’ve invented.

 

As artists, we’re blind to the most radical effects of our own art.

 

Millions and millions of artists working over long periods of time establish new beachheads of time, space, and energy, against which the background of “old” physical space, time, and energy begins to fade and dissolve.

 

The so-called eternality of the continuum opens up gaps and loses its solidity in places.

 

Dean Radin, in his classic work, The Conscious Universe, argues that the totality of well-designed published laboratory studies of paranormal phenomena reveal a success rate greater than probability. In other words, statistical odds don’t rule the day. Something else is happening.

 

For example, a volunteer sits in front of a large glass case, which contains a funnel down which small balls are released. The balls end up falling into spaced holes to the left or right of vertical center. The apparatus is designed to yield the statistical probability: a 50-50 spread of balls (half to the left of center, half to the right.) The volunteer is told to try to influence the pattern of balls so they will move to the right or left.

 

A comprehensive analysis of the published literature indicates volunteers do, in fact, exert an overall paranormal influence beyond the 50-50 expectation.

 

What paranormal researchers so far fail to see is that this act of “influencing” is actually an action of imagination.

 

Imagination changes the laws of the space/time/energy continuum.

 

Art, which is a far more intense action of imagination than “mentally influencing balls,” does the same thing.

 

We aren’t living in a continuum-universe bounded by unalterable laws. This universe, from the most important point of view, is a default structure that exists AFTER the power of imagination has been subtracted.

 

And when it is added, the continuum changes.

 

One of the most radical changes would be a “fading effect,” as new realities (spaces, times, and energies) are invented in great profusion and with great power.

 

Consider New York City itself. If you transported a human from 1700, when the city was simply two rivers and forests, to 2011, his state of utter bewilderment would be overwhelming, as he stood in the middle of Times Square at night. He might actually think space and time themselves had been transformed.

 

Presently, millions of people believe that an observer affects matter at a sub-atomic level merely by the act of observing. This belief, however, is a version of re-arranging deck chairs. It doesn’t posit that new energy, space, and time are superseding and replacing the old. It clings to the old idea of universe.

 

It is patently obvious that, since the dawn of art, artists have been creating and introducing new energy into reality. The law of the conservation of energy is applicable, if at all, only in a narrow range that excludes the power of imagination. Well, if new energy can be created, why not new space and time?

 

And if this creative capability exists, and if its influence is strong enough, why shouldn’t art (imagination) begin to replace that other work of art called universe?

 

Why shouldn’t the overall force of art wake us up to the fact that the universe isn’t primary and never has been?

 

The old Tibetan magicians practiced creative exercises in which they imagined personae, and the announced objective of these techniques was the realization that UNIVERSE IS A PRODUCT OF MIND.

 

The magic was, in fact, the capacity of an individual to delete pieces of universe or spontaneously invent space/time/energy that had never existed before.

 

For some years now, Dean Radin and his colleagues have been conducting experiments with random number generators, placed at various positions around the planet. These devices continuously spit out random sequences of numbers. Radin has discovered that, just before momentous events (such as 9/11), the quality and degree of randomness produced by the machines significantly alters.

 

This has been taken to confirm collective precognition. Realizing that something shocking is about to happen, the consciousness of billions of people exerts an effect that is registered by these machines. A coherence previously not present comes into being.

 

That is a general hypothesis. Let’s consider translating it into another obvious format: billions of people, sensing a momentous event on the immediate horizon, CREATE AN ENERGY THAT HAS NEVER EXISTED, and this energy affects the random number generators.

 

New energy is created (imagined), and the environment adjusts to it.

 

A most profound transition is underway. How long it will take to become visible to everyone is speculation. But the outcome is: the work of art called universe will no longer be primary and “eternal.” Instead, imagination will engender millions and billions of works of art that supersede it.

 

Think of this transition in pedestrian terms—a painting that has hung in a room in a museum for centuries will be replaced by a series of new paintings.

 

My assertion is: this process, millimeter by millimeter, has been happening since “the beginning.” The idea of it was too radical to consider. It is no longer too radical.

 

The idea that, no matter how much we imagine and create, universe will always be universe, is just that: an idea. It has no intrinsic power, except for the power we attribute to it.

 

Lately, as I’ve engaged in a number of Magic Theater dialogues (see my blog archive here for many articles on the Magic Theater), I’ve begun to consider that the dialogues are, in fact, works of art that punch holes in universe.

 

The overwhelming sentiment among the populace is dedicated to rejecting the notion of such effects. Their whole program is a pledge of allegiance to normality. In other words, every situation, at bottom, is assessed by the proposition that universe is the ultimate reality, forever the same.

 

And yet, everywhere we look we see the results of imagination and invention. I’m taking it a step further. Universe is also the result of imagination and invention. And just as one style of art, which was acclaimed, in its time, as primary and final, was eventually placed on the shelf in favor of a new emerging style, universe, too, will be put in storage. It can be dragged out for conversations based on low-level consensus, but we will realize that something far more adventurous is in the ever-expanding foreground:

 

The individual…

 

IMAGINING

 

INVENTING

 

CREATING

 

IMPROVISING.

 

And then nothing will ever be the same.

 

Actually, it never was the same.

 

Universe was a children’s book we all read a long time ago. When we need to refer to the sentiments and delights and conflicts and push-pull emotions of that story, we can remember. We can bring it back and enjoy the moment. Otherwise, we’re each launched in expressing the unbounded force of our imaginations.

 

Until that day, people will staunchly defend universe-as-it-is, with all its rules and restrictions, while they take every opportunity to file into dark theaters and longingly watch fantastic personages break every one of those rules in paranormal fireworks.

 

I say universe has a beginning and an end, in the same way that a famous novel has its time in the sun and then fades from recognition. It was a long-running play, and then the audience dwindled and the performances closed down.

 

It was always that way, except that a trick was thrown into the mix. If people could be convinced to bow and scrape at the play, pay deep homage to it, even pray to it, hope for it to grant their wishes—then perhaps it might go on and on forever.

 

But it won’t.

 

Because other plays, more and more plays, are being written and performed in profusion.

 

I suggest that certain anomalies, puzzles, confusions, and mysteries in physics can be worked out by starting from the premise that imagination is superseding the illusory “permanent” effects of universe. And that fades and holes and other phenomena are opening up in universe as a result.

 

Imagination has no illusions. The universe does.

 

The primary laws of implicative logic are indeed applicable to the work of art called universe, and to all thought that attempts to operate within that field. But outside it, the force of imagination does not concern itself with those laws, and never did. To imagination, for example, the stricture against logical contradiction is a joke. And there is no pinnacle on which “the one and only work of art” sits. That’s the biggest joke of all.

 

Imagination hasn’t been powerless all these centuries. It has been changing universe and punching holes in space and introducing new energies and replacing sections of universe and even altering time. It’s been doing all sorts of things—all of which we’ve denied.

 

Now we are coming of age. And I don’t mean the New Age, in which people try to believe some external force will deliver all their dreams to them. No, I mean an age in which we, by the power of imagination, invent multiverses without limit or end.

 

The Tibetan magicians (who at one point dominated the spiritual path in their culture, before the priests took over), would probably agree with the main points in this article. For them, the idea that the universe is a product of mind was far more than just a fancy. All their techniques were geared to realizing this profoundly and permanently—and jumping off from the realization to launch what some people would now call paranormal feats. Such feats included deleting pieces of universe and creating space/time/energy of their own. There is, of course, debate about whether these practitioners were actually able to perform such acts.

 

I would highly recommend John Blofeld’s extraordinary book, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet, and any of Alexandra David-Neel’s books about her travels through Tibet. Blofeld’s description of what he calls “deity visualization” is a key to understanding the original practices of the Tibetan magicians.

 

Jon Rappoport

 

For information about the upcoming Magic Theater workshop in San Diego, in March, email me directly at qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

THE NEXT MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP!

 

JANUARY 2, 2012. The first workshop, held in San Diego last month, was a smashing success. So I’m scheduling another one for this March.

 

When: Saturday and Sunday, March 3 and 4.

 

Where: San Diego.

 

The 2 sessions: Saturday, 11:30AM-6PM. Sunday: 9:30AM-1PM.

 

To sign up, contact me directly at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

I suggest doing that soon; the workshop will fill up quickly; we need a fairly small group to make the dynamics work.

 

Here is a statement from Rick Dubov, who has participated in a number of Magic Theater dialogues:

 

“I came to my MACIC THEATER sessions with Jon with the feeling that many of you have had, I’m sure—namely that the reliable systems and ways of doing things are antiques by now. And furthermore they just don’t WORK!

 

“I have had two sessions with Jon and I will tell you that new worlds are being born by the second in me. We started our sessions with the theme of my fears and worries about money, and what I have discovered is astounding.

 

“But these sessions are not some pie-in-the-sky, passive writing down of affirmations. That approach is antique and weak. In these sessions YOU become the active creator of your life. Jon has stated this many times in his posts, but I am here to tell you that I am now living this, after only two sessions, and I look forward to many more of these sessions.

 

“In fact, the sessions have created an infinite thirst and hunger in me for more living in my creative imagination. This also is not just a fun holiday from the dreariness of daily routine, this is life transforming.

 

“I will close by saying that in just these two sessions, in which I have indulged most wildly in my imagination, I feel more solidly rooted in my life on numerous levels. And finally let me say this…even upon my first entry into the MAGIC THEATER. I was stunned and amazed, and remain so.”

 

For those readers who are encountering the idea of the Magic Theater for the first time, you can access this section of my blog archive at https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/category/magic-theater/ to learn more.

 

The Magic Theater is beginning to spread. As a result of the first workshop and my private clients, there are presently 3 separate groups operating. I’m sure more will follow.

 

Hope to see you in San Diego in March!

 

Jon

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COAGULATING PERSONALITY, THE MAGIC THEATER, AND IMMORTAL LAUGHTER

by Jon Rappoport

December 14, 2011

A person who won’t play roles is left with the role he has. For various reasons, he’s so in love with it he doesn’t want to budge from it, even temporarily. For example, he fervently believes, in his present role, he knows everything worth knowing.

Or he’s playing a central role of victim, and he won’t vary from that because he envisions losing something important if he does.

Or he thinks reality is tough and nasty and he must have a role to match.

In any case, over time, his persona COAGULATES.

Like a clot.

It may be a beautiful wonderful clot, but it hardens. And there he is.

And when the Magic Theater comes through town, with

222356789456789023456432890 available roles to play, just for starters, he passes on it. He says NO.

Starving man at table. Feast. “Give me bread and water.”

Every person who’s ever had a drug experience or a spiritual insight or a big up of any kind comes back down—and he comes back down because he’s got his coagulated role waiting for him and he can’t be late.

But the thing is, if he’s played a few hundred roles for a few hundred hours, improvising them with other people who are doing the same (Magic Theater), when he comes back down he sees his central role with different eyes. It doesn’t look the same. He realizes he can go beyond it. He can branch out. He can kiss that hard coagulation goodbye.

One thing I learned at this past weekend’s first Magic Theater workshop—the people who show up want to play roles. The people who don’t, don’t. It’s an easy line.

It isn’t about knowing; it’s about doing. And the more you do in the Magic Theater, the more you end up knowing, but what you then know is made of stuff you never could have gotten to otherwise.

It’s instant knowing. Spontaneous. Direct.

I’ve spent enough of my life looking at the coagulation of other people. I’ve learned all I need to about that.

I’m riding out into new territory.

And like everybody else, I’ve experienced enough coagulation of my own, too. It doesn’t really matter what a person produces out of that coagulation of personality, because eventually he needs something else. It’s called freedom. Breathing new air.

Imagination. In the Magic Theater, it lights up all over the place.

Like a comedian with a million jokes, people have a million excuses for staying the same.

Or they can improvise their way to a million new surprises.

It’s an easy line.

Yeah, it’s called freedom.

The Magic Theater, as I’ve written before, is based on Psychodrama, but it’s really something new. It’s an endlessly flowering tree, a rope across a canyon, a rocket to the stars and beyond, a flip into different universes of one’s own making. It’s all created in the moment, in a dialogue between two or more people playing roles. Where it goes depends entirely on the imagination of the people involved.

I suppose you could have boring Magic Theater, if the people are dedicated to boredom. Hey, that might be fun for a half hour or so. Play the most boring creature in the cosmos. So boring the cosmos just folds up in his presence.

But really, Magic Theater is thrilling. It’s funny as hell. Once you pierce the usual strictures of subjects conversation is supposed to be about, it seems you do pretty much end up in comedy. It’s hard to avoid.

We’re all sitting on a joke, after all. We’re sitting on it day after day, and the expanse of that joke is enormous, and maybe it keeps getting bigger and bigger, the more weight we put on. Our sober attitudes are like struts and pillars and connectors and beams that hold the whole universe together in a stern pattern—and the secret is, when we start to play really interesting roles together, the whole tight structure falls apart.

Like Pablo in Hesse’s Steppenwolf (where the term Magic Theater came from), we laugh the whole System into oblivion, and if it still stands after that, it’s just the stage it was meant to be, where we do more and more theater, with more and more imagination.

Endless rich contrary imagination.

Does this ring some kind of bell with you?

Because after last weekend’s Magic Theater workshop, it makes perfect sense to me.

I’ll tell you this. The world is built to impose on us more and more and more deadened and leadened thought and feeling. We can try to solve that by fixing every wrong thing and detail on the planet, or we can come at it from the top and do so much Magic Theater that eventually, as an incidental side effect, the whole deadened and leadened business comes apart at the seams and we’re all holding royal flushes.

That’s the way I intend to go about it.

I’m starting to plan the next Magic Theater workshop. Let me know if you’re interested.

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. 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

 

REPORT ON MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP

 

THE SIX

 

by Jon Rappoport

December 13, 2011.

 

The first workshop was held here in San Diego this past weekend. I am not going to write the few hundred pages it deserves. Yes, you had to be there. I was a participant as well. I joined in the two and three person dialogues. There were six of us. We spent about ten hours acting out various roles.

 

There’s no substitute for “hours on the job.”

 

There was much, much laughter and hilarity. A lot of the laughter was falling off the chair stuff.

 

One of the most interesting sessions involved people inventing roles of their own choosing and just diving in. I watched one of these dialogues for about an hour, and I developed a tremendous fascination, in part because I couldn’t figure out who two of the people were. But it was more than that. The interplay, the sheer improvisation, the wildness of it—yeah, you had to be there.

 

Spontaneously, at the end, in the last hour on Sunday, two groups who had been carrying on very different dialogues joined up and connected. The six of us invented a super-group whose motives and strategies and plans were preposterously gorgeous. We subverted a corporation, figured out how to take over a country, invented a new religion, launched a film enterprise, appointed a reluctant saint, and that was just the beginning of it.

 

My life will never be the same. Of that I’m sure. The others in the group would have to make their own assessments. I’m quite sure they were surprised by the effects—beyond what they anticipated.

 

Time and time again, I was blown away by the initiative of the people there—how they jumped in and played their roles with power, imagination, and a true ability for expressing the absurd.

 

After a weekend like this, I don’t think anyone can return to his/her central role in life with the same grinding certainty that this is it, this is life, this is all there is. No. We are in different territory.

 

Trying to explain all this is like saying there is a joke that’s very, very funny and ha ha. You not only have to be there to hear the actual joke, you have to be telling the jokes. And we did.

 

Without a script.

 

The workshop wasn’t the purveying of knowledge. It was all in the doing. It was action theater.

 

It breaks the layer of supposition and pre-judgment and conditioned perception. It gets to the real stuff, which is invention.

 

Which is so much more interesting and joyous than “real life.”

 

One of my favorite things about the weekend: no boredom. You start feeling the edges of “sameness” creeping in? Kick the dialogue in a new direction. We did, hundreds of times. And launched ourselves. You want multiple dimensions? Boom.

 

I felt confident in our group. I knew we were in good hands: each others’. This was and is a piece of cosmic relief. And comic relief.

 

My admiration for the other five people grew and grew. Ready, willing, and able.

 

I always knew ordinary life was crazy. The workshop offered living proof. But we were unrolling other worlds and universes in the process. And every new leap implied more leaps. No limits.

 

It’s like the trip you always hoped you’d take one day. The vacation that’s a piece of sheer synchronistic way beyond illumimation FUN. Surprises at every turn.

 

You’re galvanized and riveted and intrigued and inspired by your companions. And they’re inspired by each other and you. Alive moment to moment theater.

 

Dream come true.

 

There are no major and minor actors. Everybody is major.

 

“You expand mine; I expand yours.”

 

I just can’t do it justice. These words are just markers that might point you to clues about the fabulous nature of this enterprise.

 

I see the faces of the other five, I see them spontaneously percolating the new meanings of what it means to be alive—beyond all the sober baloney of illusion and beyond all the programmatic concocted wisdom.

 

I’ll take this New.

 

Yeah, give me some of that. Give me more of that.

 

Anybody with deep pockets out there who’s freezing into a replica of a replica of a replica? Put me in a building and I’ll give away the Magic Theater for the next 20 years, every day. I’ll spawn branch offices all over the planet. We’ll make it into a flood.

 

Meanwhile, I’m very, very happy with my six.

 

Hello, universe: got your number. You’re busted.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

DEADLINE, MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP

 

NOVEMBER 21, 2011. This is the final week for registering for the Magic Theater workshop in San Diego.

 

The dates of the workshop are December 10-11.

 

To register, contact me directly at qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

The Magic Theater has wide implications. It puts imagination into action right away. No contemplation necessary.

 

From the beginning of the theatrical tradition in ancient Greece, there has always been a sense of the power inherent in acting roles. Quite naturally, the actor begins to realize that the conventional perception of reality is quite limited.

 

The roles people take on in “real life” generate a certain amount and quality of energy. This is like filling up a bottle by dipping it in the ocean. The rest of the ocean (energy) is left over, never to be used.

 

But in the Magic Theater, where many roles are improvised, greater and greater areas of the ocean become available.

 

This is particularly true because some of the roles in the Magic Theater are much more imaginative than ordinary life would permit. And yet it’s easy to take on such roles. It’s as if people have been waiting for the opportunity.

 

And now that opportunity is here.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

MORE FOUNDATION, THE MAGIC THEATER

 

–for Jacob Levy Moreno, the inventor of Psychodrama

 

“A glass of water sits on a table. We see and say this glass is an object positioned in space. We can also see it is an occasion for action—we can pick up the glass and drink the water. With another adjustment, more daring, we can say the glass is a role. We can personify a glass. We can act the part of the glass. With imagination, we can speak as the glass. Nothing is stopping us. Suppose, if the universe could speak, it would say, “Go ahead, play the role of the glass. I never intended you to go so far with your perception that the glass is merely an object. I never thought you would give so much credence to objects. I made a mistake and you made a mistake. You took this cockeyed perception of objects to an extreme. You overplayed it. Now I’m stuck with you seeing me as all sorts of dead objects floating in space. Do you have any idea how strange that is?”

–Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes

 

NOVEMBER 3, 2011. In science, everything is calculated from the position of the observer. He is separate from the thing observed. Contrary to popular belief, “observer influence” or indeterminacy does not change this in any fundamental way.

 

Certain spiritual or mystical beliefs maintain that the observer can discard his position and “merge” with the object of his perception. He can then feel what it is like to be that object.

 

Thus, the two choices are: stay separate or merge.

 

The Magic Theater takes a different approach:

 

Play the role of some object or person that is usually perceived at a distance. Speak as that object. Engage in improvised dialogue with someone who is similarly playing another role. Then, after a time, switch roles and continue the dialogue.

 

Furthermore, a person can take the role of something that is never observed; in other words, an imaginative entity, an “impossible” entity.

 

In any event, there is no longer, in this game, an observer. He is replaced by the actor.

 

Think of these choices. A person can observe a tree. He can merge with the tree. He can act the role of the tree and speak. He can act the role of the tree and speak to someone who is acting the role of, say, “the dark side of the moon.” Why not?

 

The advantages of the Magic Theater formulation are increased dynamism; slipping out of the normal point of view; speaking as something usually thought of as having no voice; engaging in conversation with another person who has taken on a role himself.

 

This extends reality. Eventually, it breaks open the reality egg.

 

It does these things not merely through thought or contemplation or supposition or speculation, but through improvised acting.

 

“Being one’s self” is considered a virtue. However, as time passes,a person hardens that position and thereby excludes other channels of experience and perception. This process reduces available energy.

 

Even more importantly, aspects of self are ruled out of bounds and forgotten. The Magic Theater brings these aspects back into play. They are part of infinite imagination.

 

No-imagination is considered normal or average. But actually, imagination is the norm. It is the wellspring. It is what a person would be exercising to the fullest, were it not for cultural strictures and dedication to the status quo.

 

No imagination or limited imagination is the ultimate source of all chronic human problems. In this sense, society and culture can be seen as structures set up to produce unsolvable problems. And indeed, this is the case.

 

Within a society, those people who set themselves up as authorities are predisposed to protect their “territory of expertise.” From their platforms and towers, they project opinions masked as final words. But they are working from spaces within an invisible context of unsolvable human problems—and no matter how wise their opinions may seem, the Unsolvable remains intact—obscured by their “wisdom.”

 

The real goal should be to move outside the context. And this can be achieved in the Magic Theater, where among the many, many roles enacted are Authorities. In playing such roles, we experience their theatrical nature—and their importance dissolves.

 

In a similar vein, consider a rock. We know many things about it. Science tells us more about it. We could write a book, perhaps an encyclopedia about a rock. We could say: this is the total reality of the rock.

 

A certain aspect of self is geared, so to speak, to understand the rock in this way and no other. A certain aspect of self is accommodated by knowing that it knows everything reality can tell it about the rock.

 

And now, in the Magic Theater, we go further than reality can go. We play the rock. We act as the rock. We speak as the rock. We engage in dialogue with another person who is playing a man with a sledgehammer, or God, or a worm who lives under the rock, or wind that is slowly wearing away the rock, or a wolf who is sitting on the rock.

 

And in doing this, we are engaging another aspect of self that never considered reality to be the arbiter of what is possible.

 

And this aspect, as it turns out, is universes and universes and universes larger and greater than the aspect of self that accepts reality as primary and definitive of experience.

 

Imagine the wisest of the wisest sage-prophet-archetype-god-supergod in charge of knowing everything there is to know about ultimate consciousness.

 

Now play that role. Play it in improvised dialogue with The Eternal Seeker. Converse for an hour and then switch roles.

 

This is a distinctly different approach.

 

People want conflict because they can’t see any other way to live. But there is a greater aspect of self, presently unengaged, that views conflict as theatrical, and if that aspect can be brought into the picture, things change, become more fluid, and conflict is understood to be a plot device.

 

People are obsessed with secrets at all levels. They want to pursue them, root them out, expose them. Secrets on the level of family all the way to mysteries of the universe itself. The obsession is reflective of the self that wants “unlocked reality”–but you see, this is still reality. It’s expanded, yes, but it’s the same basic reality. Whereas, if you PLAY THE ROLE of The Secret, if you speak as the secret, you begin to see beyond reality. You begin to see the theatricality of secrets.

 

A basic principle could be expressed this way: every object, person, process, place, whether real or imaginary, can be played as a role.

 

Suppose, 20 years from now, scientists discover that, yes, the universe is actually a hologram projected from a two-dimensional surface, on which the bits of information that create universe are inscribed. And suppose these scientists figure out a way to change that inscribed information, so that universe automatically changes—radically. This would be momentous, yes? But you see, all these fantastic changes would be coming into us from the outside, so to speak, from alterations made on the machine that projects universe. How would this change US?

 

Though we would be perceiving something that is much different, we would still be perceiving reality in the same WAY we perceive it now.

 

There is another way to look at universe. It is a THEATER. It is the stage on which roles are acted, and we are the actors. We are largely unaware of this fact. So we need experience acting roles. All sorts of roles. We need to act the roles of elements of universe, and we also need to act roles of elements that aren’t and couldn’t be part of universe—roles we imagine.

 

Such a simple idea. Such far-reaching consequences.

 

If you were to do an encyclopedic search of every spiritual system and teaching that has ever purported to lead seekers to ultimate consciousness, you would not find the method I’m suggesting here. Yet it has been in front of our noses forever.

 

But most people see their lives in terms of gain and loss. They see their own behavior, their own first principles, their own opinions, their own positions, their own desires, their own pursuits as rock-bottom factors. Therefore, they believe, if they were to “play other roles,” they would lose what they already have.

 

So they say, “Play a role? That’s ridiculous.” They really mean, “If I played a role, I would lose the one I already have.” That’s an error. That’s not true.

 

Look at it this way. If you were suddenly given 50 million dollars, would you lose the house you’re living in now? You might move out and buy a bigger house, but you wouldn’t LOSE the old house. It wouldn’t be a matter of loss. You just have new options. You can stay in the old house. You can build a new addition. You can leave it exactly the way it is now. You can move out and buy a new house. But LOSS is not a factor.

 

I’ve made this statement many times: The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.

 

To that I add the following: The universe is waiting for infinite theater to begin.

 

I started the Magic Theater for both reasons.

 

Perhaps metaphorically speaking, the universe says, “Here I am. Look at all my things. Each thing is itself.” But the universe is also saying, “Each of my things is a potential role. You can play it, you can play them all.”

 

The It-ness of any It is just the beginning of the story. Yes, we see many Its. We know we are looking at this It and that It and the other It. We have language to enforce this position. A language of nouns which are subjects and objects, a language we use to describe what happens to the nouns, the Its. We believe that’s the beginning and the end of the story. But each It can be seen and acted as a role. And then the dynamics expand.

 

I’m fully aware that the kind of revolution I’m proposing isn’t going to take the world by storm overnight. After all, it’s not a drug you can ingest on your couch while watching reruns of The Brady Bunch.

 

But on a large scale, the transformational effects are really scoffed at in the same way that any form of art is claimed to be irrelevant to the life of civilization—people say it’s a “separate issue.” In other words, art exists in a vacuum. Paintings exist on walls of museums. Music is played in concert halls. Novels are read in living rooms. Poems are rarely read at all. Art is embroidery for the mind.

 

All this is nonsense of the highest order. Art always bleeds into the life of a society. In the same way, the Magic Theater changes consciousness of the nature of events in the so-called real world. More and people begin to see these events as theater. As roles being played out. And when a tipping point is reached, major actors (e.g, political leaders) will have to admit they are, in fact, on stage, speaking lines, hoping to gain an advantage over rivals. Authorities of all stripes will be exposed.

 

This is what’s called being “laughed out of court.”

 

You reach a critical mass eventually, where enough people see the overlap between “real” and “theatrical,” and the old sense of the way the world works is superseded.

 

Looking at it from one angle, we have a long way to go. This doesn’t disturb me in the least, because the Magic Theater already separates the wheat from the chaff, and doing that is no small thing. And it all starts with the individual and what his participation can bring to him. It isn’t about sacrifice and self-abnegation. It’s about more power for self. That’s the only way ANY lasting revolution can be built.

 

If you have experience with theater, you know the “ensemble effect” is created from the work of the individual actors—that’s the initial launch.

 

The Magic Theater is a new space, to which you are invited. The first workshop will take place in San Diego on December 10-11. To inquire about attending: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com