MAGIC AND THEATER

 

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011. In ancient Athens, theater was brand new. It had never been done fully and freely, prior to that time. Anywhere.

 

In Athens, you had full-blown tragedies, comedies, and satires performed on stage, and actors even played gods! And local citizens were recruited for some roles.

 

Of course, later scholars spent their lives analyzing the content and meaning of the plays, but didn’t really bother to highlight the fact that introducing theater to a culture is a revolution.

 

Because people begin to realize in such cultures that ANYTHING can be a role. Anything can be acted out.

 

“You mean the high priest of yaba-doo, who runs the temple, might be just a good actor with a script? Hmm…”

 

If the ancient Egyptians had the sort of theater the Greeks did, who knows how many theocratic dynasties might have been prevented?

 

Which is, of course, why the Egyptians didn’t have real theater.

 

In 1969, I wrote a poem called The Age of the Actor. One line reads: “And in the many little republics, dying out, the joining of a great theater.” The poem was based on the idea that, now, we look back on the past as if the people living in it were “merely” acting out parts, but of course, we consider ourselves realists. Non-actors.

 

It would take me many years to realize the full implications of the poem.

 

And one of those implications is embodied in the dichotomy between stillness and action. Silence/introspection vs. action. Both qualities are extraordinary when played out far enough, but unfortunately, people tend to be hooked on stillness. Once they get a taste of it, they feel it’s a safer position.

 

That’s why, for example, they prefer meditation to art. And by art I mean doing art.

 

Profound stillness and peace do allow a flexibility of being to emerge. But if one doesn’t make anything of that, it tends to soften and become mushy.

 

In the magic theater, the dynamic principle is primary. And of course, when a person plays many roles and speaks spontaneously from them, one result is more energy.

 

Some roles will produce more liberated energy than others. My job in the Magic Theater is to find those roles for a given person. They can be fairly obvious or not obvious at all.

 

With one client, it was “the manager of a galactic factory.” I pounced on that idea spontaneously. I mean, people don’t walk around wearing a sign that says, “I want to play the role of a galactic manager.” But I felt something on that order might produce fireworks. And it did.

 

The person, as he began speaking from the role, as he worked his way into it, took on enormous energies, as if he already knew the part well. His autocratic, outgoing managerial persona was in direct contradiction to his chronic stillness, developed during long years of meditation.

 

When he was done with the galactic manager role, after a few hours, he looked like he had just walked out of a cosmic steam bath. His face had lost its sallow cast.

 

He started talking about new plans for the future, plans he’d been sitting on for a long time. Suddenly, what he really wanted seemed possible.

 

The other thing was, he dropped his attitude of already knowing everything it was important to know. Prior to that moment, it had been his central character trait. He had been “the master of hidden spiritual secrets.” (He and I would get to that role later.)

 

The Magic Theater works in fabulous ways.

 

In society, those who know more and can do more often end up in charge of people who know less and can do less. But there is something interesting when we adjust the terms of this formulation: those who can play the role of knowing more and doing more are in charge of those who play the role of knowing less and doing less.

 

I’m not saying people who are more capable shouldn’t occupy senior positions. I’m saying the whole basis of the hierarchy can be expanded to come closer to the truth of things.

 

To the benefit of everyone.

 

Because every role, any role, when played out long enough, tends to become stifling and dreary. What makes it dreary is the lack of spontaneity and change. And the concomitant decline of energy.

 

You are you, but you can take on other roles and you can speak as them and from them.

 

And when you do that, a process begins. You not only gain a wider understanding of life, you become more creative, more energetic, more powerful.

 

I continue to plan the first live seminar for the Magic Theater. I’ve received emails from a few of you expressing interest. One objective of the seminar will be to prepare attendees to continue the work after they go home, via phone/Skype with partners. In the seminar itself, people will play several roles with each other. They’ll get the feel of the process.

 

When I plan the whole thing, and settle on a date and place, I’ll give you details.

 

I once thought I wanted to start a school for actors. It turns out that was a half-idea, and the Magic Theater was and is its full realization.

 

The idea that each one of us can create his own reality takes on new meaning in the Magic Theater. We can, for example, play the roles of “the person who has achieved his goals,” and “the person who doesn’t arrive at fulfillment.” This is a very interesting wrinkle. It blows open obstacles and uncertainties. It dissolves polarities.

 

The Magic Theater is an ongoing enterprise. It isn’t a quick piece of work. It can move from sub-microscopic entities as roles all the way up to multiple universes and beyond.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, Hesse, in his famous novel, Steppenwolf, introduces The Magic Theater as a place where people can find wider meaning in the stream of their lives. I believe he came to that notion when he realized that the quest for spiritual fulfillment, as he played it out in his novels, possessed a distinctly theatrical quality. This is was a stupendous discovery.

 

Rather than pursuing magic or illumination or enlightenment or fulfillment as a strictly straight-line proposition, a moving from A to Z, he re-cast the pursuit as BOTH straight-line AND theater.

 

In his final novel, Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game, despite the fact that all the master-teachers in his fictional cloister were profound experts in their fields of endeavor, Hesse kept hold of the idea that the school-cloister was a kind of theater. He knew he had something vital in that premise, and he never left it behind.

 

In the Magic Theater, as I’ve invented it for my work, the incomprehensible, the baffling, the puzzling, the obstructed, the bored, the fatigued, the successful-but-dissatisfied, the aspiring, the controlling, the rulers, the rebels are all given a platform from which to speak. As characters, improvised, in dialogue.

 

Not because the process offers straight-line solutions, but because straight-line solutions eventually yield fewer results. Instead, by these theatrical means, resolutions occur as breakthroughs into larger spaces, greater energies—and the exact manner by which the resolutions take place can’t be traced. It can’t be given step-by-step analysis. Step-by-step analysis is impossible, because what is driving the whole enterprise is imagination, which succeeds because it moves beyond prediction.

 

It’s important to note that human response/cultural response tends to seek out the One as the answer. There is one solution, one state of mind to aspire to, one goal, one focus, one secret, one key to magic. In truth, this mindset is an obstruction. It is proliferation that holds answers—and what could be more abundant than a theatrical setting in which a person can play out many roles and, thereby, break through into more profound magic and power?

 

New spaces, new energies, new roles—that is what drove the incredible response to the original Star Trek series, and Star Wars. But after a burst of energy in the NASA space program, the whole business died down. No leader could or would set a priority of space travel for the human race and make it stick. The fervor cooled. The potential roles faded.

 

I maintain that, if taken far enough, the Magic Theater can become far more thrilling. It can take us to another platform of dynamic consciousness, where we shape societies on a different basis, one which we haven’t yet invented.

 

The nomorefakenews fund drive continues through September. To contribute to this work, go to PayPal.com, click the “send money” button, enter the email, qjrconsulting@gmail.com, and make a donation. You don’t need your own PayPal account to do this. Thanks to those who are helping.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

MORE MAGIC THEATER

 

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011. I’ve found that many people will do anything they possibly can to avoid actually striking out on a path of being creative. They’ll come up with the most astonishing theories, if necessary, to keep themselves in check. They’ll psychically put themselves through hell to maintain the idea that CREATE is a line they shouldn’t cross. They’ll invent a persona as thick as a brick wall and uphold it, just to prove they can’t create or imagine anything. They’ll travel to the ends of the Earth to postpone the moment when they cross that line. They’ll distract themselves with the most preposterous tasks.

 

And to cap it off, the ANGER that all this breeds inside them—they’ll hold on to it like a life raft in a typhoon and claim it’s impolite or immoral or “contrary to the wishes of the universe” to express the anger or use it as fuel for the creative fire. They’ll force a smile and freeze it in place all the way into decline, decrepitude, and decay.

 

It’s quite a performance.

 

It’s something the Academy Awards can’t even begin to touch.

 

The profound depth of the performance is immortal, and if they only realized or owned up to the role they are playing, they’d immediately recognize how creative they actually ARE.

 

The world isn’t just theater, it’s amazingly well done theater. It’s fabulous theater. It’s the kind of theater you just can’t find in a theater.

 

People are confused? People are at loose ends? People are in a muddle? Yes, but people know those roles down to the last cue and gesture and intonation.

 

So, you see, my position is: LET’S BRING ALL THIS OUT INTO THE OPEN.

 

LET’S MAKE IT CLEAR IT’S ART.

 

LET’S DO THEATER.

 

LET’S TAKE OVER THE PROCESS THAT’S BEEN UNDERWAY FOR THE LAST 10,000 YEARS AND RAISE IT TO THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

 

LET’S ENTER THE MAGIC THEATER, where all roles are welcomed and all roles are reversible. Let’s do the generous thing and open up space and time and energy and revolutionize the old worn-out theater.

 

People hold on to their roles so tightly in life. It’s how they define reality. And that’s fine, but as the years go by, the roles become more tired, because they know them so well they can perform them in their sleep. Which is, eventually, how they DO perform them, in a trance. They phone it in.

 

Whereas, what they really want is the feeling of communicating with live energy, with life-force.

 

In the Magic Theater, we get into cracking the reality egg.

 

If you want to look at this from the point of view of secret societies, the whole idea is to get the population to accept a limited number of possible roles from which they can live and speak, and to define those roles rather narrowly, in order to plot out the future of the planet on the grand chessboard, as the roles play out their futures.

 

The magic theater reverses that overall strategy.

 

Under the surface, this whole civilization is composed of theater that doesn’t take place, conversations that are never held, dialogue that doesn’t happen. And the result is a structure of frozen counter-balanced energies. But in the magic theater, the river flows. The energies unhook and the unhealthy equilibrium is blown apart.

 

Windows fly open, fresh air comes in. Light shines.

 

We are all consummate actors, and we’re waiting for more roles.

 

Juicy ones.

 

In that psychic firmament where each one of us has roles wrapped in paralyzed energy, held in balance, all it takes is a few pushes, a few dialogues, and the whole business begins to unravel.

 

We’re back on stage, where we want to be.

 

Readers have emailed me asking where to start with all this, which seminars and books of mine I would recommend. The initial short list is:

 

The Secret Behind Secret Societies (ebook)

Mind Control, Mind Freedom (audio seminar)

The Transformations (audio seminar)

The Mystery and Magic of Dialogue (audio seminar)

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

 

IN THE MAGIC THEATER

 

THE BREAKTHROUGH

 

SEPTEMBER 4, 2011. Well, we have Shakespeare’s famous versions:

 

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…”

 

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more…”

 

But no. Not “merely” players. Not “and then is heard no more.”

 

There is potentially much more to it than that.

 

JL Moreno, the unheralded genius who invented Psychodrama, realized a person playing a role in a significant, theatrical, improvised dialogue with another person, could and would experience significant breakthroughs.

 

The dialogue needed certain requirements. The roles had to be important. Father talks to son. Son talks to father. When, finally, the son establishes his position in the dialogue, when he gains power, then the roles are switched, and the son plays the father, and vice versa. Then, the energy explosions occur. Then the crystallized status quo shatters. Then energy flows again.

 

Of course, I’m giving you the shorthand account here.

 

From here I take off and go to other places.

 

Because it turns out that reality as we find it, ordinary reality, physical reality, social reality, political reality, economic reality, space-time-energy reality…they ALL set up crystallized conditions between “subject and object,” between an individual (subject) and a personage who represents any of these realities (object).

 

And there is an energy lock-up occurring below the surface of these relationships. A status quo. A frozen dynamic of forces.

 

In this way, freedom and power are limited.

 

Understand me. I’m not trying to paint a grim picture of an overall static existence. I’m saying that, besides whatever degree of freedom and power a given individual has, there is an unexplored domain where more of his power is confined.

 

And a way to explore it and liberate the energy and the power is through live dialogue in a theatrical setting. Not in a written stage play. In a simple improvised situation. In a room.

 

Let us say I am the “guide.” Let us say I play God, and you play YOU. We talk to each other, no holds barred. The dialogue can go anywhere.

 

When we reach a point where you have established some “position” and degree and feeling of power, we switch roles. Now you are God, and I am you. And a new improvised dialogue is launched.

 

Or: I am David Rockefeller and you are you. In dialogue. And then we switch.

 

Or: I am the Pope and you are you. And then we switch.

 

I am an angry, resentful sub-human carrying a flaming torch and you are flying in the air, free, above me. And then we switch.

 

I am the Universe and you are you. And then we switch.

 

I am a steel wall a hundred feet thick and you are you. And then we switch.

 

I am a horrendous boss, and you are you. And then we switch.

 

I am Stalin and you are you. And then we switch.

 

I am a terrorist and you are you. And then we switch.

 

I am The Joker and you are Batman. And then we switch.

 

I am a slavemaster and you are a victim. And then we switch.

 

I am a feudal lord and you are a poor peasant. And then we switch.

 

I am the dumb, idiotic viewer of paintings, and you are the brilliant revolutionary artist. And then we switch.

 

I’m the hard-headed realist snob and you are the true psychic. And then we switch.

 

I’m a white-power Aryan, and you are Barack Obama. And then we switch.

 

I’m Dick Cheney and you’re a socialist revolutionary. And then we switch.

 

I’m a clandestine global banker and you’re a conspiracy researcher. And then we switch.

 

I’m a bottle of booze, and you’re an alcoholic. And then we switch.

 

And so on and so forth.

 

A personage of power speaks with a personage of much less power. And then we switch.

 

This is all based on the fact that the individual assumes certain types of people or certain forces have more power than he does. This is key. This sets up the dynamic, in consciousness, of a primary illusion. Yes, illusion. Because, underneath it all, the individual actually has great power.

 

The illusion is: your power is limited—and theatrically, so to speak, this is represented by a set of relationships with “those who hold the real power.”

 

Reality, below the surface, is theatrical.

 

But the play is frozen in mid-stride.

 

The journey involves unfreezing it.

 

Yes, in an important way, life IS theater. The solution is to play it out.

 

The person who believes he has less power CONCEIVES OF HIS SITUATION IN TERMS OF A RELATIONSHIP WITH “THOSE WHO HOLD THE REAL POWER.” This is his way of explaining why he has less power. Understanding this is crucial.

 

When I developed the exercises in my audio seminar, The Transformations, I was opening up energy. I was presenting ways in which the individual could project energy across space. These techniques change the status quo. They reveal that an individual can use energy in a non-physical way. A non-technological way. Doing the exercises breaks apart many crystallizations. Frozen rivers run again. Much more energy becomes available. Paranormal events can happen.

 

Leading forward from there, we come to this theater of the psyche. The magic theater.

 

And in the magic theater, anyone or anything can speak and enter into dialogue. A chair, a galaxy, a black hole, a cigarette, a phantom, a ghost, a universe, an imperious unattainable lover, a father, a son, a dead friend, a supernova, a magician, a snail, a penniless beggar, a terminally ill person, a doctor, a slumlord, Karl Marx, Attila the Hun, Jesus, Buddha, a murderer, a TV set, Bill Gates, a glass of water, a photon, a dragon, a parallel dimension, a painting, a door, a stone, a desert, ice cream, jell-o, an iceberg…they can all enter into dialogue and you can speak with them and AS them. There is no limit on the dialogues that can be set up between Two.

 

NOW REALITY EXPANDS.

 

Now, the whole notion of frozen roles dissolves.

 

Now, imagination comes into play with enormous strength and fluidity.

 

Now you are not only you talking to a tiger in a zoo, you are also the tiger talking to you. Or to a forest.

 

Everything we decided reality could not be cracks open like a walnut.

 

And as we gain our “sea legs,” we realize how limited our notion of reality was.

 

THIS IS THEATER.

 

The boundaries and obstacles we set up, in order to define reality and feel familiar with it, fall away.

 

This is magic.

 

And the fantastic result is: you are more you than ever before.

 

When I wrote that people are stuffed into limited roles in a societal stage play, THIS is what I meant.

 

We have taken on, with great certainty, a very, very limited conception of what reality is, and we have bought it lock, stock, and barrel. We’ve decided we know all about reality, we’re very smart, we’re very keen, we’re very aware, we’re masters of information, we know all about what’s really going on behind the scene, we don’t need to learn anything new, we’re tight and right and super-perceptive.

 

But you see, ALL THIS is taking place within the reality we’ve defined and bought and paid for. All this is taking place within the context we accept.

 

And, believe me, this is fine. No problem. It’s quite okay. It’s life as we seem to find it. I have no quarrel with any of this. It’s just that there is an opening to MORE. Much more. And every step we take on this NEW road is ours, it’s dialogue as we improvise it—no restricting system, no rules, no demands, no super King Kong at the end of the road who says he’s in charge.

 

It’s freedom.

 

It’s the liberation of endless energy and power.

 

It cracks the cosmic egg.

 

The magic theater.

 

Hints and clues and breakthroughs come in the work of Hesse, JL Moreno, Fritz Perls, the old Tibetan magicians, and many others. We find traces of it in ancient Greek tragedy, where local citizens were chosen to play the characters in these dramas, which is where my friend, Richard Jenkins, an extraordinary healer picked up his first clues and passed them on to me in 1961. Richard was also quite interested in the “merging” exercises of Tibetan magicians, as described in Alexandra David-Neel’s great books. He told me:

 

“I can expand the healing process with a patient by becoming him for a few minutes. It’s as if he and I are talking to each under the surface. He’s telling me his story, and I’m telling him mine. A switch occurs. He takes on my persona and I take on his. We experience that. And then the possibilities open up. Healing becomes easy. It’s like a dialogue…”

 

In an expanded view of theater, a person can inhabit any character, personage, archetype, physical object, force, idea, process—and he can then speak as that thing. What was formerly considered dead, neutral, silent, gone, unattainable comes alive.

 

Ordinary reality can be seen as a kind of formula, through which we say, “Well, I can feel and touch A,B,C,D, and E, but I can’t touch anything else.” That is how we shape what we take to be reality.

 

However, in the The Magic Theater, all bets are off. We not only touch what was out of reach, we talk to it, and we talk AS it. This is imagination at work in a most profound way.

 

And the release of energy, in the process, is extraordinary, as walls fall.

 

One day in 1961, I watched Richard Jenkins work with a patient. The patient had been in therapy for some years, and he told Richard that it was going nowhere. He said the most interesting thing about it was A GREEN PHANTOM. During therapy, for no reason he could ascertain—except that he was quite bored with the whole business—he began to muse on a character he’d dreamed about as a child. A green phantom. The more he mused, the more interesting the phantom became. He was like the trickster god, Hermes, flying around and stealing things from people’s homes.

 

Richard said, “Let’s have a conversation with him. I’ll be the phantom.”

 

For an hour or so, they engaged in dialogue. The whole demeanor of the patient changed. The pallor on his cheeks disappeared. He became animated and happy. Then Richard told him, “Let’s switch. You’ll be the phantom…”

 

In the next hour, I could feel energy explosions in Richard’s studio. The patient went through a whole gamut of emotions. He was projecting forces and energies and feelings of great power.

 

At the end of it, he said, “Now this is what I call living!”

 

He stood up from his chair and looked at me and said, “Remember what you saw here today. This is alchemy. My body is alive for the first time in ten years. I finally know what space is. It’s ten times larger than when I walked in here.”

 

I did remember.

 

Two weeks after that session, the patient discovered he could “home in” on conversations a hundred yards away from his house and hear what was being said as clear as a bell. He was a composer, and he had been struggling to write music that, as he said, “would bring in the rhythms of planets in their orbits.” From that moment on, the struggle ceased. He picked up his primary instrument, the saxophone, and he began to play that music. The importance of this for him couldn’t be overstated. He ceased being unhappy. He was transformed. The “before and after” was astonishing.

 

Richard’s comment was: The man had been trying to fit an expanded reality into ordinary reality, and because he thought allegiance to ordinary reality was obligatory, he was caught in a mouse trap. Now he was free. He was injecting such power into his own reality, life was ecstatic.

 

Indeed.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com