Why I produced “The Matrix Revealed”
by Jon Rappoport
June 20, 2012
www.nomorefakenews.com
My new collection, The Matrix Revealed, was assembled on the same basis as the suggestion that “None Of The Above” should be placed on all ballots at election polls.
The more you understand about how the Matrix is put together, the nuts and bolts of it, the closer you approach the decision that you want none of it.
And then you begin to think about and imagine and enact true alternatives.
It’s as if you enter a huge factory where machines run night and day, and you examine the highly complex operation at close range. The more details that emerge to your eye and mind, the fuller your penetration of the inescapable conclusion that all this activity is generated to fabricate an illusion:
An illusion that this is the only possible Reality.
That’s the objective of Matrix.
My objective is to explode that myth through 1) detailed knowledge of how Matrix is built and 2) the ascension of individual creative power to invent new realities.
With that in mind, here is an interview with my late colleague and friend, Jack True. Jack was a most brilliant and innovative hypnotherapist who eventually stopped using hypnosis in his practice. (I interview him 43 times in THE MATRIX REVEALED; 320 pages.) Jack developed extraordinary methods for waking people up beyond a point that is normally considered possible. I’ve published this interview before. Since then, I’ve found additional notes from the conversation and added them.
Before the interview, I want to say a relevant few words about the animated videos I’ve been making with my colleague, Theo Wesson. You can see them at www.youtube.com/jonrappoport. There’s a new one, just out, on the Obama/Romney debates. We make these animations because the viewer has a chance to have a unique experience for a few minutes, where ordinary reality is blown apart.
Aside from all the usual reasons for making a cartoon, you can expose the lies of ordinary reality. People, whether they admit it or not, want a unique moment. A moment where the rules are suspended. The machine of ordinary reality-manufacture stops.
This is what Jack True is talking about in this interview. As a hypnotherapist, he was particularly adept at putting people in a light trance. Their minds would be open to new experience, but they wouldn’t be suggestible. That was the trick. To relax the mind and eliminate, for the moment, the clutter and the internal dialogue and the push-pull of competing automatic thoughts. Finding that sweet spot, Jack was then able to have his patients achieve some remarkable things, things they wouldn’t be able to do in their ordinary state of consciousness.
This is important to understand. When Jack talks about a patient being able “to conceive of something,” it might, on the surface, not sound so important. But Jack wasn’t working on the surface. The patient, conceiving of something in a light trance, was operating in a whole different theater of experience. The impact was magnified many times.
Okay, here we go.
Q: You’ve talked about “the habitual mind.” What do you mean?
A: It’s a mind that can’t get enough of predictability. It’s addicted to seeing the same thing over and over.
Q: Even if it doesn’t see it?
A: (laughs) That’s right. It will invent it.
Q: Why?
A: Because it’s avoiding something. It’s avoiding the possibility of a unique experience.
Q: Again, why?
A: Because a unique experience would open the door to the possibility that all the systems the mind has built up are insufficient or lacking.
Q: Why is it important to allow your patients to see “beyond ordinary reality?”
A: The answer to that is, of course, obvious. But I’ll try to give you a slightly different slant on it. You could say that everything a person believes or is conditioned to believe is held in place, held in one place, like a corral. The sheep in the corral are all his beliefs, and they stand there. There is a fence around the corral, and the gate is locked by the way he views reality. As long as he views reality in the same way, the gate is going to be locked. And his beliefs are going remain there. They’re not going to change. But if, for some reason, he begins to see reality in a new way, the lock on the gate is going to spring open, and the beliefs are going to scatter and disperse.
Q: So, in hypnotherapy, you try to get patients to–
A: Not through suggestions, but by other strategies.
Q: For example?
A: With certain patients who I feel are up to to it, I bring in the idea of a unique object. A singular object.
Q: What’s that?
A: A unique object, for my purposes, is a one-of-a-kind thing that never existed before and will never exist again. It could be anything.
Q: There are lots of unique objects.
A: Depends on how you look at that meaning. I’m talking about a thing that isn’t composed of whatever everything else is composed of. So a unique object isn’t made out of atoms. It’s different.
Q: Like a very strange chair?
A: Why not? It could be anything. But it’s utterly unlike anything else.
Q: Not sure I follow you.
A: I put a patient in a light trance. That means he’s aware, and it also means he can focus. His mind is, for the moment, uncluttered. He’s not thinking fifteen thoughts. He’s in a sort of zero state. Calm. He can think and he can respond, but he’s not distracted. His consciousness is relaxed and open. He’s not overly receptive to suggestions. He’s not in a Pavlovian condition. He’s in the moment.
Q: Okay. Then what?
A: Then I describe, in general terms, what a unique object is. And I ask him to conceive of one.
Q: Does he?
A: It varies. Some people work at it but they don’t come up with anything. Other people give me lots of objects, but nothing much happens. In some cases, though, a very interesting thing occurs. The patient begins to see or imagine or think about a truly unique thing. An object of great significance to him. It’s not me who is telling him the object has great meaning. He comes upon that by himself. It’s all subjective. You see? I give him the general idea of what a unique object is, and then he takes it from there. And what he describes to me isn’t a startling revelation, in terms of the object itself. It’s how he sees it and how he feels about it. It’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. When it happens, the patient experiences a change in perception. Right away.
Q: Because he feels he’s really seeing something unique.
A: That’s right. He feels that. You know, people go through their lives and they see all sorts of things, and nothing much registers with any great impact. It’s often just cultural responses, like, “Well, I’m standing here on top of a mountain, and I’m supposed to be enthralled, so I’ll act like I am.” Or “I’m walking through a forest and I’m supposed to feel the majesty of the tall trees, so I will.” My idea is to have a patient actually experience something in a spontaneous way.
Q: Give me an example.
A: One patient was quiet for a long time. Then he began talking slowly about…it seemed to be a musical instrument. He got this look in his eye, as if he was feeling something he had never felt before. As if he was making a real discovery. As if this object wasn’t part of the known world.
Q: And then what?
A: The next day, he told me his blood pressure, which had been high, was down to normal levels. His low-level chronic headache was gone. He didn’t need his glasses.
Q: Was this change permanent?
A: The blood pressure never went all the way back to the high level. For about a week, he didn’t need his glasses. The chronic headache eventually became a once-a-month headache. But he also began to see his life differently. His marriage really underwent a revolution. He reconciled with his wife, and they became much happier. His overall mood changed.
Q: All from…
A: From that experience.
Q: And you would say his beliefs changed.
A: Absolutely. Until that point, he had a very restricted view of his possibilities. That all shifted.
Q: Because he glimpsed a unique object.
A: It sounds strange, doesn’t it. But yes. It was a moment in a session. The “gap” between what he believed and what he could see just…fell apart. Here’s how I would characterize it. Perception is often an apparatus where you have whole strings of things that are deemed to be similar. The person sees A and subconsciously thinks, “Well, A is like B and B is like C and C is like D…” He’s not really seeing A. He’s linking A to other things he’s seen or heard about. It’s not true vivid perception. It’s perception plus memory and thought. It’s a hybrid. And it’s dull. It’s really uninteresting. Which has emotional implications. The person’s level of feeling becomes dull, too. So what happened in this case with the patient was, that whole pattern was broken. For a few minutes, the perception, the seeing was direct. He saw a unique object. Or to put it differently, he saw uniquely.
Q: And what caused his beliefs to change?
A: Well, if perception is dull, feeling is dull. If feeling is dull, then a person begins to adopt beliefs that will go along with that level of dull feeling. Limited beliefs. Limited ideas about the possibility of his life and even existence itself. So when that whole pattern broke apart, the sun came through. He perceived uniquely. He did it himself. Not through my suggestions. Not through drugs. He did it. And so, automatically, his dull beliefs began to slip away, because there was nothing to hold them in the corral.
Q: He perceived uniquely, so he felt uniquely, and then his beliefs, which were based on, as you say, dull feelings, were unsupported.
A: Right. Life tends to form into an un-unique pattern. That’s what characterizes it. The un-uniqueness is the glue that holds the pattern together. When you melt that glue, you get a chance at liberation.
Q: This reminds me of preconceived knowing. A person has a set of assumptions, and then anything he comes across—information, ideas, concepts—he fits them into the assumptions he already has and…grinds out a conclusion about whether these ideas are of value or not.
A: Yes, it’s the same thing, but what I do with patients relates to direct perception. Direct spontaneous experience.
[At this point, we took a long break. When we came back, we continued the conversation. Jack reiterated some of things he’d been saying, adding a few twists.]
Q: You were talking about political structures.
A: Yes. They are built in relation to public blindness.
Q: What does that mean?
A: To the degree that people think they are blind to what is going on in the world, the political structures that act on their behalf become larger.
Q: Governments are people’s eyes?
A: Absolutely. So the more complex the world becomes, the more people think they are blind, and they allow governments to expand. The formula works from both ends. Government is an apparatus of perception.
Q: Of course, what governments “see” is colored by their agendas.
A: Sure. I didn’t say the government is a reliable set of eyes. I just said it substitutes for people’s blindness. It’s second-hand perception. But I bring it up because it’s very much like what happens within an individual.
Q: How so?
A: A person tends to believe he can’t see what’s really going on, in front of his own eyes. This comes about because of disappointments the person suffers. He sees something and he wants it, and he tries, but he doesn’t get it. So he begins to believe there is something wrong with the way he sees.
Q: That’s a strange idea.
A: Yes, but it’s true. People start out with a simple formula—if I can see it and I want it, I can get it. When that formula doesn’t work enough times, the person begins to believe he isn’t seeing correctly. So he enters into a complex process with his mind, where he appoints a structure, an internal structure to see for him.
Q: A proxy.
A: Yes. And this structure is based on comparisons. A is like B, and B is like C, and C is like D. A person begins to see in categories. He doesn’t perceive directly. Instead of seeing A directly and uniquely, he sees the things A is compared to. He sees a concept. And he gets into cultural norms, seeing what the culture tells him he is supposed to see.
Q: You’re talking about a habit.
A: A deeply ingrained habit.
Q: Aside from your technique of “the unique object,” how would it be broken?
A: You’re the one who told me how.
Q: Through imagination.
A: Yes. Because imagination throws a monkey wrench into the apparatus of second-hand perception. It doesn’t go along with A is like B and B is like C. It comes from a different place. I once did an experiment with ink blots. You know, the ink blot test psychologists use. I took a small group of people and told them I wanted them to look at a few cards with ink blots on them and write down what they could imagine when they saw them. It was all imagination. The people knew that. So first, they wrote down a number, before they looked at any of the cards. The number represented their estimate of their “feeling of well-being” at that moment. It was a scale from 1 to 20, with 20 being highest. Then, after I showed them the cards, and they spent about an hour writing down what they imagined…they wrote down another number—their state of well-being at THAT moment. And in all cases, the second number was higher than the first. The well-being index. (laughs) Imagination raises the level of emotion. It raises energy. But it also creates perception. That’s the most important thing. So, essentially, imagination shreds the apparatus of second-hand perception by creating new perception.
Q: The culture isn’t set up to accommodate that.
A: The culture is all about showing people what they’re supposed to see, through sets of definitions and categorizations. That’s what a culture IS. An apparatus of perception. Imagination works at cross purposes to that.
Q: Because imagination doesn’t care what the culture says or thinks.
A: When you imagine something, you see it or feel it right away. You see what you imagine. Your perceive THAT. So it’s a different way of seeing.
Q: And it only applies to the individual.
A: Of course. As soon as it becomes a group enterprise, you’re building a culture. You’re building another second-hand perception apparatus.
Q: With this patient you were talking about, you asked him to conceive of a unique object. What do you think that meant to him
A: Well, it was a puzzle to start with. He didn’t know exactly what to do. The gears of his ordinary mind stopped working in the usual way. See, I wasn’t asking him to remember his Social Security number. I wasn’t asking him to tell me what he thought about the weather or his trip to the Greek islands or some article in the Times. He knew how to come up with answers to those things. I was asking him to come up with something completely new and different.
Q: Very Zen.
A: You could say that, yes.
Q: So how did he do it?
A: I’m sure he scoured his memory. But there was no map. He had to come to grips with the idea that there was some other way to proceed, some way he wasn’t used to. He had to think in a different way.
Q: Suppose he couldn’t?
A: But he could. That’s the thing. You see? It’s possible. There is a way to get past all the usual categories of perception. It’s as if you’re walking down a street and everywhere you look there are gates. You can walk through the gates, but if you do, you’re going to come into territory you’re already familiar with. You’ve been through all those gates before, thousands of times. So you don’t do that. You look for something else. You don’t know what it is, but you look.
Q: Are you saying this is a natural process? Are you saying that the gates and the categories are unnatural?
A: The gates and the territories and the rest of it are the result of conditioning. A lot of the conditioning comes into us from the outside, but we also condition ourselves. When you look for a unique object, you’re going past the programming in a very direct way.
Q: Somehow, energy plays a role here.
A: When you come upon a unique object, energy is released. It’s not the usual pedestrian plodding energy.
Q: You’re talking about inspiration.
A: Yes, in a way. But the energy is also a kind of signal. It’s communicating to you. It’s telling you that you just “climbed the mountain.” You climbed the mountain and you floated off the top. That energy, that signal also is transmitted to the body. Your body is alerted to a new dimension of experience. The body responds.
Q: How?
A: It generates a new energy field. A more alive field. Endorphin release also occurs. But the energy field goes beyond that. Your ordinary categories of thought and perception, the normal associations you make…all this is plugged into processes of the body, and the body takes its cues from that grid. But when you supersede all this, as with the perception of a unique object, the old grid isn’t in the seat of control anymore. It isn’t the absolute dictator.
Q: With patients where you’ve been successful with this, I assume there’s no predicting what unique object they’ll come up with.
A: That’s the whole point. If the unique object were the same for everyone, it wouldn’t be unique. People get nervous about this idea. They want to know right away what the object would be. They want a plan. A pattern.
Q: They want a system.
A: “Yes, class, here is the unique object. Now everybody focus on it.” This is exactly what mysticism and religion give you. They tell you up front what the unique object is, because they know that’s what the majority of people want.
Q: And focus isn’t the issue, is it?
A: No, this has nothing to do with focus or concentration. And it certainly has nothing to do with repetition. It’s all about finding or inventing a unique object. Look, what I’m talking about here isn’t for the masses. The masses want symbols they can hang on to. They want symbols that seem to promise them rescue.
Q: You’re saying that all conditioning and programming have to do with sameness.
A: That’s what’s programmed into people. Do A and then A and then A and then A over and over again. People program themselves this way. So their perception of reality becomes stagnant. On one level, it really doesn’t matter how people program themselves. It’s the fact of the programming that’s important, because all conditioning has this feature. It repeats. It spits out the same answer every time. It has the same solutions, to the point where you don’t think any other solution is possible. The strategy of the unique object works in exactly the opposite direction. And in my clinical experience, when it works, it’s extraordinary what happens. One search, one finding of one unique object, and you get a shift. The programming begins to split open.
Q: Before we sat down to talk, you said something about second-hand existence.
A: People look at something or read something and right away they’re experts. They’re experts on what other people will think about it. So you show them something and they judge it by what they think other people will think about it. So they’re not looking at it for themselves. Their perception is geared to a category called “what other people will think.” Except those other people will do the same thing. They’ll look at it and decide its value on the basis of what still OTHER people will think about it. So you get this complete absurdity.
Q: Whereas when a patient of yours conceives of a unique object?
A: As you can see, it’s hard to describe that experience.
Q: Well, you can’t relate it to any system.
A: That’s the point. You have somebody who’s lived for fifty years without ever having considered the idea that there is a unique object. The whole premise seems ridiculous or trivial. But then one day in my office, he does it. He’s in a light trance, and he comes up with a unique object. When he does, there is no system. There is no conditioned apparatus for perceiving. He breaks through that. He’s in a space that is free in a way he’s never experienced freedom before. He’s “off the grid.” He feels like a combination of a treasure hunter who’s just arrived in the cave and opened the box full of gold and jewels, after tracking the place for a long time—and an artist who just made something on a canvas that was completely spontaneous and new and alive. That’s a transcendent moment. It’s his own experience. He did it.
Most of the time we operate inside the grid. Everything happens there, or we think so. Some things we like and some we don’t. We assemble all sorts of concepts and preferences and ideas to justify why we should be doing what we’re doing. But there is a whole universe of experience that lies outside this grid.
[A few comments. Later in his career, Jack True developed many other methods for achieving the kind of breakthrough he explains in this interview. In our many conversations, I also began to develop exercises and techniques for such breakthroughs. The starting point for gaining a grasp on this work is The Matrix Revealed, followed by my audio seminars, MIND CONTROL, MIND FREEDOM, and THE TRANSFORMATIONS incorporated into Exit From The Matrix.]
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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com