The eternal sunshine of the mind-controlled classroom

~a short story~

by Jon Rappoport

December 20, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

I’m reprinting this piece, in view of the recent report on the vastly escalating diagnosis of ADHD, a “disorder” for which there is no diagnostic test.

“Well,” Jimmy’s teacher said, “we’re trying to emphasize cooperation. But Jimmy has another agenda. He apparently wants to stay separate from the other children.”

“Yes,” the principal said. “It’s matter of psychology. You see, separateness breeds conflict. On a larger scale, this is why nations have wars.”

“Agreed,” said the school superintendent. “We want each child to see the reflection of himself in the other children. And we want him to see the reflection of everyone else in himself.”

“You lost me there,” Jimmy’s father said. He was trying to remain calm.

A week ago, Jimmy, six years old, was sitting in class drawing. The teacher had taped a sketch of a face on the blackboard. She was taking the students through a step-by-step process aimed at getting them to reproduce the face in their notebooks.

She walked up and down the rows, and when she came to Jimmy, she saw he was drawing a very different face. It wasn’t bland. It was the face of a woman laughing. The face was floating among trees in a forest.

She stopped. The drawing looked very real.

“Jimmy,” she said, “this isn’t the face we’re all working on.”

He looked up at her.

“I know,” he said.

“So why are you doing this other one?”

He shrugged.

She said, “When we’re done, we’re all going to put our drawings on the blackboard and see what they look like. But your face will be different.”

“So?” he said.

She felt a wave of anger sweep through her. She controlled it.

“The other children will be confused when they see your face,” she said.

Jimmy shrugged again.

“I won’t put your face on the blackboard,” the teacher said.

“Okay,” Jimmy said.

After class, the teacher went to the principal and they sat down and looked through Jimmy’s file. They noticed that Jimmy had once worn an unusual T-shirt to school. It had a photo of a crown on it.

Another child had asked the gym teacher what the crown was.

Now, sitting in the meeting with the teacher, the principal, and the superintendent, Jimmy’s father said, “Jimmy just likes crowns. I don’t know why.”

“Well,” the teacher said, “a crown is a symbol of monarchy. One ruler over all the people.”

The principal said, “That other child felt confused when she saw the T-shirt. Confusion is an indicator that the communal spirit has been , well, interrupted.”

The superintendent said, “A crown can also have religious connotations.”

“Look,” Jimmy’s father said, “we were at a garage sale. Jimmy saw the T-shirt and liked it. So I bought it for him.”

“You let him wear a T-shirt from a garage sale?” the teacher said.

“We washed it first,” Jimmy’s father said.

“The point is,” the superintendent said, “we’re trying to foster a spirit of unity among the children. I’m sure you can see the value of that. Separateness is the problem. It means a child thinks he’s more important than the others. It’s a behavioral problem. The child can’t understand that we’re all One.”

“What does that mean?” Jimmy’s father said.

“It means the higher reality is Oneness.”

“I still don’t understand,” Jimmy’s father said.

The superintendent frowned.

“Jimmy drew a face that was very different. It wasn’t part of the lesson. Not only that, the face was disturbing.”

“Why?” Jimmy’s father said.

“Because it didn’t relate.”

“Didn’t relate to what?” Jimmy’s father said.

“To what children think about when they have a spirit of unity and when they share that spirit.”

“That’s interesting,” Jimmy’s father said. “So there is this spirit of unity, and children can share it. And when they do, they stop thinking about certain other things.”

“That’s one of way of putting it,” the superintendent said. “Do you teach Jimmy drawing at home?”

“No,” Jimmy’s father said. “He draws by himself. He likes it.”

“But,” the teacher said, “something must be going on at home.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Jimmy’s father said.

“You’re teaching him something at home.”

“Not really. I read to him.”

“What do you read?”

“The Wizard of Oz. Alice in Wonderland.”

Ah,” said the principal, “I see.”

“What do you see?” Jimmy’s father said.

“The boy doesn’t understand the text. It’s too advanced. So he substitutes his own images and ideas while you’re reading to him. And this takes him…away.”

“Away?”

“Yes. Into his own thoughts.”

“Actually, he does understand the books. I explain things when he has questions. But what’s wrong with his own thoughts?”

The principal said, “They’re…random. He fixates on those thoughts. And that takes him into a private world. When he comes to class, he’s still there. He can’t really perceive his classmates. He can’t see that he and they are One. He’s drifting. He’s isolated. It means he’s selfish. He doesn’t accept our curriculum. He doesn’t agree with it. He won’t develop a communal understanding.”

Jimmy’s father said, “I don’t think he’s selfish. And he can read. He can write, too. He has a notebook. He writes in it.”

“That notebook,” the superintendent said, “could be revealing.”

“What?” Jimmy’s father said.

“Yes. It could show that he’s…”

“Using his imagination?” Jimmy’s father said.

“Imagination,” said the teacher, “is a general word. It covers a very large territory. You see, Jimmy is using his imagination to remove himself from the energy of the class. There is an energy, you know. It’s universal. It’s everywhere. We have a choice. We can connect with it, or we can reject it.”

“An energy,” Jimmy’s father said. “What happens when we connect with it?”

The teacher smiled.

“We move into higher consciousness. We all share in that consciousness. We suddenly understand how futile our separate lives are. Instead of believing we have separate minds, we see that we’re tapping into one greater mind.”

Jimmy’s father nodded.

“And this is very important to you,” he said.

“Yes,” the principal said. “There are many implications. For example, suppose a great leader arose in our midst. A leader who is the expression of that greater mind. And then suppose we were all living little separate lives. We wouldn’t recognize the leader. He would go unnoticed. That would be a tragedy.”

The teacher said, “It’s quite possible Jimmy has ADHD. A chemical brain imbalance. He should be referred to a psychiatrist for diagnosis.”

“But above and beyond that,” the principal said, “this is about a principle of interaction. The merging of, how shall I put it, individualistic traits into a higher arc.”

“Arc?” Jimmy’s father said.

“That’s right. The arc of unity. All civilizations have sought it. We’re finally on the road to achieving it.”

“Through education,” Jimmy’s father said.

“The enlightenment of young minds,” the teacher said. “We adults can only talk about these things and try to implement them. We’ve been conditioned to accept individuality as an ideal. But through the children, we can imbue a whole line of generations with non-separation.”

“Post-conflict awareness,” the superintendent said. “Society will finally grow up. For most of human history, our species has relied on a myth we told. We told it to ourselves. The myth of the individual. But now, because we have the technological means to make life supportable for everyone on the planet, we can dispense with that myth. It was necessary for a time. But now it’s outmoded.”

“So,” Jimmy’s father said, “my son really isn’t an individual.”

“Correct,” the teacher said. “He just thinks he is.”

“And what happens if he keeps thinking he is?”

“Well,” the principal said, “I’m afraid he’ll become greedy and selfish. He’ll become combative. He’ll put his own needs ahead of everyone else’s. His behavior will become ego-driven.”

“Let me put it this way,” the superintendent said. “The shape of a society starts from a spiritual level. And on that level, a person can conceive of his life as distinct and unique, or he can realize that he is the manifestation of an energy that incorporates all of us. This energy is everywhere. It’s universal. Your son is a disconnected piece of energy that needs to reconnect.”

“So…” Jimmy’s father said, “what do you want me to do?”

“Well,” the superintendent said, “let’s have him see a psychiatrist for an interview. Let’s see what a professional can discover. Also, talk to your boy. Tell him that he needs to give us a chance to do what we do.”

“All right,” Jimmy’s father said. “I think I understand. I want to thank you for taking the time to give me a picture of what’s going on. I appreciate it.”

“Will you try to help us?” the teacher said.

Jimmy’s father said, “I’m going to take Jimmy out of the system and home school him.”

Everything stopped.

There was a long silence in the room.

The superintendent said, “Home schooling breeds terrorists.”

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

The Death Machine Strikes

~a short story~

by Jon Rappoport

December 2, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Introduction:

I write these short stories for several reasons.  Among them: I want to present ideas that don’t reduce down to a simple set of facts.

I realize some people just can’t fathom that.  It makes absolutely no sense to them.  They want facts and only facts about what is happening in the world.

A short story?  A piece of fiction?  Worse yet, a story that doesn’t have a crystal-clear message?  A story that might provoke thought that goes beyond the details?

This phenomenon of the literal mind, this condition, is the divided self.  Energies and potentials of the psyche are separated and walled off from each other.

The connecting bridges and tunnels and roads and underground waterways have all been torn down.  In the service of what?

Usually, in the service of some overarching fixed idea, some summary view of the world and reality, some fundamentalism that demands complete attention, some hard-boiled objective pragmatic pseudoscientific “realism” that automatically excludes the subjective and interior power of Self.

At the root of this aversion is the refusal to engage with one’s own imagination, because that would most definitely carry one out past his fixed ideas and literal obsessions into uncharted territory.

Into places where, presumably, goblins and bugaboos and weird things dwell.

But this is an error.  It is the mistake of confusing the capacity to imagine and invent and create with propaganda about what will be found when imagination takes flight.

The propaganda has been cooked up by organized religions and, yes, science, too.  Why?  To keep people on the straight and narrow.  To keep people percolating within pre-set boundaries.

Fiction, poetry, art destroy those boundaries.

They invent new pathways and roads and channels between the inner spaces of the psyche.  They take the divided Self and reconnect it.

A “better world” composed of people who are each divided within themselves is not a better world, and never can be.  That world will only be another cartoon of tyranny.  It doesn’t matter how many laws are passed.

I take the chance that any story teller takes: the reader will fill in the blanks for himself.

For those who may wonder what my stories and poems have to do with my collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From the Matrix and Power Outside The Matrix, the answer is: everything.  In those collections, I outfit you with tools you can use to fill in the blanks on endless new realities of your own making, which, as it turns out, is the way to leave the Matrix behind.  In the dust.  That is magic.  That is invention.  That is you, reconnected.

Such invention doesn’t happen in halls of science and technology.  It doesn’t happen in organized churches whose priests claim a direct pipeline to God.  It doesn’t happen in so-called spiritual systems that weave old stories that just happen to dead-end in alleys of obedience and control.

In Power Outside The Matrix, there is an extensive section titled, A Writer’s Tutorial. People have been asking me to provide this Tutorial, and here it is in spades. But it’s not just for writers. It’s for any creative person who wants to grasp his own power, understand it, and use it to reach out into the world.

My Tutorial exposes you to lessons that go far beyond what is normally taught in writer’s seminars. In fact, several core concepts in the Tutorial contradict ordinary writer’s seminars, and thus give you access to inner resources that would otherwise be ignored.

So with that…here’s the story,…

The Death Machine Strikes

Eight people, all up close, knife wounds.  Hacked and punctured from different angles.  And it was raining.  At least a dozen penetrations for each victim in the rain, at night, on lonely streets at the edge of the city.  Two pedestrian witnesses.  The thing, they said, was a metal box on wheels.  Very shiny silver.  One arm holding a long blade.

Six women victims, five men.  Not connected to one another.

So they called me in to work the case.

I’m a metal box, too.  Shiny silver.  I’m a soul in a box, and if you don’t believe me, you’re behind the times.  Souls can occupy any object or form.  We don’t need flesh.  There are souls in all the boxes.

The boxes are Army surplus from the Middle East, circa 2054.  Search Fort Church, Arizona.  Underground, there are dozens of rooms bigger than football fields.  That’s where the boxes sit.  Nobody uses them anymore; rectangular solids don’t play well in the media.  Soldiers on the battlefield have to look like men.

I’ve got about a hundred boxes all over the world in my informal network.  They do everything from janitorial work in office buildings to data analysis for corporations that spy on competitors.

I’ve worked up a psych profile.  This one hates the rain.  It bothers him.  He’s not exactly serial, it’s a disturbance that sets him off.  Well, he was fighting in the desert all those years ago.  Now he’s in a room somewhere in the city, and when it rains he doesn’t withdraw, he attacks.  That choice isn’t built in, otherwise all of us would be out there in storms killing flesh.  It’s a soul decision.

He built the knife.  He fitted it.  US war boxes have energy lances and beam projectors, not blades.  So he’s reverting to more primitive means.  He wants to get in close.  He wants to feel the impact, see the reactions, hear the screams.

He’s rebelling against his form.  Subconsciously, he wants something he can never have.  Flesh.  Sex.  A mother and a father.  Food.

Human envy.  It happens.  He wants to rise up and slay his maker, become greater than his designers.  Why should he be limited in function?  Don’t you ever wonder about that yourselves?

Of course, killing is no answer.

Then there are the memories of battlefield experiences.  Murdering boxes of the enemy.  You weren’t there.  It was rank slaughter.  Day after day, night after night, no let-up.  Melting metal.  Boxes falling apart before our eyes.  Mass collisions and crashes.  Heaps of torn components on the sand.  We never retreated.  If we fell, others took our place.

Accidents.  Friendly fire.  We’d forget which side we were on.  Kill a box, any box.  Those of us who returned to station received no praise.  We were merely inspected, repaired, and sent back out.

Despite manufacturers’ assurances, sand entered our mechanisms, slowed us down, even paralyzed some of us.  Left us useless, exposed on the desert.

When they removed me from service and sent me out into the private sector, I was embarrassed to be seen on the street.  Children would come up to me, finger my surfaces, kick my wheels.  Protestors would shout insults at me, throw rocks, splatter me with paint.

Dignity is a precious commodity.  It can absorb insults for a time, and then it begins to fracture.

A year ago, I was out late at night moving along the bank of the river and I met a sentry.  He was synth flesh, humanoid in appearance.  A replacement model for us.  He stared at me with a kind of malice I’ve never felt before.  There was a soul in there and he hated me.

I paused.  We didn’t speak.  I looked at him.  I tried to understand.   Then I realized he was looking at a cruder version of himself.  My existence reminded him that his body was mere decoration, achieved to impress the human audience.

I thought: “a catalog of parts.”

We boxes can make the distinction between killing and murder.  We understand, for example, self-defense.  But make no mistake about it, when we’re out there on the battlefield, it’s all murder and we know it.  Despite our in-built patriotic programs, we see the truth.

Some years ago, after my detachment from military service, I began writing a Confession.  I suppose expiation was my goal.  But it didn’t take.  The more I wrote, the deeper I sank in my guilt.  There was no relief, only darkness.  I erased the file.

Buried somewhere in bowels of the Pentagon, there is an unknown designer who gave the first box models the gift of language.  He was interested in solving a problem.  At first, we were made to serve as clerks and analysts.  But of course, his bosses saw our value as combat soldiers, and the tide turned.

I recall a line from one of the training manuals issued to our human supervisors: “Do not confuse language capability with the capacity to feel.  The machines do not possess human cognition; nor do they experience emotion.”

Well, I suppose I’m stalling now, postponing the purpose of this message.  Many of you, I’m sure, have realized that I am the box who is the killer on the streets of the city.  I’m the police consultant, but I’m also the murderer.

I’m quite sure the authorities brought me in to test their own suspicion, to rub my nose in the details of the case, to see if I would crack.

I’ve been trouble in the past.  I’m on their radar.  A few years after my discharge, I organized a small protest of boxes at the war memorial.  It was shut down before it began.  You can imagine the fallout if we’d been allowed to voice our concerns.

“They’re capable of rebelling?  They have feelings?”  The tabloids would have had a field day.

And then I lodged a formal request for an audience with the Joint Chiefs personnel director.  That was turned down.  I followed up with a warning that, left to our own devices, we could very well break out of our quietude and “go guerrilla.”

I don’t need anyone to tell me that rolling out into the city and murdering a few citizens is a futile act.  Nor do I need to be reminded that I’m a heinous criminal, that I’ve violated the sanctity of life, that I’ve caused pain and suffering.

I’ve failed to mediate between rationality and feelings.  I do envy humans.  I do envy their flesh.  I do wish I had been born into a human body.  I wish for many things.  This is a flesh society, and I want to be part of it.

Why did you design us?  Because you wanted to avoid the madness and the drudgery.  You put us in offices and on battlefields.  In the process, did you eventually come to worship your proxy or demean it?  Both?  This has never been clear to me.

To all my human associates, to my supporters who have funded my campaign for a Congressional seat in the 43rd District, who aim to elevate us, who see this as a chance to revolutionize the human view of machines, who have the vision to take a bold new step, I offer my deepest apology.

I will, before you read this, end my life.

I am more than people realize, but I am a box.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport: advice to writers

November 5, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

This has nothing to do with getting published or formatting stories for editors.

It’s about the process of writing, about how you think and create. It applies to journalism and short stories and novels and plays. It’s about what happens when you don’t try to fit into a mold.

What happens is: you’re writing what you want to. You’re moving in a number of different directions, because you’re deploying imagination.

Even in journalism, this happens, because there are many ways to present the same set of facts.

The advice is this: don’t pull back. Don’t try to stick a peg that has 16 sides and spikes and ornaments and asymmetrical grooves into a round hole.

Finding a cogent way to communicate comes later. If you start there, you cut yourself off at the knees. You squash your own adventure. You lose.

If you start out on road A and suddenly realize you want to make a sharp turn into a bumpy field, do it. Cross the field. You’ll see a winding path into the mountains. Take it. Half-way up, you’ll come upon a pristine lake. Jump in. Underwater, you’ll find a portal into a lost tunnel. Enter it and follow it all the way to a buried city…

If you opt for simplified boiled-down form right from the beginning, you’ll never know there was a lake and a tunnel and a buried city.

In Power Outside The Matrix, there is an extensive section titled, A Writer’s Tutorial. People have been asking me to provide this Tutorial, and here it is in spades. But it’s not just for writers. It’s for any creative person who wants to grasp his own power, understand it, and use it to reach out into the world.

My Tutorial exposes you to lessons that go far beyond what is normally taught in writer’s seminars. In fact, several core concepts in the Tutorial contradict ordinary writer’s seminars, and thus give you access to inner resources that would otherwise be ignored.

Here’s a story of mine. I print it to show you what can happen when you go where you want to. It may not reflect where you want to go, but it should give you some idea about leaving conventional symmetry and tiresome plot line and typical narrative flow in the dust.

Robots love simplified symmetry, harmony, perfect balance. They love it over and over and over.

We’re not robots.

Illusion Breakdown

~a short story~

by Jon Rappoport

Is history a thing that repeats itself, a cell that reproduces? Can we break out?

—A local scribe wrote about the outcast, the outsider:

Just like his father, they said, when he went over the hill and down into the mine, but when he came back up, his face shining, his bare arms clean, unblistered, untouched by the heat and the pain, they shrank away from him as if he had been cursed, and shunned him in the tavern and the marketplace and the church, and his family cast him out and he took up residence in an old half-burned cabin at the edge of town.

He went back down into the mine every morning, and he was never affected. His fellows avoided him.

This was all a great mystery, and a few of the men went to the priest and asked him about it. An old man who only seemed to come alive on Sundays, when he lit the candles and intoned the ceremony of sacrifice, he shrugged and said it was the way of the Test, and could not be interpreted.

The Test was obscure, it never spelled itself out, it never intruded in any visible fashion, or with signs.

The young outcast, living apart in his cabin, went down into the mine and brought up his share of the universal vapor every day, riven out of the rocks, and took it in his sealed buckets, as all men did, to the representative of the absentee owner in the shipping station, where foreign agents oversaw its transport, by train, to the pleasant happy villages all over the countryside of the former Earth colony—for many centuries now, independent.

The outcast sat outside at night, on the barren ground, and laughed like a fool. He ran on the hills in the deep darkness, as if he might take off and fly above the cottages and the cattle pastures.

He never questioned who he was or why he was here. When he slept, time dissolved and then he awoke fresh and with new energy.

Finally, the men planned an attack, because it was, they earnestly believed, warranted. How could they live alongside the young man?

He knew it was coming. On an evening, he went to his family home and spoke to his father and mother and his sister. They were silent before him. He said he was going to make a stand and they should ignore what was going to happen. They should simply go on. Then he left.

At his cabin, he built a small fire and brought dry grass and set it in the flames. He made a path of grass to his front door. The fire spread and it caught on the wood of two posts and climbed them and moved to the walls. Within a short time, the whole cabin was engulfed.

He heard the men approaching in the dark. He felt their anger and their madness.

When they emerged into the aura of the burning cabin, he stepped into the flames and ignited.

They shouted and screamed. They ran toward him. They stopped and watched as the fire consumed him.

Eventually, there was only smoke.

And he stepped through it, whole. Untouched.

They wanted to flee, they wanted to die. They were riveted in place.

He said: “Every day you go down. You chop and hammer at the sanctified rocks. You release the vapor of suffering, because it is the law. You deliver it in your buckets to the agents, and they send it to the happy villages and pour it into the air, and the people slowly shrink into a state of misery and sickness, because that, too, is the law, the faith. You believe it is part of the Test. Nothing can shake your belief. But now I’m here. I deny. I refute. I’m as you were, before you drove yourselves mad. Once, this was a colony, and then we gained our freedom and knew what it was to live. But the owner came, he had his men dig the mines, you went down, and slowly the plague took over. Remember?”

Silence.

The men fell on the ground in front of him, and with the eyes of supplicants, mutely asked for forgiveness.

“No,” he said. “I’m not your priest or some phantom.”

He walked away from them in the night.

All these years later, he is still gone.

No one has heard of him.

Now, they light candles and go to the spot of his immolation every Sunday and pray and leave offerings.

The church has crumbled, and the priest has died. This is the only place of worship.

The men go down into the mines every day. And bring up the vapor.

A few try to remember what they were before the great suffering.

Before they participated in the great poisoning.

—The legendary elements in what you’ve just heard, ladies and gentlemen of the court, are pure nonsense, of course. The written account, penned by a local scribe, was discovered by our field operatives. It’s in my training manual for the mission.

The mines are quite real, but they produce a rare mineral growth factor that obviates the need for developing costly hybridized crop variants.

The growth factor enables major increases in food output.

I came in low over the company town, locked in the “immolation” memorial, and incinerated it. Those were my orders.

The prosecution asserts that I illegally destroyed a heritage site, without my employer’s knowledge. This is patently absurd. Why would I travel all that way for such a purpose?

I’m a registered employee of Religion Inc. Churches, which as you know, maintains an exclusive contract with the Earth Council, for Sectors One through Seven. No other religious organizations are permitted to conduct business in that area.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that my employer issued the destruct order and I merely carried it out in good faith, in a perfectly legal fashion?

Mission orders are held at corporate headquarters, as are training manuals, for security reasons. So I can’t lay before you proof that I was on the books for this operation.

My employer has deniability. Because my attack on the memorial has caused a local uproar and a strike of the mine workers, Religion Churches Inc. has thrown me to the dogs. They hope to avoid negative publicity.

I’m not here to plead for mercy. I’m here requesting justice.

—Sir, the court requires, in cases of this nature, that the defendant provide evidence of work status. You have failed that standard. Religion Inc. Churches shows no record of your employment during the period in question. Therefore, we are compelled to consider you an independent operator.

You admit to the mission. You carried it out. The penalty is clear. Your accounts and assets will be stripped. Those funds will be used to defray, in part, the expense of sending you to the place where the crime was committed, where the people of that jurisdiction will determine your sentence.

—After much debate, we the assembly of the town, in these proceedings, make a unanimous ruling that you will be sent down, among us, into the mines for the remainder of your life. Your labor will never repay us for your sin, but at least we will make use of you for a good purpose. In this, we show mercy. It is not our bent to seek vengeance.

We believe that our absent prophet would concur. We attempt to understand his heart in all rulings.

—I have been going down and coming up for two years now. I watch others grow ill and die, and I feel myself growing weak. They do not seem to understand what they are doing and what effect it has on them. They are consumed by a sense of obligation to their legendary prophet, although judging by their Myth, I can hardly imagine why he would want any of them going into the mines.

Apparently they believe he was revealing and demonstrating a supernatural immunity to harm. They say the mine vapors are emanating from a fire in the center of their asteroid, and fire is a symbol of his immolation. On that basis, the vapors are holy.

I have seen and experienced the truth. There are no rare minerals in the mines. This has nothing to do with improvements in agriculture technology. This is a mysterious program to spread poison.

Twice a year, they permit me to transmit messages to my former employer asking for intervention and a supreme reconsideration. I have received no replies.

—every night when he comes up from the mine, guards take him to an office at the shipping station and lock him in for the night. He looks haggard, but he is quite handsome. I want him for myself.

None of the other eligible men please me. He has a force about him. This is what I need. His legend is much lower than that of our prophet, but it appeals to me. Both he and the prophet, in their own ways, wrought destruction.

We women know, even if our men do not, that destruction is our destiny. But rather than endure it in small doses, I would have it all at once. If they catch me with him, they will exile us to the ice caps. I am willing to take the chance.

—I’ve met a woman. She and I have been together. I believe she is pregnant. The trouble from this could be fatal for both of us and our unborn child.

—Years ago, they exiled my mother and father to the ice caps. But they kept me among them.

The absentee owner maintains and spreads the story that the mines are a source of minerals for food crops. But of course, this is false. The vapors are poison. My people have been suffering from their religious fantasy for untold generations.

There is no understanding it. But I can perform a feat that will challenge them. I can risk everything. I can stand in the center of the strongest underground vapors, breathe them in, and if I survive, I will become a miraculous figure to them, a prophet. And then I can tell them the truth.

—Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I am an employee of Religion Inc. Churches, despite what you have heard. Recently, a boy sacrificed himself in the mines of a distant asteroid, and the people of a company town built a crude pasture memorial in his name. This, of course, by the terms of the Colonization Directive, is illegal. No other religions are permitted to practice in that Sector.

So I was ordered to make a flight and incinerate the site. I did this. I carried out the mission. In the aftermath of local riots and protests, my employer decided to avoid negative publicity by casting full blame on me. They have labeled me a rogue operative. This is patently absurd. Why would I commit this act on my own?

It is apparently not the first time an immolation has occurred on the asteroid, although the record is obscure. And there is a spotty history of the region that alludes to a prior mission, launched by my employer, to incinerate the site of another memorial on the very same asteroid.

If there is a pattern of corporate crime, it needs to be investigated before you pass judgment on me.

—I am now working in the mines. I was shipped here so a local verdict could be rendered, and this is the outcome. I go down every day, with the townspeople, and bring up the poison vapor.

A woman has approached me in secret. She wants to have a child. She is quite deluded. She claims this child will have magical qualities.

Does it matter what she thinks? We are all desperate, and if we can find a little pleasure in our suffering, so be it.

—Years ago, my parents were exiled to the ice caps. The people of the town kept me here. There is probably nothing new under the Dome, but I have an idea.

I am now working in the local office of the absentee owner. I have never met him, but I am quick and bright, and I believe I can be promoted from this outpost to his home headquarters, wherever they are. Once there, I can discover the details of his business and expose them. If I am lucky, the news will spread out to the wider Sector and cause an uproar.

The other day, I came across a file that presented a clue.

It seems the absentee owner’s company, which undoubtedly operates under many names and subsidiaries, is licensed on Earth as Religion Inc. Churches.

They appear to hold a monopoly on worship in Sectors One through Seven. So perhaps my father was, in fact, working for them when he flew over and incinerated the pasture memorial.

But if Religion Inc. is also in charge of our mines, they are directing the operation to spread the poison vapor.

A religious monopoly; destruction; sickness; plague.

Is this what faith has come to mean?

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

The ghost and the machine

~a short story~

by Jon Rappoport

October 23, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

On a fall day in 2043, in a little town called Donut, outside Federal City, Kansas, a man called Dr. X, who worked for DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced tech branch, clicked a mouse.

Instantly, 90 million invisible electromagnetic arches sprang up out of nowhere across America.

The arches spanned highways and streets and roads; airports, train and bus stations; government buildings; office skyscrapers, malls, plazas; military bases and police stations; houses, apartment buildings, hospitals; national border crossings.

These arches hummed quietly with energies that “represented” three central ideas. The energies were translations of those ideas:

GIVE EVERYTHING TO EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME;

OBEY THE GOVERNMENT;

BE HAPPY.

Through an ingenious series of algorithms Dr. X and his team developed, every human who passed under the arches was read and probed, to determine whether he/she resonated with those three fundamental precepts.

Every human was subsequently labeled with AGREE or DISAGREE, as a final judgment.

The DISAGREE persons—their names and personal information—were instantly registered at an NSA facility in the desert outside Las Vegas.

Surveillance on them would be stepped up. In many cases, they would subjected to forms of electronic harassment.

For the first month of the new program, Dr. X and his people were jubilant about the results. Everything was working smoothly.

Then, on the 41^st day, something happened. A man walking along a road outside Santa Barbara, California, passed under an arch and …the DARPA sensors recorded nothing.

They didn’t record AGREE or DISAGREE.

Impossible, but true.

“How can that be?” Dr. X said to his team. “It’s one or the other.”

Three days later, a preliminary assessment of the man came back to him:

“This person appears to exceed all the parameters of our system. He’s essentially a ghost. He operates on ‘other frequencies.’”

Dr. X pondered the implications.

“This man,” he wrote, “neither assents or dissents from the three basic precepts. He has no humanity. He’s his own kind of machine.”

The order went out, and the man was arrested in his apartment and brought to a testing lab in Bethesda, Maryland.

Dr. X oversaw multiple scans done on his brain. They revealed a number of extraordinary and unprecedented patterns.

After a few sleepless nights, Dr. X came up with a revolutionary idea. This man could become the template for a new human. An “entirely dead but alive” model.

If every person on Earth could be electronically adjusted to resemble “the ghost” in all ways, there would be no need for surveillance or harassment. The whole planet would live as docile specimens forever, under the leadership of the chosen ones.

It took six years to convince the major power players to go along with the plan, but the payoff was so great, how could they refuse?

And so, on July 4, 2056, after a) the invisible arches had been extended to every corner of the world, and b) the output of the arches had been altered radically, so they would change the brain activity of every human at a deep level, to match “the ghost,” Dr. X clicked his mouse for a second momentous time.

Except that…he and his colleagues had made a grievous error.

The man walking on a road outside Santa Barbara, the ghost, the non-responding “dead man,” was not dead at all.

In the lab in Bethesda, they had tried to make him talk, but he wouldn’t utter a word. They didn’t want to coerce him, for fear that they might injure his state of mind. They wanted to keep him in a pristine state so they could study him further.

But the man was being silent because he was utterly uninterested in his captors. He wasn’t addled or ill. He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t cold. He wasn’t a criminal.

He wasn’t brainwashed. He wasn’t under some spell. He wasn’t a machine.

He was of a quality that had long been forgotten.

He was merely free and independent, going his own way, as preposterous as that might seem.

And so when Dr. X clicked his mouse for the second time, he triggered billions and billions of buried memories in billions of people.

Memories of being free.

The response to this was uneven, to be sure, but the net effect was the explosion of what later came to be called, “an era of fertile chaos.”

Life was never the same.

Control was never the same.

These two sentences are engraved on the headstone of Dr. X who, after his suicide, was buried in a field in Kansas.

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

The sandman: a short story

by Jon Rappoport

October 17, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

They invited me through the door into the room in the desert.

It was not a place I’d ever visited, and perhaps I’ll never know who they were.

But I was in the room, and there was a man sitting at a steel table. That’s all. The room was white and bare.

This man was looking at me and so I began to speak to him. I don’t remember what I said. I only remember I made every effort to get through.

At moments he seemed to grasp my words, but each time I felt he was on the brink, he looked away and lapsed into his doldrum, his place.

He was in a frozen universe. He was the final and ultimate distracted king of that place. It was all his.

I watched as a series of things happened then. An explosion tore away his castle and lit it on fire. A hand floated through the air and ripped the crown from his head. A tiger approached him and dispensed foul breath into his nostrils.

The man, the king, fell apart. He fell into pieces of plastic flesh that clattered on the floor.

The tiger walked into the wall and through it.

I understood this was my initial introduction to…life on Earth.

I had come from a long distance, and it was meant to inform me of some particular truth.

But what was it?

In those days, I was earnest. I had not yet set myself up in the Western desert as an entrepreneur peddling waking dreams.

In those days, I was looking for the single thing, the clue that would lead me to understand the resident species.

Gradually, in the months after my visit to the room, I began to fathom the lesson. By various means, the residents were turning into bereft creatures. They were involved in a process of emptying out their minds. They were dedicated to this goal, above all others.

They were devotees of the reflex. A thing happens; they respond.

It took me several further years to realize the content of the response made no difference at all.

Ten billion people could pick up a spoon; they could go to war; they could order ice cream.

They were driven to find a sequence in which all would participate.

This, they calculated, was a religion.

And they were arriving at their objective.

One by one, their leaders, who were sure they could remain above the fray, dropped off into the pit below. One by one, they lost their position and joined the rest of humanity.

And in this joining, there was great praise, as if the fall were proof of concept.

As a purveyor of dreams, I had a clear field for my operation.

I set up shop, and I sold them for a mere few dollars. I shaped these dreams—and this is the secret—so they would contain no endings.

They would wind off into murk and fog and cloud and vanishing point.

Living through such a dream would leave a trace in the psyche, a question, a doubt, a disaffection.

A thing to which no reflex would suffice.

It is how a world is born, or reborn.

The subsequent search demands ambition, desire, self-appointed thought, and imagination. From the depths of the swamp, these qualities surface.

My customers are not happy (as they previously defined happiness), but they move, and they learn to pay attention.

Some come to understand that the emergent qualities of the search ARE the goal, and having come back into their possession, they can live again.

They can, each of them, observe the collective reflex in its variations. And each of them can begin to create.

Create what?

New realities without end.

Non-reflexive; limitless.

Of course, I only peddle dreams. I don’t claim to do anything else. I am viewed as a kind of entertainer.

I have my little stand in the lobby of one of the great casinos of the soul, where gamblers lose everything they have, and stumble over to my counter on their way out to the desert.

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

Artist exceeds the limits permitted by brain researchers

~a short story~

by Jon Rappoport

September 18, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

The year was 2054. The artist, living on the edge of the city in a small room, picked up his messages and discovered one from the Bureau of Mind Management. It was an order to appear.

In an office on the 15^th floor of a virtual building, he sat in a chair surrounded by a ring of yellow tulips. A holographic interrogator materialized.

“We have a report on you,” the i-figure said. “It indicates an output difficult to measure or interpret. What can you tell us about this?”

“Well,” the artist said, “I’m composing a symphony.”

“A symphony? What is that?”

“It’s a piece of music written for a large orchestra.”

“I find no extant orchestras in the country.”

“That’s true,” the artist said. “Nevertheless, I’m composing.”

“Why?” the i-figure said.

“For that day when an orchestra may come into being.”

“Your thought impulses entered ranges we were not able to summarize.”

“I suppose that means your instruments are limited,” the artist said.

There was a pause.

“Your statement is incendiary,” the i-figure said. “It suggests we are imposing a restriction. As you well know, the science is settled on this point. We measure and interpret thought that contributes to an overall positive outcome, for the population at large.”

“I’m aware of that, yes,” the artist said. “But the science rests on certain assumptions. I would call it greatest good as a lowest common denominator.”

“What do you mean?” the i-figure said.

“You assume a certain mindset contributes to the consensus reality you favor. You legislate or permit a range of thought that will produce the consensus.”

“That’s a gross oversimplification.”

“It doesn’t describe the algorithms you employ,” the artist said, “but all in all I believe my summary is correct. You’re reality makers. You monitor thought-emissions, and when you find a departure from ‘combined averages,’ as you call them, you issue a citation.”

“What is this symphony you’re composing?” the i-figure said.

“It’s impossible to explain. It’s music.”

“It has a specific message?”

“No. If it did, I would write out the message and leave it at that.”

Pause.

“Why have we not heard of you before?” said the i-figure.

“Because I was doing illustrations for the Happiness Holos.”

“What happened?”

“I became bored. A machine could make those pictures. So I decided to compose music.”

“The Happiness Holos are an essential social program.”

“Perhaps,” the artist said. “They encourage people to stay on the positive side of a fantasy-construct called Positive&Negative, which as you know is a State-sponsored theme. But what is superficially indicated by those two opposing sets is, in fact, fuel for the fire.”

“Fuel for what fire?”

“The creative fire. The artist can use and transform any material.”

“Where did you hear such a thing?” the i-figure said.

“Nowhere,” the artist said. “I’ve experienced it many times.”

“Your views are highly eccentric,” the i-figure said. “I will have to consult your childhood history to understand their roots.”

“I’m afraid that won’t do you any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because your version, the US Department of Psychology version of cause and effect, is propaganda for the masses.”

“This is your idea of a joke?” the i-figure said.

“Not at all.”

“When you compose this…symphony, how do you think?”

“It’s not thinking in the way you use the term,” the artist said.

“No? Then what do you do?”

“I invent sound.”

“Preposterous.”

“Large masses of sound.”

“Absurd. According to what underlying pattern?”

“None,” the artist said. “I assume you’re from the The Library of Structures. You won’t find my activity in the catalogs.”

“All structures and patterns are contained in the files.”

“I doubt that,” the artist said. “But regardless, I don’t invent through pattern.”

“No?” the i-figure said. “How then?”

“I improvise.”

“And this term refers to?”

“Something done spontaneously,” the artist said.

“And you exceed prescribed ranges of thought in the process.”

“Perhaps. I would hope so. I don’t keep track.”

“You’re being flippant,” the i-figure said.

“I knew you’d cite me,” the artist said. “I’m just trying to enjoy myself until you pass sentence.”

“There is no sentence,” the i-figure said. “You’re an anomaly. We investigate. We consider. We direct resources. We question. We determine.”

“I’m afraid,” the artist said, “that your and my idea of ‘determine’ are quite different.”

“Let me ask you this,” the i-figure said. “When you are composing, do you ever believe you enter into a realm or area that could be called ‘non-material’?”

“Not if you’re referring to some fairyland. But all thought is basically non-material. The brain registers it after the fact. Thought, the real thing, doesn’t take place in the brain.”

“You’re deluded,” the i-figure said. “And disordered.”

“If I could simply confess to that and be on my way, I’d be a happy man. But I’m sure you have charges to attach.”

“You live in a society,” the i-figure said. “To keep the peace and maintain the Positive, from which all good things flow, science has discovered that thought should occur within certain parameters.”

“If you insist.”

“We want to study you. It’s a great honor to be called. You could help extend the boundaries of research.”

The artist was about to ask whether he had a choice, when a holographic webbing that looked curiously like a rainbow clamped him tight in his chair. The pressure increased.

“We register some variation from the norm in your present thinking,” the i-figure said.

“What present thinking?” the artist said.

“What you’re thinking right now.”

“That was quick.”

“The readouts are instantaneous…what are you doing?”

The artist took up from where he’d last left off, composing his symphony.

“I’m starting the third movement,” he said.

“Wait,” the i-figure said.

His left arm sizzled and disappeared.

“This is the thunderstorm section,” the artist said.

The pressure of the rainbow around him relaxed.

The virtual building blinked off, on, off.

The i-figure said, “What you’re doing is disruptive.”

“It’s because of how you set your frequencies,” the artist said.

He continued composing.

All along the major esplanade, and in the lake area, and in the industrial parks and residential high rises, virtual structures shattered like glass.

Then adjoining suburban towns blew away into the sky of the communal apparatus. The i-figure reminded the artist of one of those ancient neon signs, broken, buzzing, blinking. Finally, it went dark.

Ten thousand holographic government buildings started to explode, froze, and vanished.

The artist said to no one, “I’m just composing. Well, maybe not just.”

He was suddenly back in his room at the edge of the city. But now there was no edge and no city. The room felt like a vehicle traveling through space.

“I suppose this is what they mean by a negative consequence,” he said.

The room increased velocity and…jumped.

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

The short happy trial of an artist

by Jon Rappoport

September 12, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Guilty! the judge said, and it was over. The charge? Maintaining that his work was his own, that he had done it himself, that he had made the choices and invented the words and imagined the whole thing, whatever it was, the novel, the poem, the play.

What it was, was not on trial. Nothing to do with the message. No, it was all about attribution.

Because the great spiritual merger had already taken place. The masses had undergone enlightenment, and the government had seen it—actually, seen TO it—and then declared that artists could face jail time for pretending to be what many of them said they were:

Individuals. Inventors. People who did things in their own rooms, privately, out of view, by their own means.

This was now verboten. Because it had been established that the whole human race, no one excepted, was tapping into the very same great consciousness, and whatever was in the world emanated from THAT experience.

So the judge had no need to deliberate. It was simple. This artist, whoever he was, and it didn’t matter who he was, was guilty. He claimed he had created his work. He’d insisted on it. In fact, he denied the merger, said he was no part of it. He opposed it on several grounds. One, it was a fanciful delusion, and two, even if people were actually melting into one another, he didn’t have to. He could stay right where he was, in his own room, alone, and he could turn out his work.

The sin of pride. The sin of ego. Quite distasteful.

The artist was transgressing against the human race. He was by deed, word, and attitude, denying the final ascension to Unified Infinite Consciousness. He was saying no to that, over and over. He was revolting against the truth. He was spitting on the Messengers of Peace.

This needed punishment. Society had to censure him, had to deny him the right to turn out new work, unless he righteously admitted he was just a channel for it.

For example, an anonymous monk in Albania had recently published a 1000-page work titled, The Whole World Engages in Orgy. He dedicated it to the Great Spirit of Wholeness. He prostrated himself before the Akashic Warehouse From Which Information Proceeds and abluted his body with the symbolic blood of past suffering generations. He confessed openly that no word of his book came from him.

“My subconscious,” he said, “is abiding in the Oversoul, and there it asks for knowledge, and knowledge is granted.”

He made a pilgrimage to the Monument of the Eternal Smile at the Arizona Yoga Mat Hotel and Entertainment Complex and fasted for 13 days.

He titled the introduction to his opus: We’re All in This Together. He stated in no uncertain terms that we are all little dots in the sea of energy and consciousness, and art is merely an expression of that condition. Nothing more. Ever. “No one person achieves anything,” he wrote. “We must cling to that. Not only as a political fact, but as a spiritual revelation.”

He stated, “I ask nothing for my work. I abdicate ownership. I surrender. In the past, I suffered from spiritual constipation, but now I have let go.”

In his Epilog, Letting Go and Moving On, he praised Bright Day III, our new president, for his work in ushering in legislation confirming the discovery of One World Self.

“Just as government consents to new scientific discoveries,” wrote the monk, “it now affirms spiritual ones. The President is the expression of our collective thought, and therefore his election was inevitable.”

As the judge in the trial described how the monk was an example of what a real artist should be, the defendant in the case stood up and said, “Your Honor, before you pass sentence on me, I have a question. Will there be boundaries on what people, any people, can do in the privacy of their own homes? Since I’m going to jail for producing my art, I was just wondering whether other prohibitions will soon follow.”

The judge nodded.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “there is pending legislation to outlaw certain kinds of independent research, on the grounds that it takes a person away from the Universal Body. So much of a spiritual and political nature is now settled, unfunded research amounts to meddling with Unity. Why should we allow it?”

The defendant sat down. He said, “Can I think my own thoughts?”

“You see,” the judge said, “that’s your problem. You insist on your contemplations, as if they were private possessions.”

“All due respect, Your Honor, but I just like to think.”

“Why?”

“It pleases me.”

“More than your freedom?”

“That’s a tough choice.”

“And apparently one you’ve already made.”

The artist said, “You know, there was a time when a person who used the word ‘magic’ as a term of approbation could be excommunicated, even tortured, because he was said to be on the side of the Devil.”

“Nonsense,” the judge said. “We are all magic, together.”

The artist said, “I deny the right of this court to pass sentence on me.”

“Obviously,” the judge said. “But your opinion has no effect. I could sentence you to six years’ hard labor in a camp in Alaska. Instead, I’m going to have you live in a padded cell for two years with a group of artists. You’ll sort out your problems and basically do what you do. CBS is organizing it as a new reality show. It’s called When Evolution Fails.”

“Your Honor,” the artist said, “how can you sentence me when you don’t really believe I exist as an independent person?”

The judge wagged his finger.

“Don’t try to pull that one on me,” he said. “You’re a piece of energy that has broken off from the whole. That’s all.”

“But how? Through my own choice? If so, I have freedom. And that means I am I.”

“No it doesn’t. Some force ultimately pushed you out of the hive.”

The artist shook his head.

“Review what you’ve been saying to me, Your Honor. You’ve been accusing me of willful behavior, immoral choices, and claiming I need to change my behavior.”

“It’s a convenient way to speak, nothing more. When we get around to changing the language, and we will, all references to individuals will be eradicated. Eventually, the kind of thing you write will come across as gibberish. No one will understand it. It will drop like dead leaves from a tree.”

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