CASTLE ON THE HILL

JUNE 8, 2011. During his sessions with a psychiatrist, an artist named Gauguin P. Gauguin was asked to relate a dream.

He described it this way:

In the year 2078, a new category of crime was invented. It was called BI, Being Inhuman. A general charge, it could be brought against an individual who failed to exhibit a basic guilt.

Guilt about what?

No need to specify. Guilt about himself.

The new crime was placed on the books because it was finally acknowledged that guilt is the gateway drug into “the human condition,” and that condition is part and parcel of submerging one’s self in a GROUP.

Without pervasive guilt, there are no groups that make up the center of what we call civilization.

So why fool around? Go the heart of the matter.

Various tests were devised to measure the guilt index. A citizen could be dragged into an administrative court on the flimsiest of pretexts, where an examination would be carried out.

The central theme to be explored? Whose life is more important? Yours? Or your fellow human’s?

“That’s all?” the psychiatrist said. “That’s the dream?”

“Yes,” Gauguin said.

“Were you arrested in the dream?”

“Oh? Yes. Sure. I was brought in.”

“And how did you answer the question put to you?”

“I said my fellow human was of no importance to me at all.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“And what did they do to you?”

“Well, they wanted to hang me from a tree, but I escaped. I ran up to a castle on a hill. It was abandoned. So I took it over. I set myself up as king, and I began issuing edicts. From that moment on, no one would be permitted to care about anyone except himself. Violation of this law would result in electrocution.”

“Quite a radical step.”

“I thought desperate times required desperate measures.”

“And?”

“Everyone suddenly woke up. It was miraculous. Everyone realized we had been living a sham. This share and care nonsense was a social trap. It was operant conditioning. Mind control.”

“Did people start killing each other?”

“No, actually. Peace broke out for the first time in several centuries.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s true. We were too busy pursuing our own futures to waste time on war. Besides, no one wanted to die bleeding on a battlefield.”

“But what about social conventions?”

“They fell away like old fungus.”

“So now it was about brutal honesty?”

“No, life suddenly became more…theatrical. Pretension was developed into a high art. High comedy.”

“What?”

“I can’t really explain it. I guess, underneath all the insanity that had been propagated, we wanted art. Theater.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, let’s see. Don’t you spend most of your days listening to people’s wretched stories? Aren’t you bored out of your mind? Don’t you wish you could find a better part to play?”

“Nonsense.”

“Sure you do. You’re the authority. You’ve got your own castle on the hill. You’d love to change the rules. You want to sweep away the bullshit. Well, that’s what we did.”

“We did? You’re describing a dream.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, it’s not actually a dream. I AM from the year 2078. I’m here on vacation. Just dipping a toe in the water of the past. I can see you need some serious help.”

“You mean you feel an altruistic non-selfish impulse to help me?”

“No. I’m having fun. You’re in your castle, and you’ve lost the thread. You’ve become a megalomaniac. It’s interesting. See, doc, throwing away your guilt doesn’t mean you turn into a beast. That’s a fairy tale told to keep the rubes in check. To sustain an unworkable society.”

“I’m going to write a prescription for you.”’

“Sure. No problem. Write as many scripts as you want. You think if you drop your act about caring about everybody else, you’ll suddenly take off all your clothes and dance on your desk. You’ll be thrown into a well of infantile fantasies. But it doesn’t turn out that way. People have a natural sense of generosity. It has nothing to do with guilt or redemption or any of that crap.”

“But we have a system to run.”

“You sure do. How’s that working out?”

“It’s all we have.”

“Forget the we. Think about you in the castle. It’s pretty miserable, isn’t it?”

“You’re in serious trouble, sir.”

“From where I’m sitting, I’d say there’s something eating you up. And you don’t know what to do about it. I’m suggesting an out. But hey, if you don’t want to consider what I’m saying, no problem. I’ve got places to go, people to see.”

“In this dream of yours, what happens to the social system? What happens to the less fortunate?”

“They catch on.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“They stop looking up at the castle, for one thing. They realize the whole society was crazy, from top to bottom. They—well, all of us—discover we have our own resources. As individuals. It’s a revelation and it doesn’t come from the castle.”

“Sounds like self-serving doctrine.”

“Actually, it’s just the opposite. In a society of a little less than a billion people, we have a few hundred million theater companies.”

WHAT?”

“Last year, I played a guy like you. He tried to kill himself a few times. People would come into his hospital room and laugh at him. You should have heard the audience. People were wetting themselves.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Easy, doc. You’ll give yourself a stroke. At the end of the play, you wake up and see the future. For the first time in your life. You really see the future out there, hanging like a big moon in the sky. And you’re overcome with grief. It’s quite a moment. Not a dry eye in the house. Because we’ve all been through it. We thought we knew what the future was. But that was just a gray hazy light. It was all of us going down with the ship together. To wake up from that is quite, quite something. Believe me. Nothing quite like it.”

“You’re a madman.”

“For all practical purposes, I’m just you looking at you. If you want to take the ride.”

“And become a selfish greedy moron?”

“I guess you haven’t been listening. I thought listening was your specialty. You’re the priest, aren’t you? Maybe you’re the inquisitor type, trying to drive people into a sea of normalcy. That’s a nice theme for a tragedy. Of course, in the process, you become the most normal person in the universe. Then people start laughing. Fucked, straight up with a twist.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

CREATIVITY/IMAGINATION

JUNE 8, 2011. A funny thing happens when you try to teach students a class in poetry. You end up carving a poem into lots of pieces, and you tend to impose some sort of system on it.

Of course, that’s counterproductive, because the poem isn’t a system, and it isn’t meant to be dissected like a dead frog.

I found an interesting way around this.

We would read a great poem in class. Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Hart Crane. We’d read it out loud six or seven times, so the sound would come through and the meaning would gradually sink in. Then I’d tell the students to write something about the poem. Anything. That was their between-class assignment. Write as much as they could about the poem.

When I got the assignments handed in, I’d take them home and read them, looking for a sentence here, a sentence there, that had a glint of fire and imagination…and I would circle those sentences.

The next class session, I’d read those sentences and indicate they had a spirit of poetry in them.

Then we’d move on to another poem.

Doing just this for a month or two, with poem after poem, some students began to get the idea. They began to make a connection between poetry and what they were writing. And so they’d dive deeper into that spirit of poetry in their own writing.

They made the shift from audience/spectator to creator. Which is the whole point.

When imagination is directed into psy-op PR and propaganda, one of the biggest preoccupations of this culture, you get something very different: passivity. Non-creation.

And that really is the objective. Holding a population in a kind of trance.

Breaking the trance, in the long run, leads to a future that is open, ifin the process, audience becomes actor, spectator becomes creator.

In that poetry class, the students, at the beginning, didn’t really feel they had what it took to create something. They were just looking to understand my system, my approach, so they could win a good grade. But I didn’t have a system. Instead, I turned the tables on them.

We ended up dealing, first-hand, with the fire of imagination. That was all the class was about.

I was just pointing to a sentence here, a phrase there, and saying, “This. This is it. This is something. You wrote it. Keep going.”

Imagination is never boring. It’s alive. It cuts through all sleep-inducing structures.

If you want to take this illustration (the poetry class) and extend it out to the whole of life, you’ll be walking a different road.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

REPORT OF A RETURNING STAR EXPLORER

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Vladimir Nabokov

JUNE 7, 2011. Frank C. Voyle was sent to the stars, and when he came home, he said he had encountered a man who sat behind a desk in a bed of clouds.

The man had begun talking. He made no sense, even though he was speaking English. The way he threw words together added up to complete gibberish. But gradually, Voyle claimed, he began to pick up a phrase here and there.

“They were like objects falling from a tree. There were periods when I blacked out, and when I came to, he was still talking. It didn’t bother him that I’d checked out.

“It was like listening to strange music. Changes of tempo, instruments arriving and going away, interludes. I learned to go along with it.

“It was almost as if I was receiving a treatment for a disease. I realized I’d been suffering from internal inflammation, because I had been subjected, somewhere along the line, to a form of indoctrination—and now this man was curing it.

“The programming…you see, it wasn’t a matter of content. Not at all. It was the basic nature of the method, which was reduction. That was the secret. In order to achieve clarity, and I needed clarity in my work, I had to eliminate vast amounts of potential meaning. And with reduction, I entered into a territory of sickness. Slowly. One step at a time.

“Everyone is suffering from this. We don’t see it because our only standard of reference is each other. We’re mirrors. And when someone doesn’t operate according to our rules, we can’t make sense out of it.

“Well, here was this man. He was talking on for what seemed like days, in the most outrageous way. He didn’t care. To look at his face, his expressions, the way he moved his hands, you would swear he knew exactly what he was saying. He didn’t have to think about things.

“As I caught on, I felt better. Coils and dead-ends left me. Tensions drained out of my body. But I wasn’t falling into a state of greater relaxation, I was more alert.

“I have thought about this a great deal. I don’t think he was trying to cure me. He knew it was happening, but he was merely talking. He knew that, for a long period of time, I didn’t understand anything he was saying, but it didn’t bother him. It didn’t bother him at all.

“He had arrived at a plateau that was entirely unfamiliar to me. He was comfortable there. He saw no reason to climb down. He wasn’t trying to make things simple for me.

“Of course, I’ve been trained in many techniques that hopefully bridge the gap when we encounter new species of intelligent life. But this was unprecedented. This was a man who was human and spoke English.

“I eventually reached a point where I understood a great deal of what he was saying. For long stretches of time, I was comprehending things without effort.

“So now I believe I need to learn how to talk like this. For many reasons. Of course, there is no way I can begin to explain to you what actually happened unless I can speak as he did. But beyond that, I want to talk in this way, so I can reach those places and those heights.

“Part of this man’s genius, if we want to call it that, was that he felt absolutely no suspicion about me.”

Q: Mr. Voyle, couldn’t you at least repeat some of this person’s statements for us?

A: I could, sir. But it wouldn’t do any good. You see, for him it was all spontaneous utterance. And that made the difference. It wasn’t only the words and combinations of words, it was the way in which they were being delivered. You could take a song and have two singers perform it, and of course there would be all the difference in the world between the two renditions.

Q: Well, we’ll have to decide on that later. But for now, we’ll continue to run tests. It’s apparent your brain patterns have been altered, to a degree.

A: But again, you’re not going to gain anything from that information—even if you reproduce those patterns in another brain.

Q: That’s quite an extraordinary statement. Would you care to explain it?

A: What might have happened to my brain is an effect. Of a cause. If you remove the original cause, you’ll at best replicate a series of electrical impulses without my accompanying perception. I was there. I saw him. I heard him. I perceived. It was the essence of the experience.

Q: Well, yes. But this is not the way science works. Most of the time, we aren’t “there.” But we nevertheless can infer.

A: In this case, science would bring you up short.

Q: Suppose what you’re reporting never happened to you. Suppose it was an extended hallucination.

A: Like a dream? Even if that’s true, I was there.

Q: Or you were tricked into thinking you were.

A: This is the crux, isn’t it? Do we take out our box of labels and impose one? Or do we treat my experience as genuine?

Q: Mr. Voyle, we really will need a number of examples from you. Things that…this person said.

A: I’ll be happy to provide them. But again, it won’t make sense to you, and nothing will happen.

Q: We can decide that. We’ll also present you with computer-generated examples of English spoken in random ways. You can determine which of these is closest to what you heard. You know, Frank, we have a whole file full of extraordinary astronaut experiences. They come back with stories. One astronaut stated he could see people walking around down on Earth from a hundred thousand miles out. Another one spoke to a dead aunt.

A: But in the end, there was nothing you could do with those events, because you couldn’t replicate them.

Q: That’s right.

A: You see, this is my point. I already know what happened to me was unique. I’m not asking for anything from the Agency.

Q: Was there practical value in the “messages” you received?

A: In the content?

Q: Yes.

A: It wasn’t about the content. And for quite awhile, I assumed he was speaking nonsense, gibberish.

Q: So perhaps you inserted your own interpretation of what was essentially meaningless.

A: That would be you placing a label on what happened.

Q: What else can we do?

A: The official position will be that I had a dream or suffered from an hallucination.

Q: You spoke to a man who was sitting at a desk in a cloud.

A: I was outside the ship doing repairs, and I saw him. I made my way to him. I was still tethered.

Q: Did he introduce himself?

A: He just started talking.

Q: Did he look like anyone you know?

A: No.

Q: But he was human and he spoke English.

A: That’s right.

Q: What was he wearing?

A: A pair of pants and a shirt.

Q: Do you have a sense of how long the event lasted?

A: The log indicates it was six hours.

Q: This was a one-man flitter. According to the main ship’s records, you took it to track down a transmission no one else was picking up. And there was nothing on ship’s instruments, either.

A: That’s right.

Q: You seem to have some mystical notions about language.

A: I’m just recalling what happened to me.

Q: Placebo effect. Dream. Hallucination.

A: From your point of view.

Q: This idea of “being cured.”

A: You go to a concert. The orchestra plays a composition that comes across as noise. It’s absurd. You wish you’d never come. You doze off, wake up. But after a while, the music begins to make sense to you, against your better judgment. You resist that. But as you keep listening, the whole thing falls into place. Only it’s a place you’ve never been. You can’t describe it to anyone else. You feel as if you’re flying. Your sense of well-being is extraordinary. You realize you’ve been perceiving reality inside a severely limited context. All your life.

Q: I see what you’re driving at. But then the person sitting next to you has a completely different experience.

A: That’s my point. We don’t know what would have happened if another crew member had been outside the ship with me.

Q: Actually, Frank, we wanted to get your impressions before we told you that we do, in fact, have a recording of what happened during those six hours. You were unaware your Cave-3 was on. We have the whole thing.

A: Really? That’s…amazing.

Q: And as you report, there was a monologue. An extended monologue. It doesn’t sound like you talking. But we have to infer that you were. Who else could it have been?

A: What do you make of it?

Q: We’ve had people listening. It’s gibberish. Words randomly thrown together. So far, we’re not finding any pattern.

A: Pattern? Of course there isn’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Q: We’d really like to avoid getting into a confrontational psych eval on this.

A: Oh, you mean you don’t want me going around like a religious convert? Don’t worry about that. You know, I could have kept silent. But I felt an obligation to report what happened.

Q: And we appreciate that. You’re paying a price for coming forward.

A: Doesn’t matter how high I test out on my annual anymore. Doesn’t matter how high my performance quotients come in. You won’t be sending me out again. I understand that. But I don’t need to go out anymore. I found what I was looking for, even though I didn’t know I was looking for it.

Q: Here’s the thing, Frank. On all the physical tests so far, your numbers are good. Things are checking out fine. If that continues to be the case during the whole debrief process, we’re prepared to make you an offer.

A: A pay-off?

Absolutely not. You’ll leave the service. Which you’d want to do anyway, because you won’t be going out on future space missions. Aside from your pension, we’ll see to it, through a cut-out, that a small stipend handles your “extra expenses.” You can set up a non-profit research foundation. Whatever you want. Continue to pursue this “avenue.” It would be completely unofficial, of course. No ties to the Agency. Once a year, you’ll meet with one of us, and you’ll report. We’re not demanding performance quotas. Nothing like that. We just want to be kept in the loop.

A: This has happened before.

Q: Several times. Not the way it happened to you. But we’ve got a few men out there in the world who are “following their instincts.” It’s our way of keeping an open mind.

A: You’ll give me their names?

Q: No. We don’t want to taint the experiment. But you’ll find them anyway. You’ll nose around and figure it out. Or somebody will contact you. We’re not in the business of Weird, Frank. Nevertheless, we’re not completely stupid…

A: And if at some point I go public? Not about our arrangement. But about what I discover?

Q: Up to you. Obviously, we don’t want a big splash that’ll make us look crazy for having had you in the program.

A: I’m not interested in making the tabloids.

Q: Not much chance of that. You’d be going up against some celebrity who had sex with a sheep in a hotel room…

A: So the Agency’s official position, if pressed, is that you don’t understand a word of what I reported happened to me while I was out there.

Q: If it comes to that, yes.

A: Which was exactly my position when the man began talking to me outside my ship. Until it wasn’t my position anymore.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE APOSTLES

MEMORY OF A BRIEF JOURNEY

AN EXCERPT FROM THE MAGICIAN AWAKES

The object of travel is to get lost.

Lin Yutang

“…the universe is infinite; beyond the visible world there is an infinity of other worlds, each of which is inhabited…”

Catholic Encyclopedia, describing the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, the Church’s greatest heretic.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Vladimir Nabokov

JUNE 5, 2011. My ongoing book, THE MAGICIAN AWAKES, is not only about multiple and simultaneous dimensions, it is itself taking place in such dimensions—paintings, poems, audio, text, lost text (computer crash some months back), dialogue, articles, and so on. It’s not a novel anymore, although that’s how it started out. It’s a hybrid. Right now, I don’t bother to keep track of it all. I just know I’m inventing it.

This is a non-form that works and satisfies me.

The word magic has been used in so many ridiculous ways. In fact, as I go along, I discover more and more ridiculousities.

As I’ve said and written many times by now, magic occurs as a side effect of wide open and proliferating imagination in action. The direct and straight-line approach is at best, a very minor pocket in an infinite coat.

Beginning, middle, and end is an addiction.

In an email, an old friend, a college professor, described his philosophy of life: “A golf ball is a golf ball and a steak is a steak.”

“So,” I said, “you know what you’re eating and you know what you’re hitting.”

He asked me what I’d been up to. It had been a long time since we’d been in touch. I sent him the following story, which I wrote in an airport, waiting out a surreal flight delay:

In Florence six years ago, I walked into a dim church and sat down. Next to me on the bench was a round gray stone. I picked it up and held it.

I dozed off. A voice came to me and explained matters that had long been puzzling:

Peter, John, Philip, Bartholomew, James, Andrew, et al, lived in Judea, followed Jesus, and were his apostles.

Philip’s father worked at the British embassy in Jerusalem. Bartholomew was a stock trader who’d flown from London to hear the Sermon on the Mount. James and Andrew were setting up a string of men’s shops along the West Bank.

The apostles’ names were part of the culture of miracles, because other people in that neck of the woods were Moishe, Sol, Marty, Jake, Al, Dov, Ish, and Zaide.

The Brit apostles could say shalom, but otherwise they knew no Hebrew. They learned to shrug, and made do with that.

Peter, Paul, and Mary formed a singing group in Tel Aviv.

When Jesus turned five loaves and two fish into food for 5000, Andrew asked if he could have a small jar of Marmite, and a Cadbury’s, but they were not available that day.

As illustrated in the painting of Piero Della Francesca, Jesus was actually flagellated in the courtyard of an upscale Roman villa.

I woke up.

I found the grim interior geometry of the Duomo again…a soul in here would decide he needed saving, even if that hadn’t been on his mind when he entered from the street. I thought about what a few De Koonings and Picassos would accomplish.

A short fat man in a gray suit walked up to me.

“Go to another universe?” he said.

I was still holding the stone.

“How much?” I said.

“Fifty Euros for the basic ticket. Insurance, mandatory. Ten dollars a day. But they have the best corned beef this side of the Carnegie.”

“You a priest?”

“A travel agent.”

He evaporated in the gloom.

A light snow began falling from the high dome.

It formed a shroud around my shoulders.

Give me your happiest hours,

We will make a template for the rest of your nights.

Who said that?

A man dragging his seared leg hobbled out of the shadows and smiled at me. What a face of pain and joy! It was the astronomer and poet, Giordano Bruno, who, in the winter of 1600, had died in flames in the garden of flowers, in Rome, after his seven-year trial. The apogee of heresy in Church history.

He whispered, “Infinite souls of infinite extension, overlapping, and yet not merged…”

He took my hand in his and sent a bolt of electricity through my brain.

I was suddenly hovering above the dome, in the late afternoon, and looking down at the plaza, I saw my wife walking among the stalls of merchandise. She glanced up at me, nodded, and smiled—enveloping the world map.

…Later that night, eating supper in a small restaurant facing an alley, we toasted Bruno, warrior of deep space. His telescope, his heraldic cosmos, his poems about immortality.

Trip the light fantastic, my friend, they built as far as they could go and hit the wall.

Gaspara Seigos was dying in his cabin in the Andes. His last book, Salvaje Silvestre, half-finished, lay on a sagging table next to the sink.

People from nearby settlements brought him light meals, and local healers arrived with their brews. A young doctor from Burma carried medicines in his bag.

Seigos told them, “Don’t bother.” To the doctor, he said, “I’m in touch with a nothing that is something, and if it can, it will heal me. The situation is cutting it close. We’ll see. I relax as far as I can, and then natural functioning takes over.”

Once, the doctor thought Seigos was dead. He could detect no pulse, no heartbeat. But then the writer’s eyes opened. He looked at the hazy light coming through the window by the door, nodded, and went to sleep.

A month later, he was up and walking around the cabin. He went outside and a dog ran up to him and smelled his hand.

At the little stream, he bent down and picked up a handful of pebbles and took them back to the cabin and threw them on the floor.

Every day he went out and found stones and brought them home. Eventually, he returned from his walks with large rocks.

A few months later, the cabin was piled high with boulders. Most of the space was gone. Seigos slept at night among the rocks. At that point, the villagers, the healers, and the doctor left him alone.

Seigos lived this way for almost a year. He passed into stone and stayed in that state for weeks. Then he returned, and walked out of his cabin and went into the mountain passes and disappeared.

In Lima, Salvaje Silvestre appeared on the shelves of bookstores. Some copies were missing pages. Not all copies were identical.

One night, along the Higuerta Roundabout, a parade of children walked silently. Above them, bicycles and urns and lamps and stoves catapulted and burned on the ground. At dawn, feral dogs gathered there and chewed the ashes.

That day, naked figures were seen walking on low clouds. A group of them clutched at the blue sky and tore it open at a seam. Behind the sky—the prow of a sailing ship. The sky continued to tear on its own, until the whole ship was visible. The crew took down the large and small sails and then stood silently on the deck as the ship passed across out of view.

The entire sky over the city fell away, exposing terraces of wild gardens and roving patrols of soldiers.

It rained heavily for the next month: extraviado. The terraces were still there, but extraviado. Snow fell, and in it people heard intricate music from the mouths of dead relatives. The soldier patrols fell back and staggered and crawled into a bruised cloud.

I brought the stone home with me from Florence. I placed it in a bowl of water for a few days. It gradually dissolved. The water turned blue.

…There was a scratching at our front door. I opened it, and a sleek brown dog trotted past me and went into the kitchen. I took the bowl off the counter and put it on the floor. The dog glanced at me and then drank the water. He ran out of the kitchen into the living room and through the back wall into the yard. He sat down, looked up at the sky, and barked. I looked at the sky.

When I looked back at the dog, only his head remained, floating above the grass. Then it faded out. My cell phone rang.

“This is the Pope’s appointment secretary, “ a voice said. “We’re defecting. Can you put us up for a few days? Ha-ha, just kidding. But we do have a question. Security cameras caught you in the Duomo with a man who looked very much like Giordono Bruno. Anything you can tell us about that?”

“Well,” I said, “did cameras also catch me hovering above the dome?”

Pause.

“I’m afraid we missed that one,” he said.

“Can’t help you locate him,” I said.

“He comes back now and then.”

“Good luck.”

“We try to maintain our seal on things,” he said. “But after fifteen hundred years or so, it develops cracks.”

“No big surprise there.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MORE ON THOMAS JEFFERSON PROJECT

JUNE 6, 2011. Yesterday I sent out the press release about my upcoming radio interview (June 15) with Clay Jenkinson, as he performs his vaunted role as Thomas Jefferson. He will be in character for the show.

I have seen him on C-SPAN, debating with “Alexander Hamilton,” and I can tell you Clay is phenomenal. Not just good. Great.

So tell all your friends and enemies and your grandma, too.

When I wrote my logic course for home schoolers, I discovered that Jefferson was a devoted student of logic. He went to college to study it. It was one of his pillars. So I hope to touch on that in the conversation.

Of course, there are so MANY questions I want to ask him. Impossible to get them all in. One hour is good, eight hours would be better.

For example, Jefferson once remarked rather casually, in a letter, that the federal government should run foreign affairs and policy, and the states should handle everything else. In 2011, I fell off my chair. Apparently, this is way he pretty much viewed the distribution of powers as laid out in the Constitution.

I have to believe that Jefferson, looking at the massive USA these days, would want radical decentralization. What form would it take?

Again, Clay isn’t just an actor playing Jefferson. He’s a scholar, and he’s explored Jefferson’s life and ideas up one side and down the other.

It’s a unique opportunity.

I’m sure you folks can navigate the site where the show will emanate far better than I can…as I’ve said many times, I’m basically a typist with a computer.

My understanding is it’s easy. Go to www.ProgressiveRadioNetowork.com and click on “listen live.” A few days after the show, the archive will have it there:

www.ProgressiveRadioNetowork.com/archive

Here is the press release again: spread it far and wide.

Hmm. Wonder if we can connect with 50 or 60 million listeners in China. Just an idea.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A MAJOR RADIO EVENT!

AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER INTERVIEWS

THOMAS JEFFERSON!

When: Wednesday, June 15, 7-8 PM, Eastern Time

Where: www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

Scholar Clay Jenkinson, who has portrayed, with stunning accuracy, Thomas Jefferson, in venues all over the world, will assume the identity once more, for a sit-down interview with Jon Rappoport, Pulitzer-nominated reporter.

“Mr. Jefferson,” in character, will answer Jon’s questions about life in 2011, from his 18^th-century perspective.

“I wish we had three hours,” Jon stated, “but we’ll squeeze in everything we can in one hour.”

What is Jefferson’s view of where America has gone in two centuries? Is it still a Republic? Should it be? How can a Constitution designed to fit fewer than three million citizens apply to a population of 300 million? Do even the rights and powers of individual states make sense, when one state, California, has 37 million residents? What about the national health-care plan? The state of public education? Mega-corporate influence? Two political parties with common agendas? The military-industrial complex? The Federal Reserve? Invasive surveillance?

The questions pile up.

This will be an intriguing and riveting hour of radio—a unique experience.

To pick up the show live: www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com and click on “listen live.” To access the show in the archive, www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com/archive, and scroll down to The Jon Rappoport Show.

Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute and the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. A humanities scholar, he is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Thomas JeffersonHour. (www.jeffersonhour.org)

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 35 years. He has published articles on politics, health, and media for LAWeekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin Magazine, Stern, and is the author of Logic and Analysis, a course for high-school students.

(www.nomorefakenews.com)

###

For further information, contact Jon Rappoport at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A MAJOR RADIO EVENT!

AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER INTERVIEWS

THOMAS JEFFERSON!

When: Wednesday, June 15, 7-8 PM, Eastern Time

Where: www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

Scholar Clay Jenkinson, who has portrayed, with stunning accuracy, Thomas Jefferson, in venues all over the world, will assume the identity once more, for a sit-down interview with Jon Rappoport, Pulitzer-nominated reporter.

“Mr. Jefferson,” in character, will answer Jon’s questions about life in 2011, from his 18^th-century perspective.

“I wish we had three hours,” Jon stated, “but we’ll squeeze in everything we can in one hour.”

What is Jefferson’s view of where America has gone in two centuries? Is it still a Republic? Should it be? How can a Constitution designed to fit fewer than three million citizens apply to a population of 300 million? Do even the rights and powers of individual states make sense, when one state, California, has 37 million residents? What about the national health-care plan? The state of public education? Mega-corporate influence? Two political parties with common agendas? The military-industrial complex? The Federal Reserve? Invasive surveillance?

The questions pile up.

This will be an intriguing and riveting hour of radio—a unique experience.

Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute and the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. A humanities scholar, he is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Thomas JeffersonHour. (www.jeffersonhour.org)

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 35 years. He has published articles on politics, health, and media for LAWeekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin Magazine, Stern, and is the author of Logic and Analysis, a course for high-school students.

(www.nomorefakenews.com)

###

For further information, contact Jon Rappoport at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

FULL SPECTRUM INSIGHT

“Watch television?” She was awake now.

“Well,” Rydell said, “Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.”

“God’s on television?”

“Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.”

“So they watch tv and pray, or what?”

“Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter intothem.”

(William Gibson, Virtual Light)

At a cocktail party, one oligarch says to another, “I commit crimes to help myself.”

The other oligarch replies, “So do I. But I mask them so it appears I’m helping others.”

A third oligarch stops by. “You know,” he says, “I follow a simple formula. Try to get people to forget they have imagination. After that, everything takes care of itself.”

A fourth oligarch strolls over. “I created a universe,” he says. “People live in it. They can’t get out. They think I’m…what do they call me…God. They sing songs and write poems to me. It’s really quite ridiculous. But I’m on the tennis court most of time, so who cares?”

“How’s your game these days?” says a voice coming from the air around them.

Hermes, the trickster, suddenly appears in the room. He’s holding a gray L-shaped piece of metal in his hand.

And that was that.

A few days later, a key opened the sky and all the people escaped.

Hermes stood on a plateau and watched.

“Easy come, easy go,” he said.

Tripping the light fantastic.

(Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes)

JUNE 4, 2011. Human perception can be likened to the light spectrum, which is only partially visible to the eye.

Through the use of instruments, we know the rest of the light is there, but we don’t access it under normal conditions.

In 1995, after a number of smaller experiments, I made a series of three paintings on large pieces of brown cardboard. They appeared to be “pages” of text…pictographs in an unknown language. After I finished the paintings, I leaned them against the wall of my studio and left them there for several weeks.

One afternoon, I was lying on my bed, and I glanced over at the paintings. I asked myself, “What if these pictographs really WERE from another language?”

And then they were.

A shower of meanings…

To describe them…it isn’t a matter of making a translation into English. The meanings were…shifts of sensation-in-motion. They were also additional pictographs—some of which were flying figures.

The sensations and the flying figures were…“elevating aesthetics.” A doorway had opened for me, through which I saw and felt “versions of beauty-in-action” that were unlike anything I had ever experienced…and yet it was somehow familiar.

I entered a wider realm of sensation/feeling.

I knew, of course, that my imagination was playing a role, but there was another X factor.

The message was: there are languages like this.

They don’t function in the usual way. They don’t give you words that have specific limited meanings. They give you strings of pictographs that trigger wide elevated sensations and images, the immediate impact of which is undeniable.

These languages transport you.

I could see and infer that such languages could be read and spoken.

And there would be no problem of “what do you mean by that?”

The point wouldn’t be to “inflict” specific meaning on the other person.

One set of pictographs, dealt to another person, would set off an explosion of aesthetic sensations/feelings/images, and then a new set of pictographs would go back the other way and return the favor.

The spectrum of meaning, like light, is only partially visible to us. In fact, the spectrum of meaning has no limit. It hasn’t been set or pre-established in a finite way—and can’t be.

What happens to consciousness in the process of speaking or reading these new languages is the realization of a deep desire.

Psychology generally assumes that what is repressed is “negative material.” But actually, the reverse is true. The much more important repression is all about wanting access to wider realms of meaning. Realms in which fantastic, wonderful, elevating sensations/feelings/images are revealed/invented AS PALPABLE MANIFEST REALITIES.

From a societal point of view, the repression of THIS causes all sorts of untoward events and circumstances. It’s like being chained to a fence—you can go a certain distance from the fence, but then the chain reaches its limit. The frustration builds.

Yet, somewhere down deep, people realize this is a false state of affairs. The fence and the chain are delusions.

For the most part, people operate within a context of consensus meaning. They get used to it. They forget there is anything else. They make the best of things. They take their pleasures where they can find them. I’m not saying this reality is a veil of tears. But the major aspect of the spectrum is invisible.

Part of what magic is, is the opening of the gate of meaning.

With more and expanded meaning comes greater freedom.

Religion, generally speaking, is the accommodation that is made to the chain and the fence. It offers a glint of light, a promise of escape and release, and a suggestion of expanded perception/meaning.

However, one discovers that each religion has its own cosmology, its own picture of the cosmos. Its own set of meanings.

Whereas, we have the capacity to transcend all cosmologies.

Entertainment media, beyond the simple strategies of selling a story the public will buy, and re-inventing an old plot a network will bankroll, continues to search for new meaning…but within the narrow context of what is familiar. So even in this restricted territory, there is the consciousness of “the rewards and pleasures” of invented meaning.

Human desire is, in some respects, a strange animal, by virtue of the fact that it has been tamed. It expresses hope and wish within acceptable contexts. And then people pursue these tamed desires, thinking their fulfillment will make them happy. When that doesn’t happen, confusion sets in.

“But this is what I wanted. Then I got it. So where is the continuing joy?”

It turns out that, through imagination, through exploration of a wider spectrum of meaning, untamed desires surface. THIS is what the spirit and psyche really want to pursue. And when they recognize that, and when the pursuit is launched, a new and deeper happiness and joy appear. No longer superficial gloss that lights up and then fades, this fierce joy keeps ringing bells and pushing clouds in a landscape that has never before been experienced, and yet is familiar…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

OPEN-ENDED MAGIC

I’m sitting there at The Blue Scam having my second beer and thinking about how I can escape a teaching offer, when Jimmy Skimmy walks into the place high and hard with his fire-engine red sports jacket and matching fedora, a green parrot feather in the band, and kisses Marie on her heavily powdered cheek, coming away with a spot on the end of his long sharp nose.

He sees me, reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out two long tickets. He nods. We’re in.

The seasonal rains are pelting the metal roof of the place, and people are blabbing at tables and the speakers are playing a ride tune by Mars, the wall of pinball machines is shaking with explosions, and I think I’m screaming, but I can’t hear myself—tomorrow night, Jimmy and I are leaving.

Blowing this universe.

Finally.

(Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes)

JUNE 1, 2011. Consciousness itself wants improvisation.

That may sound like an odd statement.

But, backtracking, realize your consciousness is not a certain amount of “air or liquid” in a container for all time.

Unfortunately, some quasi-philosophies suggest that. They view consciousness the same way a soup manufacturer assesses his work: make the can hold so much volume and fill it up with soup.

Then, of course, we have cosmologies in which consciousness is a buttery sauce spread all over the cosmos, from which we take little sips.

Let’s start here:

Consciousness creates more consciousness.

That is its primary interest.

Not floating, not expanding, but creating. More of itself.

Itself? What does that mean?

Are we talking about molecules of the “same stuff?” Just more of them?

No.

Consciousness is diverse. It’s not stuff to begin with. It’s the capacity to be conscious. It’s being conscious. It’s non-material.

In a live way. Not in some dull fashion.

For example, if you knew what tomorrow was going to bring, you would be aware of MORE.

But there is another road that is much different. It’s best described by two words: spontaneity and improvisation.

These are VERY interesting words. Spontaneous comes from the late Latin, and means “of one’s own accord.” Improvise is from French and Latin—“not foreseen, unprepared.”

The French and Latin roots don’t begin to encompass all the modern meanings and implications.

Awareness is often about seeing patterns and systems and structures.

But consciousness wants more and wants DIFFERENT. Face it, seeing patterns, after a while, doesn’t turn on the adrenaline.

However, when you improvise, when you take an action that is spontaneous, you break out of old reality into something else, something that has no name.

Consciousness wants THAT.

It can’t catalog it, it can’t fit it into neat compartments, but it wants it.

In 1963, I was painting in a very small apartment in Santa Monica, California. A table, small sheets of paper, oil crayons. One night, I had a blank sheet in front of me. I was about to begin. All of a sudden, there was a shift. To describe it, it doesn’t seem like much. But I knew in a way I had never known before, that I had the freedom to make any shape on that paper. This wasn’t a dry obvious fact, it was an exhilarating magic. And yet, I had no shape in mind. This was all pre-painting. This was a tremendously elastic and flexible sense of freedom. It was warm. It was more real than real. It was a unique immersion in happiness.

All in a minute.

And then when I put the crayon to paper and began to make a shape, the feeling grew. This line, this shape, any line, any shape…it was so much more than I’d ever realized. Drawing.

Spontaneous, improvised.

I drank it in.

It was as if this was what I had been looking for, without knowing it, all my life.

Some truth about that moment has never left me. It confirmed suspicions and leanings I’d had previously, and it handed me, on a silver platter, something I truly wanted to know.

Under endless disguises and masks and apparatus, improvisation-from-nothing really exists.

So when I say magic isn’t a system or a manual or a structure, perhaps now you have a better idea of what I’m talking about.

When you feed consciousness a spoon of THIS, it has the party it’s been looking for.

Of course, you can’t chain yourself to the floor and remain in such a moment. “I had a spontaneous and ecstatic Q-3TY-7 and now I’m going to tie lead weights to my legs so I can continue to be in Q-3TY-7.”

Fortunately, CREATING and SPONTANEOUS and INVENTION and IMAGINATION and IMPROVISATION are all close cousins, and they all engender escalations out of old reality systems…no cover, no minimum, stay as late as you want to.

Free is free.

Magic is open-ended.

Imagination/creating are the open sky and the rocket and the infinity of possible paths, and that’s just for starters.

“…a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

When scientists try to talk about consciousness in terms of the flesh inside the human skull or twists of DNA, they are as far from the truth as the farthest universe is from a doll house in an attic in Pittsburgh.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

FINANCIAL MARKET REALITY

JUNE 1, 2011. I know that many readers are with me as I go to the wall and gladly blow through it to depict and explain the power of imagination (magic) and present a completely different picture of reality. All this information and MUCH more is in my audio seminars, where unique exercises are presented as well.

But you see, other people cozily opt for consensus reality, which is the bottom of the creative barrel and is, hilariously, thought of as rock solid and dependable all the way along the line.

“I dunno about this imagination stuff, I think I’ll stay with plain ordinary every-day reality. I wuz brought up that way…”

Yeah. Sure.

So with that, have a look at the recent financial meltdown from a different perspective.

Aside from those famous sub-prime mortgages, what else do we need to know about? The whole investment-market universe is a propaganda-induced hallucination. How about that?

There was a time, maybe 50 years ago, when people bought stocks because they saw them as a symbol for confidence in companies and growth and expansion and, therefore, confidence in America and democracy and ingenuity and so on.

A hard-working moderately successful husband, who wanted to parlay his assets into something more, for the future, would find a broker and open up an account. “Buy something, Bill, and hold on to it, and let it rise.”

Long-term investing.

But all that changed, as the game of buy and sell itself became the main event. It morphed into Vegas.

So-called stock speculation, which carried an aura of sleaze, became the hip thing to do.

“Buy and sell in your underwear from home. Buy and sell 20 times an hour and become a millionaire by next Friday. I did it, and I’ll show you how.”

Clue: He didn’t do it. If he did, do you think he’d be wasting his time teaching you his secrets? Judging from his demeanor, he’d be on his yacht with seven hookers and a liquor cabinet.

With the Great Morph in the way trading was done, the companies whose stock people were buying was the last thing on their minds. America? The future? Confidence in this great nation? Is that what a demented addict at the craps tables on the Strip is thinking about as he blows on the dice?

The whole game changed.

And big companies like banks and insurance outfits and even pension funds got deeply into the deal. They were all investing in the market and shoving in their chips on making a profit that way.

The reach of the game widened.

In this vast interlocking CONSENSUS REALITY OF VEGAS-ON-WALL-STREET, everybody and his brother got into the act.

So if the market suddenly tanked, the reality could split at the seams.

Probably the Pope could develop ulcers.

From this perspective, think about the following: institutions whose lifeblood is lending money to people…if those guys are investing, investing, investing in the market, and if they suddenly experience big losses, and they don’t have the same ability to lend money, then everybody who wants loans to start businesses or order new materials is up the creek and creek is dry.

This consensus reality, involving so many various players, could cause the whole economy of the country to spiral down out of control.

That’s ordinary reality for you.

That’s the religion so many people are backing.

From the point of view of a company that’s selling stock to raise money for expansion, the vagaries of the market can be brutal.

“We’re performing well as a company, but our stock goes up and down without any seeming reference to that.”

What did you expect? Sanity?

When bad mortgages were packaged in units, like stocks, and traded like baseball cards all over the world, it was with the assumption that the whole game of buying and selling could somehow remain independent of the value of those mortgages, forever. Big banks in this game, finally incurring huge losses, tightened up their lending policies on all fronts…and in a society that runs on credit (loans), the curtain began dropping.

Of course, at that point, things became quite confusing, because these banks and other big players started lying in new and inventive ways. Who knows how many lies were told?

But regardless, when loose credit turns into tight credit overnight, the chance of a crash and depression looms.

Hence, the bailout.

Imagine players at a Vegas casino, where the bosses (insanely) extend blanket credit to cover losses and encourage further gambling…and then, one night, the bosses say enough. No more credit. Lots of people at the tables are caught with their pants down.

When the government issued $700 billion to patch-patch the broken system, banks turned around and said, “You want us to lend this money now. You want the credit to flow again, but at the same time you’re telling us to be more cautious about whom we lend money to.”

In this nexus, there was certainly lying and cheating going on, but the upshot was the lending didn’t smoothly pick up again.

The fundamental thing a person asks for, from consensus reality, is that it be consistent. If you have a table, and you put objects on it, they stay there. They don’t start walking around on the table and floating in the air. Because if they do, what’s a table for? Each thing has a function, and the functions mesh.

The sudden bubble in the trading markets popped because the commonly held hallucination developed flaws. Its elements didn’t obey their assigned functions. And then, as the repair work began, the loans didn’t flow as they were supposed to. More dysfunction.

Remember AIG, the insurance giant? A trader there invented a money maker. AIG would sell insurance to companies that were trading the packaged bad mortgages…just in case the packages turned bad. Of course, the idea was they would never turn bad. Well, what kind of insurance plan is that? “We’ll sell health insurance on the premise that no one will ever get sick.”

People inside the hallucination were doing things that would explode it. Why? Because they were convinced the consensus would hold, no matter what. The hallucination would remain.

It’s not so very different from a person on LSD who, say, walks around thinking he’s a Dutch settler in the American colonies. It all works until he arrives in New York looking for Indians who want to unload Manhattan for a handful of beads.

Assume for a minute that the financial meltdown happened through manipulation, on purpose, as a way of impoverishing, demoralizing, and pressing down on populations and making them helpless and malleable. Even then, we’re still talking about a basic set-up (trading markets and how they operate) that massive numbers of people have to buy into, in the first place, as consensus ordinary reality.

“This is America. This is the world. This is the way it works. This is a mutually beneficial trillion-dollar operation that goes on and on and on…and smart people take advantage of it, to expand their assets…this is what every intelligent person does.”

Brush your teeth twice a day, buy stocks.

Bottom line?

Every ordinary reality has loopholes, and people will try to capitalize on them, and in the process, actual holes will show up and expand, until the hallucination sags and deteriorates…at which point the monitors will do anything they have to, to re-inflate it.

These ordinary realities, through thick and thin, are viewed by most people as basic to life itself.

The truth is, they are products of imagination.

And since that is so, why not start from the real platform of power, which is you and your imagination and what you deeply want to create?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

To view Jon’s audio-seminar catalog, scroll down in this email and click on MARKETPLACE, or visit the site and go to the store.

UNIVERSE MANUFACTURERS

MAY 31, 2011. Here are several ads from an interdimensional newspaper that might prove informative:

UNIVERSE MANUFACTURING! Let us build it for you! Move-in ready. All appliances and energy sources. Consult our catalog. Gods supplied or not. Easy entrance, no exit. Pre-hypnosis induced painlessly in our clean spacious facilities by licensed physicians!

CUSTOM BUILT UNIVERSES OUR SPECIALTY! Uni-language, gated planets, military emperors. Inspect our plans, work with a seasoned professional. Dignified cemeteries. CSI reruns.

A RETIREMENT UNIVERSE for the whole family! Do you want to pass on your genes to millions of future generations? Of course you do! Why else would you be alive? In our universe, we supply a religion that forbids gene waste, under penalty of deportation to a state-run hospital. Appoint surrogates to wage an eternal war between matriarchal and patriarchal gene-transmission preference. Square dancing, ping-pong tournaments, celebrity-look-alike performers on weekends.

COLLECTIVE GOO UNIVERSE FOR ADDLED MINDS! Be part of the Doofus! Delete thinking! Experience the thrill of melting down in 24/7 love with the One All Thingo! At first you’ll feel icy winds whipping through your separated soul on the plains of cruel choice. But then, at the last moment, from the deepest well of reality, a radiant finale will clutch your sacred yearning, as you’re shot up on to on a cloud of honey and transported to a fortress where patented OmniJuice floods your being and you realize this is your home forever! Soft rock, lake of marshmallows, electro-massage units. One and two bedroom apts.

NATURE IS NATURE UNIVERSE! Hunt for 60,000 years, fit into the environment, hear the roots grow; climb trees, shepherd goats, bath in snow, chant in monotone, blow up evil machines in distant cities. Exclusive Gaia tweets. Become utterly convinced there is nothing else! Raise children as primates! “Secrets of the Urine Garden” for first five callers.

AT LAST! THE SOULMATE UNIVERSE! Let us design your agonizing quest for the other half of yourself. You met a stranger for 18 seconds in a hotel bar? He’s here! Receive your initiation rites in the Oprah Palace and journey out on to the landscape of despair. Lifetimes of synchrony…and just-misses…and then….but we can’t give away the glorious ending. You know you want it, so let us build this low to mid-range IQ universe with billions of extras and millions of planets. Herbal wraps, hot stones; vegan paramedics on call.

PROMISE OF PARADISE UNIVERSE, slightly used version, for sale at giveaway price. Commit untold numbers of righteous acts that would be considered capital crimes with special circumstances in other universes, along the severe path of loyalty to a standard that will put you in a heaven others are denied. Commandments, holy book, some flagellation required. All races and religions invited. We have our own God and he’s pissed off!

VICTIMS PLUS! Have you been inventing a story of oppression that’s somehow never been accorded its proper due? Well, in our universe, we bring in the sheep and put bows on their necks! This your place! Normals supplied as foils. All the tables are turned. For once (and forever), you get what you deserve! Lavish benefits! Pre-training in the necromancy of bureaucratic interactions. Work the system as it’s never been worked before! Choose from a catalog of disorders. Full insurance coverage extended to family members.

THE END OF IMAGINATION UNIVERSE! Have you finally reached the end of your tether? Want to attribute all magic and creation to an external source? We have attractive life paths for trillions of serial incarnations. You’ll go with God, you’ll go with science, you’ll go with money, you’ll go with pills. We have it all. Our calibrated partial-narcosis treatments will saddle you with just enough doubt to make you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing by your existence…and yet, in the end, you’ll submit to a Greater Pattern. Geometric homilies, sacred this and that, ideal forms, gradualism, “it’s all about family,” “I’m doing this for the children,” “you only live once,” endless distractions constructed on the basis of “realism,”–you’ll become facile with them all. We’ll keep you hopping! Try our new on-and-off paranoia option. Limited light-year adventures available in some areas. Inquire about liability. Ask yourself if the End of Imagination Universe is right for you.

And a small classified ad: “Universe disintegration plus universe invention=You. Details re imagination. Send $35 and self-addressed stamped envelope to PO Box 43920518-A, Altoona, Pennsylvania.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

If you received this as an email, scroll down to MARKETPLACE and order an audio seminar.