PART 2, CRADLE TO GRAVE, BABY

DON’T YOU DARE ROLL THE DICE, YOU SON OF A BITCH

MAY 26, 2011. Peer pressure, which is to say, family and friends, is a major force in the medical world.

It’s really a piece of the model.

It can work this way. Patient A is diagnosed with disease B. Actually, B isn’t a disease at all. It’s a nutritional deficiency. But the medical cartel is always looking to expand its dominion, like any ambitious church, so it labels whatever moves, wiggles, or vibrates a disease or a disorder.

“Hey, we throw a lot of stuff against the wall and see what sticks.”

It’s the infomercial pattern. “So you get the 12 knives at $39.95. That’s a $300 value. But hold on. If you order in the next five minutes, we’ll give you two sets for the same price, can you believe it? And the pork-intestine slicer. And the sharpener, plus the 50 napkins, and season tickets to the Opera is My Life lecture series at the Biloxi 7-Eleven…”

Patient A has been diagnosed with disease B, and therefore receives treatment C, which is a powerful drug that causes a little thing called DNA chain termination. Normal cell reproduction is disrupted.

The patient, on drug C, finds he can’t get out of bed in the morning without an overhead crane. His sister pours him into the car and takes him to the doctor, who says, “The disease is disrupting your cells.”

“What?” the patient says.

His sister pats him on the arm. “Listen to what the doctor is telling you.” she says.

The patient shakes his head.

“Doctor, I’ve read that the drug disrupts cells.”

The doctor smiles and nods.

“Yes, in rare cases, but this is different. It’s the disease doing it. We’re going to have to escalate the treatment. Increase the dose and add another drug.”

The sister nods sagely. She has a degree in house-sitting from a junior college.

The patient closes his eyes. A few tears leak and dribble down his cheeks. Which, of course, prompts the sister to say, “Do you think my brother should see a counselor, Doctor?”

“Might not be a bad idea,” he says. “I can set up an appointment with social services. I think they’ve straightened out the billing scandal down there.”

Flash forward a week. Patient A, who is now on a higher dose of drug C and a new drug, D, which favors disrupting immune-systemcells, is laid up with three infections. A phone call to the doctor, and another appointment, introduces patient A to drug E, an anti-viral, for which, in clinical trials, no efficacy has been established.

Two days later, the patient is vomiting and has diarrhea.

The social services counselor welcomes the pale sweating patient into her office. He is accompanied by his sister and her husband, for moral support. The husband does payroll for a local medical testing lab. He’s now on the case, assuring the patient the doctor has been handling his drug treatment properly.

The conversation with the counselor lasts 20 minutes. The counselor establishes that serious disease can trigger depression. The brother-in-law concurs. This astonishing insight about depression has, of course, consequences. A psychiatrist will probably prescribe one of the SSRIs. Prozac, Paxil.

“I started on Paxil four years ago,” the sister says. “It’s changed my life.”

She smiles and nods at the counselor.

The sister’s husband concurs.

“We had a little problem with the social stigma attached to these…disorders,” he says. “But we got past that. And never looked back.”

“Well,” the patient says, “I was on Paxil after the boating accident. Remember? A week later, I tried to burn down the flag pole in the back yard.”

“I’m glad you mentioned that,” the counselor says. “The psychiatrist will probably try Prozac instead.”

Flash forward again. The patient has been having hallucinations. His sister and brother-in-law tell him Prozac could not be the cause.

The patient says, “But I don’t usually think our dead mother is Big Foot dancing upside down on the ceiling.”

His brother-in-law gives him a hard stare.

“Listen, Bob, tough love isn’t usually my thing, but I’m going there now. You have to keep up the protocol. You can gut it through. We’re with you all the way, but you have to do your part…”

To which the patient replies: “Appreciate the pep talk, bro, but this isn’t friggin’ Afghanistan, and you aren’t my lieutenant.”

The patient’s sister frowns and shakes her head. She calls the psychiatrist later and says she thinks her brother is going over the edge into psychosis.

…Three months into this multi-drug treatment, the patient has another appointment with his doctor. The doctor tells him that despite these heroic pharmaceutical measures, what he suspected all along has come to pass. There is nothing more he can do. The disease has spread. He gives the patient two months to live.

After breaking down and weeping, the sister says to the doctor, “But he should continue taking the drugs, correct?”

The doctor offers a noncommittal shrug. “Research just hasn’t caught up yet to where we are.”

Two days later, the patient, through a herculean effort, staggers from his bed to the computer on his desk and begins to read about disease B.

It turns out there is a clinic in the Bahamas where doctors are using nutrients to treat even advanced cases—there are claims of success in some cases.

The patient makes a call and speaks with one of these doctors. The conversation lasts half an hour. Afterwards, the patient feels better. He feels hope.

Back in bed, he plans how he’ll get himself to the clinic.

Unfortunately, his sister, her husband, and a cousin, who’s flown in from Detroit, recognize patient A is smiling and seems a little better. This sends up red flags. He finally confesses he’s booking a flight to Freeport.

All hell breaks loose.

This is war.

The brother-in-law (who does payroll) handles the money-rip-off scenario aspect. “They’ll bleed you dry. Then they’ll leave you on the side of the road like a dog without a license.”

The cousin, who is a retired prosecutor with chronic shingles, adds the American-alone-in-a-foreign-land-without-a-support-system-they-can-do-anything-they-want-to-to you-and-there-is-no-recourse mantra.

The brother-in-law comes back for an encore with the they’re-just-a-bunch-of-quacks-they’re-not-real-doctors-if-they-had-anything-don’t-you-think-it-would-have-been-approved-and-everybody-would-be-using-it rumba.

Then the sister drops the you’re-crazy-what-will-people-think-you’re-thumbing-your-nose-at-the-only-family-you-have-left-I-always-knew-something-like-this-would-happen-from-the-time-you-were-a-kid you-thought-you-were-different-from-the-rest-of-us tonnage on her brother’s head.

A call comes in from the patient’s uncle in Fresno. The uncle is 92 and has good days and bad days in the nursing home. He tells the patient, “If they’re big men, stand near a doorway. They might give you a badge with a different name on it, if you ask them. Lace up your shoes after surgery.”

When the hubbub finally subsides in the patient’s bedroom, he closes his eyes and lies there in a rancid puddle of shame, resentment, and fear. His relatives go into the living room for a pow-wow.

The phone rings. It’s his friend Allan, a retired loan hustler.

“Listen,” Allan says, “I know what you’re going through. We have a group. I want you to come to a meeting. Every session starts with a member saying, “What’s the last stop on the train track?”

The patient mumbles, “Do they all go choo-choo then?”

“Just trying to help you, pal,” Allan says.

The patient dangles the receiver in his hand, holds it for a minute, then lets it drop on the rug.

Something is taking shape in his mind. Something that’s never occurred to him before.

The thought is interrupted as his sister raises her voice in the living room. She’s saying, “The shame he’s bringing on us. How can I tell my friends about this? We have to stop him from going. Look, here’s his plane ticket on he table.”

Now, it all comes clear.

He realizes that, even though he’s been diagnosed as terminal, he’s supposed to follow the advice of his doctor—who has nothing for him. It’s protocol. Social protocol.

Take the drugs, or stop them, but don’t do anything else. Don’t roll the dice. Rolling dice would be abhorrent.

The real message of his family is, just close your mouth, do what the doctor says, even if it’s nothing, and DIE.

He nods.

That’s it.

Don’t rock the boat.

Don’t switch tracks.

Don’t leave the bus.

The Bahamas. Sunny days. Lying on the beach with a cold vodka- soda, a little paper umbrella.

Maybe that’s just a pipe dream.

The chemo, the Prozac, the other drugs, or nothing—that’s the consensus.

He bangs his fist on the wall behind him.

His family comes rushing in.

“What’s wrong!” his sister says.

He holds up his hand.

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s all right. I want to talk to you.”

The sister, the brother-in-law, and the cousin quickly gather in a little semicircle by his side.

“What is it?” his cousin says.

“I’ve made a decision,” the patient says. He pauses. “I just want you to listen. Don’t interrupt me.” He starts to choke up, but brings himself under control. His face slowly settles into stone. “I’m…not going to Freeport. I…want to you to make sure my plot is ready in the cemetery. It’s supposed to be. Just check on it. I don’t want a big funeral. Family and close friends.”

His sister wails and drops to her knees. She grabs the carpet with her nails and tries to tug it off the floor. Her husband restrains her, pulls her back to her feet.

The cousin frowns and nods slowly.

“Everything’s been paid for,” the brother-in-law says.

The sister screams once. Then she covers her mouth with her hand and bends down and takes her brother’s limp hand. She kisses it over and over.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to be cruel, darling. We’re just so…concerned about you.”

The patient nods.

“I understand,” he says.

His face is composed.

“You want me to die so I’m not going to try to do anything else.”

Silence.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

EVE AND THE SNAKE RETOLD

MAY 26, 2011. One fine day (every day was fine), in the floating place called Astral Island Y-96a4, or The Garden, Eve was sitting naked under a large tree working on her tan, when a long serpent approached, slithering through the tall grass.

Eve sat up and watched him. She and Adam were on their Multi-Dimensional Universe Tour II.

He was the color of old oil. The sun picked up rainbow highlights on his scales. The main thing about him was his smile. She’d seen it on the faces of used-car salesmen, New Age talisman peddlers, and agents.

“Hello, Eve,” he said, coming to rest at her feet. His voice was low and rich, like spoiled caviar.

“Where’s Adam?” he said.

“Oh, he went to Bold Foods to pick up some food,” she said.

“Really?” he said. “There’s a Bold Foods here?”

Eve pointed to three low hills in the distance.

“That way,” she said. “This is a hybrid island. Primitive and pristine on this side, overdeveloped out there in the flats. Tire recappers, gas stations, bars, thrift shops, a couple of drug stores, and a Dome Depot.”

The snake paused at this news.

“Well,” he said, “so you’re eating well?”

“Sure,” she said. “Lots of chips, the chicken noodle soup, salad bar, burgers. Chocolate cake.”

The snake sniffed the air.

“I was wondering if you know what tree you’re sitting under,” he said.

“This?” she said, patting the trunk with her hand. “There’s a plaque on the other side. Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I can smell the apples. Tart.”

“Yes, well,” the snake said, “there’s a rule. You can’t eat any apples .”

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

“I’m surprised,” the snake said.

“How would I know it? Adam and I just arrived last Tuesday.”

“I see,” the snake said. “So you haven’t been briefed.”

She frowned.

“What are you talking about?”

“When people land, they’re instructed on how to proceed. Usually, the clouds part, and the King comes down half-way and issues a few edicts.”

“Haven’t seen a king,” she said.

“Maybe he’s away,” the snake said. “I stand in for him then.”

“That’s good,” she said. “I guess.”

The snake stuck out his tongue, then withdrew it.

“But you see,” he said, “I can issue special dispensations. And for you, I think it’s the right thing to do.”

“Why would that be?” she said.

“Because the apples are quite delicious, and when you eat them, you automatically acquire wisdom. Essentially, you become more like the King.”

“Wisdom?” she said. “In general?”

She seemed a little puzzled.

“No,” he said, “you learn about the distinction between good and evil. It’s a tricky subject. The King knows all about it. It’s a source of his strength.”

“Good and evil,” she said. “For example, when someone is trying to sell you a used pickup with a cracked engine block?”

The snake gave her his big smile.

“Yes,” he said, “that would be one instance.”

“Over a few islands from here,” she said, “Adam and I were at this country club playing golf. On the sixteenth hole, I hooked my tee shot into the rough. I was in there, in the woods, trying to find my ball when a golf cart came whizzing by on the road. It stopped, a porky guy got out, and offered to help me. So we’re searching in all the bushes and tangles, and he says he can give me a good deal on a club membership. But I figured this was baloney, because what’s he doing way out on the sixteenth hustling memberships? Know what I mean? Besides, he doesn’t even have any clubs in his cart. He’s wearing a rug, his pants are checkered, his white shoes have little gold buckles on them. But you know, I didn’t want to call him out. Adam and I had been invited to play the course, so we needed to be polite. We keep looking for the Titleist, and he keeps up the hustle–”

“Okay! Okay!” the snake says. “I get it. But what about the tree and the apple?”

“What about it?” Eve says.

“It’s a very good apple.”

And then Eve turns on a kilowatt smile. She’s really quite lovely.

“Listen,” she says. “Adam and I have been around a block a few times. Right? We’ve visited thousands of these astral islands, and you’d be surprised how many times snakes have tried to run this same number on me. It’s a staple. There’s a book on it somewhere. The temptation, eat the apple, gain knowledge of good and evil, whatever that means, and then the Fall. Wow. I mean, come on. Who cares about good and evil? I know the difference. I’m not stupid. I don’t need to go to school on that. It’s simple. You’re free unless you lean on somebody else’s freedom. Case closed. Why you guys want to keep re-enacting it is beyond me. What’s the point? We should all bow down and support something that’s a scam to begin with? I’m just sunning myself here, Adam will be back from the store soon with goodies, and we’ll have an early supper. Then we might take in a movie.”

The snake coiled and uncoiled a few times.

“Suppose,” he said, “I decide to sink my fangs in your thigh?”

Eve reached behind her and brought out a thin flat L-slab of gray metal. She pointed it at the snake.

“Then,” she said, “I’d have to fill you full of energy that would rip most of your cells apart in under five seconds.”

“Hmm,” he said.

“Yeah. Hmm. Why don’t you find a nice little critter for dinner and leave us alone.”

The snake shook his neck and instantly reappeared as the king. He was large and thunderous in his blue robe, and his white beard swung back and forth under his chin. His eyes bulged, then relaxed back into his sockets. He stared at Eve.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” he said.

Eve nodded.

“Last summer. We stopped off here on the way to the circus at HT4ux. Just for the day.”

“Yes,” he said. “And you and I played out this little scene then.”

“Right,” she said.

“So what are doing back again?”

“We came for the apples. I really like the apples. Very tart. They’re hard to find. Most of the fruit these days is fibrous. It’s dead.”

He nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I have a few discount coupons for the mall. They get fresh fruit in every day from locals.”

“We’d appreciate that,” Eve said.

The king pondered for a few moments.

“No problem. You know, the plaque on the tree. I’m thinking of changing it. Good and evil was a mistake from the beginning. It just didn’t add up. Why should knowledge of good and evil be a bad thing? Redundant, yes. Bad, no? The writer was looking for a hook. I don’t think he found it.”

“No,” she said. “It’s a misdirection no one really cares about. But in all fairness, what really works? Adam and I have discussed it, and we couldn’t come up with anything, either. Eat the apple and lose your power? Won’t be able to sleep at night? See, that would be going the other way, and still it doesn’t compute, because then there’s no temptation to eat the apple. The story just got off on the wrong premise, and there was no way to fix it after that.”

The king sighed.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I’m still amazed so many people bought in.”

“Well, the guilt thing, I guess, delivers a lot of mileage…although Adam and I have never been prone to falling for it.”

The king reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out three wrinkled coupons. He bent down and handed them to Eve.

“Good until Christmas,” he said.

Eve laughed.

“Let’s not get started on that one,” she said.

The king pointed at her.

“No guilt, no redemption,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You know, Adam has this script he’s been trying to peddle for a while. You might take a look at it.”

“He have an agent?” he king said.

“I’m his agent,” Eve said.

“Well, then…”

“Take you an hour to go through it,” she said. “Lots of action. The dialogue’s pretty straightforward.”

“Give me the bottom line.”

“Adam and I create the world and trap the king.”

“The old switcheroo. Might have legs in an art house.”

“We’re not looking for boffo. Starting small.”

“What’s the budget?”

“Four-five mill. Chicken feed.”

“When you get home, check with the Pope. Tell him to call me.”

“Why would he bankroll it?” Eve said.

“The Church feeds off criticism. They get an outrage and sympathy bump. Figures show it. Collection plates. Church attendance.”

“Maybe they could issue a statement when we’re ready for release. Condemning it.”

“Oh, they will…”

“For the extras on the DVD, we could do a sit-down with you.”

The king thought about this.

“If things don’t pick up soon,” he said, “I might even take a small part.”

“Who’s your agent?” Eve said.

“On most deals,” the king said, “the Vatican.”

“Like they need the money.”

He shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “They run me. My cut of their action just about keeps me in in Kleenex.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

WHEN THE WORM TOOK OVER

MAY 25, 2011. Everybody on astral island W-53A2K was free, young, happy, and wild.

Except one worm that moved slowly through the soil.

In his younger days, he’d wanted to write The Great W-53A2K Novel, but his dream had now taken on a new shape.

On a long flat stone near the river, across from the palace where people ran and played in the small grove of purple trees, the worm inscribed a series of indelible smears in the local language.

Five years later, a young shepherd found the stone, took it to the palace, where it was examined by a bevy of drunken scholars. Its message, in essence, was: THE WORM IS GOD.

A general meeting was called, and after much hilarity, a verdict was agreed upon:

“Let’s make the worm God. It might be fun.”

So a search was mounted, and they eventually discovered the creature under a rusty plow by a hay barn near the river. He was taken on a white satin cloth to the palace and installed on a throne.

A scribe was appointed to note and convey his commands.

The first worm edict was: YOU’RE ALL CRAZY AND I’M SANE. THEREFORE, STOP MAKING MAGIC. NO MORE TELEPATHIC TRANSMISSIONS, SPONTANEOUS MATERIALIZATIONS, OR SUNDAY BREAKFASTS. SUNDAY IS FOR CHURCH. I’M THE GOD. SO I CONDUCT THE SERVICES. GATHER HERE, LISTEN TO MY WORDS, AND HEED THEM. WE’RE GOING TO WAR, WHEN I SELECT A SUITABLE ENEMY. DIVERT THE RIVER AND DRY OUT THE BED. WEAR CLOTHES. NO MORE NAKEDNESS. PRAY TO ME AT BREAKFAST, LUNCH, AND DINNER. FORGET YOUR NAMES. YOU HAVE NO NAMES. BURN THE FIELDS. IF YOU DREAM AT NIGHT, REPORT YOUR DREAMS TO THE SCRIBE AND I WILL INTERPRET THEM. LEVITATING IS A FELONY. ON TUESDAYS, EVERYONE WEARS A BLINDFOLD. ALL DAY. NO DRINKING WATER ON WEEKENDS. ALCOHOL IS BANNED. ILLNESS IS A SIN PUNISHABLE BY DEATH. NO WRITTEN OR SPOKEN SENTENCE MAY BE LONGER THAN SIX WORDS. ADVERBS ARE OUTLAWED. STOP WEEDING GARDENS. TRAVEL IS ILLEGAL. ADDRESS ME AS HE WHO CREATED THIS PLACE. DO NOT SHOW YOUR TEETH FOR ANY REASON. FISHING IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH. WALK SLOWLY. WEAR ONE SHOE. EXTINGUISH ALL LIGHTS AFTER SUNSET. EAT STALE BREAD. BY A SYSTEM YET TO BE DETERMINED, HAPPINESS WILL BE QUANTIFIED IN UNITS. EACH PERSON MAY EXPERIENCE THREE UNITS A YEAR. MEMORY IS OUTLAWED. SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE MUST BE CLEARED THROUGH ME.

The scribe read the edict to a throng gathered outside the palace.

Afterwards, the laughter went on for several hours.

One by one, the people disappeared. Winked out where they were standing. The last to go was the scribe.

So now, on astral island W-53A2K, the worm, alone on his white cloth on the throne, in the palace, ruled no one.

“It’s a shame,” he said. “I was going to create a whole new civilization. Gift cards, cell phones, subways, Oprah, news headlines, law schools…”

Suddenly, a thin man in a suit appeared in the throne room and stepped forward.

“Your Majesty of Majesties,” he said. “I’m here from TY437UIS49Qv-32-ITYD. It’s quite an advanced operation, and we just lost our God in a tsunami. Terrible thing. We’re interviewing candidates for the job. The superstructure of our society has 2Q-/%yuv7* layers. Very complex. Maintaining order is a top priority. I have a feeling you might be right for the job.”

Silence.

The worm gazed at the thin man for a long time. The man didn’t seem to mind waiting.

Finally, the worm spoke.

“I assume there would be conditions. A contract of some kind.”

The man nodded.

“Yes, sir. I have a copy with me. Basically, you would exert unlimited power. Quarterly reviews of your actions would be compared to a Standards Board Outlook long form, which was drafted for the purpose of assuring our population would remain in a servile and malleable state of mind.”

“So, for example,” the worm said, “total destruction is out of the question.”

“Well, of course.”

“And devastating storms, floods, magnetic shifts, earthquakes and the like would be adjudicated against a grid of ongoing operational control.”

“There are clauses which cover that, yes.”

“You have the landing platform of a myth structure on which I could credibly alight?”

“I believe so, sir. Its cardinal premise is ‘the lowest shall be highest.’”

The worm considered this.

“I’m the only one who can perform magic.”

“Goes without saying. Over the course of twenty centuries, we’ve scrubbed the memory of it from the collective consciousness.”

“Oh,” the worm said, “you have a collective consciousness?”

“We do,” the man said. “Its propagation is Job One. Actually, it’s a fiction, but a widespread belief in it is as effective as the real thing—if there were a real thing.”

“Yes,” the worm said, “I believe I understand. Now, if I wanted to change my identity, even my appearance…”

“This could take place gradually, over a suitable period of time,” the thin man said. “For example, you could become a seventeen-year-old boy at the height of his sexual power. There are coteries of girls which could be made available. But that’s just one possible scenario. We’re flexible on the details.”

“An old man holding a scroll sitting in a thundercloud, a radiant figure floating down from a cherry tree, a fierce hawk diving through still blue air to seize prey, a troll surfacing from a pond, a hybrid genetically engineered military leader holding an electronic paralyzing whip, a priestess adorned in gleaming metal astride a magnificent stallion…”

“All those, and more,” the man said.

Again, silence.

“And this would be a permanent job?” the worm said.

“That is the whole point, sir,” the man said.

“You are continuing to degrade the intelligence and energy of the population, over time?”

The thin man nodded.

“We have a medical establishment dedicated to that goal. Drugs. They depress function.”

“While mitigating symptoms.”

“Yes.”

“I’m interested,” the worm said.

“I thought you might be,” the man said.

“What about my rake-off from taxes?”

“After your ascension, you start in at eleven percent. That figure increases each year by one percent, based on a positive report from the Standards Board Outlook Committee, until you max out at forty-nine percent.”

“And who holds the other fifty-one percent?”

“We do.”

“Who is we?”

“Well, sir, it’s a question you’re not permitted to ask.”

“I see. Was that why your recently deceased God was wiped out in the tsunami? He asked the question?”

“We had to send a message. After all, we watch God.”

“And who watches you?” the worm said.

“Even I’m not privy to that information,” the thin man said. “I’m told it’s an infinitely receding series of control centers. But that may be just a cover story.”

“Can you be promoted?”

“Yes.”

“What about me?”

“No. You’re God.”

“Can I write a book?”

“Of course. We would consider that a plus.”

“Where would I live?”

“As far as the people are concerned, your home is in the sky. Actually, you and your staff would occupy a villa overlooking the sea in temperate zone 4A04dtL.”

“Why have a God at all?” the worm asked. “Why not make one up?”

The thin man pursed his lips.

“It’s a position. It exists. Someone has to issue commands, edicts, and arbitrary decisions.”

“There would be churches in my name?”

“Churches, temples, cathedrals, small far-flung franchises.”

“After the unfortunate tsunami, you could have introduced a double of the old God.”

“We thought of that, but we have the opportunity to stimulate the population with a Great Change. It will be said you are the inheritor of the mantle, by His decree.”

“Which means you’ll have to announce that he died.”

“No. We’ll say he has important business elsewhere, where things need to be cleaned up.”

“Then I’m simply his deputy,” the worm said.

“The scepter will be passed. Permanently.”

“Do you have television?”

“A form of it. There are no screens. Electromagnetic waves of meaning distributed over the whole system.”

“I can promise to give much and yet give little?”

The thin man paused. He moved a step closer to the throne.

“Sir, let me make this very clear. Your job is to promise everything and give nothing.”

“Why?” the worm asked.

“Because we’ve found, through trial and error, that things work out best that way. The total hoax is the most effective hoax.”

“In other words,” the worm said, “the people pretend I’m a giving God.”

The thin man snapped his fingers.

“You’ve got it,” he said.

“Where do I sign?” the worm said.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE MAGIC UNIVERSE

MAY 25, 2011. When you throw off the myths and fairy tales and diversions and distractions, when you offload the various cosmologies and religious superstructures and hierarchies, and when you stop being hypnotized by science and its speculations on origins, you are left with a sense of relief, because you no longer have a compulsion to fall back on the idea of The Sacred.

People who are devoted to some notion of the Sacred…well, they’re hooked on that. They firmly believe it is an existential category, and without it everything would disintegrate or spin into chaos or suddenly shrink down into incomprehensible babble. That’s what they think. They’re operating from a basis in which they simply don’t understand the range of imagination and what it offers.

They’re really taking one tiny slice of what imagination can produce and blowing it up into a unity (“the Sacred”) that is for them the whole ballgame.

Sacred is the basic umbrella they walk around under all the time, and it’s the ultimate backup when they have to find a backup.

But Sacred is simply one INVENTED idea/feeling.

It tends to decay over time, and then universe becomes a fetish. Qualities are ascribed to it by puerile minds.

I say all this because magic is definitely not the same thing as sacred.

And people have them confused.

Magic, vis-a-vis the universe, is all about the ability to make changes in space and time, so that what appears to be a billiard-ball cause-and-effect system opens up into a reflection, confirmation, and fulfillment of desire. One’s own desire. And this happens in an uplifting expansive way.

Charting the course of a person’s life can be done in myriad ways, but one way is by discovering how his desires change over time. However, there is a missing element: what does really and most profoundly and expansively desire?

And does he ever discover this?

Or does he skim across the surface?

And if he does discover this, does he then create action that will lead to the fulfillment of that desire?

These and other related questions lead you toward magic vis-a-vis the world.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list, and check out Jon’s audio seminars at: http://tinyurl.com44/xac31

FRED MEETS GOD

THE EXTENT AND DEPTH OF HUMAN CONDITIONING

MAY 25, 2011. Here is a principle for you. To understand how deep human programming goes, you have to view the extreme possibilities in the opposite direction.

If you believe there are ten things in this universe, only ten, and most people are aware of three, then you can say they are minus-7. Their conditioning is keeping them from noticing 7 things. Get it?

But of course, there aren’t only ten things in the universe. You’ve missed the extreme possibilities. Let’s say, in truth, there are a quadrillion to the quadrillionth-power things in this universe—and you just found that out. If you know that now, then you say the people who are aware of only three things in the universe are programmed to an incredibly greater degree than you originally believed. Their blindness is their programming.

If you want to understand the depth of human programming, you need to be able to view the extreme possibilities in the opposite direction.

In the articles I’ve been writing about language in the last few months, I’ve been pointing out that many possible kinds of language exist, including those that haven’t been invented yet…and it is ingrained conditioning that prevents people from realizing this.

They’re programmed to communicate in subject-action verb-object sentences, or subject-being verb-adjective sentences.

I’ve suggested, for example, that languages can be invented in which nouns are also verbs…rays and streamers and energies of action radiate from them. These nouns are things and they are actions all rolled up into one.

I’ve further proposed that these nouns could, while having great impact, change their meanings radically, over and over.

I’ve suggested that it is the viewer, the reader (in the case of written text) who, THROUGH IMAGINATION, would find and attribute and invent these changing meanings.

A language of dynamic imagination…

Of course, in order for such languages to appear and be used, human beings would need to escalate their reliance on imagination. Which would create new dimensions and layers of consciousness.

And if we conceive of the radical possibilities of these invented languages (which I’ve been painting for the past year), and we compare them to the kind of language-awareness that’s prevalent in Earth cultures, we can see that the depth of the restrictive programming about language is much greater than we supposed.

I choose not to focus much on the conditioning side of the coin—I’m interested in the upward breakthroughs.

So in this piece, I want to try to give you an example.

Imagine that you’re looking at a shape on paper. It has four or five parts and they flow through and around each other. You begin to use your imagination on it. You begin to invent and therefore find meanings in this complex shape. All in all, you’re going to look at this shape for about ten minutes, and you’re going to imagine/invent what you can.

Well, let’s say that in the space of that ten minutes, for a second ortwo, you’re going to imagine a particular flash of ideas/images/meanings/sensations…..and in that second or two, EVERYTHING I write from now on in this piece, after this intro, is going to be that flash, conveyed to you through your own imagination, IN THOSE ONE OR TWO SECONDS, ZAP BOOM, ZOW.

Which is, of course, just a tiny fraction of what you’re going to invent/see in that shape in 10 minutes…just a tiny fraction, but it’s there, it’s indisputably there. Pretend that’s so.

Everything I’m going to write from now on in this article is going to be what flashes for you in two seconds of looking at that complex shape, in a language that has just been invented.

This is what I mean by EXTREME POSSIBILITIES.

This is what I mean by shaking off the doldrum of Earth culture.

And if you ask, is this complex shape you’re looking at a really cardinal shape in this new invented language, I’m going to say: no it isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the more ordinary shapes in that language which has 50 million different shapes.

Okay?

Ready?

Here we go.

Fred is a helluva guy. He’s made 50 universes I know about. They’re interesting places. He just dreams them up and pops them into existence. Bang. Like that.

He’s pretty cheerful, too. He has a place over by the river and the tigers. He doesn’t try to tame them. Couldn’t if he wanted to. They come running at him while he’s out for a walk, launch themselves at him, and he puts up his hand and stops them. But they stop him, too. It’s a standoff, everybody hanging in mid-air, until it’s time to fall down and out wheezing and sneezing and laughing. That’s our provincial version of a picnic.

Anyway, a few months ago, Fred was roaming around, a long way from here, and he came across this universe that had an entrance like a big mall. There was a glowing sign above the entrance:

MAGICAL WEIRD SECRET FANTASTIC ESOTERIC FABULOUS ILLUMINATING ENLIGHTENING ULTIMATE PLACE.

A guy in a tattered doorman’s uniform stood by the door.

“How much?” Fred said.

“Twelve bucks cover, two-drink minimum. The band doesn’t show up until eleven.”

Fred handed him a hundred. The guy blinked, smiled, stepped aside, and Fred walked through the door.

Inside it was ink black. Little holes in black cloth covered the ceiling. Gold glints showing through.

Fred walked into another dark room where there were all sorts of paintings on the walls and altars and tiny candles in long rows. He moved along into a blue dome, where men were standing around measuring things. Globes, plants, stuffed creatures. A inscribed plaque hung over a big blue cube. “Sacred Geometry.” Fred watched the men measuring things for a minute and then walked to the exit and into the nightclub, which was almost empty. A few people sat at the bar. At the end of the bar, he saw a blank door in the wall.

As he approached it, a big guy in a jump suit blocked his way.

“For employees only,” he said.

Fred nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to go inside. How about five hundred.”

Fred flashed his roll, peeled off five bills, and the big guy snatched them out of his hand.

“You get two minutes,” he said.

Fred stepped past him, opened the door and went in.

It was an old office with a light bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. Behind a battered desk, a man sat looking at big ledgers. He glanced up and waved Fred to a chair. Fred sat down.

The man looked up.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Just trying to get the lay of the land,” Fred said.

“Well,” the man said, “I’m the boss. God.”

“Really.”

“Right.”

“You own this place?”

The man smiled.

“I own everything,” he said.

“That’s a broad term.”

“Anything you can see, anywhere you go, it’s mine.”

Fred leaned back in his chair.

“So how do you play it?” he said.

The man looked at Fred for a few seconds.

“You some kind of hipster?” he said. “Basically, nobody leaves this universe. That’s the rule. And it’s a good rule, because there’s nowhere else to go.”

“But I came from somewhere else,” Fred said.

“You think you did,” the man said, “but if it’s real I own it. Get it?”

“I think I do,” Fred said.

“Of course,” the man said, “with somebody like you, which we don’t get too often, there are arrangements that can be made.”

“Sure,” Fred said.

“Make me an offer,” the man said.

“I won’t punch a big hole in space-time,” Fred said.

“What?”

Fred said it again.

“Wise guy, huh?” the man said.

Fred smiled.

“Just chewing the fat,” he said.

“I could call security and have you locked up.”

“Yeah,” Fred said. “but wherever you put me, I would still have access to space-time.”

Silence, as the man stared at Fred.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Let’s take it down a notch.”

“Good idea,” Fred said. “I’ll give you this.”

And he produced a high stack of gold bars standing on the floor.

“Real stuff?” the man said.

“Hundred percent pure,” Fred said.

“What’s your game?” the man said.

“Just nosing around,” Fred said. He paused. “I make you for a middle manager. Somebody put you in charge and they went off. You’re God by appointment. Interim. But you’ve been here a long time. And whoever gave you the job, the one who made this whole continuum…for him it was just a lark. He popped it, then needed a deputy. You’re running a protection racket. You collect skim. You probably have a few good hypnotists working for you. Some PR people. They try to keep things smooth.”

There was a long silence.

The man stood up.

“If it exists,” he said, “I made it and it’s mine.”

“Sure,” Fred said. “Play out the string.”

“You’re guilty.”

“Of what?”

“I could list fifty violations,” the man said. “It all comes down to denying I’m the one and only creator.”

“Yeah,” Fred said, “that would be it. I’ve heard it before. I was hoping this place would be a little more interesting, but…same old same old.”

The man’s face turned purple.

“I’m in the BOOK,” he said.

“Right,” Fred said. “I was in a place once where people wrote a book apout me. I laughed for a long time until they couldn’t stand listening to it, and they burned it.”

“Well,” the man said, trying to pull himself together. “That’s your problem. I’ve got mine.”

“You have no idea,” Fred said. “But eventually, I bet, you will.”

He turned to leave and felt a strong pulse at his back. It was one of those stay-where-you-are tentacles…he shrugged it off like a slow Thursday afternoon and disappeared.

Fred gets around. He brings my wife and me exotic little souvenirs from his trips, and we have them hanging on the wall of our living room. They’re usually geometric knick knacks. He tells us they represent what he calls “one-and only” places. People prop up some invisible celebrity who lives far away from them and claim he made their particular continuum. I don’t quite get it. It sounds crazy. If I needed that kind of thing, I’d vote for Fred—but he’d just start that laughing thing. Truth be told, my wife and I are getting a little tired of the decorations on the wall. It’s building up into a clutter. She’s almost ready for a trip to the Void. That’s where you stop creating anything for a while. It’s a zero state. Very refreshing.

We used to run a spa for it. That’s where we met Fred. He came in one day and we let him use a void-room for a few years. When he came out, he said, “You know, if they made bullshit into money, everybody in every universe would be a billionaire.” For that one we inscribed a sign, and it’s above the sink in the kitchen, next to the little two-inch coil that supplies all the energy we need in this continuum.

Once, three guys from somewhere showed up and tried to snatch it. My wife and I launched our striped selves at them, and there wasn’t much to clean up afterwards.

BOOM. Your two seconds are up. And that’s what you invented in two seconds of looking at one shape…which you’re going to keep looking at for ten minutes…and that shape is one of 50 million in that language.

Chew on it.

Think about it.

Imagine extreme possibilities.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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ENGINEERING A COCKEYED CONTINUUM

MAY 24, 2011. Well, we tried to build a universe, you know, a really big one, but it kept falling apart. They shipped in some seal they said was unbeatable, but that didn’t even begin to help close the cracks.

It must have been a design flaw, but the architects swore it wasn’t their fault. And the bio-labs were useless.

The engineers tried, but they were on patch-patch duty around the clock, and then big sections caved in and blew out through the wormholes.

It was a mess.

One guy, I don’t know, some kind of nomad on independent contract, just laughed and told us we were going about it the wrong way. He said all we needed to do was stand back and set up a really good movie projector. Something like that. Nobody paid any attention to him.

Then, finally, a domehead scholar showed up, and in three days he solved the whole problem.

Religion.

Going that way brought everything into focus.

Turned out it was the universal seal, and those huge drifting pieces came back together like filings drawn to a magnet.

Of course, you then convince the inhabitants they need to bow and scrape and believe in one creative force that lies outside themselves. You can sidestep the need to appoint actual deities by claiming they’re all invisible. That would be a tough sell for about five minutes, and then everybody would settle in.

Just a matter of transference (non-Freudian), through which the inhabitants yield up their native capacity to do magic to gods they’ll never see or know.

When, in the general population, symptoms of “magic-repression” rear their heads, you call it something else, and you distract everybody by inventing ceremonies and rituals.

Scriptures are nice. Particularly, if they’re said to have been found rather than concocted.

Eventually, people won’t even know what you mean by the word magic. They’ll claim they’re confused, it doesn’t makes sense, it must have happened in a distant past too obscure to reconstruct.

Centuries later, everybody is used to being inside the continuum. Permanently.

Of course, that wasn’t what the original designers had in mind when they started building the universe, but they were willing to make sacrifices to get the job done.

And that movie projector deal was apparently too far-out for them to grasp. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of time and suffering, if they’d caught on to the concept that reality can be manufactured whole-hog. Boom. It doesn’t need piecemeal construction at all.

You put one guy in the Void, which is to say, you ask him to stop creating altogether, and once he does that and gets used to the state of mind, he unrolls a whole universe from scratch, from nothing, in a few minutes, at most.

If you want to go into his continuum and see what’s it like when he’s done, you can. But there are no gods, there is no ritual, there are no hierarchies, and there is no contention of SACREDNESS about his art.

And the measurements of things? You know, the fact that a leaf on a nut tree is 5.1265 to the length of its 12.4902 branch…and that ratio is also found in the eye to the nose of a certain fish and the horn to the leg of a particular mammoth and the tooth to the jaw of a monkey…it was just the way it was. Interesting, but no big deal.

You can visit this universe whenever you want to. And leave, too. There aren’t any entrance or exit signs. You just hop in and hop out.

It might be fun, it might be thrilling, it might be ecstatic, it might be boring. Up to you to decide.

You don’t like this one, there are plenty of others to see.

One—that is to say, the illusion there is only one—is always a problem. The continuum that has Earth in it—they call it the physical universe. To a lot of people who look at it from the outside, it’s a joke, because, well, the illusion is operating there. All manner of weird things going on. The pride in living in the “only one,” the continuous manufacturing of humility, too, as the flip side of that coin. Those people are really bizarre. Even the scientists. They keep figuring out more and more about the construction details—which, of course, is okay, if that’s what they want to do—but what do they have in the end? What do they think is going to be the result of all that work? Seems like another twist on religion. You could just hand them a complete set of blueprints, but they’d probably make a Scripture out of it. I once knew a guy off the X-145 who tried to set himself up as a god in one of these continua. No, really. He’d come out on his balcony every morning in a multi-colored bathrobe and holding, what was it, a lamp in his hand. I forget what it was supposed to signify.

He could talk, I’ll give him that. And he’d draw small crowds. But they thought he was funny. They laughed and took pictures. The guy said he had created that continuum and therefore he was in charge of it. I mean, even if he had made it (which he hadn’t), so what? He could suddenly make up all sorts of rules? The only basic rule is, don’t punch a hole in a continuum somebody else created. That is, unless it’s one of those “only ones,” and the people there need a kick in the pants…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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CREATING REALITY (updated)

MAY 23, 2011. Creating reality presupposes that the status quo isn’t permanent. This sounds obvious, but when you expand the meaning and territory of status quo and realize it covers all aspects of life and even the universe itself, you have something worth considering and chewing on.

You have magic.

You have whatever qualities a human being possesses that would allow him to alter the status quo.

When a person steps out into this journey, one of the first mistakes he can make is to assume that whatever reality he creates must resemble, in all respects, physical reality. It must mirror physical reality.

In painting, this would be saying the artist has to paint a bowl that looks like a bowl and behaves like a bowl, and he has to put apples in it that look like apples—his success DEPENDS on his ability to paint apples that look like they could be picked right off a tree.

It would be like saying a slave, newly released, has to imitate his former master down to the last detail of form, habit, style, thought, and action.

It would be saying the son has to emulate the father.

There used to be a word that was quite popular. You don’t hear it used in the same way anymore. The word is REBEL. Not protester, rioter. Rebel. At one time, the word carried a sense, in some quarters, that the person had intelligence. He had some inkling of what he was doing and why. He had a spirit of struggle and determination. He wasn’t just saying no to something, he had something better in mind to replace what he was rebelling against.

I bring this up, because, in order to create reality and cast aside some aspect of the status quo, a person needs to have the spirit of a rebel. He can’t be a slave in his mind. He can’t be a know-nothing. He can’t be a fool.

The spirit of the rebel permits a new perspective about reality—how reality seeps in and puts people into a state of sleep. The rebel doesn’t want to go to sleep.

But these days, there is a culture of spiritual change in which the person is essentially passive. He looks to the rainbow to come down out of the sky and embrace him, without effort—and he believes that the Great Change will just descend on him like a pleasant and forever dream.

That person doesn’t create new realities.

That person certainly doesn’t see that this space-time continuum is merely one work of art among many. That person doesn’t entertain such an idea.

To get a little background on the depth of creating reality, let’s revisit the old idea of the labyrinth, a prominent piece of myth in the ancient world. I want to expand the meaning of it. The labyrinth, the maze is really all about THE FASCINATION WITH DISCOVERING THE MYSTERIES OF REALITY. That’s why it’s a labyrinth. It draws you in. You become increasingly attracted to solving mysteries and ironing out details.

Does this idea remind you of anything?

This is physics. Modern physics, and allied sciences. You go deeper and deeper into the universe and you try to figure out answers to all the questions.

You end up in the center of the universe and you realize you have no idea what’s going on at the most profound level.

To illustrate, here is a statement that has been attributed to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine:

“In my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps…”

Perfect. Reality, as it presents itself, becomes such an intriguing labyrinth that you journey further and further into the heart of it, seeking its answers, its ultimate answers, and finally you discover that the mysteries you were solving were not the mysteries you wanted to solve.

From this perspective, does it really matter whether, for example, the people who built the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids lined them up with astronomical events in the distant skies? Does it matter whether the Ark of Noah is buried somewhere in a mountain in Asia? Does it matter whether light is composed of particles or waves or both? The question is: what reality are you going to CREATE?

At one time, I seriously considered trying to raise funds for a creative center that would function, day to day, as a residence for students. Someday, I may pick up that project again. But meanwhile, this, this site and these emails have been my center.

The work continues.

In 2005, the Dalai Lama wrote, in The Universe is a Single Atom: “…if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterizes our individuality as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence. The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for all attachment, clinging and the development of numerous prejudices.”

I propose the original basis of Tibetan practice had quite a different view. First, the philosophy of emptiness was not really about “delusions of self.” In fact, self was rightly understood to be quite real and quite powerful, independent of anything going on in the world, in nature, in the universe. The emptiness, or void, was really a state of existence in which, BY CHOICE, an individual, a quite conscious individual who knew he was creating reality, decided to stop creating—as he most certainly could, and can.

One could say this is an experiment. The individual wants to experience what happens when he stops creating reality. And he finds out.

He is in a “nothing.” This nothing is not about the impermanence of things…it IS the state in which an individual simply ceases to generate reality. Period.

Of course, he can then decide to create reality again—as it is, as it was, or as he wants it to be.

The universe is not one collective atom. It is a movie, ultimately projected by the individual.

Magic is: the individual creating reality.

All philosophies which assert “vast and universal interdependence of everything” have, at this point, been co-opted and supported, to one degree or another, by elites who use them to promote an agenda which simultaneously de-emphasizes the individual and inflates the prospect of political collectivism—a condition in which interdependence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and humans become ciphers and units in the blueprint of Central Planning.

Magic is as far beyond this as Tesla was from an amoeba.

JON RAPPOPORT

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

www.nomorefakenews.com

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MAGIC AND EGO

MAY 22, 2011. There is much baloney that needs to be swept off the magic table. Who could be interested in the subject with so many cheap substitutes sitting there in piles?

A few words on EGO. Which is from the Latin and means: “I.” That’s what it means. It’s a pronoun. You know: I, me, you, he, him, she, her…

One of the biggest globs of nonsense floating around is the notion that ego is intrinsically bad. Part of this, of course, comes from a semantic distortion many centuries in the making.

Ego is now supposed to be associated with boastfulness, lack of concern about others, lying and trampling to move one’s own status forward, and so on. That’s how it comes down to us.

Humility, on the other hand, is a virtue. This is what we’re told. Well, when you get in there and look at it, it usually translates into, “I’m not important, I only serve others, I’m non-self-inflating. I’m kind, generous, and loyal. Please give me a gold star. I’m a model citizen, but somehow I can’t catch a ride on the trolley.”

It’s an act. It’s a role. It’s theater with a quite low transmission level.

Let’s get it straight. You can be creative and powerful without trampling on other people. Okay? And you can be generous without wearing an old robe and going up the hill to catch your water in a storm drain every morning.

Both these terms, EGO and HUMILITY, are useless. They’ve been walked on so much that no one can find a clue in them anymore. They’re misdirections. Mechanisms for social control.

But people still love to play with them. Goody-two-shoes types really work them. It’s a twisted morality game that comes straight out of religion. I don’t know about you, but I was never raised to be egotistical or humble. That wasn’t part of the dinner conversation.

“So, Jon, what did you do today? Did you help an old lady across the street and then bow down to her and make three prostrations? Or did you stand on the hill looking over the school and raise a bullhorn to your mouth and shout your name a hundred times and pound your chest?”

Can’t remember such a conversation in my sallow youth.

Magic has absolutely nothing to do with humility. Or Ego.

NOTHING.

You take a word, EGO, and in Latin it means “I.” That’s all it means. Then, centuries later, it means “a terrible person who only cares about himself and uses other people and deceives them and harms them, in order to advance his own power.”

Hmm. Is there a clue here?

Somebody wanted to erode and mangle the sense of self by loading it up with abhorrent qualities. Gee, who would do that? Religion? The Church? In the effort to control the individual?

Let’s check that out. The myth starts with eternal guilt. Well, yes. Adam and Eve ate an apple and destroyed the future of the human race in four seconds. It wasn’t even apple sauce or cobbler. One bite. Boom. Guilty. Bad boy! Bad girl! Sin of pride. “I’m more important than God.” “He told me not to take the Porsche to the dance, but I stole the key and crashed it into a lamppost.”

Then fast forward…if I’m not mistaken, there were people all over Europe who were doing some kind of conga line with whips, flagellating each other and themselves. Seems to convey an attempt to arrive at HUMILITY.

Eat the apple and destroy humanity or beat myself with the whip? Any other options? No? Well, okay, give me that nine-tails. Can I put on some cream first?

Keep in mind, as well, that the Roman Church controlled the Latin language, was its central keeper in Europe after the fall of Rome. Ego is Latin. Want to twist a word? Helps if you control the language of which it’s a piece. Might be something there.

…And then, down the road, when psychology enters the scene, EGO gains new meanings and contexts. For example, and this is a beauty, “ego defense mechanisms.” Hello? Excuse me, but when you break this down, doesn’t it simply mean a person will try to ward off external threats? But that doesn’t sound like “science.” Ego defense mechanisms. The implication is: people set up defenses against imaginary threats because they’re insecure…and to one degree or another, everybody operates this way. More erosion of the simple notion of “I” and “ego.”

Hey, I was just saying “I” and all of a sudden I ate an apple and was guilty forever and so I beat myself for a few centuries and now I’m insecure and trying to defend myself by making up imaginary paranoid threats? I was just going to say, “I think I’ll go to the store.”

But wait, there’s more!

In the 1960s, the US began to import various Asian spiritual philosophies. Of course, the few really good parts were left in Asia. The stuff America (and other countries) got was all about, how shall I put this, NO-SELF. In several forms. Stay poor, if you can. Forget about your power, you don’t really have any, that was just a delusion. Do nothing for self and everything for others. Otherwise, you’ll just be pushing your own EGO, which is terrible, terrible, very naughty.

The artificial polarity. It’s either EGO or HUMBLE. Take your pick. Of course, either way, you’re screwed.

And if you don’t think variations on this perverse ego-humility theme survived, with twists and turns, into the 70s and 80s and right up to the present day, I have a time shares on Pluto I’d really love to stick you with.

Magic is about power. Can’t skirt it or walk around it or build a detour or pretend it’s all coming from some collective goo of consciousness in the waa waa of the daa daa.

But you see, power has been hooked in with ego and humility, through social programming, and that leaves lots of people confused, helpless, and beached. Because they went to the 99-cent store and bought the program and plugged it into their heads.

Magic is basically the power to create extraordinary realities. Ultimately, without limit.

People who don’t want to cross the line from non-magic to magic think that ordinary reality is peachy-keen and quite enough for a lifetime or a hundred lifetimes.

They’re right about one thing. Ordinary reality, in its own way, is quite astonishing.

How did it get here? Who let it in the door? Was it the result of a fire sale? Did they empty out the stables and the castles and the junkyards of stars from some other universe and dump all the leftovers here?

“Well, we don’t need this gizmo, what’s it called? Law of the Conservation of Energy? Give it to them. See what they can do with it.”

People are touchy. You start talking about magic and they want to tread a narrow space. They may hear a sentence or two they like, and it’s all good…and then you say something that pushes them off a cliff. At least, that’s what they think is happening.

You say, “Suppose I could turn ten minutes into six hours. Would you come to my house?”

And over the cliff they go.

“I can compress an hour into four seconds.”

“No thanks. Look, Ihave to see my orthodontist.”

But some day soon, when they invent a machine you attach to your ear, and a movie streams into your head in 30 seconds, a whole two-hour film, people will buy it. They’ll hook up the earpiece and play the movie, and after the 30 seconds is over they won’t have the slightest idea what it was about, but they’ll feel as if they do. They’ll feel something enormous happened, and they’ll be happy with that. Because it was a machine. So the earpiece did shrink time, and that was okay.

A machine can be magic, but a human can’t.

There is a set of rules about that. Tinkering with time, au naturel, is a felonious act. By definition. And that’s all it is, a definition.

Let’s get real about this. You have seven or eight billion people on the planet who ALREADY believe in magic. Only they call it religion.

They shove their religion into a non-theatrical context where they have an arrow that leads straight up to heaven. They’re sold on it. They’re operating out of a change that happened somewhere in the 4^th century, when a few people decided that religion in the West should become rational.

That was the cover story. “Oh yes, we have rational religion now. It’s different. See? It’s all founded on a solid basis. We know where to go for the official information. The depot. They have it there in a book.”

And the witches of the Middle Ages were different. They were the outsiders, the heretics, because they were looking at other books. Instead of going into Barnes and Noble, they were frequenting little independent operations, and that was that. Heretics. Besides, they were actually trying out manifestation and direct healing, which was supposed to be property of the Roman Church.

Property? What? Somebody suddenly owns magic and has a monopoly on it? No anti-trust laws? No law suits?

The Church eventually decided their own rudimentary attempts at magic weren’t worth the effort. They had a business to run. They were sending salesmen out into the field. They were building franchises in some pretty tough places. They needed to screw their minds in tight and concentrate on the bottom line. Numbers of adherents. Collection plates. Taxes. Treaties and deals with monarchs. Cost-risk assessments of missionaries skewered on spits versus new members signed up for the duration.

Very rational.

They had St. Thomas Aquinas, who was recycling Aristotle to prove there had to be a God, and even though his argument had holes in it you could drive an 18-wheeler through, it was a good imitation of rationality.

They had stern people with pinched faces talking about redemption and absolution and, quietly, bribes.

“We can get you into heaven, but it’s going to cost you. Joey here will be around next Tuesday to collect the silverware. Put it in a bag.”

Redemption? From what? I was eating an apple in the back yard, and three guys in crazy hats walked through the gate and asked to see some ID.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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HORROR, VAMPIRES, ALIENS

THE MEANING OF WHAT’S HAPPENING ON THE SCREEN

MAY 20, 2011. Whatever else they do, movies allow people to sit in the dark and experience, from just enough safe distance, the lives of characters they would never inhabit on that other screen called Reality.

People want to feel what it’s like to be all sorts of strange creatures.

Ghosts, monsters, demons, vampires, aliens, trolls, androids, wizards, lizards, space gods, tyrants, machines…

People want to feel that.

Objections are made about the effect on the culture. I’m not here, in this article, to argue about that.

I’m focusing on the brilliance of virtual experience.

The audience as actor, living out on the edge, investing tonnage of emotion, stepping into the shoes of weird desires that can’t be played out on the street.

This is theater.

Why do they have to get their juice from movies?

They want to be active and passive at the same time.

You could call this fear, but the fact remains: people want it both ways, simultaneously. There is a kick to it.

“I am and I’m not.” In the same moment.

This is not an aspect of human behavior that has been co-opted and classified by the pseudo-science of psychology. Not yet.

“I am, and I’m not.”

This is actually a state of being.

“I’m sucking the blood from the neck of some naïve idiot, and I’m also sitting in front of my flat-screen chewing a Snickers.”

O joy. O paradise.

How about this as a translation of that dual passive-active state?

I CAN IMAGINE, NO I CAN’T.

I CAN INHABIT ANOTHER LIFE, NO I CAN’T.

I’M AN ACTOR, NO I’M NOT.

The jolt of a car that bounces off three walls and then plunges out over a cliff into a ravine—I’m in the car screaming and dying, I’m the car itself, waiting for the first big crash on the way down, I’m the guy who was originally chasing the car shooting at it—what could be better?

Eventually, for a veteran fan of horror films, the inflicting of neck wounds and the drinking of blood and the burning of suburban homes is what he believes is the best thing he could imagine on his own, if the movies didn’t exist. When ten or 20 average annoying people are crushed under the foot of a giant toaster oven with the face of a medieval gargoyle, it’s a religious moment.

I’m buried in the movie, I’m killing idiots, and I’m eating Milk Duds, honey-clustered peanuts, and naturally, I’m taking my Ritalin. It’s heaven.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, movies have to keep upping the ante, to drag people into the theater. The killings have to be more grisly and sudden, the explosions have to be more intense, and now the glasses have to be 3-D. We’ve got IMAX 3-D. I guess in-the-round holograms are next.

“In the 1930s, in a movie, if you had an actress in a wheelchair and pushed her down a flight of stairs, people thought it was funny. Now it has to be a real woman really falling down stairs.”

Groucho Marx

I’ll take it a stepfurther. Horror movies are a rebellion against reality itself. Social, political, cultural, economic, and physical reality. And being able to play that out, even in virtual terms, is very satisfying to some people. Lots of people.

Taken to the full extreme…if millions of monsters and gargoyles and werewolves and vampires actually roamed the Earth, and if a hundred-year war ensued between them and population of the planet, and if the humans lost, what would be the upshot?

The monsters wold attack one another.

Why? For what?

What are they looking for?

They’re looking for whatever would remain after all reality was destroyed.

That’s their payday.

Not really control, not mastery over slaves, not manipulation.

They believe reality is a basic affront, and they want to wipe it out.

And they’re motivated.

What they couldn’t possibly realize in a million years is the creative version of what they’re feeling: reality is a ultimately product of mind, one work of art among an infinite possible number of works of art. This is the true spiritual tradition of planet Earth, the one that has been twisted and buried and concealed.

It’s not an accident that the most highly controlled large society on Earth, China, has sought to eradicate Tibet, the place where this tradition flourished for a brief time. The bottom-line reason for waging war against Tibet is subconsciously held, of course.

Why do humans find so many ways to refuse the power of their own imagination, which can make new worlds and supersede all rules and regulations that underpin this universe?

Because LOSING has its own attractions. It’s a mode of perception and feeling, and it’s another kind of art.

When people become profoundly sick and tired of that art, but are still addicted to it, they side with the monster. They want to smash every apparatus and system and marker of reality they can find.

Put that on the screen and they’ll love you for it. Set down a gorgeous white blank canvas in front of them, and they’ll do nothing. They’ll think about taking a blowtorch to it.

The world is a suspension bridge held up by the two ends: creation and destruction. All the people are milling around in the middle of the concrete road. They’re telling and listening to stories. Occasionally, a small number of people feel drawn to one end of the bridge or the other. Mostly, though, they tell and listen to stories. The ends of the bridge are covered in vines, which are religion’s attempt to obscure the naked forces.

Occasionally, someone in the middle of the bridge sets off a bomb. But it hasn’t disturbed the structure. Then stories about the bomber proliferate and morph. Large numbers of people sit entranced and listen to those stories. They feel there is something fundamentally wrong about the bridge, and so the prospect of blowing it up is appealing. And they’re right. Something about the bridge is a lie.

The two ends are actually attached, by giant cables, to something that floats in the sky.

Imagination.

One of its minor inventions was the pylons of creation and destruction. A whim on a summer afternoon.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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TRAINING ASTRONAUTS IN MAGIC

“It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light.”

Thelonious Monk

“If you want to say microtonal music has a social purpose, it involves letting people experience reality outside the boundaries they believe surround EVERYTHING.”

Unknown San Diego microtonal composer

“She did not really want to know; she believed she already understood.”

Philip K Dick, “Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said”

MAY 18, 2011. Anyone who’s read much science fiction eventually comes across a story about an alien who lands on Earth and falls into the hands of the US government.

The military holds him in a facility, while scientists try to figure out how to communicate with him. They run all sorts of tests, of course, and they bring in experts.

But the alien isn’t talking.

The solution sometimes occurs in the form of higher mathematics, “the universal language.” Equations on a page, and the alien perks up.

I’ve never read one of these stories that satisfied me. The “breakthrough” always seemed too easy. I mean, suppose the guy was so different he spoke a vastly strange kind of language, based on principles that would, if we discovered them, make absolutely no sense to us?

His language would be absolutely meaningless, no matter which way we turned it. Worse than gibberish. Far worse. It might somehow be invisible, soundless. An empty space, perhaps. We’d perceive it as a vacuum. We’d have nothing to compare it to.

And then, for our own deep-space missions, we’d have to train our astronauts to deal with this situation. What would we do? Give them reproductions of Dali paintings to show the aliens on Parsec-12?

I once had an interesting conversation with an electrician about light bulbs.

We got down to discussing where the light comes from. He explained that the electrons flowing through the wires in the house, when they reached the thin filament inside the bulb, heated it up, excited atoms in the filament, and then electrons in those atoms gained, momentarily, more energy. When the electrons went back to their original levels of energy and orbits, their atoms released photons of light…

Yeah, I said, but what about the light itself?

“What about it?” he said.

“Where does it come from?”

“The photons.”

“You mean they contain light and emit it?”

“Right.”

“Or ARE the photons light?”

“Look at it either way, I guess,” he said.

“Because,” I said, “if the photons CONTAIN light, then light isn’t the photons. It’s the stuff they release.”

“Mmm, well, the photons are light,” he said.

“Not little tin cans full of light.”

“No.”

“The filament in the bulb—it already has light in it—photons.”

He smiled.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

We had reached the limit, because light is, after you break it down and explain it, still light. It’s that stuff that illuminates. It is. It doesn’t really derive from something else. If a photon (or a wave, or both) is made of light, then the labels don’t matter. Light is light.

It’s the same way with language, although linguists would choke on their coffee if you argued that. What I mean is, you can diagram sentences and underline parts of speech, and go back in time to show how words developed and changed, you can float half-baked hypotheses about how babies learn to talk, but in the end, you have to admit, without explanation, that we UNDERSTAND each other when we use language.

Maybe not perfectly, but we understand. Meaning means something. And it can’t be captured in a bottle and sold over the counter. You can’t describe how we know the meaning of conversation and text any better than you can explain light.

I bring all this up because, when we come to the subject of magic, people like to differentiate between everything we do understand, and the incomprehensible and possibly meaningless thing called magic.

However, whether it’s light or meaning or understanding, we very quickly reach a point where we draw a blank and throw up our hands. So magic isn’t the only thing that’s strange.

Or as Thelonious Monk once said, “Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.”

I keep returning to this subject of understanding because, since it is a given, since it comes from something non-material about us (see my recent “Interview with Einstein”), its limits might be expanded by stretching the medium of language itself.

In the same way, by increasing the threshold temperature at which a filament in a light bulb would melt, we could pump more juice into it and make the bulb brighter.

So what is it about our present language that imposes limits on us?

Another analogy: until the subject of topology was invented, no one was serious about measuring irregular surfaces. A new mathematics was brought to bear, and boom, understanding was widened.

Our language tends to fall into two basic categories. You have your subject-action verb-object sentence. And you have your “sentences of being.”

Jones broke the stone.

Jones is a man.

Action.

Being.

Those are the structures.

There is the little-known work of a philosopher/linguist named Ernest Fenollosa, the author of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry. Fenollosa analyzed modern Chinese words back to pictographs that minimized nouns. Instead, these pictographs presented a view of reality that was far more dynamic and shifting, in which action was the main event. The subject and object were themselves of lesser importance, and were related to one another by their mutual participation in action. “To be” verbs—is, are, am, and so on were just dead ducks.

A different kind of language.

There are many possibilities once you open the door.

Suppose we had a language in which every noun is also a verb, in the sense that it throws off rays and curves and vectors of action and energy.

What would we have then, aside from the linguistic shift?

We might, at the extreme, have an endless supply of dynamic universes. No potted plants. No unmoving rods buried in the ground. ACTION.

And what would this do for us?

Well, for starters, we would be communicating with each other in a way that instantly gave birth to possibilities beyond current meanings embedded in our style of speaking and writing. The implications of each word of text would jump and leap. Instead of peeling off layers to get at the precise definition of a word, we would automatically be proliferating it.

I’m not trying to ban English or any language we use now. I’m adding a new one.

Language, created by consciousness, also feeds back to it. And this feedback is very powerful, in the sense that it informs our way of viewing reality. The structure of language becomes, in a true sense, a monitor on what we can see and what we can’t see. What we can imagine and what we can’t imagine.

As imagination is the door through which we walk into magic, making that door wider allows more magic.

A new language of the sort I’m suggesting here would pump more energy into imagination and widen its scope.

For the past year, I’ve been painting such languages. Many times, in many ways. These languages require no explanation, nor do they offer one. Rather, they enlist innovative thinking.

It’s as if a psychologist, running one of those old inkblot Rorshach tests, told the patient: “Guess what? There’s nothing wrong with you. Forget all that nonsense. Look at these shapes and imagine anything you want to. Tell me what you invent. Then I’ll do thesame. Pretty soon we’ll be speaking a different language, and we’ll levitate out of this worn-out reality into new worlds. We’ll get a few hundred, a few thousand other people to join in, and we’ll…”

Find magic.

Going from structures to non-structures.

The example of the inkblot test is useful. Used in the normal setting of the psychologist’s office, it’s employed to connect the patient’s descriptions of what he sees in the blots to his “states of mind.” As preposterous as this is, it does reveal a crude attempt to pipe language (what the patient reports to the therapist) through an innovative system: the patient looks at blobs of ink, sees things, and tells what they are. The therapist then adds his own ludicrous interpretation. (All in all, sort of a more deeply depressing version of modern art criticism.)

It’s not the kind of talking you’d hear on the street. Or at parties. Or in the office. Or at home.

Having supper at a restaurant, you’re not likely to have your companion say, “Looking at this piece of salmon, I see a shoot-out between a twelve-legged insect and a flock of flying goats.”

So in that sense, conventional Rorshach tests are interesting. They unfortunately assume that neurotic states of mind are generating the perception of “neutral objects” (blobs of ink on a page). Of course, a person actually generates those perceptions out of his imagination. He creates the perceptions.

So let’s just cut out the middleman: therapeutic evaluation. Let’s eliminate the notion of mental disorders generating imagery, and let’s eliminate the connecting of perceptions to an arbitrary catalog of disorders. Let’s eliminate the idea of a test, and results, and actions based on those results.

What conventional Rorschach proves is this: you can build a partly visual language of psychological interpretation out of thin air. You can invent categories and disorders and results, and all the rest.

And people can communicate in this limited language.

So if they can do that, they’re part-way there. They’re already seeing something where people aren’t used to thinking they can see something. In ink blots.

That’s pretty good.

It’s a start.

So instead of the blots, print out all sorts of complex shapes on a page and say THIS IS A LANGUAGE. FIGURE OUT WHAT IT MEANS. WORK ON IT.

Then if you can nudge or inspire or bribe people to do that, they will work for a few years on believing there is really something there, something that is embedded in the shapes, and they’ll dig in and try to “decode” it. A few more years and they might throw in the towel and say, “The hell with this, let’s just make it up. Let’s say each shape means whatever we imagine it to mean, and each shape canchange its meaning from minute to minute.”

Then they start writing to each with these shapes and thousands of others they make up—and gradually, they forget about the notion that they might be crazy. After that, glimpses and glints begin to surface in their minds. They don’t know what they are, but they feel they’re de-conditioning themselves from any language they previously knew. They’re out in open water. Their operational concept of Understanding is undergoing a revolution.

They realize the former power of their conditioning about what meanssomething and what doesn’t.

They realize how tightly they clung to their old basic notion of Meaning.

They drop that. They discard it in the wastebasket, because they’re fascinated with the glints and glimpses they’re getting. They want more glimpses. They’re writing back and forth in this language with no rules and no assigned structure.

They’re experiencing sensations of flying and soaring in a free sky. These sensations are feeding back into their body processes and into their minds. The hard wiring is giving way.

You could say they’re astronauts training for a mission in which they’ll encounter an intelligence that’s completely alien to Earth.

There are many analogues to what I’m discussing here. For example, microtonal music. You tune a piano so that, altogether, 88 keys display the range of sounds contained within just one octave of a conventional piano. Going from the lowest note to the highest on the microtonal piano, you hear thin slices and graduations of notes that cover, all told, no more ground than one octave of a normal piano.

You sit at the microtonal piano and you play.

You listen to what you play.

At first, it’s repugnant. It’s not only dissonant, it’s absurdly muddy.

But after a few months of playing that piano every day, you begin to hear something. It comes through. And the sensations it brings might remind you of places you’ve been, experiences you’ve had. But they go further, into a void where new sensations and meanings you can’t name are possible, are happening. Are real. Eventually, super-real.

These sensations flood your endocrine system, and new proportions and sequences of hormones are produced. You experience feelings you’d forgotten or never had before.

The spectrum of feeling and thought expands.

Your whole notion of what you can experience and understand changes.

Your imagination is gearing up.

You never seriously considered there could be seven comprehensible sounds between any two keys on an ordinary piano. Now, you’re not only hearing them, they make sense. They convey emotion.

This would be like saying that, between each word in the sentence, “I want to go outside,” there are seven other words, and every one of them is an action verb.

When you understand that expanded and exploded sentence, you can talk to the alien from Parsec-12. He can talk to you.

After your first conversation, when you walk out of the facility where he’s under heavy guard, take the elevator down to the parking lot, and drive through the gate, you look at the desert and you see things you never saw before.

You understand why magic was hard to do. It was all supposed to be taking place in a tight reality of unbreakable connections. But now those connections have snapped. The landscape, any landscape, is much more inclusive and malleable.

You look at a tall cactus and it floats off the ground a few feet.

You’re reminded things were this way once. And now processes in your body open up. There is a reason for them to change. They secrete information and energy that have been dormant for a long time. Dormant, because there was no use for them.

The cells in your nervous system wake up to a remarkable degree. They’ve been waiting for this moment. They turn off the game show they’ve been watching on TV for 40 years. They project brilliant rays in all directions. Your physical aliveness shifts up exponentially.

Through the walls of the holding facility behind you, you can see the alien. He’s nodding at you. Yes, he’s thinking. You’re getting the message.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order an audio seminar from the catalog.