MIND CONTROL, IMAGINATION, AND RIGHT AND WRONG

FEBRUARY 11, 2006. Here is a backgrounder that applies both to my upcoming workshop, MIND CONTROL, MIND FREEDOM, and to several of the products on this page, including, IMAGINATION EXERCISES FOR A LIFETIME and THE PARANORMAL PROJECT.
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Every society lays down principles of right and wrong. These are embedded in the culture and in the law.

It's not my intent to argue against the IDEA of right and wrong, but only to point out that, from a very early age, we learn about these twin concepts. We learn about them at home and in school. We get a very strong dose in school, because every lesson we carry out comes with the insistence that there is a right and wrong answer.

When we leave school and get a job, we are shown the right and the wrong way to do things as well.

It's everywhere.

Of course, here and there we find punishments for doing things the wrong way.

So we're buttoned up to the chin with right and wrong.

Internalizing all this gives us a very nice chunk of mind control.

At the bottom of it is the precept that ANYTHING has a right and a wrong attached to it. That generalization.

All sorts of people (such as "the authorities") can play tunes on our minds once this chunk is in place.

No wonder we have the word REBEL in our language.

It takes some effort to break out of this Venus fly trap.

To boot, there are vague New Agey "philosophies" floating around that have also landed in the middle of the culture. Embodying, for example, the idea that anger is never a good thing. Never.

That seals the deal for many people. Be nice, be polite, do the good and right thing, and don't get angry and rebel. In case you hadn't noticed, you do get angry when you rebel. That's part of the deal.

Anger is energy. If you can't feel it and can't express it when someone is trying to sit on your chest, you're either a saint (of which there are very few) or you're a fuzzy bunny in a forest of wolves.

The American Revolution was not carried out without anger.

Of course, once the rebellion succeeds and you stake out your position, you don't have to be angry at whatever brand of authority you unseated. To be more precise---and here I'm talking on a personal level and not a political level---you don't have to keep fighting the battle you already won. You only have to do something with the piece of freedom you just gained.

Which is where imagination comes in, because freedom is the freedom TO CREATE. It isn't really the freedom to malinger.

Funny thing. Imagination has no intrinsic right or wrong. Whether you create a business selling clocks or paint a picture with circles or squiggles or triangles or faces or fly to Kenya or Brazil or climb Mt. Ranier or Everest is entirely up to you.

But I run into people who want to use their imaginations and do use their imaginations and keep running into that old operant conditioning that tells them there is a right and wrong way to do this, and if they "make a mistake," someone somewhere will give them a low grade or flunk them altogether.

Innovators in any field get past that. They ignore it. They leap ahead.

And real innovators in any field are willing to consider very far-out ideas.

(You'll ocasionally run into people who are buttoned up real tight and don't want to think about their situation or change it, and they'll say, "You mean you're allowed to use your imagination to figure out better ways to kill people, and there is no right or wrong about that?" My response to them is to walk away, or if I'm in a really good mood, I'll say, "I already know what's right and wrong, but I suggest you start using your imagination, because if you don't, one day YOU might be the person who decides he has to kill someone. You're as tight as a drum, buddy.")

How do innovators consider very far-out ideas that everyone else thinks are crazy? By imagining them. It's that simple.

And then later, everyone else says, "Why didn't I think of that?"

There are many places in the arena of work and projects where obvious right and wrong situations apply. But beyond that level, there are the people who strike out on their own and come up with something new. And the choice is, you can live your whole life following a path someone else has laid down, or you can make your own path.

Making means inventing. Imagining.

As the years roll by, it's pretty easy to take that personal inventory. Are you walking someone else's road, or are you inventing your own?

In case you missed it, the game of rising higher in a structure not of your own making is just that, a game. You get praise and pats on the head from superiors, but you're still walking the path invented by someone else.

It's my experience that, down deep, everyone wants to invent his own path.

Everyone wants to IMAGINE, INVENT, CREATE, IMPROVISE, INNOVATE.

There is one really fabulous diversion that people come up with that sidetracks them. They decide that there is AN ILLUMINATED END TO EVERYTHING, A PLACE THEY CAN GET TO WHERE EVERYTHING IS SOLVED AND SETTLED AND WORKED OUT FOR ALL TIME, AND THE PATS ON THE HEAD KEEP COMING. And since that's the case, they just have to find out how to do the right navigation and arrive and never look back.

This might be the biggest principle of Earth culture, the "final frontier" built by the jokers.

Imagination and creation are endless roads. Along the way, you get EVERYTHING you want and much, much more, and you just keep on going, and there is no feeling that you wish you could just stop and forget the whole thing.

Along that endless road, you do reach a place where you realize that you don't need to turn into a couch potato or a robot or a servant or an agent of someone else's concocted reality, whatever it is.

And you also realize that you don't have to keep pushing one agenda and one agenda only, even if you invented it, and even if you think it's right. That means you can imagine and create without limit. WITHOUT LIMIT. You can do it in a billion directions, and each direction becomes a kind of universe of its own.

Again, I resort to the analogy of the painter. Every canvas becomes a new universe.

It's called freedom. Empty of all the slogans that nudge people around the corner into guess what? Slavery.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com




MONET, KANDINSKY, AND THE CREATION OF NEW REALITY

FEBRUARY 10, 2006. Here is another backgrounder for my upcoming telephone workshop, MIND CONTROL, MIND FREEDOM. For details on the worskhop, just click on the link on banner above.
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Claude Monet, by the 1860s, was well on the way to dissolving ordinary reality. His paintings focused on the effects of light in nature. Some people have taken this as a sign that he was not so attentive to color in nature. That, of course, is false.

There is a well-known story about Monet hiking in the forest with friends, one of whom discovered he had lost his black jacket far below the hill they were treading. Monet looked back down the long hill and pointed to a speck of black. "There's your jacket," he said.

The man said, "That could be a rock or a branch, couldn't it?"

To which Monet replied, "Sir, that black does not exist in nature."

When they walked down the hill, the black speck turned out to be the lost jacket.

Monet eventually took light to the far reaches. Objects were so bathed in it that they seemed to lose their solidity. The whole purpose of painting---to render nature as we (think) we see it---shifted over into a different road. Monet and the other impressionists were providing a whole new way of seeing. Perception and exhilaration blended into a startling and convincing whole.

Near the end of the 19th century, the young painter Kandinsky was baffled and repelled when he saw a Monet painting of a haystack. Kandinsky felt that objects on a canvas should imitate (the consensus view of) nature.

Yet, a scant 15 years later, Kandinsky announced to the world that he had just painted (1910) the first entirely abstract work. He would soon go on to say that an acute angle touching the edge of a circle was as spiritual as the finger of God reaching toward the finger of Adam in Michelangelo's famous ceiling.

Painters were leading the way to a completely different conception of the universe, of the space-time continuum. For them, imagination was the leading edge.

In 1933, the Nazi regime announced that all abstract art was forbidden and was to be considered degenerate.

It's no accident that overtly fascist regimes were hostile toward the opening up of universes beyond the normal range. Their oppressive actions mirrored the idea of the SINGLE space-time continuum. Slavery in politics; slavery in perception.

A multiplicity of universes is the natural outcome of imagination.

And when imagination takes hold, power for the individual follows.

However, in Earth culture, the separation of the arts from individual power is a precept that runs deep. Art is thought of, more or less, as a plaything, an entertainment. Or it is considered an instrument of state (or religious) propaganda. Or it is praised as a reflection of the triumphs of a few geniuses, toward which we should humbly bow, from our low station.

With this precept in tow, people feel that art can teach them nothing about their own power.

The truth is, art has everything to teach about power.

Our creations are spirals of change. They take place in our own spaces and then we put them into the continuum.

If we fail to see this, we paradoxically create---and then fall back into being victims of consensus collective creation. As if we had done nothing.

In which case, we are targets of our own self-imposed mind control.

How else did we wind up believing that we live entirely inside the tin can called consensus space-time?

My goal is to dissolve that conception. To put it on the shelf with other strange ideas from the dustbin of history.

When I was 24, I decided to start painting. On the basis of no training and no recognizable skill and no academic background, I turned my small studio apartment in New York into a work space.

Six months later, with no intention of doing so, I reversed my long-standing unpleasant and unhappy relationship with my parents. Simply because I was creating a dozen or so new worlds every day on canvas or paper, I escaped from the one habitual space I had lived in with my mother and father. I was now operating from a position of power. And, much to my surprise, I discovered that power included an amount of generosity I had never conceived was possible.

And that was just the beginning...

Mind control takes many forms. The exit from it has a thousand doors. And ultimately, they are all marked IMAGINATION, CREATIVE POWER.

I hope you'll be in the workshop with me.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com