THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION

APRIL 29, 2006. Here is another backgrounder for my upcoming tele-workshop, THE TRANSFORMATIONS. May 8,15,22. Ten days until the first session. Get in on the live calls. Click on the link above for details.
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HERE ARE SOME KEY FIRST PRINCIPLES.

Transformation involves the fulfillment of desires. Without that, all transformation is temporary and fades away.

Transformation isn't about waiting around for something to happen.

It isn't about "putting yourself in a receptive state and then getting "what the universe wants to give you."

It isn't about passivity.

There is a widespread confusion here. Many people associate proactive energy with aggression AGAINST someone, and therefore they drift over into the opposite camp, which teaches a person to wait, to be still, to do nothing, to receive.

Proactive energy is necessary. It's good. It works. It's healthy.

There is also widespread confusion about the word "desire." Some people (who consider themselves spiritual) think desire implies money, sex, houses, cars, jewelry and the like.

On the other hand, people who want material things think desire, in the context of transformation, is all about ethereal goals such as enlightenment, salvation, Oneness, and the like.

Both groups are wrong. Desire is desire. It spans an enormous and varied territory. To compartmentalize desire is to set oneself up for defeat.

When people practice the exercises I teach in my workshops, they soon find out that they desire all sorts of different things and futures. This is a liberating discovery.

Transformation isn't about becoming something other than what you truly are. It isn't about "leaving your personality behind." It's about moving more and more into the core of what you are. This doesn't feel strange. It feels good.

Transformation is about becoming more powerful. Using more power. Radiating more power. It's about manifesting what you desire with greater intensity.

Arcane symbols and ceremonies created by someone else have nothing to do with transformation.

With these principles in your possession, you have a stripped-down understanding that leaves behind a great, great deal of useless baggage.

Join me in the workshop and begin to practice techniques that actually help you being about transformation.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefaknews.com




THE MECHANICAL VERSUS THE CREATIVE

APRIL 27, 2006. Newsflash. Life on planet Earth is pretty bizarre.

I always wanted to read a philosophic tract that started that way.

The creative abundant ecstasy is waiting for us all, but some crazy people are trying to block the gate.

Meanwhile, many of us, who would like to get those lunatics out of the way, are still brainwashing ourselves into believing that even with widespread freedom, we would dedicate ourselves to mechanical systems of thought and action.

It's a deep jones, an addiction born out of a pretense of ignorance.

"I want to deal with things that work, that have established patterns, that give you B from A every time, even if the payoff is pain. At least I know what to expect."

And it's true, once you begin to create in a conscious way, you enter into unpatterned territory.

Which brings us to the subject of esthetics, which most people think has to do with art. But esthetics is everywhere. It's in the bathroom and the car and the church and the market and the city and the meadows and the sky.

Designing a painting is like designing a future. If a person has an unshakable faith in the traditional patterns, he will copy what he already knows. He'll move from pillar to pillar and lay down what he has been taught. You can give him the Bill of Rights or a fat inheritance or a winning lottery ticket, and he'll build the Taj Mahal all over again.

Why? Because he has no faith in himself. He thinks the past is present and the great things need to be repeated.

If you scrape the dust and grime off a cog that has been part of an old machine, he'll buy the shiny cog again, even though he already bought it.

If it has an inexorable pattern, he wants it. Steam engine, radio, TV, computer.

If it doesn't, if it's patternless, he's back in the cave, anxiously retreating from the new innovation called fire burning up the logs.

DO YOU WANT TO CREATE OR DON'T YOU?

That's the question, instead of “to be or not to be.”

There are too many people on the fence.

They want to create if the result magically resembles closely something they've already seen. But if the outcome might be new, they're atwitter with fear. What will other people think? Will they scoff? Suppose the roof caves in or a rain of frogs occurs?

Do you see what I’m getting at here? I’m describing the make-break point, where a person makes a choice. He either opts for something he knows well, and sticks to it over and over, or he decides to manifest something that wasn’t there before.

What keeps most people from being creative? They are glued to a mechanical interpretation of reality. They think in terms of a pattern or a system, in which A gives birth to B and B gives birth to C, endlessly, every time.

Existence has beaten them into thinking that anything worthwhile has a repeatable cause-and-effect system. And they believe that’s all there is.

This belief is so strong they have no understanding of the creative process. It’s a mystery to them. It doesn’t make sense to them.

Well, planet Earth is at a crossroad. At least in the industrial and technological nations, many people have enough time and space to evolve. If they want to. They can take a step across the threshold. And that evolution is all about the creative process.

If that is shunted aside and put on the shelf, what is left is the MAZE.

In the maze, people just go around and around on the same paths, never finding exits. They keep remembering they have been there before. They think that must be what life is all about: getting used to repetition.

Whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, this is what we are dealing with. We can choose the maze, or we can choose the creative process.

If you look at the subjects of my recent and upcoming workshops, and if you look at the descriptions of the products on my home page, you’ll see that they are all devoted to crossing the threshold. They are devoted to fleshing out and working with the creative process.

No matter where you look in the world, you find philosophies that ultimately rely on pattern. It may be uplifting pattern or boring pattern or inexplicable pattern, but it’s pattern. It’s about a set version of reality. Whereas, once you let creative process in the door, everything is up for grabs. The future, the present, and even the past are flexible and malleable.

At first glance, this flexibility may seem confusing, because we tend to base our ideas and beliefs on what we think is bedrock. The bedrock forms a very familiar point of view. We only look at things THIS way or THAT way, and from there we know how to proceed. But the downside is, we stay in the maze. We walk the same paths. We always come back to the same view of what’s possible and what’s not. What’s allowable and what’s not.

It’s a prison of our own making.

The person who is devoted to pattern and system and repetition doesn’t recognize he’s in the maze. He just keeps walking. At best, he has faith that somehow something new and startling and pleasurable will appear out of the blue.

And when the latest DVD player or telephone or car comes on the market, he convinces himself that “the new and startling thing” has indeed arrived, that this is what novelty and innovation are all about--- and that’s ALL they’re about.

A better glass of beer. A better car. A better computer. A better TV series. A better scandal in the news. A better job in the same company. A better vacation this year.

If that’s what a person is counting on, he’s also unconsciously counting on some disease to take hold of his body along the line, so he won’t have to worry about the settling-in boredom that is capturing his mind. He can use up all of his time working with doctors and drugs and hospitals.

You see, when a person is devoted to repetition and pattern, the string eventually plays out. He has to admit life is not turning out the way he hoped it would. The promise of the New isn’t really working. He is becoming bored more easily. Despite himself, he is seeing through the illusion of the New faster and faster.

But at that point, he doesn’t have the energy or the courage or the power of desire to take the second path: the path of creative process.

You know those TV ads that say, “The sale is almost over. Time is running out. Act now.” Well, that might be the ad for entering into the creative process.

Because everything else runs downhill into nowhere land.

It doesn’t matter whether your neighbors or friends or family or colleagues are going downhill. You don’t have to. You can trigger a different switch. You don’t have to buy conventional wisdom about your life. You can strike out into new territory.

I can’t emphasize too strongly how important this make-break point is. You can opt for the mechanical and the seemingly reliable, and take the consequences, or you can explore the creative process and all it offers.

This May, the 8th, the 15th, and the 22nd, I’ll be doing my latest tele-workshop, THE TRANSFORMATIONS. I hope you’ll join me. It’s about you, your future, and the Great Possibilities.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

Former President of CBS news Richard Salant said, "Our job is to give
people not what they want, but what WE decide they ought to have."

Hermann Goering (Hitler's propaganda minister) explained how to properly
use propagand to control the citizens to psychologist, Gustave Gilbert.

[GG] We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary
to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very
thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

[HG]"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why
would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the
best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.
Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is
understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people
along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a
Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

[GG] "There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the
people have some say in the matter through their elected
representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare
wars."

[HG] "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people
can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All
you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same way in any country."[3]

David Rockefeller: 1990, Baden, Baden Germany at a UN conference: "we
are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York times, Time Magazine
and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings
and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years.... It
would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if
we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those
years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march
towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an
intellectuals elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the
national determination practiced in past centuries."

John Swinton, for Chief of Staff for the New York Times-1953 toast
before New York press Club:
"...If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper,
before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of
journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to
vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his
race for his daily bread. you know it and I know it and what folly is
this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich
men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks and they pull the
strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are
all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

SOUL READING AND THE SLAM-BANG CIRCUS OF REALITY

APRIL 25, 2006. In certain respects, this is the most important article I've written on this site...

As many visitors to nomorefakenews know, I have been doing readings for people for several years now. The work involves assigning unusual symbols to the letters of their names and accessing those symbols.

The symbols are like windows. I look through them and report what I find.

As a painter, I spent about a year creating thousands of shapes on paper---and found that I could work with them as another language. A language whose shapes (symbols) were highly mobile and flexible and changeable in their meanings.

In this way, I gained access to territories I had only glimpsed or speculated about before.

The key question I found myself asking was: how far am I willing to go? Should I comfortably step down the translations of these symbols to fit them into Earth culture terms, or should I track them to their most distant shores, no matter what those shores looked like?

I opted for the second choice.

The result of that decision was an extraordinary liberation from patterns of Earth culture. However, along the way, it required me to dump any compulsive loyalty I might feel toward "the logical, the reasonable, the consensus, the expected."

The process of doing readings is fascinating. It uncovers many hidden realities and indicates that, in order to live in this society, we repress experience and perception that doesn't fit. We tailor our view of ourselves. We adopt cover stories for ourselves about who we are and who we aren't, what we can do and what we can't do.

I also discovered that the range of acceptable symbols on this planet is actually very narrow. Very stereotypical. In fact, there are an infinite number of symbols, and many of them are more along the line of poetic images. These images lead down fantastic roads, if one is willing to make the journeys.

From a recent reading I did, here is just one symbol and part of the meaning I uncovered for it. The section I'm printing here is only a few minutes from a 3-hour reading (I put every reading on 3 CDs).

I suggest you read what follows several times, because it may seem quite strange at first.

Symbol: WINDS OF SPACE INSIDE OUT

"This symbol, in your case, indicates a life in which you were marooned on a ship between worlds. The period lasted about three years. You were alone. There was no one else on board. This you took to be an imprisonment. Communication devices to the outside were cut off. You had provisions, but no company.

"Resourceful, you began inventing 'games'. You started inspecting and makes notes on every part of the ship, every significant piece of equipment. After a month or so of this, your notes no longer read as descriptions. They were more like character analysis, as if each piece of machinery were a personage, a character, alive in some way.

"Some might think you had gone crazy, but in fact you felt more vital and energetic and galvanized than at any time you could remember. You came to see the whole ship as an organism, connected in its millions of parts. You experienced enormous relief, as if you had been set free from some intolerable burden. The burden of accepting a common view of what existence was all about. You were cut loose, unchained.

"This is reminiscent of the journey on foot across the southern United States by Cabeza de Vaca, recounted in Haniel Long's book, The Power Within. A Spanish aristocrat, de Vaca was forced into a different universe of experience, and found he could heal natives who took him to their homes where sick people lay.

"You, too, aboard the ship, could heal. You healed machines [details about this omitted here]. This accounts for your present timidity toward anything mechanical. You don't want to go there. You don't want to expand your view of what is alive. You affect an air of ignorance about machines. You let other people handle them.

"You are working with an inside out view of what is real. All the while, you are enormously attracted to machinery, but you don't confess it, even to yourself.

"For example, you occasionally think people are machines. This glimpse repulses you. You flee from it. In fact, though, you are imposing on yourself a false division in your consciousness. You are saying that a machine is a dead thing and a person is alive. On a deeper level, you believe that both are alive. There is nothing 'inhuman' about your perception. It's expanded. It's large. It takes in plants, animals, natural phenomena, machines, processes, ideas, and so on. You know they are all alive.

"You have a problem with fatigue. You tire easily. You keep trying to solve that over and over. The solution needs to involve you at a different level. You need to be able to get rid of the compartmentalization of what is alive and what isn't. Get this: perception involves a degree of choice. You can see anything as alive, and you can see anything as not alive. Perception is choice. And it's real, either way. It's a stage play.

"Perception is a stage play. You direct it. You assign values and make distinctions. You open doors and close them. You see this, and then you don't see it.

"Because of this particular compartmentalization of perception you engage in, you want to catalog the living and the not living. You want to keep the separation. This takes energy. The separating takes great energy. You use it up. Then you get tired.

"You associate getting tired with getting old. Your physical aging process has something to do with this. You engineer certain aging physical changes in your body to fit with the concept of 'tired.'

"It's all a stage play. You direct it. You think it must have some positive payoffs for you, the aging process. You think you will become wiser. But instead you just become more tired.

"You have the capability of hearing the winds of space. You can, if you want to, listen to that wind. It's a kind of music. It's alive to you. You see it as alive. But you don't want that. You want to stay separate from realizing that, from choosing that. You want to maintain that the winds of space indicate an isolation, when in fact, and joyously so, it indicates your connection. You stay with isolation, though, and you re-interpret and explain that isolation in all sorts of interesting Earth-culture terms---but it really has nothing to do with Earth culture. It all comes back to how you want to perceive and how you don't want to perceive.

"You fear what you call dissonance. Look up that word, and think about it. The winds of space you call a dissonance. A bad thing. A thing that has no harmony. You've arranged your perception so that you take in and accept harmony and keep out and reject dissonance. You separate them. Harmony is alive, and dissonance is dead. You think you feel comfortable with that, but you don't.

"Earth culture biology has a preference for saying that organisms are healthy and functioning according to plan when they are harmonious, and they are out of kilter (or even dead) when they are dissonant. This is a provincial view. There are many organisms that function because they are dissonant. The dissonance gives them power.

"You keep opting for the harmonious. You secretly use this as a way of separating the elements of your own perception. As a way of cataloging. As a way of staying within what you call the normal range. But the normal range isn't working for you. You need to get a grip on that.

"You think you are harmonious, but you are much more than that. As you keep cutting yourself off from everything that is 'not harmonious', you keep getting tired. You keep aging.

"The sounds of the winds of space are like a voice that tells you about what is really alive. You don't want to hear that right now. You think hearing it will cut you off from other people and from Earth culture. But that's not the case. It's really just the opposite. You will be more vital and connected and less tired if you hear it.

"You are not marooned. You once learned there is no such thing. On that ship, driven by circumstances to fall back on your own resources, you made a breakthrough. You abandoned what was separating you from wider perception---which is to say, wider feeling.

"You did that. Then you pulled back. You wanted to believe that your eventual rescue from the ship was a very fortunate thing. But you used that event to shut down. You used all your skill to fit back in to your culture. You thought that would make you happy. It didn't.

"You are working from a premise that says everything you want can be gained and launched from a platform of you being normal and harmonious and nothing else. This is a fiction. It's a fiction you are inventing, and it isn't working for you.

"You already know this at some level, but you don't want to go to that level. You want to say that, on that ship, you were lost and then they found you and brought you back. That's inside out. On that ship, you were found, and then they brought you back and you were lost.

"You have a fascination for secrets. Yet you say you have no secrets. You say you are an open book. Another fiction that isn't working for you. I can tell you that the person who appears to have no secrets has many secrets.

"I once knew a therapist who tried and failed, for many months, to help a patient. Finally, out of desperation (which meant the therapist was at last getting to reality with a capital R), he asked the patient, 'What am I entirely missing about you? Why do all my suppositions about therapy crash and burn at your feet? Why are you different?' And this opened the floodgates. The patient began to pour out all sorts of fantastic stories about his life. Not exactly the life he was living, but the life he was concealing. A life that was going on on a very different platform. A life that some would call imaginary. A life that had nothing to do with neurosis or trauma or any of the other concepts of psychotherapy or religion or self-help. A life that was about perception---perception that didn't fit into any of the comfortable categories of Earth culture. And from that point on, the therapy worked brilliantly. The therapist took all his cues from the patient. A year later, the therapist revolutionized his work completely.

"Do you see? You are claiming all the time to yourself that you are normal, and THEN you are wondering what's wrong. This is a cosmic joke you are playing on yourself, and you know you are playing it, but you don't want anyone else to know it. There's nothing wrong with that. It's actually quite amusing and spectacular---but it isn't working for you. It isn't working, because you are buying your own joke. You aren't just making a joke, you are also buying it. That's the problem.

"If you want to pretend to be normal, that's fine. But why pretend to yourself? Why buy your own act? Let me tell you something else. Earth culture is not only about people 'acting normal,' it's also about people telling themselves they ARE normal. And THEN they think that if they move a short distance away from normal, they're really on the cutting edge. They've arrived. This is nonsense of the most hilarious kind.

"You begin to move ahead by leaps and bounds when you open up your perception. Not just your perception of events around you, not just seeing what's behind the various lies that are told by official leaders. That's step one. We are talking about something far different. We're talking about a real revolution of the person, the soul. You.

"You say to yourself: 'I will see only THESE things. I won't see THOSE things. I'll call the division and the separation normal. I'll say I am normal and harmonious. I'll maintain it to my dying breath. I'll THEN say I have a problem and I don't know how to solve it. I'll seek assistance. I'll maintain an iron grip on normalcy and THEN say I need to solve the problem.'

"That gets you nowhere. You have a fear of dissonance. Dissonance is your open door waiting for you to walk through into a life more abundant. It's your door. It's the answer, but you don't want to pull the trigger. That's fine. It's interesting, as a role in a play. But why give it such force? Why pretend it's not a play?

"I'll tell you why. Because you are trying to learn about normal. You might say it's your art. You're investigating it. And you've come to the perfect place to do it. Earth. America. 2006. At a deeper level, you're trying to understand normal because it's the weirdest thing you've ever seen. IT'S THE WEIRDEST THING YOU'VE EVER SEEN, AND YOU WANT TO GO ON THE ADVENTURE OF UNDERSTANDING IT IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY---BY LIVING IT.

"Do you think you went on that ship and got marooned in space because you were a timid person? Heck no. You have been out there, you've been going on all sorts of wild voyages for a long time. Do you think you got into the fabulous art of seeing the life in machines, seeing the life in ANYTHING, because you're just average? Hell no. Okay. So look at this very directly. From that vantage point as the explorer among the winds of space, from that vantage point, what could you see that would be a really terrific new adventure, once you got back home?

"Finding out what normal is. THAT would be the adventure. Because to you, normal is the weirdest thing of all. It trumps everything else. It's the circus of circuses.

"That's what you did. And you're still doing it. But it's time you owned up to it. You're staging that play and living inside it. Own up to it. And THEN you can EXPAND in a thousand new directions, and you won't feel tired anymore and you won't be worried about aging anymore. Those problems will dissolve.

"You won't get where you want to go, and you won't get everything you want if you keep insisting you're normal. You can tell me you're normal and tell everybody else you're normal, but STOP TELLING YOURSELF.

"Normal is not a platform from which you can make progress..."

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com



Copyright © 2005 The Jon Rappoport Store by MRW Connected - jonrappoport@nomorefakenews.com - Need Help? Call: 888.884.8355

For starters, I think there are two kinds of assholes:

1) Those who get you closer to the truth.

2) Those who try to keep you from the truth.

Clint mentioned sarcasm being mistaken for assholism. In my lexicon, that's merely the first brand of assholism—the for-a-higher-cause kind.

I consider myself the first kind of asshole. The truth, no matter how it reflects on me, is Priority #1. I write about all sorts of unpleasant truths and get called an asshole about it all the time. Note that they never DISPROVE what I'm saying—they just call me an asshole for saying it.

But I am NOT the second kind of asshole. I respect the space of others. I never foist myself on people. I'm very, very polite until faced with serious provocation. And invariably when people meet me, they're shocked that I don't act like the sort of asshole they'd been primed to expect.

In Shit Magnet, I make a distinction between "righteous assholes" and "petty assholes":

It’s all about being the right kind of asshole. I mean the type who tells the ugly truth even when it causes pain and lays waste to cities. The righteous asshole is always a sociopath, because society only exists to tell comforting lies about itself. To the righteous asshole, truth is more important than approval. Truth can slay entire civilizations. But truth doesn’t exist to make the righteous asshole look better—looking better is the sole concern of petty assholes. The righteous asshole realizes that the truth is often unkind to him. But he’d rather shake hands with the truth than fight it, or else he’d fall into the pit of petty assholes.

The petty assholes have tiny sphincters which scatter their rabbit pellets atop things they’ll never be able to comprehend. They act out of socialized fear, often with no sense of self beyond a patchwork quilt of ideas which others have fed them. The petty assholes invariably tag the righteous asshole as the problem, not realizing it is he who cleans the bottom of their cages and provides them with fresh water. The petty assholes are incapable of grasping their subordinate role in the fecal food chain.

By telling the truth about himself, the righteous asshole sets himself free. By telling the truth about the petty assholes, he enslaves them.

I used to be a petty asshole. But more and more, as the shadows stretch longer on the sundial, I grow righteous. I look better and better because I no longer desire to look better.


When I resort to calling someone an asshole, I always mean the petty kind.

TEP UP ON THE FLYING HORSE

FEBRUARY 2, 2006. We all come to the crossroad where we make the deep choices. How will we live our lives?

I envision a contrast. There is the rabbit. I see him hopping forward, munching plants. He hops, he munches, he hops again, and he munches.

That is how he goes. Eating the next thing. Moving to the next piece of nourishment. Finding small satisfactions just ahead of him on the path of time.

He may be thinking about some giant leap. We don’t know. But he doesn’t take it. He just pushes on. He finds no other way.

The contrast is Pegasus, the flying winged horse. Here, from Shakespeare, Henry V:
"When I bestride him [Pegasus], I
soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth
sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his
hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes."

There is always an inclination to believe that every person is endowed with small or large abilities, and must make peace with what has been given.

Why? Because it seems a comfortable view of existence. Estimate your role in the grand play, and then live it out.

In fact, go one step further. Arrange (yes, arrange) your perceptions so that they come around and feed back to you a confirmation that you are correct; you have seen your proper role; you have found it; and now you can act the part.

See only and precisely what is necessary for the role. When you do that, you are home. Don’t see more. That would be confusing.

This is a good description of self-imposed mind control.

But then, in the world literature, we come across quotes like these:

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” (Henry David Thoreau)

“Probably the difference between men and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.” (Lin Yutang)

“The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going beyond them to the impossible.” (Arthur C Clarke)

“Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.” (Vincent Van Gogh)

“Everything you can imagine is real.” (Pablo Picasso)

“Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” (Albert Einstein)

“The human race is governed by its imagination.” (Thomas B Macaulay)

“Formerly, we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing our belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities…” (Paul Klee)

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.” (Salvador Dali)

“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination?” (Carl Jung)

When you take up imagination, you embark on the great work and the great adventure. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to change a visible thing in your life. You will make those changes, later.

The light on the bridge at night says: you are here; you are at the place where you make a decision; to be what you have been, or to engage the energy of new islands of realities.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

USING IMAGINATION FOR A BETTER LIFE NOW

JANUARY 31, 2006. Here is an important backgrounder for three of the products listed on this page: IMAGINATION EXERCISES FOR A LIFETIME; PAST LIVES, ARCHETYPES AND HIDDEN HUMAN ENERGIES; THE PARANORMAL PROJECT.

The other day, I posted a piece on boredom, the underlying chronic psychic illness in all industrial societies.

I want to expand on that theme by considering other psychic states.

For example, "the thrill that goes around and around and then fades." How does that work?

Illustration: a person becomes intensely interested in a subject. He researches it, reads about it, thinks about it, talks about it, researches it some more, understands it more deeply...and all the time, he feels a thrill. He keeps feeling that, until one day, it isn't there anymore. Where did it go? What happened?

Here is another psychic state: "positive outrage that works like an engine." A person comes across a news item, perhaps. It reveals an obvious and unconscionable injustice. Someone is being punished for no reason. It makes the blood boil. So this person who has read the news item begins to spread the word. He works night and day to alert his friends to what is happening. His outrage is like rocket fuel. And then, a month later, that outrage cools and nothing further happens.

How about this? "Annoyance and irritation with one's own situation in life." This can rise to great heights, and it can produce enough steam to push someone to look for better paths. But then, after a few months, the annoyance goes away. It dissolves. And so does the steam.

Or this. "I did X and Y and Z, and then I looked around and nothing had really changed."

Or this. "I feel like I'm trying to move a great wall."

Or this. "I'm settling for what I have. It doesn't do any good to keep trying to break out. It just produces more frustration."

Or this. "I've learned everything I can. Now I have to get back to practical matters."

Or this. "I know everything there is to know. I'm smarter than anyone else. I can close the door on learning anything new."

Or this. "I've found out the most important thing in the universe. For some reason, I'm not all that excited about it anymore, but I can wear my insight like a badge and walk around with it pinned to my chest. That gives me a leg up."

Or this. "The best way to stay motivated is to dip into a little of this and a little of that and keep going that way. No need to delve deeply into any one thing. If I do, I become frustrated."

Or this. "I dreamed big and then I went out and achieved my dream. It was sensational. Now, here I am. I'm still not happy. I thought attaining the dream would give me what I wanted, and it did. So why don't I feel happy?"

Or this. "Every time I see a problem, I set a goal to overcome that problem. And it works. But then a new problem arises. Is this some endless game? It seems like a trap."

Or this. "I'm on a spiritual path. I've learned that it takes time. I've disciplined myself to be patient. I've learned patience. But somewhere along the line, the path has turned into a job. I'm not feeling true enthusiasm. Have I misplaced something? Have I settled for less than I really want? Everything seems murky."

Or this. "I'm making money. Finally. It feels good. But it seems like I have to keep pursuing more and more money---and if I stop, I'll be back in the soup again. I'll be depressed. Is there any end to the chase for more money?"

Or this. "I live my life, and I'm doing well, but every day I have this nagging thought that there is something else I'm not connecting with. Something that is the key to what life is really all about. Does that mean I need to join a church? Do I need to turn my life over to a Higher Power? If not, what then?"

Or this. "I've awakened to the fact that the world is being controlled from behind the scenes. I really see that now, and I've learned a great deal about the details. But I've reached the point where I wonder what the payoff is. What am I going to do with all that information? I feel that if I keep going along this road, I'm going to become depressed."

I could list many more states of mind.

They are all legitimate states.

But they all have something in common. They appear to lead to a dead end.

A place where the person, the soul, comes upon a swamp.

Here is the thing to understand. The details of how the person arrived at the swamp are not really important. The path the person followed that led him to the swamp is not really important.

What is important is what was missing all along.

And that thing is THE CREATIVE IMPULSE.

What is that?

It is the clear and powerful and energetic and instinctive and CONSCIOUS use of imagination to create the future.

In other words, you can have a car and drive it, but if you don't have a source of endless fuel, the car will eventually slow down and stop. Then you can blame the car, the weather, the directions, the tires, yourself...it doesn't matter. It's not relevant.

Imagination provides the endless fuel. Nothing else does.

Your fuel is not something that exists outside yourself. You have it.

In fact, you are always using it. But you are not always using it clearly and powerfully and energetically and consciously.

A funny thing about you and your imagination: they both thrive when you invent CONSCIOUSLY.

But of course, in our culture, you don't get a lot of conscious practice in that basic action. You don't get it at home or at school or on the job.

I'm stepping into that gap.

I have tried to make the entry point for people as easy as possible. In that regard, the program called IMAGINATION EXERCISES FOR A LIFETIME is several hours, in real time, during which the listener and I both do the exercises together, step by step. You can listen to the CDs and do the exercises hundreds of times

Progress is defined this way: gradually, the person becomes more able to create the futures and realities he wants.

There is NO upper limit to this.

As progress occurs, those states of mind that lead to the swamp dissolve. The dilemmas disintegrate. The unanswerable questions that are part and parcel of the dead-end states of mind wash away.

Barriers fall. Imagination comes to the fore.

And why is imagination so important?

That's like asking why the sun is so important to a growing plant.

Imagining and creating are what we DO.

Of course, in this culture, it's easy to lose track of that.

And when we do lose track of it, we find ourselves with questions that have no answers or unsatisfying answers. We find ourselves drifting. We feel we know a great about important matters (and we do), but we also feel somewhat disconnected from what we know.

As TS Eliot famously wrote, "Between the idea and the act falls the shadow."

Well, that shadow of disconnection is the absence of the imagination. That's exactly what it is.

And if we feel some uncertainty or lack of confidence about this thing called imagination, it's only because we haven't employed it consciously with sufficient power long enough.

We can comprehend and comprehend and understand and understand reality until the cows come home, but if we're not imagining and creating and manifesting, we're lopsided. We're trying to make an equation work that is missing the most vital component.

Happily, when we start to fill in that missing component, everything we've learned and know becomes much, much more useful. It becomes raw material for a truly great adventure.

The adventure where imagination itself gives birth to: more consciousness, more enlightenment, more spiritual realization, more material reward, more joy, more power, more love.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

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