Another brilliant piece by Jon Rappoport -- this one covers painting, imagination, Reality Creation, Synchronicity, and more. As an artist who paints portals with the specific intention of creating new realities, and as someone who lives my life as a creative adventure, helping others see through false limitations, I totally resonate with what he shares. I even wrote an article back in April 2010 called, "Manifestation, Law of Attraction and Creativity." Even if you don't consider yourself an "artist," have a read ... you might surprise yourself! :)
By Jon Rappoport
Unhappy is the man, woman, or child who doesn’t live with imagination at the prow of the ship…
As my readers know, I recently launched another mega-collection, Exit From the Matrix. You can read the details at my site,www.nomorefakenews.com.
A little personal background. I had a passion for painting, and I started to work in a studio in the summer of 1962, when by “chance,” down to my last few bucks, with no place to live, having just returned to New York from Cape Cod, I went to the Metropolitan Museum straight from the bus stop, and…
I wandered through rooms I’d visited many times. But this time, I decided I needed something to eat and I walked into the Museum restaurant. I’d never done that before, in my dozens of visits to the Met, and…
There I ran into a painter I knew from a gallery in the city. He sat down and we had lunch. He told me he was leaving for the Cape the next day, and he had a problem. He hadn’t found anyone to live in his studio for the summer, and…
He asked whether I knew anybody who needed a place to stay. We’ll, I said, with the blood pounding in my ears, I would be happy to sublet it, but…
I had one problem: no money. He said, don’t worry, pay me what you can, I just need someone to live there while I’m away for the next two months.
And that’s how my new life began. Painting in that studio.
I don’t cut things that close to the edge anymore, but the theme remains the same. There is reality, and then there is imagination that creates reality.
Somehow, for me, painting is a touchstone. Doing it, looking at it, thinking about it. In unexpected ways, I take off from it, and life changes, becomes far better, becomes something quite different.
I was never trained as a painter. I can remember, in the second grade, my teacher telling my parents I had no discernible talent for it, and perhaps I should be excused from art class altogether.
So years later, when I was 24, I came to it out of the blue. I knew a painter in Connecticut, and when I visited his studio, I was immediately staggered at the notion that a human being could live in a place and paint in it every day. It wasn’t a vocation or an avocation. It was a life.
From that moment on, I had to do it.
Painting is imagination at work in space. Paul Klee would start one painting, go to town on it until he couldn’t decide what to do next, and move on to a second blank canvas. He’d paint on it until he couldn’t decide what to do next, and go to a third blank canvas. He’d do this with six or seven canvases…and then return to the first one, with fresh ideas.
Making new realities.
Whereas: the Matrix is frozen imagination.
The news is frozen disinformation (which is also a form of imagination).
Consensus reality is: everybody “paints one picture.”
In a way, these are all cosmic jokes we play on ourselves. Of course, they can get deadly serious, when we’re mired in them.
Abundance is imagination realized.
Scarcity is amnesia about imagination.
Michelangelo famously said that the final figure of a sculpture was already in the raw block of stone; all he had to do was remove everything that wasn’t the figure. If that isn’t imagination, I don’t know what is.
Our technological civilization seems intent on divorcing imagination from perception, in the name of science. It’s a deteriorating strategy, because the life drains out of perception—which is another good description of what the Matrix is.
In 1996, I formed a partnership with a publisher in San Diego, The Truth Seeker. Bonnie Lange was a bolt out of the blue. As head of Truth Seeker, she wanted new ideas, and she wanted to support them and back them to the hilt.
I had never met anyone like her in the publishing field, or anywhere else for that matter. She gave me the go-ahead for my 1999 book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies, after only hearing the title. And she paid me to write it.
That book enabled me to examine history in the light of two themes I had developed: the formula of the secret society, and the tradition of imagination.
For as many centuries as you care to visit, there has always been a tradition of imagination on this planet. Scattered here and there, it is carried forward by men and women who’ve managed to cast off doctrine and orthodoxy in favor of exploring and living through their own creative power.
They carry the torch. They discover, in the process of invention, that the reality most people come to accept is a cover story laid over life-force, like rain over fire.
We were not meant for that reality.
There is no highly organized society that can afford to hold up individual imagination as a prime virtue. It is too damaging to the consensus. It is too alive. It deconstructs oppression on all fronts.
Imagination scoffs at minds that “already know it all.” Imagination is concerned with the infinity of futures that have not been yet created.
For some people, this idea creates great music in the mind. For others, who are dead in their knowing, it doesn’t register.
Here are a few of my original notes for The Secret Behind Secret Societies, made before I wrote the book: “Musicians, the greatest improvisors in the world, gather and play in a cemetery. Some people emerge from their graves and live again. Some continue to sleep. There are different kinds of dead.”
“People want Pattern. They think they live for it. At some level, it’s very pleasing. Pattern, balance, symmetry, harmony, geometry. It seems like an ultimate. But that is only true at a certain level of mind. At other levels, there is a greater hunger to imagine and create without guiding Pattern.”
“Fractals, sacred geometry. Buried treasure in the investigation of this universe. But the primary and prior fixation is on this universe as The One. It isn’t. It’s just one space and time. It’s just one work of art, among many. Among an infinity. And then there is another infinity: the universes that haven’t yet been created. They’re all works of imagination.”
“The secret society wants its members to get involved with secret Pattern. Ah, the mystery. The Pattern will be revealed. It’s just over the next hill. No it isn’t. There is no answer there. Pattern is something you can put in a work of art or a work of science. That’s all.”
At some point in my career as a journalist—which began in 1982, as an afterthought, because I was writing poetry and fiction—I realized I was taking apart consensus reality on a number of fronts. I was breaking down “works of (perverse) art” and revealing their foundations. I was exposing masquerades.
After that realization, I was far more comfortable with what I was doing.
The whole ticket to ride in this world is entry into what is created for you. It’s exciting, it buzzes, it sparkles. Unless you’re born in a place where it shoots and explodes and imprisons. But the gist of the message is: you’re here to take the trip.
That’s what keeps things going in the same way, eon after eon. If we were all artists and inventors, the whole premise and structure would break apart.
We could still take the trip. But we would be inventing far more exciting and illuminating realities.
In some ways, this universe and our minds do a tap dance in which many premises are generated, one after another. Then we follow down these premises and see what they yield. Eventually, the whole mechanism slows down. There is something missing. In the search mode, which certainly does bear fruit, we nevertheless wonder what’s being omitted.
People have answers for us. Plenty of answers. Most of their solutions are about content. The content of this, the content of that. But still…
What’s being omitted is our own power to imagine and create, which isn’t content at all.
Content is the outcome of what we create.
We exist. And we create without end. So the outcome, the content, isn’t the final factor. It’s the result, the offshoot.
Is this universe made as the holographic projection of code engraved on a two dimensional surface? Is it vibrating strings? Is it the flowering of the Big Bang? On and on goes the search, as if the content of the answer is going to be final.
It isn’t.
Whether they know or not, people have aesthetic standards, which define what they’ll accept or reject. It’s quite remarkable. People act and behave as if they’re painters judging beauty, even though they wouldn’t go near brushes, paints, and canvas in a million years, much less a museum.
These aesthetic standards form titanic convictions that act as pillars upholding a picture of this world and this universe. And from that unfolds the premise that, indeed, this universe is the only one.
It’s a self-reflexive proposition. It’s unconscious dedication to a single picture.
And in the long run, it’s a barrier against the life-force that resides in imagination, creation, invention, improvisation. It’s staking out a firm and unshakable position in a very small space, in the middle of an infinity that goes unnoticed.
On the other hand, when a person begins to live his life through and by imagination, those hidebound aesthetic standards change. The chains loosen. The links dissolve.
And perception opens up on new vistas that were never noticed, because they were off-limits.
The strategy of the Matrix is to enchant people forever with the prospect of finding out more and more about it. This is like a painting saying, “Here I am. I’m the only painting. Study me forever. I contain many mysteries…”
Or you could paint.
I’ve known a number of people who’ve made the shift. One way or another, they reported this: when they began living by and through imagination, whatever their field of work, they realized they were journeying out beyond their ironclad certainty…and it was a tremendous relief, because they had really become bored with that absolute collection of knowledge. They were set free from its limits.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com