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John Rappaport is an artist, writer, and researcher who writes from a new paradigm perspective. The following piece is one of a series of backgrounders for his upcoming tele-seminar MODERN ALCHEMY AND IMAGINATION, on September 9. To sign up, click here.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs. Wallace Stevens

Very simple questions: what would happen if the world were enveloped by art? And if we were the artists? And if we owed nothing to any hierarchy or external authority?

Is it possible that an outpouring of art, creation, invention, coming from millions and millions of people, would bring about a sea change in the conducting of human affairs? Would such a tide affect the obsession to wage war?

I’ve worked as a reporter for 25 years, and so I know the value of making a case in a reasonable fashion. Point A, point B, and then you hit them with C. Nice and neat. But the subject of magic, and its source—the creative force within the individual—can’t be approached that way.

First of all, let’s get rid of the preposterous notion that magic resides in certain families, certain bloodlines. That’s just plain stupid. Some people are attracted to the concept, because it makes a good story, and in Europe there is long tradition of viewing magic as something nasty and evil, and with elite bloodlines. It seems to fit. Secret power. Secret societies. Caves under castles. Vampires. Bats. Reptiles.

All that is coming from a collective memory about what European royalty and their minions have done in their conquest for empire. Make war, kill “inferior peoples,” rule them, amass gargantuan profits, claim God is at the head of the troops. Little lapses of judgment like that.

If you research these royal bloodlines, you’re much more likely to come across histories of crazy people—inbreeding—than you are to discover a few hints of real magic. Kings and queens like to lock away cousins who are demented or who see through the self-inflating propaganda of the ruling class.

Magic is not about arcane crests and codes and symbols. Oh, there are people who would like you to think so, but it’s nonsense. All those symbols and seals are just a way of invoking mystery and a front of supposed privilege. Remember, all the old royal families of Europe claimed the divine right to rule. That should tell you something. They needed to sell the idea that God was speaking through them as they were killing millions. Wouldn’t you? You’d have to come up with a compelling reason; otherwise, the peasants might realize you’re simply bloodthirsty and are staying on top of the pile through any means necessary.

For every Charles the Great, there were four or five Charles the Insane, and that’s just what we know from the public record.

The French Revolution may have been laid on, at some level, by Illuminati types, but there were a few good ideas in there. Freedom of the individual was one of them. It may have been dreamed up as a ruse, but it actually worked later on. I mention that because, in contemporary times, if you’re looking for magic, you’re looking at individuals (and individual freedom), not at pedigree. Pedigree is now for dogs.

But people still accept landscapes painted by a priesthood and they call those landscapes Spiritual, and hope these puerile inventions will somehow take them to bliss and final enlightenment and heaven.

In other words, people want to exist inside a phony masterpiece designed by a class of authoritarians.

In a nutshell, that’s the story of this planet, and it always was.

As a testament to the power of the hypnotic spiritual trance, when most people hear the words IMAGINATION and CREATE, they sidetrack those ideas and put them on the shelf: “That doesn’t apply to me. He must be talking about someone else. Creativity is all about genes. You have them or you don’t. I can learn how to work within a system, but beyond that I’d be hanging in mid-air without a net. If it isn’t a system, it doesn’t exist. All progress in life is about finding a better system…”

Ten years ago, I began an intense study of symbols. I wasn’t so much interested in their meanings. I wanted to understand how they’ve been used. What I discovered was simple and stark: by barraging people with symbols, and by defining those images and phrases in narrow ways, you can limit the scope of consciousness. You can make people think they are living inside a space and that all their progress is going to take place within that constructed space.

Symbols define a well-ordered space. A space that has already been explored and described. A space that is the fundamental operating arena. Of course, it’s arbitrary, but through the use of symbols, you can make people believe it’s not arbitrary at all. You can make them think it’s as real as a country on a map. That’s called mind control.

Is it successful? Well, if you tell people there are other spaces in which consciousness can operate, they’ll look at you as if you’re crazy. So yes, the deception works.

Yet, take two examples of creators at work. Michelangelo asserted that, in order to sculpt a human figure from stone, he simply had to chip away everything about that piece of stone that wasn’t the figure, at which point the sculpture would emerge.

Nikola Tesla stated that he could view a new machine, in all its details, with all its parts working, in his mind—and therefore, the physical realization was, in a sense, anti-climactic. He knew everything about it before he built it.

Had these men not made their inventions for all to see—had they not actually performed their magic—they would have been written off as quite insane. Yet all they were saying was: there are different spaces; there are different ways to operate in space; there are different ways to look at space.

Let’s pretend these two men had lived in the Middle Ages. Let’s further imagine that Michelangelo wasn’t working on contract to the Roman Church. Now, what do you think the reaction would have been, from the Church, if these artists had gone around spouting their ideas about imagination and invention? They would have been tortured and killed at the stake. Why? Because the Church was very busy painting its own portrait of the world, and in that portrait there was only one artist and creator: God. He did it all. There was nothing left over. A fait accompli.

The next great period of history, the Renaissance, was in fact an outpouring of human creation. It was a rebound from the extraordinary repression of imagination carried out by the Church.

These days, we have a new Church. We pray at the altar of consumerism. Millions of things are on sale. We buy them. We go into movie theaters and sit in the dark and give our imaginations over to the images on the screen. If we are told these movies are NOTHING unless we simultaneously imagine them as they unroll like a great carpet before us, we deny that.

We’re all “at the movies” most of the time. We’re wrapped up in what we’re supposed to support and give ourselves to.

I’ve been writing about the creative life for some time. For me, that life is a far cry from the pallid oatmeal of spiritual movements where the essence of things is “peace through avoidance”—an attempt to substitute one form of politeness for another, one form of sleep for another.

When people strip away all the hogwash that has been passed off as spiritual enlightenment for centuries, what they are left with—if they can feel it—is creative fire. That fire IS the spiritual force. IS the real thing. Finally.

Most people don’t want to travel to that grand arena. They have been trained like pets by some sector of this society to be good little girls and boys.

Art (creation/magic) is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the foul smug boredom of the soul.

Art is about what the individual invents when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s about what the individual does when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

Art is about the end of mindless postponement. It’s about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It’s about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.

Art is about destroying the old order and the new order and the present order, with a glance.

It’s about spearing the old apple on the point of a glittering sword and opening up the whole rotting crust that has attached itself to the tree of life.

It’s about shrugging off the fake harmony of the living dead.

Here is something else to imagine. The artist as gardener. I don’t mean a cute little garden where every flower balances off every other flower and the stones look like polished fingernails. I mean a garden where the author digs into fallow ground and follows his nose, unearths stones and lays on topsoil and drops in seeds for many different flowers spontaneously—where eventually his own growing hunger overtakes the process and makes it unique.

The garden grows like a hurricane. It fills the heart many times. It marches out to the trees at the edge of the forest and into the canopy. It brings out cactus and rose and iris and magnolia. It erupts and subsides. It explodes after the rain.

Like Johnny Appleseed, the gardener goes wherever he can, as far as he can, until whole hillsides and roadsides and riverbanks are absorbed. Re-making the world.

At night he dreams of new countries where he can lead the garden. Where chard and tomatoes and tulips and lilies and turnips and oak and maple and aspen and palm and plum and spinach and gardenias and goldenseal and lilacs and hydrangea and rhododendron and corn and flax and pine can sprint to the horizon.

He is the general of this army and the foot soldier and the drummer and the hero. Stroller in the wind. The engraver, the muralist, Titan, dozer in the desert flower, the sailor along banks of green saplings.

He surpasses every expectation.

He has the answer to the question, “what do I want to create,” in his teeth.

When this kind of creation overtakes the world, only then does the world become what it should be. The nasty little tale of Eden and the fall from some fictional grace of a pathological lunatic is a minor cymbal crash in the pages of a discarded book.

Writing and painting for the last 45 years have kept my head on straight. Whenever I dipped down into some system that offered insight or progress, I found those involvements ended up being stifling.

Why? Because I wasn’t calling my own shots. I wasn’t on a platform where I was putting my freedom and power and imagination on the line. I was subordinating all that.

Any road that deserves to be called progress would have that quality: it would allow a person’s own creative power to be the leading edge.

Anything else would be a compromise and a subtle (or not so subtle) form of submission and slavery.

On an individual level, boredom has pretty much the same effect as concrete does in the landscape: it covers more and more territory, and once you lay it down it doesn’t usually come up. It stays there.

If you look closely, you can see that people are walking around with big signs on their necks: I’M BORED.

They pretend they’re not. They’d rather say, “I have a cold.” “I’m worried about Aunt Sally.” “My shoes are tight.” “An asteroid could hit Earth in the next three hundred years.”

But they’re bored silly. They’re driving themselves cuckoo.

On the other hand: a dancer dances out all the moves he knows, and then suddenly leaves those familiar moves behind. He spontaneously does something new. He feels that. He feels his whole bloodstream oxygenating. He’s free for eight seconds, and those eight seconds of eternity are better than anything…

This is the kind of experience the world is dying to have.

Lawrence Durrell, the author of The Alexandria Quartet: “I imagine, therefore I belong and I am free.”

William Blake: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable world is but a faint shadow.” “Some see nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

It’s time we gave our own creative core its due. It’s time we stopped trying to avoid it by substituting notions which make us more passive.

FINDING OUT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO CREATE, AND THEN CREATING IT, IS A PATH OF SPIRIT.

Take the example of a little kid. Nine years old. Every day, when he’s not in school, he jumps up out of bed in the morning and he eats a little bowl of cereal and milk, and he runs out of the house and plays with his friends for five hours. He runs and falls down and runs some more and pretends he’s a space man or a cop or a robber. He’s inventing all these games and roles, and he’s moving in and out of them freely. He doesn’t care. He’s playing, heart and soul. There is no possible way that little bowl of corn flakes and half a cup of milk is producing the energy he’s expending. Impossible. He’s creating energy. He’s creating it right out of his imagination. He’s creating it out of nothing.

When I first started painting, in 1962, in New York, I’d begin to work early in the morning, often on no breakfast, and sometimes I’d look up and it would be four in the afternoon. I wasn’t tired at all. I’d go out and get a bite to eat, come back to the studio, start painting again, and the next time I looked up, it was dark. This was in the summer. It would be nine or ten at night.

Creating energy. Out of nothing. If that isn’t magic, nothing is.

Full-bore creation of deep desire with great fire IS the definition of magic. That’s what magic is. It isn’t anything else.

The secret of the labyrinth is this: as long as masses of people are trapped in their own acquiescence to a fictional spiritual and psychological existence, in which they are the passive receivers of “wisdom and direction,” all is lost.

No matter how many liberation movements arise, no matter what degree of success they achieve, in the long run the winners (or their descendants) always fall back into a trance state in the center of their consciousness. They look for answers to come in to them from an external source—and if they can’t find a ready-made source, they will invent one.

I say this as an investigative reporter who has spent 25 years researching these planetary elites along many fronts. Victory today becomes defeat tomorrow because the revolutionaries and the rebels eventually find some new authority on which to pin their hopes.

I am not recommending that people stop fighting for freedom. I’m saying something more is needed.

Freedom always was and always is the platform from which individuals can freely create without limit. When the creative act is abandoned, its foundation, freedom, withers on the vine.

There is an old story about the famous “mad genius,” Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). Gaudi was perhaps the most innovative architect of his time, and was certainly the most bizarre. Most of his works were built in Barcelona, including the Sagrada Familia, the massive church which, to this day, remains unfinished. Gaudi spent 43 years working on the project, during which time he also completed many other buildings in Barcelona.

The story goes that Gaudi was so prolific, the city fathers eventually became frightened that, unleashed, he might literally take over the city with his works. For that reason, his commissions declined.

I believe the story is accurate, that Gaudi WOULD have taken over Barcelona. Although he was a devout Catholic, nothing he invented had precedent in the traditional design canon of the Church.

Gaudi was an exemplar of the creative force unchained. It may sound strange to hear it, but if he had been permitted his full range of architectural expression, the city would have been transformed in its living spirit. It would have become a contagious disease of creativity. People, in its presence, would have become artists and innovators in droves.

It is possible that so many artists, so many creative people, can gather in one place at one time that the entire consciousness of, say, a city, is imbued with that creative fire, at which point magic takes over. It, rather than mercantilism, becomes the core character of a locale.

I do not believe that has ever happened on this planet, but it could. Mere physical location could undergo a radicalization that makes politics and all its crimes sink like a stone. You might say this is true in imagination only, but then you have proved the point, because imagination, unbound, can overtake and re-make reality.

Charles Ives, a brilliant American composer (1874-1964), operated with the same grand notion of space that Gaudi did. A pioneer in polytonal music, at the end of his life Ives began working on his Universe Symphony. It remains unfinished. Ives envisioned the symphony being played by a number of orchestras at once, outdoors, situated in valleys, on the sides of hills, on mountains. The overall space would be consumed by the music.

Imagination, re-making the world.

On the edge of the Gobi desert in China lie the Dun Huang Caves. For centuries, the greatest painters in China traveled there, and painted masterpieces and sculpted the walls of thousands of stone rooms. There is no coherent history of the communities that formed at Dun Huang. One can only wonder at the relationships that flourished among the artists as this gigantic creation grew and grew. The paintings of the Tang Dynasty at Dun Huang are every bit the equal of the output of the Italian Renaissance masters.

Here and there throughout the history of the planet, we find examples of creative outpouring taking over the otherwise mundane existence of places.

What would happen now if immense art spread out all over the world? Yes, it’s just a dream, but it has been realized to a degree before.

I cite these examples (there are many others) just to hint at the flavor of what can be done. Suppose, for instance, a more enlightened version of the Roman Church itself had come into being as ancient Rome declined—not a religion in the usual sense, but a unique institution in which the cathedrals were, each one, built by unique architects, as living monuments to the creative force itself—rather than as hypnotic temples housing the authority of a spiritual ruling class?

What kind of magic would have taken hold? What new technologies might have been born? By now, how much of the paranormal would have become the norm?

I don’t ask these questions as empty exercises in speculation. I propose them seriously. Because the future is always an open issue.

And once again, the whole proposition comes back to: shall we be audience only, or creators? Shall we find our spiritual destinies through obedience to “art” made with mind control as the motive, or shall we embark on a much greater adventure, along a road where what WE individually create is the hallmark and the revelation of our power?

Do we take the magic in our hands, or do we cede it to those who, by default, become our masters?

The true illustration of the principle of universal abundance is embodied, finally, by what we create. When our fire is fully lit, when we swing into the most profound kind of action, all barriers fall. We eventually perceive, with great clarity, that this physical universe is, indeed, only one piece of art. One possible piece, out of an infinity of potential universes. Then, space and time and energy become, not walls and limitations, but raw material for what we fashion.

In the repressive field of psychology, several positive towering figures stand out. One of my favorites is Dr. Jacob Levy Moreno, the founder of a therapeutic method called Psychodrama.

I believe Moreno created the most advanced way of doing therapy the world has yet seen.

Moreno visited people in their homes and constructed “stages and plays” for families to invent and enact. There is a story that goes this way:

A teenager claimed he was Jesus. Rather than trying to deconstruct and tear apart and analyze this conviction, Moreno convinced the members of the boy’s large family to gather around the dinner table each night and play the roles of the apostles.

The result? After a succession of nights, the boy simply gave up his idea of being Jesus. He wasn’t disabused of the notion. He wasn’t criticized. He wasn’t considered a patient. There was nothing wrong with him. He was just given the opportunity to do what he couldn’t do in “real life”: create and play the role of Jesus to the fullest. And eventually he became bored with it. It turned out to be a short-term dream, a short-term work of art.

Can you imagine what would have happened to the boy if he had fallen into the hands of more conventional therapists or drug-wielding psychiatrists?

Here is a quote from Dr. Moreno’s autobiography:

“…Spontaneity and creativity are the propelling forces in human progress, beyond and independent of libido and socioeconomic motives are frequently interwoven with spontaneity-creativity, but does deny that spontaneity and creativity are merely a function and derivative of libido or socioeconomic motives…”

It’s no wonder that Moreno has been ignored by the vast proportion of working therapists. He is too right, too alive, and too much a visionary.

Moreno is one of those people who broke free from the Freudian trap. In 1912, he met Freud at a lecture. Moreno writes: “ had just finished an analysis of a telepathic dream. As the students filed out, he singled me out from the crowd and asked me what I was doing. I responded, ‘Well, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off. You meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings. You analyze their dreams. I give them the courage to dream again. You analyze and tear them apart. I let them act out their conflicting roles and help them to put the parts back together again.’”

Those few moments with Freud summed up the whole psychological bifurcation of the 20th century. Would people regain their courage to dream and create their dreams, or would they become slaves to a new religion—immolating self-analysis in the labyrinth?

Moreno eventually developed a stage for the exploration of social problems. In front of an engaged local audience, several people enmeshed in community conflicts would act the roles that embodied the conflict. For example, a black man who wanted to rent an apartment in a white neighborhood would square off against a white racist landlord. But that was just the beginning. The black man would then play the role of the white landlord, and the landlord would become the frustrated black man. In their dialogues, a spontaneous happening would emerge: both people would say things and express emotions that had been bottled up. Essentially, the two “actors” would create both sides of the conflict as theater. They would become artists. They would elevate and expand and deepen the “material” and find a transcendent satisfaction from playing out dimensions of the drama they had been denied in real life.

Like Gaudi and Ives, Moreno was an artist who could have taken over enormous amounts of psychological and social territory. He could have raised, say, the life of a whole city to a kind of theater that would have transformed the chronic fixations and traps of the population.

Isn’t a major portion of life really theater? And aren’t people dying to play more roles? And wouldn’t access to those roles, on stage, give birth to new energies that would spill out into the streets and crack the egg of various kinds of caste systems?

Wouldn’t the divide between actors and audience in our society undergo a spontaneous revolution?

Art is not a little sandbox. Fueled by liberated imagination, it is THE revolution the psyche has been asking for.

When one acts long enough, he realizes that the world could really be a stage, and the sound and fury would, in fact, signify something vital and deep.

When one paints long enough, he realizes this world and all the universe are but one painting out of an infinity of possible paintings.

When one writes long enough, he realizes that so-called history is but one story—and many other (better) stories could be told.

When one plays music long enough, he realizes that emotion can be lifted out of petty concerns into realms where feeling becomes vast triumph.

When one builds long enough, he realizes that the physical structure of civilization can be led out of mere functionality into dazzling new spaces.

This is where we could go. And the stars in space would pale by comparison.

In the early 1980s, in East Los Angeles, a group of formidable buildings once occupied by the Pabst Brewery was converted to artists’ studios. Initially, about 75 painters and sculptors moved in.

Within a year or two, the first public show was laid on. Visitors would be permitted, for a day, to come to the site and stroll through these studios. I was there on that day. Several paintings of mine were up in a studio where two friends of mine lived. Fifteen hundred people showed up for the causal tour.

I decided to visit all the studios myself. It was like an interplanetary trip. Every studio was a different size. The work of each artist was unique. To come up against 75 vastly different work and living spaces and see vastly different art, in a matter of several hours, was perception-altering. The “real world” faded into obscurity. What took over was Imagination.

As we were walking down a long corridor from one studio to another, a stranger said to me, “Why can’t the whole city be like this?” Indeed.

One of the more interesting features of the Brewery was its garbage. When Pabst had left the premises, workers had dumped a huge amount of material in an open space: parts of refrigerators, motors, giant springs, sheet metal, large bolts, signs, spools of wire, wood beams, tires…

Promptly, artists began to visit this mountain of debris and take interesting objects back to their studios. There, they used them in new works. Then, the artists would take the refuse left over from their new output to large bins situated around the property. In turn, these castoff fragments became raw material for other artists, who would sift through the bins and remove what interested them.

This creative form of recycling was a communal masterpiece of investigation and discovery. Art built from scraps; new scraps becoming new art, over and over.

One day as I was pouring over the Pabst mountain of material, a sculptor said to me, “You know, if we took this far enough, we could suck up half the city and make it into art.” A desire for the ages.

At some point in such a vision, a critical mass would be reached. People, viewing an explosion of art, would themselves catch the thread and begin to inhabit their own dreams. The contagion would take hold. What was formerly viewed as an elitist activity would spill over all boundaries.

And then?

People at large would realize the connection between spirit and creative action. The propaganda machines of the world, aimed at control of the deadened masses of populations, would blow gaskets and become obsolete.” Drowned in a sea of creativity.

That would be the answer to the question, “What do I do after I see through the illusions of the puppet masters?”

Art unchained becomes titanic. It can spread out over the landscape and take it over. It can spawn and proliferate more art, until the emotional content of daily experience becomes transformed. Until we all live at a wider and deeper level.

There are artists like Stravinsky, like Gaudi, like the composer Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (who has been grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists—Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros—all of whom transmit an oceanic quality.

As in, The Flood.

There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale, they would indeed take over the world.

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened for the best is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the consensus shape we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

But creation is not neutral.

It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.

Were you to embark on a uniquely passionate course of creation, enlarging the scope at every turn, you would launch out of the realm of the push-pull humdrum Earthside disintegrating disaster…..and into the realm of what you INVENT….and as you inhabited this latter realm more fully, the SO-CALLED NATURAL LAWS OF THE FORMER REALM WOULD APPLY TO YOU LESS AND LESS, AND THE MORE FREE YOU WOULD BECOME.

Magic.

As more and more of us moved forward in this way, THAT would become the transformation we have been unconsciously hoping for. That would relentlessly make society over. That would eventually shatter the influence of all cartels and monopolies of physical and emotional and mental and spiritual experience. Not because we wished it were so, but because we made it happen.

JON RAPPOPORT
San Diego August 18, 2008
www.nomorefakenews.com

Tags:   alchemy · art · imaginationNo Comments