Jon Rappoport July 12 2013

Here is a quote from my unfinished manuscript, The Magician Awakes:

You see, Jimmy, this I can attest and swear to. We’re only operating in part of the arc, a small sector. We’re playing chords in one building. That’s where everybody is.

We’re recycling these chords, and putting them in different sequences, but it’s the same basic music. And when I say music, I mean what people call emotion.

This music goes here and there, and you’ve got ten or twelve billion people convinced it’s the whole shooting match. You can feel this or that or this or that, and nothing else is left over.

We’re talking about experience, Jimmy. But see, what if there are galaxies and universes of experience we know nothing about? Emotions we know nothing about.

We’re in the visible-spectrum arena, a tiny piece of the whole arc. We have no words for all the sixty trillion other emotions that exist out there.

And if that’s true, then we’re puttering away. What we’re quite sure life is, is just a speck in the sea.

Now, Jimmy, I KNOW you’re going to nod and agree with me. You always do that, as if you already know what I’m talking about. You’re going to tell me how the very same thing I’m talking to you about occurred to you when you were a kid in Illinois.

But see, that’s a bunch of crap. You don’t know what I’m talking about. How do I know this? Because nobody has experienced those sixty trillion unknown emotions yet. Nobody.

But we could. We could get started. The only question is how. How do we bust out of the circle, out of the labyrinth?

You’re an engineer, Jimmy. You like to think of yourself as a man who’s at the frontier of knowing what it’s possible to know. You’re a hard-headed guy. You pride yourself on that. At the same time, you claim great power to have thought of everything anyone has ever thought of. My question to you is: how can your wife stand you?

A way out of the labyrinth, Jimmy…the only faculty capable of making the necessary leap:

Imagination.

Imagination isn’t about content, Jim. It isn’t about answers. It’s about creating answers to questions that will never be asked. It’s about putting something there that wasn’t there before.

This stumps most people at the gate. They want content. They don’t want power, they want what power can bring without lifting a finger.

So, Jim, they choose model B over model A and find themselves, after a time, back where they started, because both models came out of the same machine.

We’re talking about the literal mind, Jimmy. The literal mind believes that every solution to a problem is an advance. The literal mind doesn’t notice that some problems require a jump to another landscape.

So Jim, I herewith give you a metaphor. I’m not suggesting you try this. I’m suggesting you imagine this.

If you could get a person to sit still long enough, and if you could do a very long-form interview about his life and past and present, he might, after maybe a hundred sit-downs, shake loose enough material to reframe his entire view of reality.

Everything would depend on how good an interviewer you were. Everything. (And this would be nothing like therapy.)

But…the whole interview process could be based on the interviewee inventing, wholesale, a life and a past he never had. Never had!

During a hundred sit-downs, he would imagine and invent and improvise thousands of details of a life that never was.

“So where did you live as a child?”

“We had an apartment above a hardware store in Ashton, Kansas. The kitchen doubled as my little sister’s bedroom. She slept on a small cot next to the refrigerator. Every night, she peeked over the window sill and watched soldiers standing outside a bar across the street drinking beer and talking and laughing. She collected soldier toys. She kept them in a cardboard box under the cot. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and sit on the floor and turn on the stove burners for illumination and play with the toys. Put them in lines and columns…”

Never happened, Jim. No Ashton, no hardware store, no apartment, no sister, no soldiers, no cot, no toys.

A whole past invented out of whole cloth. Years, decades. Imagined.

Continuing the metaphor: Would you invent such a life so you could step into it, or would you invent it for some other reason?

The answer, Jimmy, is: it depends. Some people would invent a life they actually want to take on, and others wouldn’t.

But in either case, the value of the process (the interview) would be that it widens the scope and power of imagination itself. That’s the damn point.

And with that change, the life you have will look and feel different.

Everything might seem the same on the surface, Jim, but events and possibilities would be more elastic, more like the wet clay the sculptor uses.

In fact, the fundamental particles of existence would be Possibility. They’d replace atoms and neutrons and quarks and wavicles. They’d replace the playing and replaying of set sequences of emotions. New emotions, which have no names, would emerge.

The physical body would get healthier, as if it had been waiting for this to happen.

Emotional programming would disintegrate.

Watch a soap opera for a few years, Jimmy, if you can bear it. You’ll come to see the characters go through the same changes over and over. They wring out the same emotional ups and downs and ins and outs. On and on. It’s a farcical symphony.

People hit the same chords. They reach the end and go back to the beginning. They play the same notes. They deliver the same sequences of frequencies.

This, we’re told, is life.

Yes, a very small corner of it. It’s interesting. For a while. Then the grooves wear out. The B sets in. Boredom.

We haven’t employed imagination intensely enough.

When we do, new roads appear.

Our bodies and minds are musical instruments ready and willing to experience 60 trillion-plus emotions, not 12.

Jim, this isn’t Western philosophy or Eastern philosophy or any philosophy from the past. This isn’t about religion. This isn’t about a system or a structure. This isn’t about solving a problem.

Jimmy, you want to say you have all the CONTENT it’s necessary to have. I know you do. You’re the king of your own castle.

You don’t want someone to shove content down your throat.

But if what content isn’t the issue? What if content is beside the point, in this case?

What if you can imagine and create endless content and substance and even knowledge?

What if, through imagination, there’s NO limit on the amount and kind of content you can create?

What if all cultural fairy tales and myths of cultures are a way of externalizing possibilities that really proceed from inside us?

See, Jim? It’s not exactly what you thought, is it? It’s not something you engineer. I’m not arguing with you about your specialty. Your specialty is systems and programs. I’m talking about something else.

I’m talking about that 60 trillion.

Jon Rappoport