Imagination and the fire

Imagination and the fire

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Once upon a time, human beings lived in cultures where images were alive.  What we now call superstitions were, to them, gods and demons and intermediary entities that transmitted or stole the juice and the energy and the power of life. It's nearly impossible to project ourselves back into such an environment and relive the burgeoning passions that infused experience---because a great shift has occurred. The West entered, with anticipation, a temple where images were aligned with so-called rational faith. This eventually precipitated a crisis.  If you don't have, or believe in, images that live and breathe and are intimately connected with life-force, how do you replace them?  How do you avoid becoming pallid skeletons of science, whose productions never impart that same fire? This crisis is reflected all around us every day. We have become liberated, and in this liberation we are left with emptiness.  On top of that, we have decided to assume that passions of the soul should be modulated, like elevator music, to somehow join with our advanced knowledge, in harmonic balance. It's no balance; it's timidity, and this attitude makes us prey to an eerie tolerance of all opinion and custom and point of view and aspiration and stretched-out egalitarianism and criminal action.  Giving no offense, under any circumstances, for any reason, is now the coin of the realm. You might say, with accurate assessment, that these are qualities of the successful salesman.  And that is what so many of us have become: ambassadors of the vague and desiccated pulse of our "rational culture." The message of this culture is the honed and blown-dry embrace of Anything.  As if this was the message of Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and other teachers of our blurry past. To counterbalance this bleached present, many of us are drawn into dark theaters to watch suburban humans turned into bloodsucking harpooned-tooth neck fetishists and genetic mistakes and hair-sprouting wolves and irradiated monsters or heroes. It's the instant-coffee version of ancient Dionysian adventure.  And the accompanying depiction of gym-sex on the screen wouldn't stir the interest of a mouse in a barn. Was this why and for what we abandoned the mysteries of the epoch of magic? For freckled children in a British academy laboring through a paranormal costume drama, tricked out with the accoutrement of grottoes and dark halls? The crisis on our hands now is not one that is going to go away.  It is not going to recede as magic once receded.  Because there WAS a reason we liberated ourselves from the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance---a reason beyond technology---and until we find it and face it and deeply accept the new struggle, we are going to see this simulacrum-culture of ours make endless cartoons of itself in dried out oceans of concrete. For what we need to do now, pharmaceuticals and brain research and genetic manipulation and cyber-affectation and instant global communication and worship (or desecration) of profit-making idols hold no answers. Suppose what took us into the age of rationality was, in some way, connected to the realization that we were, all along, inventing our own demons and gods and demigods and entities of great life-force---and although that knowledge has been shoved into the background, while technology has soared, it is still with us, and it overshadows all our machines and their power. Suppose this is the message: we are the majestic and wild creatures we built the temples to. We are the makers; we are the architects of all the dreams---and not through some compensatory impulse, but because WE CREATE.  That is our natural inclination and the source of our ecstasy.   Our societies and civilizations are arranged to make it seem as if imagination is a preposterous choice---when, in fact, that is what we are here for.  That is what got us here. Societies are actually in a satellite universe, and the prime universe is all imagination. The underlying hidden and deeply buried cry of our age is: HOW CAN I CREATE? Ridiculously, we are the artists of no limits who are asking that question of ourselves. While, in the deep past, we sucked the marrow out of the bones of the gods we invented and thereby felt enormous passions, we knew there was a missing piece, and that piece was an abyss over which we were hanging.  So we came all this way to find out that we authored the labyrinth.  We built the paths that gave us joy and terror, and now we can consciously and spontaneously make new worlds without end.  Not simply as engineers, but as artists. Swallowing that stark truth may be hard, may be upsetting, but it IS why we made the voyage. And then pulled our punches. This is no archaic revival.  It's now, today and tomorrow. The universe is waiting for imagination for revolutionize it down to its core.

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Jon Rappoport The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. 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.

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