by Jon Rappoport

When Walt Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric,” and when he wrote his long poems, he was doing a kind of art that also sustained his own physical form and made it more alive. He saw healing everywhere and he created it and he broadcast it. He projected, into the American dream, a lightning bolt of improvisation that carried energy right down into the cells of the body.

If you were to open his book of grace and read out loud, boldly, and with energy, Song of Myself, you would experience a piece of this great unknown territory. It would enter your blood and brain and taste buds and carry a new spring.

There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.

This lone word makes them see something untamed and astonishing.

They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

They suddenly know why they are alive.

When people strip away all the hogwash that has been passed off as spiritual enlightenment for centuries, fire IS what they are left with. The creative fire IS the IT they’ve been after. IS the real thing. Finally.

Ninety-nine percent of the world has been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they’re ready to cuddle up and take it all in. If they have questions, or if they want to argue, it’s about how to tweak the system to make it a little better. And with every move they make, they put another blanket over the Fire Within.

You can’t make THE CREATIVE into a debating society, because people will turn that into another system. You have to go for actual experience.

Imagine you’re suddenly a singer in the middle of a choir. That’s your whole life. This choir has no sheet music and no plan. The choir just sings, all at once. There is no together and there is no leader and there is no imposed harmony. There is just the choir. Everyone sings. It makes no sense. But you do it anyway. It’s chaos. It’s titanic and bizarre. But eventually, out of the chaos and in the chaos you find a wild beauty no one has ever heard before. It happens. And it makes the whole body and the whole mind and the whole consciousness go into a state of ecstasy.

That would be a creative experience. No one would be able to walk away from it and analyze it or label it. No one would be able to devalue it by comparing it to something else. No one would be able to debate the fine points, because there were no fine points.

I’m always amused when people discuss art as if it’s some sort of perfumed and expensive turned-out fruitcake. As if art exists in a room where the initiated are permitted to make a few deft comments in a vacuum. As if art is a few dollars more for something that hangs on a wall.

Art is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of 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 invents 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 widely praised harmonies of the living dead.

If art is a garden, 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 the famous Simon Rhodia, who made serpentine towers in Watts, California, from glass and metal and ceramic castoffs, the author takes his garden into unknown territory.

Like Johnny Appleseed, he 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. Engraver, muralist. Titan. A dozer in the desert flower, the sailor along banks of green saplings. The driving rain and the drying sun. A black leopard in miles of forest.

A maker of music who has simultaneously set a hundred orchestras in miles of red reflecting canyons playing a symphony that has no beginning and no end but only an endless middle.

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix

by Jon Rappoport

These are notes I made prior to preparing my second collection, Exit From The Matrix:

“Solutions to private problems and public problems require the ability to think things through, logically, and to reject what is unworkable or biased—but above and beyond that, a person needs to be able to imagine solutions that haven’t been tried before.”

“Propaganda says: defect from your own power. Never find out what it is. Assume it isn’t there. Propaganda says: all life is about the species, not about the individual.”

“When propagandists find a good thing, a message that works, they pound on it, they keep hammering away. Family, group, family, group, community. On and on. They never promote the message called The Individual with the same intensity. That would be counter-productive to what they are trying to accomplish: group identity; and amnesia about being an individual.”

“Civilization continues to erode and decay, as individual power is put on the back burner. But that doesn’t give the individual a license to surrender. If others want to give up, that’s their business. The individual, instead, finds new frontiers for his power, for his capacity to invent reality.”

“There is you, there is your own power. And what is that power? It comes in two forms or venues. First, there is the ability to apply logic to events and information; to think rationally from A to B to C; to analyze. And second, there is imagination, the capacity to conceive and then invent realities that would never otherwise exist in the world.”

“You exercise your creative power to fulfill what you deeply desire; and that process will, in fact, spill over and affect others in a positive way. It will lift them up. It will remind them that they, too, have power.”

“Logic and analysis keep you from being sent down wrong roads, keeps you from buying official reality. Logic also reminds you that you have a mind. Logic is a road that can take you deeper and deeper into more basic fallacies that underpin organized society and its branches of knowledge. Logic tells you there are always more fundamental questions to ask and answer. There are levels of lies. The deeper you go, the more confident you become. The more powerful. Logic also lets you know when you’re projecting basic pre-judgments over a whole landscape and neglecting to look at the details.”

“Passivity is a disease. It spreads and takes over. It makes strong people weak, and weak people demented. The passive life is precisely and exactly a life without power. The cure is a life lived with power.”

“In case there is any misunderstanding, the ability to help others and defend them from oppression is part and parcel of your own power. How could you help them without your power? How could you accomplish anything at all in that direction? How would denying your own power possibly result in a good outcome? And most importantly, it is through imagination that you can devise new ways to expose and reduce oppression, ways that haven’t been thought of before.”

“As society continues to decay, more and people attack individual power and place their faith in a program that reduces every human to a lowest common denominator of dependence on some controlling entity. This article of faith is abject surrender.”

“Some people want to say that power is a neutral object that can be used for good or evil. That isn’t true. Your deepest power is alive. It’s personal. It’s stunningly energetic and dynamic. It connects with your deepest understanding of what is true and good and right. But it never sacrifices itself on the altar of what others insist is good and true and right. It never deserts you for an abstract ideology someone else has devised. That ideology was formulated, in fact, to separate you from your power.”

“It takes great energy for a person to bury his own strength. Why not use that energy to multiply your power?”

The creative power of the individual, which is the key to his future, his happiness, his freedom, flows from his imagination.

For this reason, over the last 20 years, I’ve developed hundreds of imagination exercises, about 50 of which are included in my collection, Exit From The Matrix.

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix.