When I first wrote this article, I was imagining a physical location, a center for art and magic. Since then, I’ve come to realize that some of us are already in that place. It’s wherever we are. Although one day I may come to house it on a piece of land, that doesn’t really matter. A community of sorts is in the works. It entails no sacrifice in order to be “part of the group.” In fact, it is founded on the idea that the individual is beyond the old model of a group. This community is “composed” of individuals, each of whom knows there are no limits to what he can invent--- and no compromise on that is possible.


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 majestic and untamed and astonishing.

They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

They suddenly know why they are alive.

It happened to me one day in 1949 when I was 11 years old. I was boarding a bus in upstate New York for a full day’s ride back down into New York City. I was sitting by the window as the bus pulled out of a parking lot, and I opened the first page of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, a perfect children’s book.

The word CREATE wasn’t on that first page, but I felt it. It sounded like a great bell in my ear, and I knew I was in a different world.

Eventually, many years later, I discovered that what people call The Spiritual is actually all wrapped up in the meaning of that word CREATE.

I discovered that people try to avoid it. Instead, they accept landscapes painted by a priesthood and 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 gain the prize without ever having to create.

They 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 you may know, I’ve been writing about the creative life for some time. For me, this 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.

The Center is a place where people who have really lived with CREATIVE ACTION for a long time work. These people are artists and musicians and writers and dancers and inventors and other innovators who have shoved in all their chips on what it means to do what they do…

This Center is not a place for slogans and systems and intellectual finger food and the nasal discussion of the New. This is about EXPERIENCE. It’s not weekend seminars delivered by people who drop a few tidbits about instant wealth or drop a few mantras like rose petals. And it’s not about merely wowing audiences for an hour or two.

It’s about experiencing the creative life by living it.

It’s about diving in. It’s about a kind of transformation that rips up programming and just gets down to the energy of the Fire.

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

Most people don’t want to travel to that grand arena because they know they’re going to have to destroy something to get there.

They have been trained like pets by some sector of this society to be good little girls and boys. They think all destruction is bad and all creation is done in pastels and rainbows.

TS Eliot said the world would end with a whimper. Well, if it keeps on going the way it’s going now, it’ll end with a rainbow devised by “a really nice person” with about two functioning brain cells.

The truth is, if people want to live the creative existence, they have to be willing to destroy----and the main thing that awaits their destruction, delivered with force, is their own illusions and their commitment to the World of Nice where doily power is the only power. Where that tired phrase, “the approval of others,” is the guiding precept and the stick of fear.

There are all kinds of people around who SAY they want to create, but it turns out they want to play a little in the sandbox, and they tremble at the idea of using real power.

The Center isn’t about little changes done in little penguin steps. It’s about putting your arms and your mind and your whole juice around Deep, Big, and Wide Desire. It’s about making that Desire come to life.

99% 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.

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

Let me give you a crazy metaphor here. A very crazy metaphor. Imagine you are suddenly a singer in the middle of a choir. That’s your 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 emerges 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.

Every person would feel the fire.

Well, take that as a metaphor for the Center.

Have you ever wondered why the people who are most embedded in the holiest of holy scriptures---the ones who have had those lessons shoved down their throats---go out and kill as many people as possible?

It’s simple. What they’ve been taught is this: everything is created from above already; there is no more room; the individual creates nothing. Armed with that pungent piece of cultural brainwashing, raised in that kind of family, they are cornered rats, and they kill anything in sight.

Or if they can’t kill, they go to sleep. They sleepwalk through life and say yes to everything. They promise everything and give nothing.

Maybe you once saw something truly free that didn’t care about consequences, and it blew you away and turned on your soul’s electricity for an hour.

Maybe you’re sick and tired of bowing and scraping before a pedestal of nonsense.

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 special drawing 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 smug boredom of the soul.

Art is about what the individual creates 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, 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 harmony of the living dead.

Remember this. Every time a human being has created a startling living dream and made it more real than reality, the parasites have come along and tried to bury it with their particular twisted brand of praise or disdain. That is their method of devouring it and passing its contents along to their digestive systems.

They use praise or disdain to cover it with notions that eventually varnish the cathedrals of abject worship.

But to a creator, these little zombies mean nothing. Their approval means less than nothing.

The creator is on a different road. He has lightning in his hand, and all the gates are open.

Time and time again, it’s driven home to me how addicted people are to the act of surrendering their own creative impulse, on behalf of some imagined super-thing-or-being who is really calling the shots. This addiction is powerful. Very powerful.

Not only is it powerful when you look at the conventional religions, it’s strong when you look at the fringes, where everybody and his brother has some Entity with a name in his back pocket---the Entity who is “the ultimate source of everything good.” People actively seek out such a belief and such an entity as if they’re prospecting for gold in the mountains and they have a fever in their heads.

They invent the Entity and they want it to tell them what to do. It’s that simple.

It’s the ultimate appeal to authority. It’s saying, “I can’t stand on my own power. I have to get permission from The Big. Then and only then are things okay. Then and only then would my actions have the cosmic seal of approval. Otherwise, I’d be lost.”

People have this crazy idea that they need to prop some Entity up on a pedestal; otherwise, what their lives are about is not spiritual. In fact, the opposite is true, as I’ve mentioned many times.

Chronically bored people, encased in concrete, look for reasons to stay where they are. They often drift into some kind of spiritual gimmick. Once they’ve arrived, they get assurances that illumination will come.

To get beyond that, a person has to decide, “I don’t care.” That’s all. But his lack of caring isn’t the passive tranqed out version. It’s a very active I don’t care. It’s reckless. And then you find out you’re sane, remarkably so. It’s a funny moment. First you say, “I’m nuts,” and then you say, “I’m sane.” In that order.

Then you look around and see what you really want to do.

To see this from another angle: 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…

Now let me describe a deceptive version of this, on the other side of the coin. A person says, “Eight years ago, I was sitting in a train going to Baltimore, and suddenly an angel came to me. It was nothing I expected. The angel showed me, in a split second, how to paint. Painting was as foreign to me as the North Pole. But when I got home, I bought a large canvas and paints and brushes, and I did a landscape of Atlantis. I found I could render all the details of a great city. It was a miracle. I’ll be showing the painting to you, and I’ll be describing this miracle…”

Fine. But this person is really doing what? He’s trying to get other people to become as entranced by this landscape as he is. He wants as many people as possible to bow down before this painting.

And guess what? It works. A lot of people are drawn in. They now have a second-hand experience.

Here’s the catch, though: it doesn’t really matter whether an angel visited the train traveler. What matters is, other people are abandoning their own creative impulse to “share” in this person’s experience. That’s the trick.

That’s a good description of religion.

This kind of thing has happened over and over on planet Earth. Over and over. Very few people have said: “Wait. What I really want is to create on my own.”

Most people prefer the second-hand version: the angel who came to someone else, the alien from space who came down and talked to someone else, the entity someone else is channeling…

But I can assure you, underneath this second-hand shell game, every person has a great desire to create on his/her own.

And finally---there are many teachings that aim toward the goal of setting people free from their own negative restraints and illusions. Some of these teachings can and do lead to breakthroughs. But in most cases, the students become addicted to the sensation of the breakthrough. They keep coming back, hoping to drink from the same cup again.

It’s interesting, because in a very real way, the breakthrough is just the beginning. It’s the zero point, from which a person could then create with power. But most of them don’t. They just keep returning to the scene, hoping to find that open space of freedom again. They think that’s what they really need. But that’s skewed. What they really need is to create.

ACTION.

People come to the brink, where, so to speak, they’re ready to take the paintbrush in their hands and make a move---and then they stop. They look to that Entity in their back pockets, and they step back. They opt instead for a form of hypnosis. They say, “I’m waiting for orders. I’m looking for a sign. I’M LOOKING FOR A SIGN. I don’t have any primary impulse of my own. I want the signal that it’s okay to proceed. I’m just a channel for Otherness.”

Baloney.

It’s a form of self-induced brainwashing.

It’s a way of ending up doing nothing. It’s just one more way of rationalizing laziness and fear.

At the core of being, a person wants to be creative. To do that, he needs to actually CREATE. Take action.

We can break the hypnotic supposition that some system of harmony is our eternal guide. We can break out of the idea that all we are supposed to do is contribute another piece to a system of harmony that has already been laid down.

We can create something new and unprecedented and we can see it is magic.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com