image: Seated Hermes, found in the Villa of the Papyri, Hurculaneum. Wikimedia commons (link).
One of the most important talks at the recent Secret Space Program -- among a lineup of talks that were all extremely important, each in its own way and also in conjunction with the others and with the larger thesis that was being explored from many different angles -- and one of the most memorable was undoubtedly the theatrical tour de force delivered by Jon Rappoport.
It was "theatrical" in the sense that Jon Rappoport seamlessly "channels" the voice and persona of whatever character he needs at any moment in order to illustrate his message, at times more than one character at a time (for instance, when depicting a dialogue or a debate), and at other times (after the fashion of the classical orators of antiquity) he will declare: "But I hear someone saying . . . " and then he will deliver the imagined counter-argument or challenge to his thesis, before he takes up his own voice again and demolishes their objection.
It was also theatrical in the sense that the heart of his message involved the use of "a little theater" -- as in, Let's show that the entire construct of reality is nothing but theater, a willful "suspension of disbelief" by those who have bought into it as if it were actually real. According to his argument, theater is a powerful tool by which we can "upset the apple cart," and demonstrate a different reality than the one that everyone is accepting as "the only reality" by unthinking default.
His talk was so successful in its theatricality and its delivery of his powerful message that it deserves to be seen and heard -- and I've been waiting to see if it would show up on YouTube or some other public outlet, so that I could link to the video of the presentation itself, allowing readers to go watch and listen to Jon Rappoport for themselves. However, so far it has not shown up in any public outlet that I have found, although it is available on the Secret Space Program official website, where those who purchased tickets to the event (either tickets to attend in-person or tickets to watch the streaming videos from the conference) can log in and see all of the videos of the presentations.
So, I will discuss what I felt to be the most important points of Jon's talk, along with some quotations from the talk itself -- with the hope that if the video does become public at some point in the future, readers can go check out the entire thing.
The core of his message is at once both simple and profound . . . and so challenging that it is difficult to face, so challenging that it invites all the "defense mechanisms" of the brain to find a way to bury the message somewhere that we won't see it or have to think about it.
His message is that imagination produces "reality."
This message is exactly what I am trying to articulate when I say that the unified message of every ancient mythology is shamanic and holographic at the same time -- but Jon Rappoport articulates this message without using either of those two terms, and in a way that is perhaps more direct, more profound, and more eloquent.
Let's "listen" to some of the most important parts of his lecture, to hear him in his own words. First, his argument that, in the most profound way possible, you are not material: that is, the part of "you" that actually makes you "you" is not the material part -- and the implications of that fact will be seen to be enormous, and will lead right into the most paradigm-upending pronouncements of quantum physics, and the "holographic universe" models that theoretical physicists have been proposing for the past forty or fifty years:
OK – so let’s take the materialist’s view of life: by conventional physics – conventional physics, OK? Everywhere’s particles. Tiny little particles. Call ‘em whatever you want: say they’re matter, say they’re energy, whatever you want – but that’s it! As far as you can go in the universe, that’s it, that’s what you’ve got when you boil it all down, you’ve got these little particles, right? Quarks and the things and the wavicles and the bah-bah-bah-bah. OK. And a conventional physicist will tell you, if you (you know) press them far enough, that none of these particles contain consciousness (what?) or the ability to understand anything – you know, what we ordinarily take to be understanding. They’re just particles, right? This thing here? Particles. Particles, particles, particles, particles, particles, particles. Brain? Same particles. No different! Don’t give me that – same particles. Sorry! So, how is it possible, then, that I’m talking and you understand what I’m saying? It’s not. Something impossible is happening here right now. Your brain is made out of the same particles mine is, same as the chair is, same as that camera, same as her lipstick, same as that strap, same as that thing you’re wearing, a bracelet. It’s all the same particles. Brain? Same particles. [. . . ] So by conventional physics (materialism, that’s the philosophy aspect of it) there’s no possible way that I could be talking and you could be sitting there understanding what I’m saying. But yet, it’s happening! Impossible! Therefore . . . you’re not material. Hate to break it to you. Neither am I. We’re inhabiting these things, but we’re not material. These things are material, but we’re not . . . and we possess this capacity to understand each other. Yes, the physical vehicle has a part to play, in the theatrical this and the that and the blueah-yuh-yuh-yuh, but that’s it. The actual understanding is non-material. Somebody says, “WAIT a minute! I don’t like that. Don’t try to pull that one on me. I’m not non-material, my good friend.” Well, too bad. So if that’s the case, here, what we’re really looking at is a roomful of non-material beings inhabiting bodies, who are basically being confronted with the idea that they have extremely powerful imagination and creative power . . . That doesn’t seem like a stretch to me anymore. “Well, Hey! If I’m not really made out of matter, some pretty wild things are goin’ on here! You know? And if imagination happens to be one of those things, well why not? Yeah, I could see that! I create something, I create something!” Now somebody says, “Well, can you snap your fingers and make an elephant appear over there?” Nope! Nope! I can make him appear to me (hey, Bozo), but . . . if we go back into ancient Tibet, which is a whole other topic, I think we can see that they were on the trail of making an elephant that everybody could see – that’s another story for another time, perhaps – but the point is: it’s non-material you, asking yourself the question, “What can I do?” It’s not John Q. Patterson, of 63 Gobby-gooby Drive in San Jose, California, blah-blah, with a phone number of this, and a cell, and a pair of glasses, and a fence around his yard, and a thing, saying “What can I do?” . . . That’s not it! Because that dude has absolutely no chance! He has no answers -- he has no clue! He’s the wrong character in the play to be dealing with that issue. [Beginning at 01:10:46 into the presentation from Sunday, June 29, 2014].
In other words, once we have established that you, your consciousness, is non-material and that it is not being produced by the material physical universe of particles (it cannot be), then some pretty incredible ramifications immediately begin to force their way to the front of the crowd and start demanding we address them -- ramifications such as, "if my consciousness is not actually being generated by these particles, then is it actually dependent upon these particles, or is it somehow above and beyond them?" and "if I am not dependent upon the particles, then does that mean I can create realities with this non-material consciousness I've got? What about creating an elephant?" and "If this is true, then to what degree do we have to accept the tidy little boundaries and structures that seem to give meaning and identity to everything?" (these questions are my extrapolations of some of the implications raised by the subject which Jon is discussing in the quoted segment above -- they are not quotations from the talk but I put them in quotation marks to point out that these are the kinds of questions that the point that Jon is making above should cause us to start asking).
These are implications raised by what I would call the holographic part of the formula "shamanic-holographic." But Jon Rappoport's real gift to the world is his articulation of what I would label the shamanic -- but what he calls the artist.
The artist (and the shaman) transcends the artificial boundaries of what most of us accept as "reality" -- and in doing so they actually create a new reality.
This is the message that I believe to be at the heart of all of the ancient myths of the world -- a shamanic message, a shamanic-holographic message. And, in a profound and memorable part of his talk (the most profound and memorable part, to me) Jon Rappoport made this very point by invoking the trickster god -- specifically Hermes. Listen as he describes the process by which certain people who want to control others have become very adept at "creating reality" and handing it off to people who don't know that they can transcend the limitations of those so-called realities, and how the message that the trickster god desperately wants to get through everybody's head is that this reality is just one big giant construct, and that we should be using our imagination to transcend it and to create our own!
But it is, unfortunately, the answer: Imagination. You would think, uh, well . . . I was hoping it wouldn’t be that. [. . .] To look at it another way: the bad guys are already using their imagination. They’ve been doing that for a long time. And what they have created is this strange thing called “reality.” Who knew, right? That’s what they do. In my book The Secret Behind Secret Societies, I go into this at, you know, excruciating and painful length. The bad guys have been painting the mural of reality for a long time, but they’re not interested in looking at it themselves, unlike an actual painter. They just want to turn it the other way and show it to everybody else and say: “This is reality! OK? This is it!” And the last thing they want other people to then do is to say: “Well, who painted that?” No -- they want to make it so convincing that people are just gonna say, “Yeah! OK! That’s reality! Yeah! It looks like a reality – Uh, you know . . . I don’t know what to compare it to (maybe a ringing cellphone) – uh, it is, it must be reality! And I will accept it because . . . it’s here! You see, this is the requirement. We’re all intelligent people, and, so, well, we all know: Let’s see -- what’s the definition of reality? What’s here! Anything else?” What else could it be? Now, if you’re a particularly perverse artist and you produced that painting, you’re going – “Man! You see this guy? He comes up to us in the museum and he goes: ‘Uh huh, yeah, that’s reality!’” In fact, in fact – this is very important – he doesn’t just look at the painting: he walks into the friggin’ painting. And he takes a left, and a right, and he finds a little cottage, and he says: “Can I move in?” and everybody says: “Sure!” And he moves in, and he stays there. That’s how convinced . . . So somebody else, not just one person, of course, but . . . the mural is being painted. Right? Has been, for a long time. That’s called imagination. Now we can say, “Well, we just don’t have what it takes to do a better, different mural. You know. We gotta go with the one that we got.” And what I’m saying is, “That’s all wrong, you see.” But it kind of depends on you, saying, actually, “You know, I have an imagination, and I’m going to imagine a different reality, and some means of getting there. I’m gonna do something big.” All right? Theater – let’s have a little theater. Let’s upset the apple cart for example with some theater. Poke a hole in the status quo. This is what the trickster-god, Hermes or Mercury, was all about in the ancient Greek culture. He had enough firepower to be the king of the Olympians, in that mythology, but he didn’t wanna be, because he could see that everybody else was glued to this single reality, and he wasn’t. He was passing through buildings, and cars, and planes, and whatever they had back then, he would just go through it and around it and he would look at everybody hypnotized by the, you know, the reality and he would say: “Man! Wake up! Don’t you see?” and if necessary he would resort to stealing things from people – go into their houses at night: “OK, so he put the TV here, let me move it over here – this is gonna be good, you know. And then let’s go into the kitchen cabinet, and let’s take all of the cereal, and put it underneath with all the, you know, the cleaners and the crap, right? And then, let’s see, what else, let’s take his wife’s clothes and put ‘em in his closet, and his clothes and put ‘em in his wife’s . . . yeah, right!” And that guy wakes up the next morning and he gets up and he goes: “Wha- wha- What happened!” You know? “What happened to the reality that’s been painted for me, that I’ve accepted? Everything is different! Were the clothes . . . honey, did you change the clothes?” “No, you must have done it: I didn’t do anything.” “What happened, where is this, why is this, why is the cereal under the sink, with the Clorox? Are you now putting Clorox in my cereal?” Imagination, creative power. This is what consciousness is about. And part of the so-called, you know, paranormal – that word – it really means “imagination and creative power.” So that imagination produces reality. [00:30:44. The passage at the end introduced by "This is what the trickster god . . ." begins at 00:35:27].
This is incredibly powerful stuff. This is exactly the message (I believe) of "the hidden god." That message, you recall, portrayed in countless ancient myths of the world, is that when we plunge into incarnation, we are given a "drink of forgetfulness," causing us to forget our divine nature (and what is a divine nature, if not a "reality-producing" nature?), and the message of all the myths (from the hunt by Isis for the chopped-up pieces of Osiris, to the parable of the prodigal son, eating among the swine and forgetful of who he really is) is this: "Wake up!" (or, in the words inscribed upon the stones at Delphi: "Know thyself!").
It is a message that we are prone to forgetting, even after we have learned it once -- we may have remembered at one point that we could be an artist, transcending boundaries and creating new realities, and then somehow forgotten it and settled down inside the boundaries of someone's artificial construct again, and accepted our circumscribed little identity inside of it. That's why we need the trickster god to come "upset the apple cart" and show us that those "realities" are actually nothing more than a bunch of conventions that everyone is giving power to by their acceptance of them, but that once such acceptance is withdrawn, the conventions will melt away into the insubstantiality they always were to begin with.
The trickster-god in mythology is like the "clown" in the plays of Shakespeare (whoever he was, or whoever she was, or whoever they were . . . if the plays of Shakespeare are the products of someone or "someones" other than the Bard of Avon). The clown (or fool) is allowed to say things to those in power (including and especially the king) that no one else dares to say -- and the king welcomes it -- in fact needs it. The clown shows that the entire structure, which certainly seems to have a "reality" of its own (and a reality that is enforced by real steel bayonets and the real threat of death for those who try to resist it), is nothing more than a great big social construct, a fabrication given its power by the very acquiescence of everyone who subscribes to it. It is a power that is derived, for the most part, from words themselves -- and the clown characters of Shakespeare are past masters at playing with words, punning upon the ambiguous meanings of words, taking words too literally or otherwise twisting their meaning around to subvert their original intention, and otherwise showing that the whole thing is a great big artificial reality to which the clown refuses to subscribe and in which the clown refuses to settle down like everybody else.
In other words, the clown is trying to wake us up from our doltish acceptance of the artificial structures that limit us -- that may, in fact, have been "realities" that were spun for us by wielders of "mind control," as Jon Rappoport indicates in the quotations above. A delightful modern movie in which a "clown" character illustrates the concept of "mind control" is (appropriately enough), entitled The Court Jester.
What's more, virtually every ancient myth-system around the world has a trickster-god, and (as Jon Rappoport indicates in his discussion of Hermes quoted above), that trickster-god is an extremely important god: in many ways, the most important of all of them (think, for example, of the fact that the tradition of Hermetism or Hermeticism and Hermetic wisdom have an origin attributed to Hermes, or more specifically to Hermes Trismegistus: Hermes recognized as the Greek god who is identified with Thoth of ancient Egypt).
In Norse myth, for example, the god associated with Hermes is in fact the most powerful of all the gods: Odin himself. "Odin's day" (or "Wotan's day") is our Wednesday, which is the day of Mercury (or Hermes) in the Latin languages (for example, it is Miercoles in Spanish). Odin is a boundary-crossing god: he famously (shamanically) transcends the boundaries of the physical body by hanging himself on the World-Tree of Yggdrasil for nine days and nine nights, until he has a vision and "sees" the twigs on the ground turn themselves into runes (remember that Thoth, the Egyptian god associated with Hermes and hence with Odin, was the god of writing and of scribes and the giver of the gift of writing to humanity also). Odin passes through the boundaries to retrieve knowledge from the "other side" -- he brings into being "new realities." He is also constantly depicted in Norse myth as having to break his word and having it trouble him very deeply.
Not only that, but Odin is blood-brother to a sort of evil twin, the real trickster-god of Norse myth: Loki. If one were asked which Norse god was the counterpart of the trickster-god Hermes, the most obvious answer would seem to be Loki, not Odin. But the Norse myths tell us that Odin and Loki each opened a vein in their arms, and Odin let his blood and the blood of Loki flow together: hence, in a very real sense, Odin and Loki are actually both two sides of the same god.
Loki, like Hermes, is a distinctly hermaphroditic god: we are told that of all the gods, his shape-shifting abilities are such that he can even take on the form of female creatures (Loki once famously turned himself into a mare in order to distract the work-horse of a threatening jotun -- and then when Loki became pregnant by that jotun's stallion, Loki became the dam of Odin's marvelous eight-legged steed, Sleipnir). So, Loki is a "boundary-crossing" god as well. In fact, Loki (like Odin) is constantly breaking his word, although unlike Odin he never seems to feel any remorse about it.
It is also interesting to note that, while Hermes is often portrayed as a slender, beardless youth (such as in the famous Seated Hermes statue shown above, which was discovered in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy, a town like Pompeii on the slopes of Vesuvius, and which was horribly buried under fiery volcanic ash on that fateful day in AD 79), he is also portrayed in earlier art such as the Greek red-figure cup shown below as a bearded man with a wide-brimmed hat. Odin also famously wears such a hat in Norse mythology as well. In the scene below, Hermes is the one holding a caduceus staff -- the one topped with the twinned serpents intertwined into a figure that almost looks like a "figure eight."
