Space-time and Imagination

In space, time passes.

If you put a clock in a room, it will tick.

Time is associated with change. In that room, a person walks around. A moth circles. Another person enters, then leaves. The shadows move. If you wait long enough, a light bulb will burn out.

In space, some objects remain stationary. Books on a shelf. Notebooks on a desk. Boxes piled in a corner. Shoes on the rug. But again, if you wait long enough, those objects change. They decay.

So convincing is this presentation, we assume all space is this way. And we assume physical space is all the space there is.

Whereas, if we begin talking about the space of imagination, most people would draw a blank. “Imagination exists? Yes, maybe, I guess so. But it has a space or spaces? That’s going too far. That’s tantamount to setting up a ‘competitor’ to the space we all recognize. That’s weird and wrong…”

When I began painting in 1962, one of the first things I became aware of was I was finding and creating space on the canvas. And of course, much earlier, I had vivid sleeping dreams. What was that “thing” I was walking around in, in those dreams?

I once asked a physicist about this. He said: when you dream, you think you’re in space, but that’s just an illusion. As proof, he pointed out that he wouldn’t be able to measure what was happening in the space of my dreams, and for him, that was that.

When you’re inspired by a subjective vision of what you want to do to make your own future, and you stand at a window in the middle of the night and look out over a city, your experience of space is much different from what you experience while walking to your car in the morning to drive to work.

And even if you call “the visionary space” subjective, it can be a crucial factor in what you actually do to bring your future about. To make it happen in the world.

The energy exercises I developed for Exit From the Matrix are also about space. To project energy, you create space naturally.

Go back and watch Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil. Those films are all about created space and the arrangement/motion of people in space, and the angles from which they are shot. All film is about this, but Welles does it better.

From the viewpoint of imagination, space is being created all the time.

During the years 1935-1960, in New York, the so-called action painters (De Kooning, Pollock, Gorky, Kline, etc.) discovered space as a primary workable “substance” for their explorations. They were quite forceful about it. It had nothing to do with Renaissance perspective or the illusion of intentionally drawn objects that mimicked how we see the world. In action painting, subjective space was pushed to the hilt, and it disturbed many people because it challenged the comfortable sensation that space was an entirely settled issue.

When you create space, you create power. Yours.

You’re no longer simply living in the automatically delivered space of the universe.

The transition from heaven-based religion to the worship of the universe itself occurred because, after the deconstruction of religious myths, the simplest course of action was to claim that the space we could see all around us, or through telescopes, was holy. It was easy. And holy space would give us all we needed, without any action on our part. Passivity.

The philosopher-poet, Giordano Bruno, was burned to death by the Roman Church because he suggested that every soul could extend his own space infinitely and yet remain in accord with other souls. This view challenged the Church at such a fundamental level it could not go unanswered.

Bruno, in a real sense, was talking about imagination — and once that door is opened in the discussion, institutions fall.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that every human has the right to pursue life, liberty, happiness, and the creation of space, time, and energy…”

Money is the commonly held method for creating space. If you have money, you can make space. Witness, for example, the man who works for 30 years to accumulate enough to retire and build his dream house or buy his boat, so he can sail the seas. Space.

If there is a revolution in store for us, it will come by changing that formula, with enough power, so we can create the space first and then flesh it out in the world.

This is not a sedate undertaking. It isn’t a stroll in the park.

The space-time-energy of the universe could be looked at as a business deal. A guy sells you a coat. He says, “Put this on and you’ll have all the space, energy, and time you need. Why go to all the fuss of creating these things yourself?”

I’m drawing attention to the fact that some sort of bargain has been struck.

Artists aren’t satisfied with accepting the space-time bargain as the end-all and be-all. They chafe at that prospect.

Underneath it all, this is why people regard artists with suspicion.

“Why are you creating your own space and time? We have plenty of it already. Can’t you just accept that and get on with your lives?”

Coincidentally, this is the underlying message of secret societies: let us build reality for you.

People look around and quickly realize they’re surrounded by space, time, and energy, and they conclude there isn’t reason to create their own — and if pressed, they’ll tell as many stories as necessary to explain away their inertia. But somehow, the stories don’t do the trick. Vis-a-vis imagination, you’re either active or passive.

For many years now, I’ve been pointing out the advantages of pushing the “active” button.

The whole red-pill blue-pill story in The Matrix is, in a way, a deflection from the main event, which is: to imagine or not to imagine, to invent or not to invent, to create or not to create.

If we had an actual entity called psychology, instead of a watered-down cultural artifact, it would hinge on that choice, and everything in its purview would bloom from that seed.

Suppose, hypothetically, you found a machine that manufactures all the public space, time, and energy there is in physical reality. Suppose you somehow knew that if you turned off the machine, the continuum would shut down and utterly disappear. Suppose, finally, you also knew that when you turned the machine back on, it would smoothly pick up from where it left off, and no one would recall the “the blank period.”

That’s what we’re dealing with.

But when you invent space, that all changes.

In the thousands of stories about ETs coming to Earth with a message, where is the ET who says, “Wait a minute, don’t you people realize you’re passively accepting this space-time setup you have? Don’t you realize there’s another way to go about this? Don’t you realize you’re all artists? What happened to you? You bought a vacation in this little island of space-time, and you never went home. You forgot the way home…”

It’s even worse than that, because the vast majority have also become salespeople for this space-time continuum. They sell it every day, they pitch it and promote it and market it and hype it as “the one and only.”

Nothing intrinsically wrong with this space-time. It’s the acceptance of it as the final word that causes all the trouble.

Organized priest-class religion has a lot to answer for on that score. So do all our institutions.

One of the most successful sales tactics is making space less affordable and thus more valuable and scarce.

“Get your little space now, before it’s too late. For the low-low price of $250,000 you can move into a 250-foot-square shoebox.”

And then: “We have to spy on everything that happens in this space, because everybody is a potential terrorist.”

It’s the shrinkage factor.

Focus everyone’s attention on diminishing, tightly controlled space, and they’ll be less likely to remember that they can invent their own.

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon Rappoport 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. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Arshile Gorky. Summation (1947).