CHAPTER 3

 THE EYE, THE MIND, THE IMAGINATION

“It’s one thing to intellectualize the truth; it’s another thing to really see it.”

Makes sense. But why is seeing so important?

We intuitively suppose that, underneath our illusions, we can SEE the world as it really is. We have that capacity.

This seeing has an immediacy. And when we experience it, we are enlightened. Whereas, when we just think about “the world as it really is,” we’re “in our heads.” Which is just another illusion, we assume.

Seeing is part of direct experience, and we tend to believe it is that direct experience we are all after.

That’s what we want.

We want to wake up in the morning and open our eyes and see the world as a glorious place full of possibilities and joy.

This experience, we believe, is far greater than waking up with some vague thoughts about a joyous world.

I would agree.

But is seeing a world full of glorious possibilities the be-all and end-all?

Or, to put it another way, can we retain that marvelous level of perception from hour to hour, day to day, year to year, decade to decade?

Is there something inside us that wants to cast off even THAT continuing perception?

And if so, why?

Is it just that we are incurably dissatisfied? Incurably neurotic?

Or is the rebel in us a clue to an even greater power within, a power that will never be denied?

Is our mercurial and rebellious nature part and parcel of this greater power within?

These are all deep questions, and the answer to them is a virtually undiscussed aspect of philosophy, in the highest sense.

Suppose, one day, you suddenly realized that you were creating reality around you. Suppose, one second after that realization, magically, every single dissatisfying piece of reality vanished like a wisp of smoke, and you then saw the world as a fantastically beautiful place.

Would you be “home?” All the way? Would there be anything left to do beyond living in that new fresh moment-to-moment happiness?

There would.

Because, if your moment of insight came as a result of realizing that you were creating reality, part of what you were seeing was the inherent power of your CREATIVITY.

What would you do with that awesome force after that? Would you let it lie dormant forever? COULD you let it lie dormant forever?

No.

Letting it lie dormant would like letting your love for another person sit on the shelf and gather dust.

ALL PHILOSOPHIES AND SPIRITUAL SYSTEMS THAT STATE THE PERCEPTION OF “THE WORLD AS PARADISE” IS ENOUGH ARE MISTAKEN.

They grasp only part of the big picture.

You can’t sit on your imagination and your creativity forever.

If you try, you’ll sooner or later run into problems, and the beauty of the world as you experience it will begin to fragment.

In attempting to fully realize yourself, you need to utilize your creative power.

Why? Because that power is such an inherent part of what you are and what you do.

If you go back and read this chapter from the beginning, you’ll see that what I’m making here is a commentary that has implications for a whole host of systems that purport to define the search for truth as a road that ENDS when you finally perceive the world as a paradise.

That’s not the way it works.

That’s not the way it is.

Only one traditional system on this planet, historically, put imagination and creativity in the absolute foreground of the search for complete enlightenment.

Tibet.

And that system eventually surrounded itself with so much ritual and ceremony that its core was nearly buried.

I now want to refer you to a chapter in volume one of this three-volume work. It is chapter 95, and it describes an exercise I invented. I want to expand my commentary on it. (That chapter will eventually be posted as part of volume one.)

I came to this exercise as a result of conducting many interviews with people in my work as a reporter.

I found that, in some cases, after a certain point in the interviews, people began to loosen up. They talked more freely. They became more absorbed in telling their stories.

But, of course, they were always talking about themselves and their experiences and insights and discoveries.

So I thought: what if they were, instead, talking about something APART from their own experience.

What if they INVENTED as they talked?

Specifically, what if I asked them a whole host of questions about a person that did not even exist?

Suppose they chose a person to talk about, and that person did not exist?

And once having focused on that imaginary person, suppose they invented all sorts of details about that person?

Suppose my questions elicited this kind of invention?

“So tell me about the early childhood of this man with the gray suit. What was his mother’s name? What color hair did she have? What kind of hairbrush does the man in the suit use every morning in front of the mirror? What does the man in the gray suit believe about God? Where did he go to school? What did the school door look like?”

On and on and on.

Suppose we did this for an hour?

And then, the next day, he invented a whole different person and we did the same thing.

Suppose we did 50 interviews?

Might he loosen up in an entirely different way?

Might he begin to widen his perception?

Might he begin to throw off the chains of conventional reality?

Might he feel certain needs to “remain a slave to reality” evaporate?

You see, all of us living in this reality feel a tie to it. We tend to see and think and work and imagine in concordance with this reality. We gauge our thoughts and feelings in the context of this reality----and we never give all this a second thought.

But think of this reality that surrounds us as a kind of monitor device installed in the engine of a car. The device limits the speed of the car.

Everything the car does is dependent on the fact that there is a pre-set top speed for the car.

Imagination has limits imposed on it. Limits which are not really there.

In chapter 95 of volume one, I offer extracts from a few of these IMAGINATION INTERVIEWS.

I discuss, briefly, the effects of doing a number of interviews with a man who is steeped in Tibetan practices.

As a result of the interviews, the man begins to come more alive.

Why?

Because he is taking the chains from his imagination.

Imagination is the fountain of life.

There are many ways to liberate it.

I developed this simple exercise because it is a quite natural way to get a person to open the door to his own creativity.

And because it has a very powerful relation to something I discussed in volume one, the deity visualization work done in Tibet.

Only, in my exercise, we don’t limit it to a deity. We explore many different kinds of imaginary people.

And we do it as an interview, with two people. It’s easier.

…But, for now, here is the point I want to make: the reality we live in has the tendency to get us to assume that all people live in this reality.

I know, that sounds weird or truistic.

But if we can bamboozle ourselves into thinking that “all people have already been invented and live in this layer of reality that we occupy,” we can then bamboozle ourselves into believing that an exercise like “inventing people” has little or no merit.

“Reality is already here. Why should we try to invent it?”

“People are people. They come out of wombs. Why should we pretend to invent them?”

“Only actors bother to invent people, and they get paid for it.”

You have to remember that reality, as we usually think of it, is designed so that we bend to it, bow to it, believe in it as the ultimate fact---and therefore we downplay the power of our own imaginations.

“Imagination may be fun, but so what? It doesn’t supplant reality, except for those fortunate few who can, say, invent new machines.”

I title the ultimate secret society RD. RD stands for REALITY DESIGNERS.

They not only designed the reality we see all around us and the principles that underlie it, they designed the concept of limited reality as a generic category.

They built in safeguards that would challenge anyone who wants to create a very different sort of reality. For example, one needs to be able to resonate with this reality in order to maintain a decent standard of physical health.

If one is constantly, at a frequency level, challenging this reality, he begins to experience energy blocks that pile up in and around his physical body.

He then thinks that challenging reality is not a very good idea, because he feels the impact it has on his body.

However, let me give you a loose metaphor for understanding what can happen when you do, in fact, challenge this reality: you are a runner; you train to run the mile; you want to break the world record; you put your body under all sorts of stress to achieve that; in the first few years of training, you encounter all sorts of obstacles, including injuries; but eventually, through persistence, you come out of that “blockage,” and you start of experience a new level of capacity and liberation.

You go through the blockages and you come out the other side. You also “learn to relax,” which means you learn how to resonate with the key frequencies of this limited reality often enough so that you can maintain a good state of health as you find out how to surmount the limitations of ordinary reality.

You can employ your imagination to create new realities and you can come through to the point where you do, in fact, create these new realities.

RD constructed this space-time-energy continuum so that it would be very difficult---or rather, it would seem very difficult---to create other realities.

And, as I say, the more we became accustomed to this limited reality we live in, the more we accepted it and decided to make our futures within its structures.

So we assist and manufacture our own limited fate by accepting this continuum as the only one possible.

That is the goal of RD.

RD is a “travel agent” that promises enormously interesting vacations that turn into prisons.

To track back RD, one would “take a look at the beginning of this particular universe.”

Okay. You can view RD as a metaphor if you want to. I don’t. Obviously, there are no literature searches that will turn up this group, and there are no insiders you can talk to on the phone about it.

I’m not “directly channeling” information about RD. Nor am I simply making an extrapolation based on other information. It’s more complex than that, and I’m not sure I can explain it.

I’ve been hot on the trail of secret societies for a long time, and volume one of this work lays out the basic underlying theme of these groups. They create realities for us, and in the process they dampen down (with our assent) the power of our own imaginations to create other realities. This is the whole point of secret societies.

What we take to be reality has many aspects and layers, and we are coaxed---and coax ourselves---somewhere along the line, to merge with, and fall into line with, some layer or aspect. In other words, we are coaxed to say, “Oh, here is where I stop. I stop creating for myself and surrender to the notion that I have to submerge myself into a greater aspect of reality and give up my perception and my individuality here and now. This is the end. This is the last stop on the train. From this point on, I’m just a cog in the great machine, I’m just an atom in a molecule, I’m just a speck in the dust storm, I’m just a slave to the greater force.”

That is what RD is all about.

If your “weapon” is imagination, you lay it down at some point and you wave the white flag joyously and you give up, hoping that whatever you are giving yourself up to will be benign and beautiful and kind.

That is what RD is all about.

In our culture, we have a duality we can choose from to explain the origins of the universe. We can take evolution in some form, or we can take God.

Or we can blend the two.

And we can fold in the Big Bang as well, some form of that.

I propose that we look at the universe (space-time continuum) as DESIGNED.

But if we want to believe in God, I suggest we move Him further back than the creation of this space-time continuum and, instead, think about this continuum as a vacation that turned out to be a prison.

Of course, you can’t spend all your time railing against the prison. You’ll get tired and worn out.

But you can conduct a search, using all your capabilities, including instinct and intuition.

Things are created. There is no way to explain the progress of life by assuming that it arises from matter alone. Matter does not imply life and it certainly does not imply freedom.

Matter is one of those things, one of those places where many people lay down their arms and surrender. They say, “Okay, this is the end of the line. I don’t know what I am, but I know that I ultimately come from matter, and I go back to it when I die.”

Reincarnation was condemned in the West by the Roman Church, because it opened too many doors.

If you’ve had 40000000000000000000000000000000 billion lives in various forms, then it’s easy to swing from that into the notion that you are immortal, as a soul, as YOU, and you inhabit many different forms, many different “coats.”

You are the central reality.

Where does God fit into all of that, if anywhere? You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

The Church invented a nice prison myth here as well. “If you assume you and other you’s are the center of existence, then you are Luciferian, of the Devil, and there is no morality and there is no right and wrong, and there is no salvation…”

Complete baloney, invented to keep you in line, to keep you surrendering.

YOU CREATE.

That is the central reality.

If you want to walk to the end of what that means, then you are on the road back to your full self.

If you want to stop somewhere on the road and lay down your mind and surrender to something higher, that is your right, and no one can stop you. Of course, I would suggest you really ask yourself why you are surrendering.

Yeah, I know some people would consider all this heresy. So be it.

Heresy is part of the secret-society myth invented to keep us in line.

“Methinks he thinks he doth create too much. Therefore he is in league with the devil.”

Jive. Pure jive.

There is no devil, except as a thought form sustained by millions of people. If you buy into it, it’s yours.

There is no devil. There is no hell. Unless you want them, unless you create them and believe in them.

What about God?

That’s even more tricky, because most people ASSOCIATE God with everything they think is good and just and right and beautiful and surpassing.

In other words, they create God, and then they create him as embodying all these traits---so they think that if you try to take God away from them, you are taking all those beautiful qualities and stepping on them with muddy shoes.

RD designed this continuum to be the kind of place we would want to visit. It spun many myths around this place.

It shaded it and shaped it and produced it like a four-star movie.

It built in LOSS, and if you don’t think loss is a key factor, try losing someone you love, if you haven’t experienced it already.

Loss makes you believe even more in the primacy of the continuum, because if you can undergo the heartbreak of a huge loss, the place where you experienced it must as real as can be---because the loss is very, very, very real.

RD are artists.

They are good.

They really did a great job.

They put in a lot of work.

ALL REALITIES ARE CREATED.

“Evolution,” if it exists at all, is just a minor illusion wrapped around the fact that REALITIES ARE CREATED.