When I was about to release my collection, Exit From The Matrix, I wrote several introductions. Here is one I didn’t publish. It shows how seriously I take what others consider a merely “quirky tendency” of humans to imagine a better and different future for themselves and this piece of space called Earth:

Suppose everything that is happening in the human world is taking place in a synthetic space, a grossly reduced arena; and suppose you could stand outside that space and look in. You would be seeing a great deal more than ‘what is going on’. You would be seeing how it is playing out, shot through with delusions at every turn; and of course the main delusion would be the space itself, as if nothing could be happening anywhere else but there, in that place. This is what the mind, all the minds, are telling themselves, as they fight over scraps. Humans have defined themselves as social constructs in small-time stage play.

The controlled mind thinks in the same patterns, over and over. It reworks familiar territory, and when that becomes insufferably boring, it lowers its energy output and initiates shutdowns.

Then it looks for outside stimulation that will replace thinking. The type of stimulation hardly matters, as long as it moves adrenaline through the system.

The decline of a society or civilization can be viewed in the same step-down fashion.

Occasionally, in passing, a writer makes reference to the creative impulse as a missing social factor, which could be remedied, for example, by restoring funding for arts programs in schools, as if that would repair a bureaucratic failing and thus restore balance to education and “the culture.”

Which is like saying Titans, who have developed profound amnesia about themselves, could recover their consciousness and power by shampooing their hair more frequently.

The individual human being, apart from the welter of his social relationships, is sitting on a volcano-range of creative energy, about which he knows almost nothing. This ignorance is purposeful. It enables him to fit into a small life defined by habits and shrunken subjects of interest and routine interactions. Within that space, he forms opinions and preferences and aversions. He says yes to this and no to that. He cultivates a passive tolerance for differences, as if he were auditioning for sainthood.

But whoever he is and wherever he is, underneath it all, something is waiting for him. A part of himself is waiting.

It is the part that can conceive of everything that isn’t, that never was. It is the part that dreams beyond the ordinary facades of time and space.

It is the part that refuses to believe habit and repetition and routine and systems are the core of life.

It is the part that knows something new and unprecedented and stunning can be invented at the drop of a hat, and that this is the unlimited territory of the individual.

It is the part off-handedly referred to as imagination, which over time has been sold away into oblivion. But which never dies.

The elites who try to control and define the common space of humanity would like to render imagination to the junk heap of history, never to be recalled. They would like to do this by replacing the individual with the group, which has no creative impulse, but is merely, with few exceptions, the lowest-common-denominator expression of any idea.

In Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the overarching government slogan was: “Every one belongs to every one else.” One group, indivisible, with non-liberty and injustice for all.

Huxley’s slogan is now also the number-one elite propaganda message on Earth. It can be made to mean almost anything that derides and minimizes the individual and his repressed creative power.

In his 1954 short story, The Adjustment Team, Philip K Dick approaches the transformation of the individual into the group as an instantaneous, blanketing, mass-programming operation. Salesman Ed Fletcher, through an error, isn’t included in the “great change.” Instead, he witnesses it. Therefore, he is transported into the sky to meet the Old Man, the Chief, for a judgment:

Ed: “I get the picture…I was supposed to be changed like the others. But I guess something went wrong.”

Old Man: “Something went wrong. An error occurred. And now a serious problem exists. You have seen these things. You know a great deal. And you are not coordinated with the new configuration.”

The new configuration, at a deep level, is not new at all. It has existed since the dawn of history. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy that, except for a few gifted ones, humans have no creative power, no wide-ranging imagination. Thus, they must surrender to the “shape of things as they are.”

Here is a statement about reality-creation that is crucial. —Philip K Dick, his 1978 speech, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later: “…today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms…And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

Philip Dick was talking about the elite invention of a synthetic common space for human activity. And on the other hand, he was talking about an individual’s invention, through imagination, of other spaces.

These other spaces aren’t mere fantasies. They’re as real as real can be—and they can be injected into the world, into the common space, to change it, and to wake people up from their group-think trance.

The bottom-line goal of all mind control is the removal of the individual’s knowledge that he has great creative power, that this capacity gives him enormous untapped energy, that it solves problems by rendering them irrelevant and defunct.

Suppose he brings back what he has lost? Suppose, finally, he takes a stand and refuses to see himself as a victim of circumstance?

Suppose he remembers that he holds the sword of his own imagination, and can invent reality?

Suppose he exercises that capacity and thus proves to himself how far-reaching his power is?

In his 1920 novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, which spawned generations of science fiction, David Lindsay writes: “To be a free man, one must have a universe of one’s own.”

This is no flippant observation. This is psychology light years beyond what Freud and his offspring concocted. This is the power of imagination, linked as it should be, to individual freedom. Nor was Lindsay recommending some closed-off fantasy existence. He was realizing that, with “a universe of one’s own,” the individual can then comprehend and participate in the common space we call the world—at a new level of unlocked and untangled power.

I dedicate my work to explaining these factors, and more importantly, providing many exercises that, when practiced, can reawaken and restore imagination as the unlimited dynamo it actually is. These exercise are contained in my mega-collections, Exit From The Matrix and Power Outside The Matrix.