Q: So what’s the problem with imagination?

A: People are obsessed with harmony, balance, symmetry. The classical versions. They don’t know they’ve programmed themselves to want it. They think it’s some kind of eternal Form. That’s complete nonsense. It’s just one way of looking at things.

Q: A collage, for example, chops up ordinary reality and reassembles it.

A: And what’s so threatening about that? The threat is that the mind of the viewer might take a jump into the unknown, where the rules of how things appear and fit together don’t apply anymore.

Q: Perception might be challenged.

A: Momentarily unhinged. You see, people are quite sure they understand the connections between things, the transitions. The space-time hoax, I would call it.

Q: Are there spiritual systems that remedy this hoax?

A: Just about of all them might refer to the hoax, by stating there is a higher reality, but you see that higher reality is imagined as a more classical painting, with better harmony and balance. So it’s a con. The higher reality turns out to be a tighter version of what we already have. It looks like ancient Greece.

Q: You’re talking about the literal mind, aren’t you?

A: That’s a mind that holds on to the straight-ahead way of thinking no matter what. It can’t conceive of any other kind of reality. It holds on for dear life. In the physical world, we have logic. Without logic, a person is an idiot in the physical world. But there are other worlds where logic doesn’t apply. Imagination invents worlds, and there is no reason to apply logic to the process. You can, but you don’t have to.

Q: You’re saying the world as most people accept it is a con.

A: The news is a good analogy. The television anchor transitions seamlessly from one story to another. A plane crash in the jungle. A new cheaper car. A murder in Chicago. A politician sleeping with a hooker. And so on. This is actually quite surreal, all these juxtapositions. But the anchor does the transitions with tone of voice and so on, and makes it seem as if everything is quite normal. But it’s really a collage.

Q: But the viewer doesn’t see it that way.

A: If he did, the news would go away. No one would watch it, except for an occasional amusement.

Q: The viewer thinks the news is quite real.

A: That’s the point. He thinks he’s seeing harmony and symmetry, because he wants to see that. He wants it badly. So he goes along with the hoax.

Q: Take a painting like Picasso’s Guernica.

A: If you look at it for a few minutes, and get past the anti-war statement, you start seeing multiple spaces floating behind, in front of, and along side each other. The viewer instantly decides this is ugly. He says, “Modern painting is ugly.” Why? Because he’s married to the classical harmony and geometry and balance. Just as he’s married to the space-time hoax. He wants that marriage. He says it’s some kind of ultimate, but it’s his own projection. It’s his road and his car and he built them and he’s driving on the road.

Q: He doesn’t want his own seamless perception to break down.

A: He doesn’t want to use his own imagination and make something with it. He’ll sign up for a thousand different “spiritual ideas” that preach symmetry. That’s his jones, his addiction.

Q: Is harmony real?

A: Of course. You can make a trillion paintings, and in a few of them you can insert classical harmony. Why not? But it’s just one mode, one way of seeing and inventing. Here’s the catch. For a mind that’s little more than aggression and fear, the classical reality is a step up. It’s a way of controlling his impulses to engage in arbitrary destruction. But it’s not the end-all and be-all.

Q: Here’s a statement. “The universe gives us what we need.”

A: People believe whatever they want to. I can believe my big toe is the source of all wisdom. So what? “The universe” is a modern religious replacement for God, a benevolent being. Think of a huge store. You walk into the store and you can buy any belief you want to. Some are on sale. But when you check out and pay, they hit you with some kind of pulse. And then you think the belief you just bought is actually true. You don’t remember you bought it.

Q: And imagination?

A: You invent. You make your invention fact. You paint. You write. You build a house. You dream up a social or political cause and you get behind it and push. You invent a marriage every day. When it becomes a habit, you stop and reinvent it.

Q: But not according to some predetermined pattern.

A: There is no predetermination. That’s a default setting. That’s what you go for when you give up on imagination. You pretend there is some preferred pattern in things or in your mind, and you adhere to it.

Q: If large numbers of people accepted what you just said, would there be chaos?

A: Fertile chaos. Freedom. Huge diversity. The whole machine of habit would break down.

Q: Take a painter like Soutine.

A: Many people would say he painted hideous things. Buildings curving and wobbling in the wind. Distorted faces. Yes, contrasted with rigid orderly predilections. “Well, that’s not geometric. That’s ugly. That’s horrible.” Yes, sacred geometry. There is nothing sacred about it. To find out certain patterns are repeated in snails and galaxies, or whatever, is that really a revelation? Repeating patterns are everywhere. So what? This universe is a work of art, just one, and there are repetitions in it. That’s no more important than discovering that an Italian painter of the 15th century employed certain mathematical principles to achieve balance and perspective. It’s interesting, but it isn’t astonishing.

Q: So you’re wiping out technology in one stroke?

A: Not at all. Technology isn’t going anywhere. But even there you see the important inventions came about with a gap, a jump. The innovator wasn’t just building on what had come before. He was making a leap of imagination. Always. He was getting out ahead of the game. The human drones believe the history of science is one smooth road. That’s ridiculous.

Q: You’re saying mass solutions don’t work?

A: In the long, long run, nothing works. Except the individual. It keeps coming back to him. You can fight off the destructive forces and you can win, but then what? The group? If you look deeply enough, all destruction is aimed at the individual.

Q: There is more than one space-time?

A: There are an infinite number and variety of spaces and times. But the abiding fact is: fitting into any one of them is a retreat. Experiencing them? Yes. Inventing them? Yes. But fitting into them and accepting them as the end-all? Absurd.

Q: And what about a cosmic consciousness in which we are all together as One?

A: Oneness is one state of mind you can enter. There are endless numbers of others. The “ultimate answer” isn’t any particular state of consciousness.

Q: You’ve written about the Spanish architect, Gaudi.

A: In Barcelona. He was quite an “eccentric” builder. His version of symmetry was quite beyond the norm. He was getting lots of commissions to build in the city, and at some point, because he was so prolific, the city fathers stepped back and said, “Well, if we let him keep going, he’ll take over all of Barcelona.” So the commissions dried up. And they were right, Gaudi would have taken over. He would have built a new city. He should have. This is what art does. This is what imagination does. It’s endless.

Q: So now they celebrate Gaudi.

A: Yes. They call him a “playful genius.” Or something. They look back at him as a dead figure from the past “who enhanced public life.” That’s nonsense. He was an artist and he had his own unique ideas and he, for a time, was unleashed, until he was cut off.

Q: Every city in the world could be quite different.

A: If the artists designed and built them. The world would be so diverse, much more so than now. The space-time unity and hoax would be exposed. It would wither on the vine, like the rank obsession it is. The major religions would collapse and blow away. The major political systems would change into a vast variety of decentralized experiments, and succeed and fail.

Q: Freedom.

A: Freedom is the platform and imagination is the multistage multidimensional rocket.

Q: What about people who say, “A rock is a rock. An idea is an idea. There’s just this one space-time continuum.”

A: They have only a theoretical abstract idea about what imagination is. They’ve never lived it to the hilt. They invent subconsciously what everyone else is inventing and they try to become proficient at living inside that group painting.

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)