What Is the Leading Edge of Consciousness?

By Jon Rappoport, NoMoreFakeNews, Thanks to Conscious Life News

Long ago, in another life as a student, the answer to that question was never clear to me, nor did I even consider the question, because I was busy trying to make sense of the history of Western philosophy.

But in the decade-long lead-up to authoring my three Matrix collections, the question became very important. It split into two parts:

Was the ultimate in consciousness something a person plugged into, like a cosmic lamp, a reality that was already sitting there, waiting to be discovered?

Or was it something a person invented?

The second alternative, of course, is not a popular position.

Herds and flocks and squads of people are on the move, searching for the cosmic lamp. Or they’re avidly plugging themselves into some familiar religion or spiritual system.

They’re looking for authoritative content, the way an archeologist looks for a lost city, or on a lesser level, the way a chef looks for the best recipe for gnocchi.

However, the primary fact about consciousness is that it is creative, and the next most important fact is that it isn’t really looking for answers that already exist.

Looking for answers which are already there is built on a misconception. (Refer back to the primary fact above.)

Consciousness imagines, creates, invents. It may delude itself into thinking that what it creates was already there, but that illusion can be seen through.

The “creative nature of everything” doesn’t mean there are limits on what can be created. It doesn’t mean there are hard and fast rules.

Most people are not up to contemplating the idea of consciously creating, much less spontaneously improvising, which involves a kind of merging with what they would create.

But for those who can grasp such an idea, the world and the universe aren’t any longer arbiters and rule makers and guides. They are inventions that are already here.

I’ll bring up a prescription I have offered before, one which some people find interesting and others find daunting.

Paint 200 paintings.

That’s all. Paint 200 paintings.

Several people I know have done this, and they report rather astonishing results.

The point is—and I’m not talking about prior training or talent or anything of that sort—if you embarked on this course, you would sooner or later arrive at a point where you have, so to speak, reached the edge of “everything you know.”

That’s an interesting place to be. All the work and the years you’ve put into forming a picture, a construct, a description of reality no longer hold water. You’ve “already painted all that,” and what sits beyond it is something different, something unknown, because you haven’t invented it yet.

You can’t fall back on slogans, maxims, principles, familiar ideas (no matter how true they may be). Nor can you “paint some ultimate higher enlightenment,” because you’ve already done that, too.

You’ve exhausted your storehouse.

Now you’re going to invent “something out of nothing.” You’re going to step off the cliff and fly.

This is when consciousness as essentially creative appears, walks in the door. This is when you walk through a different door.

According to all theories of knowledge, such a thing shouldn’t be able to happen. But it can. And it does.

In fact, your imagination has been waiting for it to happen for a long, long time.

At this point, what all the wisest people in the history of the world might suggest, in the way of what you should paint on the canvas or paper, means absolutely nothing.

You’re creating.

If you continue, you’ll discover that, as a side effect, many important questions you’ve asked and never answered for yourself, in the past, are now beginning to “answer themselves.”

Your position or point of view, vis-à-vis reality, is changing.

Of course, most people will never get this far. They will invoke a string of opt-out excuses that, laid end to end, would circle the globe. So be it.

All I can say is, I got that far, in the summer of 1962, and…

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