Jonathan Zap on Inner & Outer Riches

Appreciating Inner Riches
By Jonathan Zap
14 November 2009

What good fortune can possibly surpass the value of a rich inner life? Yes, for thousands of years, the earth's resources have largely been ruled by extroverted men of action, but as Mark put it, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" [Mark 8:36]

Outer resources can be great too — after all, it is only through the grace of outer resources that you are able to read this right now, but the experience only has value if you have inner resources.

Which would be preferable, to be a financially struggling genius or a vacuous billionaire? Most people reading this would probably choose to be the genius, because a genius, even if her outer circumstances are challenged, has great inner riches, but a vacuous person is impoverished no matter how opulent the outer circumstances.

Of course, it would be great to have some of both, inner and outer resources, and most of us do, but if I could only choose one it would be inner resources, because those are intrinsic, and if I don't have the inner resources there's no one there to experience the outer resources.

Often, people with great inner resources underestimate the treasure they have. Even those people, like myself, who value inner resources, still underestimate the blessings and abundance of their inner wealth. We live in a world that through advertisements, and other relentless engines of conditioning, focuses our attention on surfaces, appearances and outer resources. The message that underlies every one of the millions of advertisements you have seen is that outer resources are the key to a good life.

If only you had the new pill, the shiny new gadget, or indispensable service, only then would you have the good life. For example, Subaru says, "The All-New 2010 Legacy. Feel the Love. Bigger and better, the 2010 Legacy is one dynamic drive. Feel the difference starting at $19,995.*"

If only I had the All-New Legacy, then I would feel the love, then I would be bigger and better, but I don't have the $19,995* to obtain such a love. Since I don't, I'm going to have to settle for the inner feeling of love. Unable to obtain the love of a new SUV, I will have to settle for loving and being loved by people, and on my death bed, I will have to settle for that legacy, knowing that the love of the 2010 Subaru Legacy eluded me.

Research in Motion (Blackberry) says of their new gadget, so elemental it is called Storm - "Touch it. Love it. Share it." Here is another lover, beckoning me, inviting me into its stormy depths. If only I can commit to a contract with Verizon, this lover, so ready for me to touch it, to share with it, could be mine.

And I do love gadgets, and sometimes they really do make life better, in fact, I already own a Blackberry, and it is a great gadget, it allows me to talk to people I love with better sound quality than other gadgets I have owned, but the value of that is due to my inner resources, my capacity for love, and the inner resources, the capacity for love in those other people.

But what if I could replace my Blackberry, which is not All-New, with the more loving, more touchy-feely, Storm II, but at the cost of my inner resources, would I be better off? Suppose I had both the Storm II and the All-New 2010 Legacy so I could text while driving, but this was at the cost of my inner resources, so I could only send instant messages like, "Whad up? r u hot?" would I really be better off?

No advertiser will sing the praises of inner riches. And yet with inner riches, the world has higher definition, has better colors, better audio quality, and the potential for a type of love so profound that it even surpasses the love of cars and phones. With inner riches I have something that is worth sharing, and can build my own legacy of relationships and creative works.

People who visited J.R.R. Tolkien found his house to be depressingly ordinary and middle class, but what inner riches he had! Tolkien created new languages, cultures, races and worlds. Tolkien called fantasy writing "subcreation."

Nietzsche said, "If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god?" The consumer culture gets you to say, "If there is a new gadget, how can I bear it not to own such a gadget?"

I say, "If there are subcreators, how could I bear it not to be a subcreator?" If it is possible to have the inner riches to give birth to whole worlds, the inner riches to find portals and multitudes within, to generate artistic creations, empathic intuitions and new revelations, how could I bear it not to have such inner riches, such magical fertility? What car, what phone, even a touch screen phone, could possibly compensate me for the loss of such inner riches?


Outer resources can be great, but they can never replace the value of your inner kingdom. Consider this a propitious time to appreciate your inner riches.

Jonathan Zap, Interdimensional Traveler

"Interdimensional Passport" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap (1990s)

Cosmic Orgasmologists: Alex Grey and Jonathan Zap

THE INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVELER'S CODEX
by Jonathan Zap

At all costs, the interdimensional traveler must never surrender multi-incarnate identity and essence to the Babylon Matrix, or any other such matrix. Since so many readers are most familiar with the hideous strength of the Babylon Matrix, we will give it particular emphasis in this Codex.

From a thousand thousand angles, the dark magnetisms of the Babylon Matrix would love to pull travelers into the wrong ends of telescopes. Essentially, the Babylon Matrix has a tunneling effect that can easily shrink your incarnation until it is like a twisty wormhole burrowing into the festering tissues of a rotten apple. When you choose the wormhole over the rabbit hole your incarnation shrivels and descends like the slow intestinal twisting of an endless, monotonous colonoscopy, winding its way down the wrong end of a telescope.

The Babylon Matrix seeks to remake you in its own image. It would like to play you out as a tragicomic retread, the six billionth remake of Honey, I Shrunk the Interdimensional Traveler.

Teal People are funkier than Real People (photo: Jonathan Zap)

The Babylon Matrix churns out remakes by shrink-wrapping hominids into stock characters. It would love for you to be a frat boy, a homeboy, a drama queen, a geek, a couch potato, a yuppie, a workaholic, a celebrity, a celebrity stalker and so forth. Surrender to its shrinking rays and you might find yourself living out your incarnation as one of these diminutive caricatures, a skin job with a limited shelf life.

In the Eighties, in the early hours of a smoggy and overcast Monday morning on the Cross Bronx Expressway, I first saw what would become a ubiquitous bumper sticker. It read, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” It was as if the veil had pulled back right there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and something I wasn’t supposed to see, one of the underlying black magical spells, actual source code of the Babylon Matrix, suddenly became visible in the manifest realm.

"Parallel Journeys" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap

What potency such spells of darkling magic have! A spellbound victim, laboring under the power of malign enchantment, discovers the spell, the actual contract the devil made him sign in blood, and yet cannot break from it. There it is, the devil’s contract, turning slowly in the spinner rack of a convenience store, rendered word for word onto self-adhesive vinyl. The victim purchases this perfect copy of the spell that rules him and attaches it to the bumper of his car where he sees it every day, and yet he never awakens from its power.

"Interdimensional Traveler" - collage by Jonathan Zap

An interdimensional traveler must never surrender to such spells! These spells are swirling around us like sheets of self-adhesive shrink-wrap spun by a tornado. The tornado is a dark and smoky twister. Spinning within the twister are newspaper headlines, faces, fragments of video, sound bytes of neurotic conversations, glossy magazine torsos---a swirling shrapnel of sticky cultural memes. Lose your footing and the twister rips you out of Oz, out of agrarian Kansas, out of all the infinite places you could be, and shrinks you into an anxious meat puppet, stuck in traffic, worried about being late for the florescent-lit cubicle, unpaid bills and debts stinging like pale scorpions at your shrunken kernel-like mind animated by coffee with non-dairy creamer, kept afloat by serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors and propelled by spell-induced fears.

Is there an engine driving the twister that eludes us, adding invisibly to its torque and stickiness? The interdimensional traveler will at least keep that an open question. He knows that there are other worlds than these, and who can account for all the forces that interpenetrate the Babylon Matrix?

Certainly there is no ambiguity about the existence of the agents of the twister, the enforcers and minor black magicians of the Babylon Matrix. They are all around us, uttering their obvious and yet potent and insidious spells from school yards, televisions, street corners, classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms, from the thousand thousand blind alleys of the Babylon Matrix.

Jonathan Zap earns his stripes as an intrepid explorer of ontological rabbit-holes

The interdimensional traveler must not step through the wrong ends of telescopes! The interdimensional traveler must not let anxious voices, inner or outer, hurry them down narrowing corridors. The interdimensional traveler must not step onto the conveyor belts of degrading and dreary timelines!

God as the Ultimate Narcissist (self-portrait by Jonathan Zap)

Some foolish interdimensional travelers will perceive these injunctions through the exciting, intoxicating and scintillating distortion fields of the archetype of the eternal youth. These archetype-possessed travelers will see the injunctions of what not to do as an infinite license to indulge, and though they emulate Peter Pan on steroids, they end up as flabby Peter Pans with kidney damage, divorcing the Babylon Matrix only to marry flaccid Never Never Lands where obese lost boys play video games in their mothers’ basements. The path of the interdimensional traveler is not a license to indulge, it is a space that opens when the imagination of the eternal youth and the impeccability of the Warrior meld. It is a path that demands prodigious will and discipline. If you try to follow the path of the interdimensional traveler without will and discipline, you will end up as a pathetic lost boy of some sort, sucking weakly at the soured edges of the Babylon Matrix, caught in a grey limbo where embittered contempt for the realm of shrink-wrapped, spell-driven drones melds with a parasitic dependence on the fruits of drone labor.

Mr Zap getting his crown chakra refurbished

Portals open for the traveler on a mission of compassion who is aligned with his true will. Different portals may open for a dark traveler possessed of and by a dark will. Still another set of portals open for the young fool traveler who may, for example, step through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. Certain intentions beckon certain matrices, for better and for worse.

Interdimensional by Herban Mama

An interdimensional traveler must be a Warrior, must have a moral purpose, and must be aware of all the shrinking rays that press upon us. The price of freedom for the interdimensional traveler is eternal vigilance about the sticky enchantments that would like to bind us to the Babylon Matrix and turn individualized travelers into hordes of automatons and hungry ghosts. To step across the event horizon you need to molt the many layers of malign enchantment encasing your soul.

Go then, there are other worlds than these...

[GET COMPLETELY ZAPPED @ ZAPORACLE!]

Interesting read: Zapped by the Blogospheric Multilinkverse