“Our job is to make wild and impractical dreams into everyday reality.” –Howard Bloom
A Note from our Creative Director:
I’ve known Howard Bloom since 1978 when his public relations firm was the tops in his field. What continues to separate Howard from others is his understanding something that he calls OMNOLOGY, a new field that he has created. He is the author of some of the most talked-about books, from “The Lucifer Principle” to “Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me,” he continues to amaze and astonish with his wit, his zest for life, and his ability to excite the senses with his storytelling that pushing us to think, rethink, imagine, reimagine, and discover improvements in the ways we co-exist.
When I had the idea for Mobilized News, Howard was the first person I called on for guidance and inspiration.
“It is time for the passionate to come out to play.” Yes, those words motivated and excited every nerve in my body. But he’s done this before, in creating campaigns for Prince, The Jacksons, Amnesty International, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Billy Idol and Billy Joel. It’s tapping into human soul, something we discuss in the interview found below.
We are proud and honored to have Howard Bloom as a contributing author and advisor to Mobilized News.
“This is not sorcery. It’s tapping into that hidden part of oneself, human Soul—that Howard understood.”
I recall us talking about Beethoven, how he was able to compose the Ninth Symphony without hearing it. He was totally deaf, and he also thought about ending his life.
I did not know that Beethoven had contemplated suicide; it was only his art, music, and love of humanity that kept him going. He wrote:
“While I am in so much pain, I joyfully hasten to meet death. If death comes before I have had the opportunity of developing all my artistic powers, then notwithstanding my cruel fate, he will come too early for me, and I should wish him a more distant period.”
Beethoven had just completed his first Symphony, and he was now facing death. Even so, he kept going with a love of humanity, art, and divinity.
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How does that speak to you as someone who has worked with so many amazing artists?
Here’s what it basically says: When I started working on my book, “Einstein, Michael Jackson, and Me,” the original title was “The Gods Inside” Beethoven said, which indicates he had a full body of work within him. Where that work was, or where it had come from, God knows.
But he had the entire thing. I have an entire body of work inside me; it consists of the seven books I published and the two more books that I have to go. I recently turned 81 years old, so I’ve got a limited amount of time to do it.
“Where do these destinies come from that descend upon us, insisting that there is a body of work which has never existed in the history of this universe before?”
We see clearly that this body of work seems to speak through us. It’s not us who have chosen it; it is it who has chosen us.
When I was 12 years old, I had this experience: I had been intensely studying science for two years, reading two books a day, including science fiction and legitimate science, such as Albert Einstein’s *General Theory of Relativity.
I discovered I was an atheist. Don’t ask why; being an atheist is not a rational thing; it’s a faith, just like any other faith. My parents were determined to take me to high holiday services, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They got me into a suit, which was almost impossible, and into the back of their blue four-door Fraser automobile.
Then came the real stumper: they got me all the way to Richmond Avenue, where the synagogue was, and at that point, I refused to get out of the car. My parents tried to drag me literally by the ankles up the street, like a sack of meat, while I held onto the sturdy American-made door frame with both hands.
I had a sudden revelation: Galileo saw what he saw because there was a new invention that the Dutch had created—a tube with a lens at each end called a spyglass, designed for horizontal viewing. Galileo took this spyglass and pointed it up, discovering that the sky, which was believed to be perfect and divine, was actually filled with imperfections, such as pockmarked moons.
“Galileo changed the way we see the universe.”
Similarly, Galileo ground a special lens to look at pond water, discovering tiny animals, which we had shared the planet with but had never known existed before.
One man turned a horizontal instrument up and caused a revolution, another turned it down and caused a revolution.
As my parents tried to pull me out of the car, I realized that there are no gods in the sky or beneath the Earth according to my atheism, but there are gods in the scene. If there are gods inside my parents, there are gods inside me too.
“Thus, one of my tasks in science became to turn the instrument inward and try to find the gods inside.”
When I was 16, I was very unpopular at high school but was voted head of the programming committee, which meant I organized school assemblies. One day, the juniors asked me to advertise a dance, which was ironic because I was never invited to social gatherings. My parents had tried to normalize me by sending me to dance classes, but I couldn’t do any of the dances.
When I put a record on the turntable and danced on stage, despite my unconventional moves, I saw the faces of 350 people who hated me melting. Their eyes widened, and they came together into a giant envelope of energy.
“I had an out-of-body experience, observing the energy of the audience flowing through me in a continuous feedback loop.”
When it was over, the audience did something they had never done before—they picked me up on their shoulders and carried me outside.
What are the gods inside? They are something that comes to life, in this case, in a performance because of the audience’s energy. Whatever takes you over, your rational, everyday self must park itself outside because something you don’t know inside of you takes over. That’s the ultimate experience of the gods inside you.
When Peter Townsend and George Harrison were trying to get Eric Clapton off heroin, Townsend described the transcendent experience of being on stage, where the performer becomes an empty pipe through which the souls of the audience flow. When the performance ends, that energy is gone, leaving an emptiness that can be overwhelming, leading Clapton to use heroin to fill it. This description captures the experience of being seized and shaken by the gods inside.
John Entwistle, whose rational self didn’t believe in this, would go on stage and become possessed by the gods inside, dancing in ways that were never predictable but filled with such passion that they pulled the audience together into a common stream of energy. Afterward, he would look like a scarecrow, and it would take him an hour to reemerge from that state. This hour without a self was agonizing for him, but that’s the power of the gods inside.
What are these forces that take us over? When you’re sitting in front of a blank computer screen or piece of paper, feeling insecure and wondering how you’ve ever written before, and suddenly, a perfect lyric appears, it feels as if it wrote itself through you.
Those forces that seize you and make you feel like a marionette on stage are the gods inside. As a lifelong scientific thinker, I want to experience these things and explain their role in the evolution of humans and in the future evolution ahead.
So, how does an atheist title something with the word “gods” in it?
God is an extraordinarily useful metaphor. There’s an epigram that says, “Since there are no gods, it is our job 
to do their work. God is not a being; he is an aspiration, a gift, a vision, a goal. Ours is the responsibility of making a cruel universe turn, of turning pain into understanding and joy, of creating ways to soar for generations to come, of fashioning wings with which our descendants will fly.”
Children’s children shall overcome by making worlds of fantasy materialize as reality—mining and transforming our greatest gifts: our passions, imaginings, pains, insecurities, and lusts. This is the work of deity, a power that resides within us.
Does everyone or just some people have this within them?
I equate the gods inside with the ecstatic experience, the Transcendent experience. Nearly everyone has had the experience of starting a book and finding it so addictive that if your mother tries to call you for lunch, you don’t want to hear her. You want to block her out and stay immersed in the world the book has created. That world is too addictive because you are in a Transcendent State, which somehow evokes selves inside you that you may never have known you had.
There is an avenue to channeling the gods inside that is accepted within our society: the tradition of Prophecy, where God is supposed to enter you and give you His words, where you become the voice of God. As an atheist, I don’t believe in an exterior God; rather, I believe that what seizes you is one of the gods inside yourself.
Once, I had just started a public and artist relations department for Gulf and Western’s 14 record companies, which was sold to ABC. I started a department for ABC, and for the first time, I had a hit record. ABC had a record at number three on the charts, but when I flew out to California to meet with the main PR department, I discovered that not a single one of them wanted to work on this piece of music because the singer was black. It wasn’t “hip” at the time to work with black entertainers.
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So, I flew back to New York and waited for the group’s manager to return from LA. I took a limo to pick him up, knowing we would be stuck in traffic on the way back to Manhattan.
I said to him, “I know that your group prides itself on its democracy, that every member is equal to every other member. But if you allow me to put all of the media attention on the lead singer, I guarantee you I will give you a star.” That was the first time in my life I ever said anything like that. I had no idea how the lead singer would become a star; I just knew it with every bone in my body. It was close to what Isaiah did in the desert, an act of Prophecy.
When I met with Michael Jackson, I got a call saying Michael was canceling his tour and that I was the only one he would listen to. I flew out to LA and, while sitting in a dressing trailer with Michael and his brothers, Michael explained his deep commitment to giving his audience awe, wonder, and surprise. This was part of his nature and his absolute goal in life. I saw a vision of his ribs as golden gates, swinging open to reveal 10,000 kids inside him, whom Michael wanted to protect and astonish. Where did that vision come from? It was like Isaiah’s visions of God.
“Prophecy is a Jewish tradition and part of our legacy, but there is no external God—only the gods within us. My friend Mark Gaffney says that this is the future speaking to us, our memory of the future.”
As a scientific thinker, it’s my obligation to experience these moments to the fullest and to understand them, even if we can’t yet explain them scientifically.
In 2005, I was reluctantly dragged to my first space conference. I saw a presentation by a young man who claimed to be in the rocket business but had never launched anything. He said he wanted to change Humanity with the internet, alternative energy, and space. He helped build PayPal, made a billion dollars, and then went into space. His name was Musk. I knew immediately that he was a figure of Mythic proportions. Even though he had launched nothing yet, I knew kids would be modeling their lives on him 110 years from now.
When you type on your laptop and run into a tiny problem, your logical brain might solve it in a matter of seconds. But your cells below the floorboards of the self have already solved and executed the problem in their own peculiar way. When I walk across an uneven meadow at night, my feet solve the problem of where to step next.
“If that’s true, we need to become conscious of these hidden powers and use them.”
When working with Prince, Bob Cavallo, Prince’s manager, asked me to predict what Prince was thinking based on his lyrics. My empathic self was tuned to Prince’s frequency, allowing me to expand on tiny hints of what he was doing. This tapping into the gods inside us is crucial. It’s important to be open to both problem-solving and prophetic powers of the selves below the floorboards.
There’s a concept I call osmology, a scientific discipline for the promiscuously curious. Osmology reflects the aspiration to omniscience. It allows you to pursue multiple curiosities without being forced into a single specialization. Instead of falling into a midlife crisis, you can explore various passions and integrate them into a broader understanding of the world. Osmology is about flying over the landscape of specializations and using them as pixels in a big picture.
They will go into a midlife depression, and I, on the other hand, will be coming back from the land of my multiple curiosities, my osmology with my very first answers.
“While my friends feel they are at the end of their lives, I will know I am at the beginning of mine.”
Osmology has become an active project within the Howard Bloom Institute, and we are putting together a course on osmology for Kepler Space University, which we will later try to get to other universities as well. The seminal figure in this project is Leonardo da Vinci.
I was on a conversation the other day with an architect who shares my kind of view on things, the osmological point of view. It was a remarkable conversation.
When he was roughly 10 years old, he fixated on Leonardo da Vinci and one line Leonardo said through the lens of architecture you can see everything. His goal became to see everything. Omology is a field for the promiscuously curious, the carnivorously curious, the omnivorously curious.
There’s a little story here about the traps of specialization.
At the age of 16, I was given a position as a lab assistant for the summer at the world’s largest cancer research institute, the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute in Buffalo, New York. I was given a legitimate scientist over my head to make sure I didn’t break too many million-dollar machines.
This scientist, Phil Fish, took me into his office. His office was a windowless cubicle, about 8 feet wide and about 15 feet deep. On the wall to the left, there was a built-in desk that went the full length of the wall, and on that desk were six piles of books. Three piles to your left when you stood facing the desk, and three piles to your right.
Phil Fish said, “You see all those books? Those on the right are books I’ve read. Those on the left are books I have not yet read but need to. All of those books are in German. Until I have finished all those books, I will not be able to synthesize my single molecule.”
I thought, this is not the kind of science I believed in.
“I want to soar over the face of the landscape and see the whole thing, the big picture. Maybe I shouldn’t be a science person; maybe I should go into philosophy or something like that.”
There was no osmology then, but now there will be a course available from Kepler Space University that starts with Leonardo and covers at least eight major osmnists in history. You can learn from each of them, and most importantly, the very word osmology and the stories of these men and women can validate you as a person of multiple curiosities. You can say to your dad, “No, this is what I am: an osmologist.”
It’s fascinating that you mentioned Leonardo da Vinci. One of the things he said is that everything is connected. I believe most science goes wrong because it specializes in one thing and doesn’t look at its impact on something else. I recall a conversation with Gustav, our mutual friend, about this. He said that ” The UN was failing miserably because they focused on one thing, like water, without considering its relation to land, sky, or human rights. Leonardo said everything is connected.”
Now, let’s talk about one of your favorite artists: Michael Jackson. What is it that you saw?
To give you the framework of the story, when I was 10 years old and a totally lost child in Buffalo, New York, a book appeared in my lap one day in my family living room.
It said the first two rules of science are:
- The truth at any price, including the price of your life,
- Look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before.
It gave the example of Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovering animalcules in ordinary pond water. The first rule is the rule of courage, the second rule is the rule of awe, wonder, and surprise.
When I met Michael Jackson, I saw the first rule, courage, in his absolute commitment to those 10,000 kids in his chest. I saw the second rule, the rule of awe, wonder, and surprise.
Michael Jackson embodied those rules in a way that defies belief. The story of how I found this is that I flew out to California to be with the Jacksons. We met in Marlin’s pool house, which was covered with arcade video games and had a billiard table in the center.
I was trying to explain that their merchandising had to have the quality of beyond amazement when I heard the screen door open. I knew Michael was coming for a meeting and had read thousands of articles about him saying he was a bubble baby and would withdraw from your touch. When I heard the screen door opening, I walked over, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi, my name is Howard.”
The person half into the room and half out stuck out his hand with warmth and said, “Hi, I’m Michael.” His handshake was normal and warm.
I asked if I could read him a press release, and he said, “Let’s go upstairs.” We went up the tiny staircase to a room filled with amplifiers and keyboards. I read him my press release, and when he heard the first two sentences, he slumped a little and said, “Oh.” When we reached the end, he said, “Man, that’s beautiful. Did you write that?”
I had been obsessively improving my writing since I was 16 years old, and Michael was the only person who ever saw the art in what I was doing. We went downstairs, where the art director from CBS was presenting portfolios. Michael and I were standing shoulder to shoulder, and as she showed the first portfolio, Michael opened it just an inch, and his knees began to buckle with awe. He was having an aesthetic orgasm, seeing the infinite in the tiniest of things.
Michael embodied all wonder and surprise in a way I had never imagined. Divinity is not something out there; it is a sense within us. Michael was the closest to divinity I have ever met, going beyond anything I ever expected to see in another human being.
Is it time now for a new social renaissance of sorts? If so, what does that look like?
Certainly, with osmology, we’re trying to bring the whole culture to another level of perception—a perception that cherishes the big picture. The big picture is the timeline set out by the evolution of the cosmos: from the big bang to the evolution of the first quarks, atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, and living beings.
But the time has also come for something else: a re-evaluation and upgrade of the Western system. To do that, we must understand what the Western system is and why it’s something we need to cherish. The Western system has increased the average lifespan by 40 years, doubled it since 1850, increased the wages of the poorest workers, and upped the average IQ by 35 points. It has also increased peace in the world by a factor of 10 despite the world wars and ongoing conflicts.
The Western system has delivered these things through a dynamic balance. It’s like balancing on a bicycle or making a bicep muscle work. It’s a dynamic balance between government and other factors, which allows for continuous improvement and progress; which does things like create the Continental Highway system, creates the internet, and creates the microchip.
Private Industry creates inventions galore like the iPhone, the smartphone, and the ability to order something online within two minutes and have it delivered within 24 to 48 hours. These are the kinds of gifts that Private Industry gives us, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is building a vehicle that will take 100 passengers at a time into space. A Japanese billionaire has bought tickets on the first one of these flights with humans in it and has announced the eight people he will take with him.
No NASA capsule has ever been capable of carrying more than four, and usually carries two or three. Without Elon Musk and his vision, no matter what you think of his Twitter actions or politics, he is expanding not just the boundaries of possibility for humanity but for all life. With his Starship rocket, we will be able to take entire ecosystems to space.
In fact, when we put you in space, we have just put an entire ecosystem in space.
Why? Because you’re 100 trillion cells; 50 trillion are other cells called “you,” and the other 50 trillion are bacterial colonies living inside of you or on your skin that help make you, YOU!
You are a complete ecosystem housing anywhere from a hundred to a thousand or more species of bacteria who are your collaborators on a daily basis.
The third element of the Western system is the protest industry, which calls out the flaws of government and private enterprise. It is only when these three are operating in balance with each other that we get the kind of material miracles that the Western system has produced.
It is time for us to figure out how we’ve accomplished these astonishing feats, how we’ve increased the peace in the world by a factor of 10 without realizing it, how we’ve increased the average human lifespan by 40 years, and how we’ve increased the average IQ by 35 points without acknowledging it in science except for discussions of what’s called the Flynn effect. We need to figure out how we’ve accomplished these things so we can accomplish more of them and encourage outside-the-box thinkers like Elon Musk.
China is trying to suppress its outside-the-box thinkers and still expects to grow at 10% a year, which has been its rate for roughly the last 40 years. China’s growth has come to an end because Xi Jinping thinks he’s the solitary genius who can run the whole country and doesn’t tolerate geniuses like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who has been suppressed in every way except being jailed and is no longer allowed to contribute to the vibrancy of the Chinese economy. We can’t allow that kind of thing to happen.
We have to encourage the creativity, acknowledge what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have done, and do everything we can to pursue the next great breakthroughs because every breakthrough gives new empowerments to humanity. Keeping the three elements of the Western system means keeping capitalism in check by government and the protest industry, while cherishing visionaries like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, not attacking them just to make ourselves feel smug.
How did your friend in France learn English? Michael Jackson’s lyrics. First off, amazing. You know why? Two reasons: First, he was one of the only ones who had actual lyrics in the CD booklet. And number two, I loved the way he played with sounds and how he pronounced them. You remember that CH in that instead of saying “come on,” I was like six or seven, and I thought,
Okay, let’s go back to whatever it is that you want to say.
For the last two years, there has been a Howard Bloom Institute. The Howard Bloom Institute is there to communicate my peculiar way of looking at things to generations yet to come. Two of its biggest projects right now are establishing osmology as an academic discipline and the “Why Save the Western System” initiative. I have a meeting coming up next Thursday with Jeff Bridges and a bunch of other people. Jeff has been a fan of my work since 1995. We’re getting the “Why Save the Western System” project off the ground. If you’re interested in participating in either of these things, go to HowardBloom.institute.
Let’s save the world, let’s upgrade the world, let’s do what Mother Nature wants us to do. Let’s romp and frolic and soar.
“A nation that looks up goes up; a nation that looks down goes down.”
Let’s get back to looking up and make new utopias for generations yet to come.
We live in a utopia; we just don’t recognize it
. Fifty years ago, there were no smartphones. Well, today a human without a smartphone is scarcely a human being. Even the immigrants crowding at the border or as refugees in Europe undertake extraordinarily dangerous travels in which many of them drown with their smartphones. They’re always connected to their families, and they always have GPS and an idea of where they are.
That is something that 50 years ago, if you had predicted, you would have been accused of wild and impractical dreams.
Our job is to make wild and impractical dreams into everyday reality.
One more thought. If you could, in a very slow tone, you talked about two things: the truth at any expense and looking at things for the first time. If you can do them slower…
The first two words of science that I learned at the age of 10 that gave me a reason for living and have been the tentpoles of the rest of my life are: Number one, the truth at any price, including the price of your life. That’s the law of courage, absolute commitment to truth. Number two, look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, and then proceed from there. Look at the things that are invisible to you and everybody around you simply because you’re accustomed to overlooking them. Look at the shapes of leaves, look at the water being poured from a pitcher. Look at everything as if you’ve never seen it before and let your curiosity roam. That is the second rule of science.
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