My talk last night in Newport Beach

My talk last night in Newport Beach

By Jon Rappoport

Last night, I gave a talk for 2 hours to a packed room at the Dead Chiropractic Society in Newport Beach, California. I may be becoming a Zen dude in my advancing years.

My paradox was: audience. What is an audience? That’s a mystery. Why exactly are people sitting there? To receive information about which they’re already—at least in a general sense—already aware? That doesn’t fly.

So, in my perverse way, I assume the audience is there to be disturbed. That’s a good assumption. The audience is there to be jarred out of being an audience. I like that. I can go with that. It makes sense to me. If I were audience, that’s what I would want.

I would want to feel shaken out of my role as somebody sitting in a seat being a pipeline for information flowing down my gullet.

I would want something alive to be happening.

As I mentioned to the crowd last night, the last thing I want to do is bore myself. That’s a no-no. Can’t stand there and talk and feel bored.

So I want to see the audience as a kind of false construct. Yes, it’s necessary to for people to sit in their seats and listen, but at the same time, that doesn’t really work. It’s a paradox.

As I was talking last night, it occurred to me that every person in the audience had a story. Not a social story. Not a familiar story. Not a hackneyed story. Not an ordinary or conventional story. Not a boring story. Not a sob story. Not a canned “uplifting” story.

In fact, each person didn’t “have” a story. Each person could invent a story. Put together a story. Make it compelling. Make it a Niagara. Make it pour down with immense force. I suppose this sounds crazy. Good. That’s not a negative. Many things sound crazy because we’re comparing them to “normal.” Comparing them to what we expect.

As long as we’re dealing with what we expect, we’re sunk. The war is over. We lost.

For example, as I mentioned last night, psychiatry has a hell of a story. 300 officially certified mental disorders, and they say they’re doing science, but not one of those disorders has any defining diagnostic test. And they’ve sold this story to the heavens. They’re gotten over on the world. That’s a feat worthy of an Atlas.

And the world is full of such stories, and they’re all official, and they’ve all been sold. So if we’re going to go up against that, we need lots of stories of our own. We need wild stories. We need electric stories delivered with electric force, no quarter given or asked for. We need stories that approach the world from completely different points of view. We need people who want to cook up and tell those stories, come hell or high water.

That’s what audience really is. A bunch of people who, for convenience sake, are doing this ridiculous thing. They’re sitting in a room in chairs and waiting for something to happen. But behind that, behind that construct, each one can tell stories. Each one can throw off convention and normality and consent and break out.

And if they did, every day of their lives, the world would be flooded with something different. And that would resolve the paradox. That would create unexpected consequences and massive disruptions in the field, the smooth field of accepted average nonsense and insanity.

That’s what occurred to me last night. I didn’t plan it or think about it before I started talking. I just saw it as I was talking, because I wasn’t happy with people sitting in chairs. I like the raw material of people sitting in chairs, but I hate it as a finished product. I refuse to accept it as a finished product.

I guess you could say I want people, at the end of a talk, to rise up and go home on fire as artists of reality.

I realize that some people in chairs aren’t going to be happy. They’re going feel put upon or dislodged and they’re going to think, “This isn’t what I bargained for.” And that’s the whole idea. Breaking the bargain. That’s what you want to do. You want to do it with, what shall I call it, good cheer, but you want to do it relentlessly.

So if by chance I were giving a talk to a room full of people who were students and practitioners of Zen meditation, and they were all sitting there, very, very calmly, I would disrupt the field. I would change the flow, redirect it, turn it inside out and upside down and squirt whipped cream and mustard on it. Because I would know that the prevailing consensus in that room was some sort of end point, and there isn’t any end point. Ever.

Audience is prepared for something finite, and you want to crack that egg. “Sorry, tonight nothing is finite or fenced or perfectly shaped or final.”

And if you can crack that egg, audience is relieved. By and large they’re relieved. And they start laughing. For you detectives out there, that’s called a clue. Steam comes out of their ears and they laugh. The message is: some con has been exposed. Maybe they don’t know what it is, and maybe the speaker doesn’t, either, but it just happened. The finite and perfect was cracked open.

Through that crack, people can escape.

Facts are important, yes. Very important. Especially when they contradict official stories. But then there is this other thing, the untouched thing. The thing that is still passive. The thing that is not telling new stories. The thing that still wants the old tales. The paralyzed thing.

And for that, you have to take the social construct in front of you, in the moment, and slice it apart. You have to move audience out of being audience.

Maybe that’s Zen.

Anyway, that’s my quick take on last night, and I thank Billy DeMoss and his crew at DeMoss Chiropractic for setting this up. Billy and I discovered neither of us has a cell phone, so we’re starting a new revolution along that line. The Dead Cell Phone Society.

Thanks to Brett for the ride home and the conversation, and thanks to my long-time readers who showed up so I could meet them face to face, and thanks to L who flew out from a long way off, and thanks to the woman in the first row who got me talking about the early Tibetan magicians and Alexandra David-Neel and John Blofeld and creation and destruction. Thanks to all. By my estimate, it was a hell of a night.

Jon Rappoport

Filed under: Uncategorized Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/