by Jon Rappoport
August 15, 2015
Wednesday 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.
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