"Mind freak"

[Paulina]

In spite of my daydreaming I've always been very racional person.  I'm an atheist, not believing in any spiritual world or any supernatural scills. What I believe in is a power of human brain. The power that we still didn't fully discovered. I'm very interested in such thing as hipnosis, NLP, subconcious etc.

 

This whole area of my interests started a few years ago. While watching BBC (which I've always enjoyed because of my love to everything what's british) I came across a program where nice looking man was paying in shops with clean pieces of paper, gessing what object people met on street have in their mind, doing some card tricks or hipnotizing some celebrities. I was amazed. Right after the show I googled him and that's how my great love to Derren Brown started.

 

During this few years I've managed to see all his shows he's done so far, I've read two of his books and currently I'm planning a trip to UK just to see third of his live shows (this one is called "Svengali"). And I think my love to him is even bigger.

 

And during this few years he became a big star in UK. Now, when he can't just trick people, because he's beeing recognized, he teaches other people technics he was using for so long, and he makes them do unbelievable things. As an example of that I can give you two shows - "Heist" and "Hero at 30,000 feets".

It's very hard to talk what these shows are about because they're kind of complicated and complex. Let me just say that in the "Heist" he literatim made three bussiness men to rob the bank (without saying a world about it to them) and in the "Hero..." he "transformed"  very shy and unsure man into the man, who had to land a plane he was flying as a passenger.

 

The best thing about him is that he's completely honest about what he does. He has never claimed to be some mentalist or mind reader or wizard. He uses hipnoze, NLP, body language and do with them almost whatever he wants just to convince people that magic doesn't has to be supernatural and that there are frauds who claim to have supernatural scills (for example they're contacting with dead poeple or they are faith healers) but all they want is just get as much money as they only can from poor poeple.

 

He is simply amazing.

[Paulina]

I can say in my case it was kind of opposite direction - my family is catholic and I was rased as catholic. When I was about 15 I've started having doubts or "thoughts" about religion. I was reading books, articles not only about atheism, but also about God and Jesus. But it was Derren and Richard Dawkins (not personaly of course, but through their movies and books) who finally pulled me "on the other side" ;)

[Julie]

That's an interesting topic. The guy reminds a modern version of Harry Houdini, who was also trying to fight with standard magic using his illusionst skills and psychology (which was not that advanced at that time).

 

Off the topic. Actually, this used to be a theme of my day-dreaming a few years ago - to find a perfect link between the three (Malinowsky's essays and that stuff; there's a very good Polish book written by psychiasrist called Magic Vision of the World / Magiczna wizja świata). Before reading on this topic I was a dedicated atheist and didn't believe in magic. After a few months of studying and thinking I realized that limiting ourselves to science only we close our minds, similarly to limiting ourselves to magic or religion only. They all go together in a perfect balance as magic and religion are primitive versions of science, working on subjects, which science will explain later. It was actually funny how much NLP, positive thinking and religion have in common and that in Medieval times witches already worked out methodology for curing depression, very similar to modern, non-chemical approach. And it's funny that psychologists, hypnosis masters and other people like this need a kind of show, similar to magicians and religion gurus to transfer their ideas. But, of course, you don't ride a horse if you have a car. And what can be explained by science we shouldn't try to explain by religion or magic. We simplify our lives too much doing so.

[Paulina]

James you don't even know how jelaous I am now! :P I'm planning to go to Manchester at the beginnig of 2012 year because I feel I HAVE TO see him live ;D