Deception, misdirection, your eye moves one way whilst the trick goes the other. Things seem to move when they don’t move at all. Is the coin in my pocket or behind your ear? Find the Queen in 3-card monty. You win the first few hands then lose it all when the misdirection occurs. Now you see her, now you don’t and… what is it you think you saw? These are the keys to most magical tricks and illusions.

Could they also apply to the seemingly mystical teachings of the Mind Body Spirit world?

Thing are seldom what they seem.
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
Hi-lows pass as patent leathers.
Jackdaws strut in peacock feathers.
Very true, so they do!

From HMS Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan

There is a popular e-mail purporting to be a magic trick by the magician and illusionist, David Copperfield. In it six face cards from a deck are randomly arranged on a slide.

You are told to pick one card and David says he will magically find the card in your mind and remove it from the deck…

You try it and WOW! It works every time. Even when you say one card and try to change your mind to trick him at the last second… it’s gone! How does he know??? You forward it in amazement to all of your friends and get these wonderful e-mails back saying it’s just uncanny! How does he do it?!?!?

 
I truly hate being the party pooper violating the sanctity of the magician’s world by revealing the solution and… I need to in order to get us focused back on my point and off the trick…

The spoiler is that even though the slides seem similar, not one card from the first slide appears on the second. The “magician” uses 11 of 12 face cards in a normal card deck in this trick… six on slide one and five different ones arranged in a similar pattern on slide two.

So there is absolutely no way he can ever miss picking YOUR card because none of the original six are on slide 2!

Bummer.

How cheated do you feel knowing it was that simple to see and yet you missed it? Why is it we often cannot see this until many tries later? And why is human nature such that we beat ourselves up for being so stupid?
Because in life… we follow the pattern and miss the true deception!

There is nothing wrong with missing the trick. We’re supposed to. The better the illusion, the harder we fall for the pattern and ignore what’s really there.

Life in the Mind Body Spirit world is, unfortunately, similar. We miss or are blocked from seeing the guru wannabee’s offstage patterns because… they are expertly hidden from view by the patterns. The cards they use offstage are often completely different from the ones in their on-stage act.

The guru wannabee live lives filled with mis-direction and, at times un-needed deception. I used to listen to one of these charlatans talk in almost ascetic terms about her lifestyle from the stage. By the time she was done I half expected her to be dust covered, wrapped in a loin cloth and walking bare-footed home the 135 miles back to Wales from London on behalf of the downtrodden and poor.

She described her home alternately as a “tiny bungalow” or “shack”. Now, my wife and I have been in this “shack” and we looked at each other somewhat disbelievingly. This “shack” has an entire back wall of ceiling to floor windows looking out over the Irish Sea. On a clear day like today, one can see from the tip of Cornwall to the left across a wide expanse of ocean to the Mumbles in Swansea on the right. It sits in one of South Wales’ most desired beach/waterfront communities on nearly an acre of land. The perfectly manicured gardens and lawns open onto about a 70 yards swathe of undeveloped grazing lands that in turn sit atop 200-foot high limestone cliffs where the ocean crashes below. Just off to the left is one of the most incredible natural horseshoe-shaped bay inlet coves which at low tide is filled with sun bathers on it’s ½ mile of sandy beach and nature enthusiasts from all over the UK come to explore the tidal pools. The interior of the “shack” is pristine, beautiful and adorned with statues and icons from India. In a word, this is one gorgeous shack!

And it does not end there. The guru is driven to and from venues (when in town) in about £100,000 worth of Beemers or Porsches complete with vanity plates spelling her name. She and the company directors fly 1st Class around the globe (I’ll wait while you price four London-Sydney tickets) and stay for weeks on end in 5-star suites and resorts.

When they hit the local office on the road, it is a comic remake of the hit film, “The Devil Wore Prada” as everyone falls over themselves to please the diva and stay in her favour… yet the public image is one of austerity…

Here’s the rub, they work hard and as far as I am concerned deserve it.

What I don’t get is this need to act like Indian ascetics one step above social welfare? What do they hide and why? Could they know they are hoodwinking folks and enabling co-dependent behaviour? Could it be they fear being sussed out and seen to, like the Emperor, have no clothes?

Tony Robbins makes no illusions about wealth and abundance. He expects it and gets it. T Harv Ekker runs seminars that help folks reach their personal best and live the life they deserve. This guru wannabee runs an Abundance seminar yet hides as if making money is not allowed in this profession and misdirects everyone into thinking she lives a poor and humble life. Indeed this sector makes lots of money, a billion dollars a year and hides behind Indian names and values thinking it somehow vulgar to make money?

That was a complaint in the comment section about the Gangaji furore on the Ashland Daily Tidings.

What if everyone stopped following the pattern, looked behind the veils at the wizard pulling the strings and pointedly asked the hard questions of these folks?

Oh yeah… that’s why we’re here.