• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 443 0

when such bold proclamations are offered. I generally shun such deceptive tactics, but the point was well made. With no formal training in how to be a psychic (and with no psychic abilities whatsoever), I repeated the mantras of New Age gurus, offered some generalizations about human behavior I learned as a student of psychology and in forty-three years of life experience, and let my callers do the rest. The first woman was about my age. She referred to her “relationship,” not her marriage. Since most people my age have been married at least once, her previous history of marriage was an easy guess. Statistically speaking men are more promiscuous than women, and women are more committed to relationships than men, so it did not take a genius (or a psychic) to figure out what was behind her question. The second woman was fifty-six years old, so I figured her son must be in his late teens or early twenties (since people are having children later in life these days). Many guys that age are lost souls, rudderless and unanchored, seeking independence from their parents but not yet parents themselves. So I played the odds and was right again.

Among magicians this process is called “cold reading,” and is practiced by those who bill themselves as “mentalists.” Start with generalizations, then work your way to specifics, using subject feedback (verbal as well as nonverbal when available). The four areas people most want to know about are obvious—love, health, money, and career. So you work your way through them, spending about ten to fifteen minutes on each. Sri Leachim Remresh was successful for the same reason all mediums, psychics, palm and tarot card readers, and astrologers are successful—the people who come to them for advice believe they will be successful. Once that belief is in place, the mind makes certain it is confirmed.

Why? Why are we so gullible? Why is it so difficult to discriminate between what is real and what is bogus? The answer can be found in understanding the power of belief systems that drive, and as often as not distort, our perceptions of reality.

THE PATTERN-SEEKING ANIMAL

In our complex and contingent world, random events often happen in seemingly peculiar sequences that cry out for meaning. We usually rise to the occasion, finding patterns in nature even when they do not exist or have no real significance: the “eagle rock” overlooking the 134 Freeway in Eagle Rock, California—it is just a stone outcropping but our minds see in it the general shape of an eagle-like bird; the “JFK” stone in Hawaii looking for all the world like the late president in profile; the face of Jesus in a tortilla; the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. The first two are amusing but do not strike observers as filled with cosmic import. For some, however, the latter two trigger emotional responses linked to spiritual significance—witness the crowds that appear whenever the Virgin Mary makes her “appearance” on a barn door, in the shadows of trees, or, recently, on the side of the Ugly Duck car rental building in Clearwater, Florida, where the faithful come in wheelchairs and canes to be healed.

We are especially attracted to patterns with a spiritual or religious link, which touch our deepest desire for there to be a Something Else calling the shots and running the show. For some, that Something Else is God; for others it is angels, or fate, or synchronicity, or collective consciousness, or some universal life force. For thousands of years our myths and religions have sustained us with stories of meaningful patterns—gods and God, supernatural beings and mystical forces, the relationship of humans with other humans and their creators, and our place in the cosmos. For the past four centuries, however, science has provided a means for determining which patterns are real and which are illusions, and so we have expelled most ancient and medieval traditions from the pantheon. Or have we?

The Virgin Mary appears in Clearwater, Florida. Humans are pattern-seeking animals, quite adept at finding meaning even in random patterns