Finally a successful Buddhist :-)
Apparently Fred Lenz made millions out of gullible people and he bought himself a mansion in Stony Brook, NY and a Mercedes-Benz to drive around town in so he could stage his "Woo Woo" events. Work cited: 'Conjuring' Being a Definitive History of the Venerable Arts of Sorcery, Prestidigitation, Wizardry, Deception, & Chicanery and of the Mountebanks & Scoundrels Who have Perpetrated these Subterfuges on a Bewildered Public by James Randi St Martin's, 1992 Rama demonstrating a one inch levitation Woo Woo event on stage in front of a crowd of TBs: On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 6:34 AM, salyavin808 <[email protected] mailto:[email protected]> wrote: More below...... ---In [email protected] mailto:[email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: salyavin808 <[email protected] mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 8:48 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Are the TM-Sidhis nothing but Placebo Effect? Some of the people Randi have had to put up with! He had a guy who could turn pages of a book with his mind. He'd sit with a book in front of him and the pages turn without him touching them! I saw the film even. Randi asked if him he could do it with a sheet of glass between him and the book and he said of course he could. He couldn't obviously, how anyone could be so deluded they weren't aware they were just breathing on the pages is beyond me. The human capacity for self-delusion must be near infinite. Which is why believers can't be trusted to examine themselves properly. He's had harder subjects than that though, telepaths and mind readers that turned out not to be are common as muck, cold readers even if they aren't aware that is what they are doing. Loads of them still make a living even after they failed in the test Randi set. "It was set up to fail" they claim afterwards. Whereas before they were keen to demonstrate their powers under conditions they themselves agreed to. To keep their belief in their powers intact they scapegoat Randi as unfair. Go figure. It's the "When Prophecy Fails" syndrome all over again. A prophecy fail makes the TBs believe in it even more. Go figure. There is simply no accounting for self-importance and an inability to say, "I was wrong." People are willing to come up with so many twisted theories to explain *their* mystical experience. And as far as I can tell, all of this is driven by self-importance. They're declaring "My experience was SPECIAL" (and of course, silently saying "And so am I"), and they're desperate for any way to "prove" it. What such people are unable to cope with is someone hearing about "their experience" and saying, "No, it's not special at all, and neither are you." One of the most interesting people that took on the Randi challenge was a guy who thought he could talk to babies telepathically. UK's Channel 5 made a doc about him in their "Extraordinary People" strand. The most extraordinary thing to me was that anyone thought it was possible in the first place, I mean babies don't have thoughts and conceptualised desires, they don't even have a language at that age! None of this has stopped the guy making a fortune out of his "powers" he still fills halls up and down the country with dopey women and their bawling kids where he rather obviously cold-reads irrelevant crap about their family lives and charges them a fortune to tell them things they already know. It's no different than mediums preying on the bereaved really. And credit where it's due, he was very good at it. Anyway, this guy took up James Randi on his offer and went to claim his money. Randi interviewed him and they came up with a test that would showcase his skills. Boy, was he confident and he really thought the money was his. The look on his face when he came out of the soundproof room to see how well he'd done and found out he'd drawn a complete blank was priceless and he accused Randi of cheating and setting him up to fail, but we all saw it. There was no doubt without the parents to talk to he couldn't do it. So why was it called Extraordinary People and not Extraordinary Failures? After his disappointment with Randi the documentary makers took him to a psychologist rather more sympathetic to claims of this kind (you can see the problem there) who did an EGG of him when he was in his cold-reading trancey state and declared that he was using his brain in a way that he'd never seen before. And it was interesting but looked like he'd simply started using another brain section for his trick, maybe one that gets used in altered states? Anyway, this was taken as confirmation that he really did have a special supernatural skill even though it completely ignored all the other evidence of cold-reading and his failure at Randi's lab. To me it was a fine cautionary tale about trusting sympathetic scientists* and the willingness to believe. The guy still makes a living conning money out of gullible young mothers and James Randi held on to his $ million. *And clueless documentary makers.
