Derren Brown Fear and faith

Anybody see this, was quite interesting. I will try and find a link.

The link to faith episode is here.

Fear

I actually found the fear episode, here, on the placebo effect, really interesting too. Brown is a hypnotist too ... I have no idea how they do his "snap inductions" To understand the BK effect, one would have to remove any placebo effect. I mean ... what is in the 'magic sweeties' (toli) the BKs hand out?

Watching the fear episode, and especially the results at the end, I'd say they match 90% + of what BKs tend to claim "Baba" has done for them, and Darren explains how they were achieved using many techniques we have discussed here, e.g. "confirmation bias" ... keep a daily chart, just like the BKs. Correct me if I am wrong. Perhaps they even have more of an effect ... but, of course, BKs are programmed not to expect good things in this life but to expect bad things, e.g. karmic purifications and settlements, "the carpet being beaten".

Faith

Wow ... 38:00 in. I found that really shocking.

The strength of the woman's reaction to what we know was nothing more than Derren Brown's suggestions and to think how easily it could be interpreted by a "religious hierarchy" to benefit itself afterwards. And it was just a serious of techniques Brown was aware of doing beforehand.

If you listen to what the woman said, it sounds just like a BK on a first high, "I felt all the love in the world had been thrown at me ... completely overwhelming ... it had always existed but I had pushed it away, mistreated it ... not let it into my life ... my spectrum had been broadened ... extended ... has to be some supernatural". If you induced that feeling into someone and then told them it was x, y, z ... Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva ... you would have them.

Before that, the first thing that jumped out at me was note of the experiment by Jesse Bering* which showed, "once the idea was sown in people's minds that there is some kind of presence in the room", people's behaviour is modified ... even though, in the given case, no one actually believed a chair was haunted by a ghost.

"Believing" was not necessary. The idea of there being a supernatural being is enough to significantly influence us to act in a moral. It's something within us, not external to us, that is hard wired into our brain. Additionally we tend to add meaning to events which don't exist, e.g. pareidolia.

To me this starts to answer how we got sucked in to BKism ... even thought we really did not believe in it. There are others things which I recognise from BKism, e.g. the confirmation of feelings or the encouraging of those feeling,

Something else he brought up, and which underlines the attractiveness of BKism to BKs, is that "randomness is not a comfortable thing for our minds to deal with ... our minds whiz to make sense out of randomness". The BK Knowledge, especially The Cycle, is the epitome of regularity and order (for eternity).

It's funny but one thing I have done as an ex-BK is accept the vast randomness of the universe and even my daily life. I feel no need for their to be any predestination, any binding threads of fate or destiny. In fact, I am resigned to the randomness of life and my own powerlessness to most of it.

Brown also points out that, again, just the idea of their being some kind of supernatural involvement, leads us to find positive results of its involvement even where there is intervention at all. He shows an experiment of a woman being told he was going set up episodes believing episodes had been set up ... even when they had not. She was told to look for them, and found them where there were none.


* Jesse Bering, who wrote 'The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life', is an evolutionary psychologist, the director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University, Belfast who argues for the neurological basis of religious belief. He studies how the theory of mind has evolved and played a part in our evolutionary process and would have increased our survival and breeding chances hence it is in our genes.

Bering explains that ... believing in a supernatural being who monitored and judged anyone at all times encouraged people to avoid acting on their immoral impulses, helping them survive ... He writes that our "overzealous" theory of mind motivates us to get "into God's head" and look for hidden meaning or messages embedded in any event, such as if your alarm clock fails to go off or a hurricane floods your basement. In fact, without this cognitive bias, "much of religion as we know it would never have gotten off the ground," Bering asserts.Why is belief so hard to shake? Despite our best attempts to embrace rational thought and reject superstition, we often find ourselves appealing to unseen forces that guide our destiny, wondering who might be watching us as we go about our lives, and imagining what might come after death.

“Psychologist Jesse Bering argues that religious beliefs are a sophisticated cognitive illusion rather than an irrational delusion. Because we have the ability to think beyond our immediate surroundings, we have evolved a tendency to project the idea that a transcendent being, or god, influences our lives. Taking a balanced and considered approach to this often inflammatory topic, he explains why this religious trait has evolutionary benefits and why it sets us apart from other animals.” – Nature

Derren Brown continues his quite amazing demonstrations of hypnotism and the power of suggestion, supported by academics including Zoltan Dienes, Professor in Experimental Psychology at University of Sussex who published his ideas here: Explaining hypnosis: The cold control theory.

I am not suggesting that the BKs are training assassins (!!!), but so many of the relaxation suggestions and conditionings are similar BK meditation, including the power of mind over matter and the feeling of disassociation. Also how simple it is to condition a certain percentage of people step by step, to do things entirely against their nature or will, without them being aware of it.

To turn it into a religion, all one has to do is add the suggest that all this is happening via the power of some god spirit.

Around the 29:00 mark, Brown gets his victim to go into trance, tell him his secret pin number and then forget that he had done so. To me this gives some insight into how the BK Seniors can gain such total control over their followers, including their money giving facilities. Shortly after that, he introduces a visual and audio triggers.

What is really the difference between the blue and white polkadot trigger and the red and white BK Shiva Baba image trigger?

Around 36:00 Brown introduces a polygraph (lie detector) expert to see if the victim "truly believes" ... or in this case has no recollection of his actions. He passes completely.

If it is possible to programme an individual to become an assassin, and not remember what he has done, is it really that far fetched to believe individuals can be hypnotised to become part of a highly controlled and trigger susceptible "ShivShakti Army" believing in it equally unquestioningly?

In this programmes case, the "target" was a famous actor Stephen Fry. In the BKs' case, the target are the equally rich, famous and powerful.

Now, a question to ex-BKs, do you still wonder and ask how on earth you did the things you did when you were a BK and how mentally blocked BKs seem when you speak to them?

which one leads to the other ... fear leads to faith, or faith leads to fear .??

Hypnotist Derren Brown takes it one step further and organizes ... the Apocalypse, (Part Two).

Note how he gradually builds up believable and acceptance in the idea that the End of the World is happening and how easy it is to convince some individuals to believe. One could argue that the BKs don't just build up the idea of an End of the World in a similar way but also, through their gardens, dressing up and performances acts a Heaven on Earth.

It's quite an amazing performance ... almost unbelievable to see how individuals can believe in something so unreal ... but then it is on a far lower budget than the BKs! Watch how at the very end of Part Two Brown is able to switch the hypnosis victim off merely through a telephone call.