The link to faith episode is
here.
FearI 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".
FaithWow ... 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