This one was written during my Derren Brown obsession in September 2009. I think the last sentence is probably the most interesting part of the whole thing, but that may be because I don't remember any of the tricks this post talks about!
Linking Derren Brown to Buddhism
I seem to have a full-blown case of DerrenBrown-itis. While I was at work, daydreaming, I realised that what Derren does can be linked to Buddhism.
Buddhism teaches that everything is essentially all in our heads. Nothing is naturally good or bad, but this is how we perceive things to be, and everyone perceives them differently. Sometimes we think things are great one day and not so good the next – the things are the same, but our state of mind is different. The thing itself, be it an object, an event or a person, might seem to be the same (although rebirth states that everything is changing all the time, these changes are not always obvious), but we might feel completely different about them from day to day. This is because our state of mind is changing.
In the show explaining the lottery prediction, Derren said that his technique might not work with people who actually wanted to win the lottery. How true that is and how much of his explanation was true, I have no idea. Maybe his explanation is true. People have believed crazier things. He also said that the fact that people were driven by fear (in the tricks with the cup with the knife in it and the box with the mouse in it), this fear made them fall into predictable patterns.
When people go to see a psychic’s show, their state of mind affects what happens as well. Maybe the psychic says “does anyone here know a John?” and someone in the audience stands up and says they do, and the psychic builds on John’s story through guesses (I’m talking about a fake psychic here), they might get something a bit wrong, but that person in the audience will want the psychic to be right, and in their mind they will make the information fit with John’s story. If they had a different state of mind, they would think that the psychic is being very vague and actually doesn’t really know anything about John at all.
I think that our state of mind also affected how we felt about Derren’s lottery prediction. I’ve watched several of his shows this past week and I’ve seen him predict what people are going to say, sometimes when they’re not even stood in front of him, sometimes over the phone, and it is the most bizarre and interesting thing to watch. When he’s in front of an audience and a person from the audience thinks of a question to ask him, and he guesses the question and the answer just by the person’s handwriting, what they say, what they look like and how they say it (I guess), nobody says “hey, we want a definite, exact explanation of how you knew all of this stuff that you couldn’t possibly know. ” They just accept it. But when he predicts the lottery numbers, everyone wants to know how he did it. Why? Because they have something to gain. People want to know how he did it so that they can do it themselves, or some similar recreation of it. They didn’t care about how he knew stuff in his shows, they just enjoyed it. Because their state of mind has changed – from simply feeling entertained, to desire and maybe greed.
The main thing that made me think about Derren Brown’s (acts, tricks, talents?) in relation to Buddhism is an episode of Trick or Treat where he showed a woman four coloured cards – red, blue, green and yellow. He showed her the blue on and said that it might not definitely be blue, there could be a bit of green in there, people might have different opinions. He then asked her what colour the card was, after a bit of convincing, and she said it was green. Continuing in the same way, he convinced her that yellow was really red, and then she seemed to come to the conclusion herself that the red card was black. They then went outside to look at her red car, and she was absolutely certain that someone had painted it black, and, pointing to a big yellow car, she said that her car (before alledgedly being painted) was the same colour as “that red car over there”. Bizarre. I suppose this isn’t just to do with the point I made earlier about people’s state of mind, but more about how different people perceive things differently – a kind of sea colour might indeed look green to one person and blue to another, or maybe even to the same person on a different day. Nothing is definite, there are so many things that depend on people’s emotions, experiences, and in turn their state of mind. It makes me wonder:
Is everything relative?
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