Gerard Senehi Confronts Us With Mystery | Big Think

Gerard Senehi Confronts Us With Mystery

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The mentalist is changing consciousness one psychic experiment at a time.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is the power of your work?

Gerard Senehi: I think it’s interesting because it’s something that people, we generally think we understand reality but when you see something like that it can make you question that, it can make you suspend your ideas and I think that is really interesting to me it’s not because some people look at it as you know it expands what’s possible but to me what’s interesting is it gets people to suspend their ideas by reality and not to be so sure that we know because I think we often think that we already understand reality.

We think that our world view is more or less complete that maybe there’s some things that we don’t know and some things that we don’t understand but more or less we’ve got to handle on reality and I like to do what I do because it brings that into question and that creates space for us to discover a lot more depth about who we are and why we’re here.

Question: Do you ever explain your tricks to people?

Gerard Senehi: No, I never explain. What I do and that’s unique to my style because I don’t tell people whether what I do is real or not real. I like to leave them guessing and that’s part of or creates this sense of suspension of the ideas because if I told them that it wasn’t real that I have some ideas about it and if I told them it was real they will just form some other ideas about it as well and I like to keep people perfectly in the middle whether they’re not sure and is much more interesting.

Question: Are we too focused on scientific explanations for paranormal phenomena?

Gerard Senehi:I don’t think they’re over focused. I mean I think we have certain belief systems that; but I find that people are remarkably open. I performed for scientists and always doctors and I’m always amazed at how open they are. I think it’s not that we tend to be skeptical it’s we’ve been given a very materialistic framework for existence and we don’t yet have a way even when new experience something on materialistic whether it’s psychic or spiritual which are two different things.

If we experience either of those we don’t necessarily have a conceptual framework or understanding to make meaning from it therefore it’s easier to kind of dismiss it but I don’t think it’s that people are necessarily overly skeptical. I’m always amazed at how open-minded people are.