Forum

- 1 May 1990

Emin-ent Silliness

We want to be active Skeptics but there is always something real to do and anyway the lunatic fringe aren’t daft enough not to charge admission. (Our scepticism has financial limits.) But, one hot holiday evening, a free talk sponsored by the “Emin Foundation” was announced. With joy in the feeling of joining a jihad we went along—only to fail!

Looking back, perhaps we should have stuck it out but the Emin Foundation has found a new way to cleanse an audience of all but the converted—boredom.

We started 10 minutes late in an unventilated room meant for 40 but packed with 114 folk (91 of them women). An unidentified little guy started a monologue. He wasn’t prepossessing. Casually dressed, he paced his arena, holding forth fluently though with no detectable coherence.

Then he lit up! The lady who challenged him on this was slapped down: “Go and sit near a window.” Then he apologised: “When I give these talks, I smoke. I know I shouldn’t.”

Early on he played his one visual aid, a whiteboard with

“You will see this as a pentagram, but I see a human wiring diagram! Look—head, arms, legs—the bits that jut out.” With only five bits that jut out no wonder he was confused. And confusion reigned: from outright contradiction (“Our problem is that we no longer are as we were when children” was followed a few minutes later by “Our problem is that most of us don’t grow up”) to rambling assertions that Kirilian photography “proves” palmistry.

Perfection in humans was defined as ”‘…shining and floating 3 feet in the air.” We were told charges run out of (and not in) hands and feet—positive ones on the left for men, which apparently proves women have finer sensitivities (as their finer hair also demonstrates).

Thinking of women led to the evening’s highlight: a rewrite of English history in which knights of King Arthur’s court were declared Noble when they proved they were able to say ‘no’—apparently, ‘no’ to sex, corruption and, especially, homosexuality. Don’t worry your dictionaries, this etymology is unique to the New Agers. And once more he asked “‘What’s wrong with us?” Well, we are poisoning our “fire food” by letting in a flood of uncensored impressions, and cats are more intelligent than us because they don’t ask what their purpose is.

This mishmash was actually quite impressive—he didn’t pause for 50 minutes. Then he announced that he had completed the warm up and would discuss the ways we could overcome our (unspecified) problems. He couldn’t find his list! But no matter:

“I can remember them.” (Brief look at ceiling.)

“Reincarnation! Always popular.”

We do it every 7 years when we replace our physical components and the knights of King Arthur had to astral travel to prove they had spirit and so were fit to become warriors instead of just gardeners.

Even this startling revelation of the militaristic tendencies of the New Agers couldn’t rescue the evening. It was too hot and dull and every bit as silly as we’d imagined. So we walked out politely and went home giggling.

A week later another newspaper ad invited those who had signed up, and any others interested, to attend the first training workshop of the Emin Foundation. Payment would not be due at this session.

Paul King

Bob Metcalf