THE POWER TO DISAPPOINT
Telecult Power: The Amazing New Way to Psychic and Occult Wonders – Reese P Dubin
A daily feature of life with Kev is ‘Shower Thoughts’.
Each morning, he bursts out the shower with his latest bathing-brainwave, from solutions to creating artificial consciousness or a work niggle, to inventions such as ‘Pigeon Religion’ and ‘Jiggy Cabs’ (neither of which I’ll dignify with an explanation).
Well, early into lockdown, Kev emerged from the shower with the news that he was going to build us a secret bookcase door. And he has indeed been busily transforming our spare-room door into a magical bookcase… rather putting my lockdown reading project to shame.
The most important parts of creating a bookcase door, however, are the books and props. Which is where I come in. After buying a couple of metres of vintage books from eBay, we (drunkenly) turned our attentions to online vintage curios shops.
“Do we need a collection of Victorian glass eyes?” “Is £250 a reasonable amount to spend on a two-headed stuffed duckling?” “How many old replica guns do we need?”
Thus we spent our Friday evening, rich on bourbon and poor on internet shopping. Over the course of the next two weeks all sorts of wonders arrived in the post: a pistol; phrenology-themed pots; poison and potions bottles; a creepy jack-in-the-box… and this book.
Bought purely for its trippy-hypnotic-eye cover, Telecult Power by Reese P Dublin, first published in 1977, boasts possibly the most impressive back cover description I’ve ever come across. I sat down to read it while Kev was working out the geometry of his door.
“This book is going to teach me how to suspend physical laws… and materialise whatever the heck I want from the invisible world into reality!”, I exclaimed, scanning the back-cover blurb. “Amazing revelations! Fame! Fortune! Happiness! It’s going to teach me how to make money without working! How to make myself invisible! How to hypnotise at a distance! How to move objects without touching them! Aaand how to recognise cosmic signs!”
“Can it teach you how to read silently in your head?”, Kev asked dryly.
Unperturbed, I dove into the introduction. This is filled with further mystic promises, such as “HOW TO JOIN THE HIDDEN BROTHERHOOD AND ENJOY A WONDERFUL NEW LIFE OF MONEY, FRIENDS, AND POWER”, “The Magic Chant to Make a Child or Spouse Obedient!” and “A Complete List of Omens”.
Next up, a whopping six pages of contents, which is pretty impressive for a 200-ish page book. I consider myself above and beyond the stuff and nonsense of The Secret these days, but, boy-oh-boy, I am PSYCHED.
Alas, fellow seekers – disappointment, of course, follows.
The general pattern of this book is to take a grain of truth – muscle reading, placebo healing, lucky guesses – and grow it into something preposterous. So, through devotion and practice to muscle reading (A Thing), say, we leap from lip-reading inner thoughts to mind-reading.
It’s not long before we’re totally off the reservation with talk of summoning “Invisible Masters”, next-dimension beings, the “Cosmic Intelligence”, and “the little people” or “little men” to do our various biddings.
You have to admire Dubin’s efforts to chuck in every conceivable biblical, alien and folk reference so as to appeal to the widest credulity possible. As a result, the latter pages of the book are a blur of leprechauns and pots of gold, cosmic powers, God and Devil.
A favourite entry has to be: “HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DEVIL”. (Apparently, Satan “thrives on disbelief” and so the solution is to “look on the bright side”. Indispensable advice, I’m sure, when you’re next sparring with Beelzebub.)
There are also first-hand accounts of Telecult Powers successes galore – aka ‘coincidences’.
Rhonda Byrne eat your heart out.
