Las Vegas Weekly

October 15, 2012 · 9:37 AM

Cleverboy dips into a New Age book of nonsense

By Rick Lax

Why does everybody else get all the good stuff?

All the other writers get all the cool stuff. They get candy and magnets and sunglasses and viewfinders from PR reps trying to entice them to cover various events. I get strip club invitations and books about bin Laden.

One book, The ALL KNOWING Diary: The Truths You Were Never Told; How to Harness ALL KNOWING To Make The Right Decisions Every Time, by Daniel Rechnitzer, wound up on my desk two weeks ago. I was about to toss it…until I saw the press kit that came with it. A folder, a pink handout, a yellow handout, a headshot, another headshot. I had to write something about it—something more than “The words ‘all’ and ‘knowing’ should have a hyphen between them.”

I began with the pink flyer. Its first line read, “Studies suggest that we only use a small portion of our brains on a daily basis.” That sounds good, only it’s 100 percent untrue. This old wives’ tale has been discredited by every neuroscientist who’s ever peeked in a brain.

So I went to the yellow flyer, which offers questions that journalists can ask Mr. Rechnitzer. Same nonsense. Its first question: “You say that so many of us are not using the human brain as it was intended, thereby utilizing only 5 to 10 percent of it. To this fact you attribute why we struggle on an individual level and as a community or species. Could you please elaborate on this?” I’m trying to decide whether I’m more put off by that question’s content or grammar.

As for the book, well, its cover is a shameless Secret rip-off, and its content might as well be created by the Chopra Random Quote Generator (wisdomofchopra.com).

I’ll leave you with these two quotes. One of them comes from The ALL KNOWING Diary, one of them comes straight out of my ass. I’ll let you decide which is which:

“The energy of your Brain Power, funneled by your Self Awareness, can be used to expand the universe of opportunities from inside and out.”

“The True Self funnels in the necessary energy or information you need to grow and evolve through your brain for your understanding.”

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