Review of Mind Penetration

Mind Penetration by Dr. Haha Lung.

From Amazon:

Dr. Haha Lung adds to his canon of easy-to-understand, relevant martial arts instruction with this indispensable guide to dominating your enemy’s mind. In his previous classics, Mind Control and Mind Manipulation, he laid the groundwork for smashing your enemy’s mental defenses. In Mind Penetration, Dr. Lung teaches the skills and techniques behind this seemingly supernatural ability to bend anyone to your will.

The underlying theme of this book is that, generally speaking, humans are easily dupped. This is a notion that skeptics and some from the discipline of psychology have already observed.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” (1950), p. 149

To demonstrate this apparent weakness the author starts out by demonstrating how faliable our senses are. In one of many examples he asks the reader to describe a spiral staircase to someone without using your hands. Most people can’t do it and inevitably end up drawing the staircase in the air with their hands. The point being that humans often attempt to create order where there is not order. Moreover, we humans are also notorious for filling in a lack of good information with whatever bad information is available. Lastly, we are often motivated to inccorectly interpret sensory data by our own subconcious biases. The trick is for the student of “Black Science” is to use these human flaws to defeat “the enemy”. (I’m not sure who the enemy exaclty is but the author spends an awful lot of time talking about him or her!) Lung covers three main Eastern approaches to understanding your enemy: India, China, and Japan. He essentially takes their core philosophies, distills them down to their essence, and then applies them to the modern day.

Likes:

Overall I like his practical approach to Eastern philosophies and how he applies them to a modern setting. There is enough material in this book that I’ll probably have to re-skim it in an attempt digest the lessons.

Dislikes:

I’m all for realism but the book paints a dour and cynical picture of humanity. In Lung’s world everyone is out to screw you over. The only way to defeat “the enemy” is to take these Eastern philosophies and screw them first! My other dislike is, at times, Lung borders on the crass and crude:

“Well, I am okay. But I don’t know about you. And there’s a good chance, unless you’re one of my close friends or family, that I don’t really care about you. So there’s not much chance I’m gonna open my hermetically sealed bomb shelter door for you when those Islami-facists finally set off the Big One–or even the Little One.

You’re not responsible to save everyone in the world. In fact, not everybody is worth saving. Somebody’s gotta feed the worms.” p.225

I plan to read his other books. I can also say that I’d recommend this book only if you are good at bracketing out authors who tend to rant, are slightly paranoid, or who border on the crude and the crass.

-BCP