The mentalist is leading a different sort of entertainment revolution.

Question: Do you distinguish between the real and unreal?

Gerard Senehi: I don’t draw a line between real and unreal and I think...I think I do that deliberately, very consciously because I’m provoking people. I’m provoking…I’m provoking them to question their ideas. I’m not giving them easy answers and also I’m entertaining them that’s part of what’s really interesting. Somebody told me early on that…I was at a fancy party and they said, “You know the reason we like what you do is because we know how to write book, we know how to operate on the human body, we know how to do all these things but we don’t understand what you do.”

And so, I think that’s part of what makes it fun and that’s part of what can create…It’s like art and beauty, you know. Art has the capacity to suspend our ideas. When we see something really beautiful, it has the capacity to make us feel like we don’t totally understand this and we can’t put it in a box. So, I like to do something that the people can’t put in a box and that’s what makes it good entertainment and has another added dimension because I like to make entertainment relevant for people.

Question: What is entertainment good for?

Gerard Senehi: I think entertainment has the capacity to evolve culture. So I think entertainment can be…can serve different functions. Entertainment can be used for escape, it can use for education. It can be used…and it can also be used to reflect deeper dimensions of who we are. I think and often I think in post modern culture, entertainment has slipped into some sort of feeling good, escape is--and I feel it’s important, it’s a great opportunity to say, “Wait a minute entertainment can be really cool, it can be dynamic, it can be intriguing, it could be creative, and it can help educate us or take culture forward.

Question: What are your goals as a mystic?

Gerard Senehi: I don’t know about 5 years but my goal is…my short term goal is to...is to try to generate momentum…Use public kind of a public success perhaps television work, to create a bit of kind of in the field of entertainment, create a movement of reflecting on deeper question, questioning reality, bringing attention to meaning, purpose, who we are or why we’re here in a creative fun way that’s not pedantic and that helps people to reflect on themselves and their own experience.

So that’s my goal and it’s something that I’ve always been interested in but recently I’ve been leaning into it and say how can I do that within my role as a kind of mystery entertainer.

Recorded on: June 4, 2009