The Initiatic Mystery of The Pick Up Artist

I’m almost whole disconnected from the realities spun by TV, though the realities weaved by the spider’s web of internet often catch me in their snares, so pleasing they are to the monkey’s of comfortable habit that lie within me. Nevertheless, I have found myself flipping through the channels recently now that I’ve moved my laptop out of the bedroom and into the living room to prevent stir craziness. (I used to think I’d make a good ascetic monk, but turns out a tiny room does nothing for my personal balance and internal silence.) The monkeys of habit like anything that keeps my hands busy, especially when they don’t want me to be typing.

So I found myself flipping through the cable channels when I came across the show The Pick Up Artist. It’s a show that further brings into the mainstream the pick up artist underground first seeded by shady NLPer Ross Jeffries, whose authoritarian hypnosis tactics of “speed seduction”have long been left behind.  The next generation of pick up artists reached mass consciousness through Neil Strauss’ The Game, where he writes of his transformation from a loser in love to a master mack daddy under the tutelage of Mystery, a stage magician and innovator of behavior-based, indirect pick up artistry. It’s probably from knowing Mystery’s stage magic past that got me considering how much this show mirrors ancient mystery schools, albeit in a debased form with more mundane and materialist goals.

In the ancient mystery schools, a select group of candidates had to learn certain esoteric keys and scripts, don ritual dress (or masks or face/body paint), then confront challenges designed to alter their perceptions and also test their worthiness to enter upon the greater secrets and fellowship that the school possessed. In our times, traditional African-based religions, certain guru-centric Eastern faiths, Freemasonry and various New Age groups and cults like Scientology and Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, continue or mimic, with various amounts of spiritual integrity, this template.

And so does the “Reality TV” of The Pick-Up Artist.

The traditional mystery schools sought to transform the individual through its teachings and trials into a new, more powerful and more spiritually awakened person. Likewise, Mystery aims at a transformation of the guys who’ve made their way onto the program. Through the initiatic process, the candidates hope to be transformed from an “incomplete” or unsuccessful man who lacks the confidence and sexual charisma required to engage beautiful women in social and sexual interactions into post-modern Casanovas. This ritual transformation is meant to take place via initiation into Mystery’s lessons in social psychology, body and verbal language control and analysis. The initiaton includes lessons on interpreting female behavior, the donning of ritual dress (each guy alters his wardrobe to fit his new identity as a pick up artist), and the use of an esoteric vocabulary–”negging,” “peacocking,” “Kino testing, etc.” These lessons are then applied in “field” tests, where bedrooms, coffee shops, and pool parties take the place of the ritual chamber or temple.

Like in other mystery schools, not every candidate wins initiation into the inner sanctum. In this case, that inner sanctum is Mystery’s personal clique of globe-trotting, thousand dollar seminar-leading pick-up artists. It wouldn’t be “reality TV” without individual candidates being found unworthy and eliminated. This seems no different from more obvious mystery schools of the past and present. It takes certain qualities and successful transformations of character and behavior to attain to each new level of initiation.

There’s at least one very great difference, though, between initiatic mystery traditions, their debased New Age mimics and Reality TV. Unlike the traditional mystery schools, The Pick Up Artist invites millions of people at home, who have not been selected as active candidates for initiation, to become voyeurs of the teachings and the trials on hand. Whereas part of the power of traditional mystery schools lies in their secrecy, the power of this Spectacular Mystery’s school now lies largely in its being viewed and consumed by as many viewers (specifically of the male persuasion) as possible. Yet in its utterly spectacular nature and seeming mass-market transparency, perhaps the real nature of the initiation becomes all the more easily left unnoticed or dismissed, thus more secret. Perhaps the most important secret knowledge is this: that by committing to new ways of engaging life, by learning new physical and perceptual skills that clarify and change how you see yourself and others, anyone might attain some semblance of enlightenment, regardless of the activity. But if you can cover that realization up in a method or activity that is likely to garner disdain, discomfort or self-consciousness in onlookers and participants alike, one designed to be consumed as trashy entertainment, you’re not likely to notice. And if you can eliminate certain individual weaknesses of character by exploiting and enlarging other, subtler ones–an obsession with sexual prowess as a validation of one’s self worth, the trivialization of sex itself and the exploitation of personal hang-ups–in both the viewers and the wanna-be Casanovas, then maybe you’re just pulling the same old magic tricks.