“The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.”
— Elbert Hubbard
Humans are great inventors. Given the naked primates credit where it us due, they are amazing inventors. The obvious inventions are physical, levers and televisions and catapults and nuclear weapons. But humans are very good at social and mental technologies as well. The scientific method, philosophy and psychology, and of course religion, number among the human inventions of an intellectual nature.
The Scientific Method is useful to humans as a soft technology because it works in ways that they are not inclined to naturally think. Science digs out the things hidden in the human mental blind spots. This is also why science faces resistance, and why the scientific method is so frequently misunderstood. Science is useful because humans do not naturally think that way. Religion works in the opposite manner. Religions have spent ten millennia learning how to work in sync with the human mind at its blind spots and assumptions. Religion is useful because humans do naturally think that way. There is no tool more useful for building and sustaining culture as religion. There is no tool more useful for motivating and sustaining communal action as religion. There is not system as good at automatically filing and transmitting cultural history and story than religion. Ten millennia have enabled the inventors and practitioners of religion plenty of time to build a marvelous system.
Keep in mind here, that none of this refers to any particular religion, but to underlying systems upon which a religion is built. The tool kit and templates of religion are the topic here, not any one particular religion.
The challenge though is that religion is thus very easy to use against the people who use it. The solution is build an alarm system, an anti-virus, a psychic firewall, using the very methods pioneered and perfected by religion in order to defend oneself from the secret plans of cult leaders and con men who would use the tactics against their practitioners. And this is the Mendasa Project, a system of tools for deconstructing the techniques of Religion and using them to ones own benefit and to improve ones life. Named after the Latin for Story, but also for deception, The Mendasa Project is a guide in how to use technologies that have historically been off limits to most people. Techniques that were the province of the monk and the mystic, the priest and the occultist; these will now be opened to a general audience.
None of this is magic or supernatural, although a great deal of the techniques listed here have masqueraded as magic for some time. None of this is religious in nature, although of it has been entwined with various religions for so long that they may seem so. These are techniques of using ones own mind and of telling stories so that the stories may impact how people think. In this case, the practitioner will tell their own stories and influence their own thoughts. For too long, modern humans have been the slaves of the stories crafted by bronze age kings. The Mendasa Project is the remedy for that. The Mendasa Project is a way to take back ones own mind, and to live ones own life.
Contributing Authors
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 