Another Reveen is getting standing ovations and wowing international audiences with amazing feats of the eye and mind.
For younger generations, Tyrone Reveen is the one and only mentalist they have ever known, but for older generations, part of the amazement is knowing Tyrone is not the original Reveen who defied the known laws of the mental universe. The late legend Peter Reveen came first, and pioneered the hypnosis and illusionist professions.
These are rare and difficult genres, no matter whom your father was, so two Reveens in a row is genuinely exciting.
It is hard enough for the daughter of a musician or the son of an athlete to learn the chops of a famous parent, but when yours is literally called an impossiblist, that almost begs for avoidance.
Tyrone Reveen did veer away from his Hall Of Famer father's footsteps, for many years. He became an innovator of another kind. As an entrepreneur, Tyrone built special effects and designed stages for many of the world's best known touring acts (ZZ Top, Usher, The Grey Cup, Madonna, Paul McCartney, etc.). The confetti/streamer cannon was his patent, among many other machines and processes that give audiences visual sizzle.
There was still, though, a magnetism towards the small dot in the middle of it all, the spotlight where the ringmaster stands in this circus life. Tyrone grew up holding the hand of the man who attained superstar status in the realm of live performance "magic" and it was always blended with the absolutely real and fascinating realm of the human super-conscious. Even after Peter's passing, the gentle guidance of that hand led Tyrone to that hot white dot.
"I got over the pressure part of it," Tyrone told The Citizen. "When I was training to do the show, that's the one thing I wasn't sure of. I wasn't used to being in the centre of the spotlight. I was always on the periphery assisting the grand master himself."
The technique Tyrone used to become not "a" Reveen but "the" Reveen was, in his own words, to over-think the weight of public attention. He overemphasized, in his own mind, an imagined audience's pressure. It allowed him to overwhelm the actual realities, which weren't that scary by comparison.
He kept thinking back to a show he saw his father do in their native Australia when Tyrone was a small child, but old enough to realize that in a theatre full of thousands of people, they weren't looking at each other or someone else, they were all looking at his dad, so dad must be someone extraordinary.
"I knew it was coming. I just conditioned myself to overcome it," Tyrone said. "Because nervous tension is the unseen enemy of the human mind. And super-conscious conditioning is perhaps the greatest tool we have to help bring forward our own true talents."
This is the foundation of his mission in life. Just as it was for his father, the stage show is the way to show the public what the super-conscious mind is capable of. Tyrone calls people up on stage out of the audience, recognizable friends and neighbours from each town on the tour, and uses his skills to enable them to entertain. He makes it fun, but keeps it clean and maintains the personal dignity of the volunteers who take over the act.
"The mind works so fast, it will protect you," he said. "It's like a watchdog, making sure nothing comes out of your mouth that your persona hasn't protected. Your mind will not abandon you. In a super-conscious state you can never do anything that's against your deep-rooted moral convictions. You cannot be made to do anything you have convictions against."
Hypnosis is not, as melodramatic movies and old comic books tend to imply, a pathway into mental slavery. It is, though, a pathway to much more powerful uses than society has embraced so far.
This is as true for Tyrone as it was for Peter, who instilled in his son the history and the wider applications of this artful science.
"He started reading (in his early teens) about the works of Anton Mesmer, Dr. John Elliotson, Dr. James Braid, all these surgeons who were able to make their patients feel no pain as they went through invasive surgeries, amputations, with no anesthetic drugs, and dad couldn't get enough of this phenomenon known as hypnosis."
The Reveen stage show was a byproduct serving the ultimate purpose of demonstrating hypnosis as a therapeutic aid. Tyrone explained that when Peter was allowed to come to North America as a newcomer from Australia, it was on an H-1 visa (at the time, an American allowance for foreigners with special abilities).
Tyrone said, "the United States government made a deal with him, if he taught the doctors throughout the medical universities how to apply the science of applied suggestion, for people in the medical field who had to deal with patients who were hypoallergenic to (anesthetic) drugs. He's the first person I know of who was drafted into the United States for the benefit of the medical industry."
Tyrone continues his father's push to develop the medical benefits of applied suggestion, but he also has a modern application Peter never had to contend with. Tyrone grew up in the first generation of mass advertising and corporate applied suggestion through media.
"We are just bombarded by consistent negative conditioning and it has an effect on our mind," said Tyrone, describing our world as an assault on our esteem to convince consumers to buy bits and pieces of artificial happiness. It hurts our body image, our sexual fulfillment, our abilities to self actualize, our sustainability as people. Even the all-too-common fear of public speaking comes from this.
"We were born without an instruction manual," said Tyrone. "You have to instruct the mind to overcome your fears and instruct it in what you want to achieve. It is repetition of suggestion."
If the TV and the magazine you're looking at won't tell you how capable and worthy you really are, you can do that yourself, he explained. The folks who get up on his stage as volunteers are put into hypnosis, but it's not a Reveen spell. It is a demonstration of what we are capable of even when we're alone with our thoughts.
"When the conscious mind is relaxed, this state is a very positive condition," he said. "I'm not making these people talented, I don't manufacture it, I just help bring it forward. When we go through life, most people block their own talents and potential. People, for the most part, make assumptions based on negative fears."
The fear melts in the heat of Reveen's spotlight on the Vanier Hall stage on Saturday night at 7:30. Tickets are on sale now at the TicketsNorth website.
