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Enlightenment Development Kit

Ben Harris

(Based on 2 reviews)
50+ additional ideas, effects, and applications with the amazing Enlightenment Concept

You won't believe the ideas expounded in this 100 PAGE BOOK: "FURTHER ENLIGHTENMENT"—Tips on getting the best from the Floating Card Application, plus dozens of OTHER WAYS to put the principle to use. Lots of practical real world applications to build— using photos, boxes, business cards, note pads and more. Guest contributors include Marc Spelmann and Ken Krenzel. Along with the book you are supplied with 2 X Micro Magnets, 2 X Internal Enlightenment Gimmicks and a Spacer. Use these to assemble and explore many of the ideas detailed, and—to invent and make your own Enlightenment effects!

Reviews

Stephan Sloan

Official Reviewer

Jun 05, 2023

If “The Enlightenment” rising card trick wasn’t enough to “lighten” your pocketbook and the “Paradigm Shifter” wasn’t enough to make your pocketbook even “lighter”, then Ben Harris and friends decided to go for broke and sell you the “The Enlightenment Development Kit” to make your pocketbook even lighter still. All in all, if you fell for this complete package you would have been “enlightened” by $170 and still have a non-working piece of magic.

For $45 you get a “massive 100-page book with 50 great ideas” on how to get more use out of your “Enlightenment" prop plus two 30¢ magnets. The reality is though, the 100 page book is 3.5” square that when printed in a 6” x 9” format, it may not equate to 12 pages. The ideas range from the somewhat serious to the outright insane. The book reminds me of when we get together with magic friends and discuss a move or a trick. Over the course of the evening it starts out serious but eventually descends to the ridiculous as one guy tries to out-stupid the other.

“You won’t believe the ideas expounded in this 100 page book”, is probably the only true statement in the entire ad copy. Nuff’ said.
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Jeff Stone

Official Reviewer

Aug 11, 2012

For $45 you get . . . well . . . not a whole lot.


This product is a "supplement" to the original Enlightenment gimmick. It's mean to be additional ideas and thoughts on how to use the gimmick. It comes with the stuff to make two more gimmicks as well as a teeny booklet with . . . well read below.


The ad copy tout's a 100 page booklet with over 50 " . . . additional ideas, effects, and applications with the amazing Enlightenment Concept."


Let's start there. The booklet is about the size of the old school 3 inch floppy drives. Were I to convert this mini booklette into 8 x 11 sheets of paper, you'd be lucky to get 15 pages. That's misleading item #1. Next, the 50 plus so-called ideas range from "it makes no sense" to "it's totally ridiculous." One of the so called ideas is to construct a larger version of the gimmick to levitate a . . . wait for it . . . car. Yes folks . . . a car. There are several other objects that would require you to construct a much larger version of the gimmick. So large are the magnets required for the gimmick that Harris warns that if you're not careful with the magnets, they'll smash your fingers.


As explained in the ad copy for the original Enlightenment gimmick, a pk magnet is required to operate the gimmick. If you read my review of that product you may recall that the PK magnet wouldn't even properly operate the levitating card gimmick. Who knows what kind of magnet you would need to levitate the car, and where the heck would you conceal it? Harris gives no clue as to where to obtain magnets and parts needed to build a car (or any other object he mentions) levitator.


Some of the other "ideas" are things like a one sentence "entry" that tells you to hold a pen in your hand when operating the gimmick in the original product. Many of the ideas assume that the original gimmick worked the way it claims. It seems that Ben Harris's "Paradigm Shifter" magnet will do the trick. However, that's an additional $35 and I don't plan on spending the money to find out. The original ad copy claims that a PK magnet will work, but it doesn't, so that means that most of the ideas in this book won't work because they're based on the original gimmick working properly.


Almost every "idea" in the book is a brief few sentences that leave out tons of details leaving the reader a sense of incompleteness and even occasional confusion. One of the suggestions is to make a book float. He makes a point of driving home the importance of using the perfect sized book or else the effect won't work, but he never tells us what that perfect size is.


I think you get the idea here. I just can't recommend this. There are really only two positive things I can say about this product; actually it's more like two half positive things. The first half positive thing is that if you can get your enlightenment gimmick to work, there are a handful of ideas that are very cool. The brief description of them is sufficient to allow you to create the "thing(s)" needed to create a cool effect . . . IF the enlightenment gimmick works. That's a big fat "IF."


The next half positive thing is this: there were a couple of ideas on how to use the gimmick that by happenstance included a presentational angle or thought that could be applied to your magic in general. For example, he mentions how to set up Buddha papers with the gimmick. The instructions were very unclear, and the applications of this seemed to be even less clear. However, he made a few suggestions on what kind of paper to use to make your Buddha papers along with some presentational ideas for the papers themselves. These were pretty clever. However it's hard to justify the cost for those few and far between clever bits.


Final verdict:
.5 star with a Stone Status of Rubble

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