Yeah I realized recently that the main reason why people are being afraid of mentalism even though you do it for entertainment, is that they all have something to had. It may even been something not really valuable, but not for them.

For Doug and Baha both, have you considered framing your presentation as non-verbal communication that is decidedly not psychic? For example, "You are a remarkably expressive person. I'm not going to try to read your mind, just to see what you can tell me without opening your mouth. You are probably familiar with concepts like poker 'tells' and body language, right? So, what I do is the same thing as a poker player, but I'm no good at the poker face myself. Everyone always seems to know what cards I am holding before I can figure out what they have!"

Cards are always fairly easy for me to justify because I talk about my uncle, who really does make his full-time living as a high-stakes gambler. For about 30 years he made a living with a deck of cards. Presentational angles for cards with intuition are simple. I talk about my uncle first. Body language, I talk about him and the way poker players learn to read body language. I also talk about how hard poker faces are to really maintain and that's why, no matter how good I am at reading tells (ahem), I'm lousy at hiding them. Which is why I lose at poker. Makes me human. I have only one of the skills needed to excel, not all of them. And not even the most important one.

So, that's an example of one presentational angle that I find works really well because I can talk about a real relative who really does something that looks like it would be related to the skills I am supposedly demonstrating. My claim is that there may or may not be something intuitive or even psychic. Or a lot of what we think is ESP may just be unconscious reading of body language. How would we know the difference anyway? It is relatively non-threatening and it allows for moving into more improbable presentations after putting the cards away. "This is the same sort of thing and it doesn't work as often as just trying to guess what card you have. But you are really good at this, so I want to try it. Take this piece of paper and print the name of a person who..."

It keeps the whole "I don't know why it works" thing going, but goes right into a range of mind reading possibilities. I'm just a hobbyist, so my experience will be more relevant to the casual "momentary entertainer" than to a professional. But it really helped to read Fundamentals and think about a hook to start the context going. I also read an essay on Doug Dyment's lovely site that talks about why he does not like playing cards in mentalism in most cases. I put them together and thought about my uncle.

-Patrick

@Baha If you want to add a bit of realism to your presention, and you want to connect it with demons, I suggest pretending that you bascially have a demon that you invoke, who helps you do supernatural things. BUT, I don't know if I'd straight up just tell people that. Maybe having it be implied is much more mysterious. But also like, I'm not sure you want to go around making people believe that you're doing something demonic. Sounds kinda dangerous for people who believe you, and then go and get themselves involved in some occult stuff to try and replicate what you're doing.

Dear Baha,
Expect this if you claim working with demons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAA6MueIRSw
Even today the belief in the supernatural is alive and well.
Yesterday I heard a fellow on the radio telling people
the 1973 movie the Exorcist was true.

Dear Baha,
This radio program had nothing to do with religion or the supernatural.
This was a D.J. playing Classic Rock stating "Facts?!"
In the days of Maggie and Jiggs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Up_Father
Puck was quoted as saying,"What fools these mortals be!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_(mythology)
Sincerely,
miistermagico

I think that Op is on the right track here. It's better to work out who you are as a performer, and then build your magic around that. Don't just take loads of different tricks and do them, as it's incongruent.