If the Buddha were alive today, the odds are just as good that he’d be an Internet Marketer as the leader of a new religious sect.

Why?

Because the guy knew how to sell.

Let me talk about the Internet Marketing world before we return full-circle to the robed former Prince of the Sakya clan (that’s Siddhartha Gautuma — the Buddha — for those who are keeping score).

This morning, as background noise while I’m doing some last minute corporate accounting, I was listening to a well known Internet marketer’s lecture on how easy it is to make money online. I won’t mention his name because I don’t want to single him out, since what he does is the same as almost every other person selling “how to make money online.”

The guy spends 30 minutes getting people psyched that they can get whatever they want (apparently everyone wants to travel, have a bigger place to live, and work in their underwear… which, in an odd way, is one way to describe what it’s like to be homeless… but I digress).

Then he launches into his personal story of woe and misery. How he grew up poor, had no arms and legs, received alien implants that sucked out his brain, can’t say the number “5″ and, in myriad other ways, shouldn’t have become successful.

Then, of course, he discovered the Internet (cue the Hallelujah chorus) and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

He found a group of people who were willing to pay for information he had…

And the next thing you know, he’s making money online, hand over fist over knees over toes.

See, it’s that simple!

Oh, are you wondering what information he had?

Well, this is the part that makes me want to toss my computer out the  window… but since my office is in the basement and the window is a window-well, that would be more like rearranging my desk than getting the glass-and-plastic-shattering effect I’d like when I hear him GLOSS OVER this one, TEENY-WEENY factoid:

He discovered, after staring at stock and commodity charts all day, that he had a knack for making accurate predictions about the future prices in the market.

Let’s pause here, shall we. Let me see if I get this straight.

How rare do you think it is that someone can predict the movement of the market? Granted, he was doing this at a time where if you just said, “I think it’s going up!” you would probably make money. But, suffice it to say, it turns out that this guy with no training or education just happened to have a knack for doing something that people would pay a ton of money for.

He was a rare and unusual person with an even rarer and unusual-er skill. Out of the millions of people who TRY to do what he did, he was the ONE IN A MILLION (or better) who could do it.

But, again, he practically dismisses with a wipe of his hand the VALUE OF THIS STATISTICALLY UNLIKELY thing.

According to him, he didn’t make money because he could do something almost nobody else could do. He didn’t make money because it was a skill that could help other people make money (Want to make a million? Tell people that you can teach them how to make a million… for only $99.99).

No, according to him, it’s just the magic of the Internet and a few skills… hell, if he can do it, so can you! (that’s what he says, anyway).

I mean, sure, if you take out the rare, unusual, unreproduceable, unteachable, improbable, and unlikely part, then it SEEMS like something usual, reproduceable, teachable, probably and likely… and something you could do.

But add that back in and, well, it’s just a nice lecture from a mildly delusional-but-entertaining guy.

And that’s the problem with people teaching Internet Marketing. They typically leave out, or overlook, or simply don’t recognize the critical component of their personal story, the factor that actually led to their success (if there even IS a factor other than luck or good timing).

And, worse, most of the people listening to their pitch don’t recognize that missing factor and, therefore, spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn some “technique” that never reproduces the results attained by the teacher.

(Can you feel the circle about to close?)

Buddha had a great sales pitch.

Perhaps one of the best ever.

“Life is inherently unsatisfactory… but I have a way for you to get something even BETTER than what you ever imagined… in fact, if you imagine it, that ain’t it… and, unlike other religions that say you’ll get the bonus prize after you’re dead, with my religion you can get it all while you’re alive!”

While the Buddha couldn’t say, “I was poor and uneducated and walked uphill to school, both ways…” he did say, “If I can do it, so can you!”

And, like our Internet marketers, who get a long line of customers when they say, “I’ll teach you how for only $2995…” the Buddha says, “I’ll show you how by sitting on your butt for decades…”

But here’s the kicker… the very texts of Buddhism talk about how rare and unusual the Buddha is. How it was the thousands of past-lives that led inevitably to his awakening.

And, like the Internet marketers who can only point to a tiny fraction of their students who seem to have proven that the technique works (until you look more closely and see that they ALSO had rare and unusual skills), out of the millions of meditators who’ve spent time on a cushion, we’ve got only an itsy-bitsy handful who ostensibly got to the end of the Buddhist path… and, when asked, usually say that their “achievement” was not something predictable, or causal, or reproducible.

And, like the Internet marketers, they then go off to teach others based on, “If I can do it, so can you!,” overlooking that even they aren’t really sure how they did it, and ignoring that the lack of results by the students.

Of course the students perpetuate the rolling of the wheel by believing that they haven’t reached the goal (Buddhist or marketing) because they need to practice more, find a different practice, fix some fictional problem that’s keeping them from their goal, get over their “resistance to meditation” or “fear of success,” feng shui their bathroom, detox their liver, set goals, take another workshop, find another teacher…

Silly humans.

It’s getting worse.

When I last wrote about “attraction,” I was getting maybe 3-4 emails a week telling me how I could attract whatever it was I wanted — sex, money, sexy money.

Now it’s 3-4 per DAY.

Clearly, I’m attracting these emails. Otherwise why would they show up in my inbox?

It must be that there’s something about me — my vibration, or my past lives, or the frequency of the universe that resonates with the clockwise curl in the hair on the left side of my head — that attracts these emails to my inbox (which then attracts a vein-curdling contraction throughout my body and the need to hold back my rising bile).

It MUST be about attraction… because, it couldn’t be because I subscribed to all those damn email lists from a-holes who know that “attraction” sells!

It’s like every copywriter and his third-cousin-twice-removed has gotten on the attraction bandwagon. And I’m sure they’re kicking themselves for not having done it sooner.

I’ll bet there were copywriting brainstorming meetings (either in actual groups, or just in the minds of solo copywriters) that sounded like:

BOB: “Okay, gang, we’re trying to communicate that our latest ‘How to make money while curled in the fetal position under the stairs and wearing ladies underwear’ product is simple to use… should we say that it only takes an hour a day?”

TIM: “Hmmm… that’s over 5… or 6… or… well, that’s a lot of hours per week, don’t you think?”

BOB: “Yeah, you’re right… how ’bout showing a paralyzed chimp making money with the system?”

HANK: “Nah, then people will think they’re buying a monkey instead of a set of poorly produced tapes and unintelligable Xeroxed manuals.”

DAN: “OH! OH! OH!”

BOB: “No, Dan, monkeys go UUH! UUH! UUH!”

DAN: “Ignoring that chimps are primates and not monkeys, I was making that noise because I thought of something awesome — instead of telling people they have to DO anything, like apply any effort out in the real world — why not tell them that their very being will ATTRACT what they want!?!?”

BOB: “You mean like human magnets?”

DAN: “Yeah, something like that. I don’t know the specifics yet. But that doesn’t matter. Just tell people they don’t have to actually do anything and then, when they don’t get results, we can sell them the SUPER ATTRACTION course!”

BOB: “I don’t know Dan. In advertising, we work on the assumption that humans are easy-to-manipulate idiots, but your idea means we have to believe they’re drool-swilling, amoeba-brained, complete and total morons. I don’t think even I can go that far.”

TIM: “UUH! UUH!”

BOB: “You have another idea, Tim.”

TIM: “Huh? No. I was making monkey noises.”

And so Dan went off and started his own advertising agency and, by merely “putting it out to the universe,” he attracted clients who were willing to tell people that getting results happens because you attract them, rather than going out and producing results by taking action.”

And the rest, as they say… is the history of my email inbox.