Shalom 26th June 1996

26th June 1996

LOOK INTO my eyes and touch the orange dot on this page andYOU can unlock your innermost forces. I’m asking all Shalomreaders to take part in this sensational experiment.
It happens at 11.11am this Sunday, June 16 – that’s when I wantto share my psychic powers with you.
But you will have to concentrate hard. Switch off the radio ortelevision because this special event could change your wholelife.
My eyes have become my trademark over the years. So I want youto look into them.
I also want you to run your hands over the orange dot. I’ve deliberatelychosen orange because it’s a mixture of red and yellow – red beingphysical energy and yellow is mental energy.
But if it’s going to work you must think GOOD thoughts. ThinkPOSITIVE. Be calm, cool and imagine what you like most.
A new job, a new car, an end to your money problems, a new romance…anythingthat’s good for you.
Caress the orange dot for just THREE MINUTES – three minutes thatcould change your whole life-and think of all the wonderful thingsyou want to happen to you and your family.
I know from my vast experience that they CAN happen. I have SEENthem happen.
Now try another experiment of your own. Fetch any broken watches,clocks, electrical household appliances like toasters. First,wind up the watches and clocks and place them on the orange dot.You may wish to put a bunch of keys or a fork or spoon on it.
Now concentrate very, very hard and WISH the watches and applianceswere working again. What I am attempting to do here is triggeryour own dormant psychic energy field.
And please let me know how these experiments affected YOUR LIFE.Did the unexpected happen?
Did a spoon bend or a broken clock start ticking again?
Was I a mender or a bender as far as you are concerned?
Write to me at Shalom, 28 St. Albans Lane, London NW117QE.

Millionaire mindreader Uri Geller was a huge star in the ’70swowing audiences worldwide with his incredible psychic powers.Now the 49-year old Israeli is back centre stage with a paranormalrange of garments fashioned to open your mind. VictoriaStagg Elliot went to meet him

URI GELLER’S fingers are six inches away from my face, rubbinga spoon at its thinnest part. “See what I do,” he says.”I stroke it very gently and instead of bending it, I’m goingto try to melt it. See, look. It’s becoming soft. I almost makethe metal like plastic, and it’s going to crack.” I am holdingone end in my hand and before my eyes the spoon bends and thenbreaks.
He pulls a black marker out of his pocket, signs it and dropsit into my bag. The spoon, which belongs to the West End coffeehouse where we are sitting, has not changed temperature and isstill cool to the touch. “I hope they don’t charge me forit,” says Geller.
I haven’t asked him to prove anything. He does this not becausehe likes to break cutlery but because he loves being the centreof attention. Around the café, all eyes are on him.
For his next trick, he reads my mind. “I’ll show you whatI do,” he says. “I’m going to close my eyes, and I’llturn away. I won’t look. Draw here something very simple and thencover it. Something that you can visualise.” I draw a pictureof a fish but accidentally show him the picture. We try again,and this time I draw a sloppy cube.
“Telepathically put it into my head. Look at me. Don’t lookat what I’m drawing.” He draws a cube that is a neater mirrorversion of my own but, he points out, is the same size. “Ireally got it very strong. Now let me show you something veryfascinating. If you look at your line from here to here and youlook at my line, they are going to be millimetrically identical.”They are close. Very, very close. “That’s telepathy. Beingable to read your mind.”
Uri Geller is an international entertainer. In his lifetime, hehas stopped Big Ben, bent the cutlery of the famous and non-famousand read the mind of Ulrika Jonsson from thousands of miles away.But he reveals that he has also spied for the CIA and FBI. “Theyput me on Aero Mexico, first class, and I would sit right nextto two KGB agents who were flying with diplomatic pouches chainedto their arms and my task was to erase the floppy discs in thebags.”
Dressed like a ski bunny in wraparound Porsche sunglasses anda bright red thermal jacket, he has eyes full of sparkle and aface that does not quite betray the fact that he is nearing 50.He sits drinking his hot chocolate and sucking on sugar cubeswhile communicating telepathically with his daughter at the nexttable. “I’m not sure if she has inherited my gift or not.We’ll see.”
The film version of his life story Mindbender is now availableon video. Uri Geller’s Mind-Power Kit, awork-out for thebrain, which comes with a quartz crystal pendant infused withGeller energy and an orange dot, has just been published by Virgin.Uri’s T-shirt line which can receive his positive vibes on thefirst day of the month is available from Joe Bloggs Jeans. Nowwe can all enter Uri Geller’s world, properly dressed, read andenergised.
The video, directed by Ken Russell and starring the Israeli actorIshai Golan, is not the kind of film that Uri would have madeabout himself
“Ken Russell is a strange guy,” says Uri. “He tookevents in my life which are true and interpreted them throughhis poetic eyes. He made the movie very entertaining. If you askedme whether this is the kind of film I would give an authorisationto, I would say no because it’s too entertaining. It’s very faraway from being a documentary.”
Have your broken clocks and watches ready. Uri appears on screenat the end and will try to fix them with the power of his mind.
The video and the T-shirts are fun, but The Mind-Power Kitis more of a mixed bag that is supposed to tap into your willpower and psychic abilities. The accompanying audio tape is relaxing,but the advice in the book is simple. The section on weight controladvises never to go food shopping when hungry, chew slowly, payattention to calories and think slim. But unlike most normal dietbooks, it also includes a spoon-bending how-to, a guide to crystalsand instructions for discovering valuable minerals through dowsing.
Uri was born in Tel Aviv in 1946 the son of Austro-Hungarian Holocaustsurvivors and a distant relative of Sigmund Freud. He broke hisfirst spoon at the age of four.
“My parents thought that I had a weird power,” he says.”They never thought that I would cultivate it or entertainwith it. They thought it would die out.” His mother was convincedthat his powers came from his famous relative.
“He didn’t have powers but she thought that maybe he did,”he says. “But I must tell you something that I just learnedrecently, that Sigmund Freud did an experiment of telepathy withAlbert Einstein.” He is a repository of psychic trivia.
In the early ’70s, he shot to fame in Britain with a headline-grabbingappearance on the David Frost Show.
“There was mass hysteria,” he says. “Spoons andkeys were bending all over the country. People couldn’t get intotheir cars.” Geller became a by-word for bent spoons andworldwide fame soon followed.
Uri aroused the interest of scientists and spent an extended periodof time at the Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International,in California to prove that what he did was not mere trickery.He erased video tapes and increased the mass of gram weights inthe laboratory. At least some of the scientists at Stanford wereconvinced.
“As a result of Geller’s success in this experimental period,we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptualability in a convincing and unambiguous manner,” wrote SRIresearchers Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ.
Whether you believe in his psychic powers or not, the evidenceof his success is plain to see. Uri’s mother now resides in awing of the beautiful home in a Berkshire village where he hasbeen living for the past ten years with his wile and two children.He says he prefers Berkshire because it is less polluted, lessviolent and more civilised than his previous homes in New Yorkand Tel Aviv.
“I had seen three murders in New York. I had a beautifulhouse in Connecticut and two beautiful apartments on 57th Streetbut I couldn’t escape the violence and the pollution. This iswhy I live in a small village now outside London. I really loveit here.”
In the garage is a boat-sized 1976 Cadillac covered with 5,000pieces of cutlery bent in all directions and welded to the body.He has Churchill’s fork and spoons previously owned by PresidentKennedy and John Lennon. He was going to drive his dream machinearound the Middle East to raise money for children in the areabut changed his mind when the bombing of Lebanon started.
“I’m saddened that we chose to bomb because I am a peacefulperson,” he says. “I believe that things can be achievedby negotiation and patience. I question what we gained out ofthis. Did we gain anything?” He doesn’t hesitate at all whenasked if he will ever live in Israel again. “Of course. I’mplanning to go back there someday.”
He believes in reincarnation and life after death but does notknow if he has had any past lives. He considers himself a religiousman. “I do pray to God every day. I do not necessarily goto synagogue to pray but I do put my hand on my head and do theprayer. I believe in one God, that one God created us all.”
He has no explanation for his powers. “It’s a mystery tome,” be says shrugging his shoulders. “It could be genetics.It could be an outside force. It could be a gift from God. Itcould be an extraterrestrial UFO out there giving it to me. Idon’t know.”
Uri cannot bend spoon after spoon. It tires him out mentally,but a waiter comes to take his order for another hot chocolateand asks him nicely. “I’ll bend this, but bring your peopleto see.” The white-suited waiters gather round. “I don’tlike making a circus out of it. I get embarrassed actually.”
Uri rubs it at its thinnest point where the handle joins the basebetween his thumb and forefinger. It starts to bend and keepsgoing even after his hands leave the metal. He pulls out his markerand signs it. The chef comes out of the kitchen flashing a hugealuminium soup spoon but does not have the nerve to ask him totry with this one.
“People are so curious, and since I’m in a good mood now,I don’t mind doing it,” says Uri. “That little thingthat I have just done there, will change their lives. They willnever forget that moment.”
‘Mindbender’ (Hollywood Pictures HomeVideo, £10.99) and ‘Uri Geller’s Mindpower Kit’ by Uri Geller with Jane Struthers (Virgin £19.99)