Telepathy triumphs over the flu virus

I’ve had the flu, and flu is something I never get. I don’t get hay fever, I don’t get colds. And I definitely never get flu. So when a rasping tickle started at the back of my nose, and a clawed fist began clutching at my throat, I assumed I was suffering an allergic food reaction and fasted for a day, swallowing only vitamin tablets and galIons of mineral water.

‘I should have woken the next day with a song on my lips. Instead there were demons with sledgehammers on my

chest, and every blow forced a dry, cough out of me.

Still, I didn’t believe it was flu. I thought I had been sprayed with pesticides. I believed my only chance of survival was to check into a health farm for a total detox – eight weeks of grape juice and oxygen masks – but there was no time. I was booked on a ten-hour flight to Los Angeles, to appear on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, and detox is not a sufficient reason to pull out of Tonight. It says so in the contract.

There were a lot of other people with pesticide poisoning on the jumbo jet. In every row someone was coughing, groaning, cursing, sputtering, hawking or sneezing.

I was starting to wonder if a nuclear reactor had leaked and it was radiation, not chermcal fertilisers, slowly killing us all, when the woman behind me complained : “By the time we get to Hollywood, every one of us is going to have the flu.”

I should have been grateful not to be dying of uranium poisoning. Instead I was angry, angry at myself. How could I have succumbed to a virus when I needed all my energy for Jay Leno?

Gradually, it dawned on me that Jay’s show was the cause. I had flu because I had a guest spot on Tonight. I was sick because I was scared. And I had a lot to be scared about

More than a quarter of a century ago, I was a guest on Tonight when Johnny Carson was the host. Carson was a convinced sceptic who wanted nothing better than to see me fail. And I was, an ultra-confident performer who thought no amount of bad vibes could spoil my success.

I can’t pretend it went well. I failed at the dowsing test, where ten sealed cans were set on a table and I had to identify which, if any, contained water.

The spoonbending worked slightly, but off-camera. I was onscreen for 22 minutes, and I felt the show proved my powers were genuinely paranormal “because any conjuror would make certain his slieght-of-hand tricks worked perfectly before stepping onto the Carson stage”.

But the truth is the show almost capsized my career. And I was terrified of a repeat failure in 2000. I believe that’s what provoked the flu – my subconscious mind was saying to my immune system: ‘Lets floor Uri before he wrecks everything.’

Hints and suspicions, floating below the level of lucid thoughts, can have a remarkable effect on health. Fortuately, it’s usually positive and so powerful that some doctors are wondering whether the mind can be harnessed and used in place of conventional drug remedies.

Medics have always known that sugarpills, harmless tablets without any active ingredients, often set patients back on their feet but recent trials prove that up to 75 per cent of people with many common ailments will benefit from dummy prescriptions, or placebos.

Surgeon Bruce Moseley took the placebo theory to its limiy. He operated on ten middle-aged and elderly men with arthritic knees but in five cases did nothing more than cut open the joint and sew it up again.

The men were all ex-military, and they knew Moseley was conducting an experiment, but as they were wheeled into the operating room at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center they had no idea whether they would unergo full arthroscopic surgery with scraping of the joint, mere rinsing, or nothing more than an incision and stitches.

Even Moseley didn’t know beforehand which patients would have placebo treatment. As he stood at the operatng table, a nurse handed him a sealed envelope, containng the instructions for that patient. Later, all ten scars were identical.

Moseley was challenged to conduct the trial by another doctor, Nelda Wray, who argued that all medical treatent created a placebo effect

The patient enjoyed the attention and the concern of expert physicians and reacted positively.

“The bigger and more dramatic the patient perceives the intervention to be”, Wray argued, “the bigger the placebo effect. Big pills have more than small pills, injections have more than pills, and surgery has the most of all”.

Six months later, all ten patients reported significant pain decreases in their knees. None knew whether they had received the full treatment, or the bogus,one. But all felt better, prompting Moseley and Wray to launch a repeat experiment with 180 patients. Results are due in October.

My stnt on Tonight was over in eight minutes, I wanted to talk about the mind and healing and I wondered if I dared to slip in a plea for the US to lift sanctions against Iraq.

But Jay just wanted to do some jokes and some baner, and try a mind-reading experiment.

The telepathy worked. And the following morning my flu had evaporated.

Uri Geller’s novels Dead COld and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99.

Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected].

Calling the techno faithful

Religion is more prevalent than porn on the internet, says URI GELLER, who predicts a worldwide explosion of faith via the web

As this millennium dawms, a new church is beng born. Two thousand years ago, Christianity began with the birth of a child. Today, a faith that can unite all people is being launched with the click of a button.

The internet is the world’s church. On the web, we can worship, pray and join in the oneness of humanity. I believe the electronic threads that are being spun between town and city on the planet will draw us together in a unified, international faith. The mass media has always promised to create a global village – a compressed community where we are all neighbors. That village is here.

The web will be its parish church.

The PIanet On Sunday is the only tabloid newspaper to proclaim this. Make the mistake of picking up one of the others, and you will read different stories about the world wide web (note to

the the technophobic: the web consists of about 30 million pages, like leaves tom from a gaudy encyclpedia which can be read by anyone for the cost of a local phone call, although they live on heavyweight computers around the world).

The web, according to smut-racking hacks with overheated imaginations, exists to promote pornography. Any child straying close to a computer screen will be assaulted with messages of racial hatred and rank perversion, and any adult who sits before a VDU will be transmuted into a sex-fiend in a nerdy cardigan.

The real facts are freely available to anyone with an online link. I wen to a major search engine, at Northern-Light.com, and demanded to know how many pages were filed under porn. The result:3,433,627.

Then I asked how many pages how many pages related to God. The answer: 4,246,775.

The conclusion: about 25 per cent more web sites are devoted to religion than to perversion. The internet is an overwhelmingly evangelical technology. In the next ten years it will provoke an international explosion of belief, prayer and worship.

Preachers have always been quick to seize on new ways to promote their beliefs. The most basic form of writin – carving letters into stone – gave us the religious laws which govern half the world today… all because Moses the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai on graven tablets.

My own religion, Judaism, survived because of writing. The religion wtudi held sway in the British Isles in Moses’ time, the creed of the druids, has been lost because it was taught by spoken word.

Fragments, beautiful slivers, of the pre-Christian faith of 1the Celts still survive, as echoes in marvellous tales and eerie tremors around standing stones. But the Jewish laws have been handed down unchanged and ancrystalised, because they were written down.

When Europe reinvented Christianity during the Reformation, technology was again the driving force. The Printing Press meant the truths of the bible were available in every town, and anyone who could read was able to pick up the gospels and proclaim them to a congregation.

Before Willaim Caxton, the bible was a text in Latin or Greek copied out by scribes. With the creation of moveable type came the creation of a new, fundamental religion – people read the bible for themselves and connected directly with God.

Now, for the third time in human history, technology is redifing religion. The internet transcends

authority. Anyone with a PC and a phone line can leapfrog authority. Whatever your school your parents, your TV, or your whole life teaches you about religion can be put aside. The web has no boundaries – there are no nations, no tribes, no divides and no forbidden questions.

Without the web, how would a girl from a strictly Hindu famliy discover the lessons of the Prophet Mohammed? Or how would a fundamentalist Moslem boy learn about the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva ?

The web teaches what families and schools cannot and will not. The web blurs every boundary.

Though in 2000 computers are expensive and demand good power supplies, I am cnofident that portable PCs, like the clockwork radios which are taking reliable news and political information all over the planet, will soon be available, with free online connectivity. By 2020, advertisers will be paying the poorest communities in the world to use their computers.

The devout and pious discovered the intemet before the pornographers. For every brothel with a 24-hour video feed online, there are ten churches with webcams in the pulpit. If you want to experience the eye-popping marvles of the Toronto Blessing, where Canadian Christians writhe helpless with laughter between the pews every Sunday and stagger to the altar to find their tooth fillings have turned to gold, look on the web. As Rodney Howard-Browne preaches, the congregation are seized with holy laughter, or compelled to make animal noises to leap, weep, dance or even collapse in a dead faint.

One of my favorite sites is Prof Jeffrey Hadden’s investigation of cults ans sects at www.relfreedom.org. Hadden, who teaches the sociology of religion at the University of Virginia, points out that, at the start of the 20th century the first radio broadcast was religious. As the 21st century dawns, the world’s modems are buzzing with the word of God.

Uri Geller’s novels Dead COld and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99.

Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected].

Get smart and stop the killing

Smart bombs, silent victims: URI GELLER pleads for an end to the sanctions that are killing the children of Iraq

We thought we were so smart. We developed a bomb which could kill only enemy soldiers and destroy only military sites. We perfected a type of warfare which wiped out the other side without exposing our own troops to danger. We made technology do our fighhng for us.

I watched in fascination in January 1991 as CNN broadcast video relayed from a camera mounted in the nose of a missile 1ovking onto a Bagidad target with pinpoint accuracy. In my memory I compared this mystcally efficient combat with the bloody and terrifying days of close-quarters fighting with Arab troops during the Six-Day War, when I was a paratrooper in the Israeli Defence Forces.

I hoped that human-kind had grown too smart for that. During the whole of the Gulf War, only 300 Allied troops were kiled – the equivalent of 20 minutes fighting on the Somme. Saddam Hussein deliberately provoked the massacre of his armies – between 10,000 and 100,000 were killed – but even when the bombs rained thickest, on the Basra road, it was soldiers who died. Armed men, not innocent children.

So I hoped. Today, 250 Iraqis will die from starvation, lack of medical care and incurable cancers. Most of thern will be children under five. I can make this prediction because about 250 have died every day this year. And the year before. Since the beginning of the Gulf campaign, United Nations sanctions and the horrific aftermath of Allied bombing have caused the deaths of an estimated 500,000 pre-school children.

During Desert Storm, the operation to retake Kuwait, the Allies fired 700,000 shells and missiles tipped with depleted Uranium (DU). This radioactive coating is diamond-hard, bursting through the tougiest armour like a needle through wool. Cheaper than titanium, it was also used extensively during the Kosovo campaign. On impact, DU is baked onto the surrounding soil or sand. It is highly radioactive. Some estimates suggest 900 tonnes of DU waste was left in Iraq – radiation levels in Basra are 84 times above World Health 0rganisation safety limits.

Radiation poisoning causes cancer and genetic deformities in unborn children. Professor Hari Sharma, a radiologist investigating illnesses among Allied veterans of the Gulf, believes up to 12 per cent of British troops involved in the ground war could die from exposure to DU. He told a Commons defence select comnnttee: ‘I have done a lot of soul-searching before making this statement, so that I did not mislead anyone.’

If a few days in the slaughter zone can cause this, what hope do ordinary Iraqi families have? According to John Hopkins University in Baltimore and Professor Mikdem M Saleh Saleh of Baghdad, 44 per cent of Iraqis will develop cancer. In the capital’s hospital cancer wards, the mortality rate among children is 100 per cent.

Every patient dies. There are no medical supplies or expertise to save even one. Doctors are paid one dollar a week.

And we continue to bomb. This year, British and US planes have flown 15,000 sorties. The Pentagon claims 200 military installations have been targeted – but, as we now know, when a military site is hit the civilian population suffers. Sometimes even smart bombs miss: when an Arnerican AGM-130 missile ploughed into a Basra housing complex in February, 17 people died and 100 were wounded. These are UN figures. Ten of the dead were children. Six more were women.

UN sanctions, imposed to lever Saddam Hussein out of power have instead made his dictatorship more impregnable. Basic foods such as lentils and rice are 1,000 times more expensive than in 1990 and farmers cannot obtain modern fertilisers or even seeds.

The New York-based UN Sanctions Committee can prohibit the export of anything regarded as non-essential that includes baking soda, light bulbs, shampoo, spark plugs, toys and even wheelbarrows.

The UN reports: Public health servieces are near total collapse. Basic medicines, life-saving drugs and essential medical supplies are lacking throughout the country.

There is no rebellion left in the population. Uprisings after Desert Storm were crushed by Saddam – now he ruthlessly slaughters any suspected dissenters, with their families. A minor rebellion this year in the south ended in the torture and execution of 200 alleged plotters.

Sanctions suit Saddam so well that he is rumoredd to deliberately destroy some of the few essentials that get through. When, on 17 Decernber, the UN Security Council proposed lifting the embargo if a 120-day inspection of Iraq’s chemical, nuclear and bio-war plants proved there were no hidden arsenals, Saddam sneered. He holds his own nation’s children as hostages.

My brief for this column is to demonstrate how science can turn this planet into a paranormal paradise. In future weeks I want to talk about microchips that will make us telepathic, lasers that will read our minds and our emeotions, teleport devices and tine machines.

“But when technology pretends to create a marvel of magic, and secretly does great harm, I must talk of this too. DU-tipped shells are not thunderbolts of wizard’s energy, giving our generals the power to quell enemies with a single stare. They are instruments of slow genocide.

it is not possible to disinfect Iran of our Uranium. What we can do, and must do now, is unconditionally lift the embargoes. Children, everywhere in the world, need food and medical supplies. We cannot deny them any longer.

Uri Geller’s novels Dead Cold and Ella are published by Headline at £5.99.
Mind Medicine is published by Element at £20. Visit hun at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected].