The Mirror

Uri Geller’s Column is in The Mirror each Monday.

British films

Anything is possible if you believe. Whatever the odds, you can win. Your chances of winning the National Lottery, for instance, are estimated at 14 million to one – but almost every week, someone achieves a miracle and collects the jackpot. Every one of us who buys a lottery ticket thinks winning is possible. If we honestly believed we had no hope, we’d save our money. But that little flame of optimism burns unquenchably, and we believe, just a little bit – enough to make the bet look good.For anyone but a statistician, 14 million to one is meaningless. Every bet is 50-50 – either you win or you don’t. It’s that indestructible confidence that makes me love Britain so much. Nowhere else in the world is quite like these wet, windy, indomitable islands. Though I was born in Israel and have lived in America, Japan, Mexico and most places in-between, Britain was the only place Hanna and I wanted to raise our children.This is home to me, so much that last year I applied for, and got, a British passport.
I love the way that the British punch above their weight – Americans love to remind me that a single US state, Texas, is hundreds of times bigger than England … but who dominates international movies? The Texans or the Brits? I’ve been working with two young British film-makers, Jon Roberts and James Eaves, on an independent movie called Diagnosis. These young men are outstandingly talented, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they have the ability to conquer Hollywood. Success on that scale is the dream of every talented youngster, but the British have an edge. I am convinced it all hinges on self-belief – believe in yourself and others will believe in you too.

Hypnotism

My ancestor Sigmund Freud, who must take responsibility for putting the whole world into therapy, almost chose a very different path, into hypnotism. For four years it fascinated him, partly because it appeared to open a doorway into the paranormal.Western culture would be utterly different if the great man had sidestepped psychoanalysis and concentrated on tools to use the brain’s vast, untapped power. Hypnosis gives control of the body to the mind: it can be so effective that, 150 years ago, the surgeon James Esdaile used it as an anaesthetic in 2,000 operations, including amputations. His patients were told they would feel no pain – and they did not.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to try DIY amputations, but self-hypnosis is a great technique to master. When you can induce calmness and alertness in your mind with a few trigger-words spoken silently to yourself, you possess an invaluable talent.Hypnosis doesn’t have to involve deep sleep or unconsciousness. The natural hypnotic state is much lighter, a feeling of being wide awake but untroubled by the usual stresses of daily life. Brain scans show it is characterised by alpha-waves, the mental frequency common in daydreams and prayer. To get started, recite these gentle, repetitive instructions in your mind. If you ask a partner to read them, or you record them
onto a cassette, they may be even more effective: “You are feeling calm. Your mind is clear. You are calm. Your
mind is clear as air. You are filled with calmness. Your mind is bright and sharp. You feel yourself draw a deep, cool breath. It floods your body with calmness. You breathe out and blow away all confusion. All that remains is calm. Your mind is focused. Now, in all you do, you can be successful.”

Affirmations

All my life I’ve had a dream – to make a movie. There’s a cinema screen inside my head, where I can telepathically project images from other people’s minds. I use it when I’m trying to visualise good things for myself and my family, and when I’m trying to picture places far away (this is called remote viewing: I’ll talk about it in
a future column).When I published my novel Ella three years ago I was determined to turn it into a film. I flew to LA and schmoozed every producer on Sunset Boulevard – I must have bent 500 spoons as I excited people about the story of a teenage girl who develops the power to heal through TV.But I flew home dejected. To film Ella was a wonderful dream – why did I keep waking up? My wife looked at me seriously and said: “You must step from hoping to believing!” Hanna was right – she always is! My eagerness was probably setting off warning bells in producers’ minds. The answer was to forget the dream and focus on a reality.For weeks I repeated to myself: “Ella will be filmed. The book will become a movie.” This technique is called affirmation. By stating something positive over and over again, you instill confidence and banish doubt. Try it if you are studying for exams this month: “I will revise hard. I will answer the questions well. I will pass.” Don’t sound desperate as you say it – sound sure. Sound confident. And repeat it 1,000 times … every day.Affirmations are a gentle form of hypnosis. They work slowly and make you feel great. And they work. The proof? I’ve just signed a contract with Bernard Rose, the highly regarded director of cinema smashes like Candyman and Anna Karenina, to produce Ella. Hollywood
here I come!

Colours of the mind

What colour is your mind? Have you ever studied one of those fascinating brain scans, where every thought lights up in vivid reds and oranges? These colours are computer-generated, to reveal areas where the grey matter is working hardest – but they were not created by accident. Red and orange are colours that thrill us, focusing our attention.After a long, grey, wet winter, when the trees are not yet in bud and every patch of grass has turned to sludge, the mind must fight back with colour.Paint an orange circle on a white sheet of paper and tape it to your bedroom wall. When you get out of bed tomorrow, spend a few moments gazing at the dot. Stand about two feet from it, with your shoulders back and your chin up. Let your facial muscles relax and breathe in slowly. Stare at the beautiful, blazing orb of orange. You’ll start to see a blue, flickering haze like an aura around the circle – it’s caused by the reaction of the orange on your retina.Imagine the energy from that brilliant colour is suffusing your whole mind. Think of a brain scan, where your whole cortex burns orange. Just the thought of it makes you smile and raise your head.Keep that energy in mind all day. When you need to concentrate, feel the orange lustre in your brain. When the going gets gruelling – at the bus stop, in the office, in the kitchen – you can tap into that dazzling orange brain of yours.That’s the power of colour. With a few seconds of focus and imagination, you have charged yourself up with positive energy for the entire day. Your brain has been transformed into a pulsating power source – and you’ve done it all yourself

How to bend spoons

If you want to learn how to bend a spoon, it’s easy. You need three things: an open mind, a spoon … and a sense of fun. Anyone can do it, but you might not have much luck if you sit there scowling at your cutlery like you’re trying to hypnotise it … spoons don’t hypnotise well.The best method is to throw a party. Get at least a dozen friends together – pick the kind of people who’ll try anything for a laugh, because your efforts won’t be helped if there’s a moaning sceptic around. And invite people who have children to bring: kids make great spoon-benders and their happy energy is infectious.Let everyone choose a spoon or a fork from a basket of cutlery. When you pick your piece, ask it out loud: “Will you bend for me?” If you feel a sympathetic tingle in your fingertips, this is the one for you.Tell your guests to hold up their spoons and shout, “Bend! Bend!” The atmosphere now will be hilarious, a scene of Carry On madness, and that’s ideal for parascientific phenomena. You’re about as far removed from dry laboratory experiments as possible!Holding your spoon by the bowl, rub the stem between your forefinger and thumb. Tell it to bend, bend, bend! Walk around and tell your friends’ cutlery to bend – especially encourage the children.Very often, particularly for first-time party-goers, nothing will happen for a few minutes – and then one spoon will start bending. Usually it begins with the children, most commonly the girls. I think complete innocent open-mindedness is the key.And once one bends, a chain reaction kicks in. Everybody begins to believe that metal-bending is possible for anyone. You’ll all be tying knots in knives and loops in ladles – have fun!

Crystal balls

An American talk show host urged me never to call myself a psychic: “That conjures pictures of a woman in a head-dress, waggling her fingers over a crystal ball and telling you the winning lottery numbers.”I wish I could tell you those numbers! The future, as Jonathan Cainer will tell you, is not so cut and dried … everything remains possible.But I still think of myself as a psychic, someone who uses all his senses – including that elusive one which scientists have yet to define. And I must confess to a fondness for crystal balls.In my home there are many beautiful crystals, many of them raw and full of jagged energy, some of them smooth and spherical. There’s even a crystal ball on the nose of my Cadillac.For centuries people have used the reflective surfaces of crystal to help them divine the possibilities of the future. When I am looking for guidance from my sub-conscious, or simply seeking to relax, I crystal-gaze too. the ancients called it ‘scrying’. If you’d like to experiment, find a stone with a polished, barely reflective surface. A clear rock crystal is good, and so too is darkly shining obsidian or jet. The stone could be as large as a football or as small as an ear-ring. You can even use the blank screen of your computer monitor.Lower the lights, and stare quietly at your reflection. Look for pictures the way you would in a flame – idly, without forcing the images. Often nothing will be visible, but a faint picture will echo in the back of your brain.Remember, you are not looking for the one-and-only future.You’re finding possibilities from inside your own mind. The lottery numbers won’t be there … but the hints to your heart could be worth even more.

Computer mindgame

Your computer is psychic. If it’s going to crash, it will choose the moment when you really can’t afford to lose your work. Somehow that pesky processor knows when you’re up against a deadline.Most people put it down to coincidence or Murphy’s Law – “If anything can go wrong – it will!” But Princeton University’s brilliant professor of engineering Robert G Jahn had a dazzling insight: he saw that an operator’s mind could influence the machinery and set out to test his theory.Jahn’s unit, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), spent more than a decade monitoring volunteers – people without any paranormal history – as they stared at a computer displaying random zeroes and ones on creen. The number sequence was not pre-programmed – the machine did not know in advance what the next digit would be. Jahn told his experimenters to will the number one to appear more often. And it did.The evidence was overwhelming, the testing conditions utterly rigorous. Ordinary people could direct their thoughts at a computer and force it to respond. The odds against achieving this by chance were calculated at 1,000 billion to one against.Everything a computer does boils down to zeroes and ones. All its calculations are binary, using just those two digits. So if your mind is influencing the number sequence, the sums will go wrong … and the PC could crash. Naturally the greatest danger occurs when your mindwaves are at their wildest, under stress, close to deadlines.To prevent this, use my simple relaxation mindgame. Close your eyes and visualise a glass bowl, filled by two taps which are gently dripping numbers cut from tissue paper. One drops green zeroes, the other blue ones. They flutter gently into the bowl, always falling where they should, with no breeze to ruffle them.It’s a calm image, controlled and precise. Your computer will thank you for it.

Pet telepathy

All my life I have owned dogs, and I know the unconditional love I receive from them is like a healing energy. Being with my waggy friends fills me with vitality and high spirits.This bond is often so close it becomes telepathic. Once, as a teenager in Cyprus, I was exploring some hillside caves when I realised I was lost in the labyrinth. My matches ran out and I thought I would starve there. I desperately wished my little dog Joker was with me – and suddenly he was.How he found me I’ll never know. But he led me to safety and, ever since, I’ve never been without a dog called Joker.

.Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a former Cambridge don and internationally respected biologist, has studied the connection between human and pet, and discovered some extraordinary animals – like a psychic African Gray parrot called N’Kisi who lives with her trainer, Aimee Morgana, in Manhattan. Sheldrake recorded tests in rigorous scientific conditions where Aimee turned over a photo, saw two people cuddling … and in another room N’Kisi squawked: “Can I give you a hug?” Then Aimee picked up a picture of a man with a receiver to his ear – “Watcha doin’ on the phone?” demanded N’Kisi.Another Sheldrake star is JayTee, a terrier who knows when his owner Pamela Smart is coming home, even if she tries to fool the dog by turning up at odd hours. The scientist’s videotapes prove Jaytee spends an average four per cent of his day at the window – but he’s there more than half the time when Pamela’s on her way home.Have you got a psychic pet? Use a video camera and a notebook to keep track of occasions when your faithful friend seems to be reacting to your unspoken thoughts – and be sure to send the proof to me here at the Mirror.

Power of crystals

Mirror readers have been winning beautiful crystals from my private collection, and some of you have emailed to ask what is so special about these fascinating stones. Here’s one answer – a crystal saved my son’s life.In the hall of my home we have a mountainous rock crystal which once belonged to Salvador Dali. During the early Seventies I was a guest of this strange man and his wife, Gala. He was fascinated by my powers – all his life he had been painting liquid spoons and molten clocks. I believe Dali thought he had conjured me from his own imagination. Long after Dali’s death, I saw his beautiful crystal was being sold at auction. I had to buy it. No price was too great. And I believe the stone repaid my extravagance.During my 40th birthday party my son, Daniel, who was then five years old, fell head-first from the first floor, over a balustrade to the marble hall floor. I think he had been listening to the laughter, and he leaned out too far. We heard a scream and a sickening thump as his little body hit the hard floor. I ran to him, instantly fearing the worst. He was not moving. But when I picked him up, he was alive – badly cut, but not feeling any pain. Daniel, who went on to make a full recovery, had landed close to the crystal.On the day after my birthday, I walked into the hallway and bursts of light exploded from the stone. I ran to the door, to see if a laser beam had been aimed, for some insane reason, into my hallway.But there was nothing. The light came from within the stone itself.I knew then the crystal had become a well of energy protecting my family.

Psi’s the limit for children

This spring’s hit movie is Spy Kids – but I’ve always wanted to make
a movie called Psi Kids, about youngsters who use their paranormal
powers to combat terrorism.

It’s not as unlikely as it sounds – the CIA launched a psychic spy programme in the early Seventies, to fight Russian Mindpower tactics. I was a key member of the first teams and I’ll tell you more about that next week.One of the first things were learned was that anyone could hone their
psi-power, but children picked it up fastest. This was made clear by the number of schoolkids who mangled their mums’ cutlery after
watching my shows. While the adults were dubiously fingering their spoons, the youngsters were confidently tying knots in metal.Scientists called them ‘mini-Gellers’ or, in Italy, Gellerini. A British boy referred to as Andrew G – his parents sensibly wanted to keep his identity secret from the press – invented what he called ‘the paperclip scrunch’: he twisted four or five clips into intricate patterns.At first his ‘scrunches’ resembled people and pets – soon he was combining dozens of clips to create psychic sculptures of ships’ anchors and knights on horseback and crucifixes. Professor John
Hasted of Birkbeck College at the University of London proved Andrew could scrunch clips even when they were enclosed in glass globes.I believe children are all natural psychics because they don’t know the meaning of ‘impossible’. Kids who watch Hollywood movies laden
with special effects find it easier to imagine that the actors really can fly and leap tall buildings, than grasp that it’s all done with computers. No wonder they happily accept that the mind can bend metal.I always taught my own children that nothing was impossible. If you
have complete faith in yourself, you can do anything, no matter how many scientific laws you have to sweep aside.

My Dream Movie’s Reality

All my life I’ve had a dream to make a movie. There’s a screen inside my head when I can telepathically project

images from other people’s minds. I use it when I tried to visualise good things for myself and my family, and trying to picture places far away. This is called remote viewing and I will talk about this in a future column. When I published my novel Ella three years ago I was determined to turn it into a film. I flew to LA and smoozed every film producer on Sunset Boulevard. I must have bent 500 spoons as I excited people about the story about a teenage girl who develops the power to heal through the TV. But I flew home dejected. To film Ella was a wonderful dream why did I keep waking up? My wife Hanna looked at me and said “you must step from hoping o believing”! Hanna was right she always Is. My eagerness was probably setting off warning bells in some producer’s minds. The answer was to forget the dream and focus on reality. For weeks I repeated to myself Ella will be filmed. The book will become a film. This is called affirmation, by stating something positive over and over again you instill confidence and banish doubt. Try this if you are studying for exams. I will revise hard. I will answer the questions is well. I will pass exams. Don’t sound desperate as you say it sound sure. Sound confident and repeat it a thousand times a day. Affirmations and a gentle form of hypnosis. They work slowly and then make you feel great. And they work. The proof? I’ve just signed a contract with Bernard Rose. The highly regarded director of cinema smashes such as the Candyman and Anna Karenina to produce Ella. Hollywood here I come.

Ronnie Biggs

When Ronnie Biggs flew into Britain last week, his weak health saddened me. I met him in Rio seven years ago, a strong, vital man with a face damaged by heavy drinking.He had broken his foot and wanted me to heal it – I told him

that he was the healer, and all I could do was act as the catalyst, to trigger his own healing energies.Biggs was an intelligent man behind the bad man’s bluster, and he intuitively understood what I was saying. He assumed a relaxed

pose and closed his eyes, focusing his imagination on a mended bone in a healthy foot. After a while he said, without opening his eyes: “I ain’t thinking of my foot no more. Know what I’m thinking of? A pint of best.” “So imagine that you are walking into an English pub,” I said, “without your stick, your foot free from pain. And you go up to the bar and put that foot on the rail and order that pint of best, and when you drink it down in one swallow the dark brown liquid turns

gold and flows through your bones into your foot. And there is great strength in your foot, and the love you have for that beer fills your foot and energises it.”I always encourage people during healing sessions to let the emotions take control. Ronnie was passionate about that picture of a warm pint, which symbolised his intense homesickness. By harnessing

that strength of feeling, he was able to release powerful healing energies. By the next time I visited his hillside home above Rio, a few days later, the bone was knitting well.Ronnie Biggs always knew he’d come back to England. I knew it too, when I heard him talk of that pint. I hope he gets it.

Remote Viewing