I came armed with a spoon.
I was to interview Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic renowned for bending utensils with the sheer power of his mind; and by George, he was going to bend one for me.
Sure as Bill Clinton never met a pain he couldn’t feel, Geller did it.
As more than a dozen of my coworkers gathered around, Geller rubbed the stem of a metal teaspoon with two fingers until slowly, almost imperceptibly, the metal just behind the bowl began to arch upward.
Geller put the spoon down on a table, warning that it might continue to bend. It did — until its handle pointed upwards at a 90-degree angle.
“I think there is an energy in here that continues to warp the molecular structure,” he told us.
What exactly was warped, none of us knew. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was those of us who lapped up his performance like hungry puppies. All we knew is that by the end of the demonstration, one of our few office spoons would no longer be scooping matzah-ball soup.
“I myself still get excited when a spoon goes to 90 degrees,” Geller said. “I’ve been on TV shows in front of 14 million people and the spoon didn’t want to bend. That happens. I have to be in the mood. It’s a power or an energy that I have to trigger.”
Geller first attracted international attention more than 25 years ago when he performed his spoon-bending and mind-reading feats on Israeli television. Skeptics quickly called this would-be psychic a fraud. They still do, accusing Geller of being little more than a deft magician trying to pass as a prince of the paranormal.
Geller, in turn, suggests his debunkers examine the results of tests he has undertaken at research institutes: These have produced evidence of at least some unusual mental powers.
At Stanford University, for example, Geller correctly predicted eight out of 10 die throws, beating million-to-one odds. At the University of London, where a team of research physicists performed controlled experiments on him, Geller reportedly caused a Geiger counter to register 500 times its normal count.
The tall, lanky Geller was in San Francisco last week to teach a class at the Learning Annex and promote his new Mind Power Kit, aimed at unleashing the “sixth sense” Geller believes we all possess.
The kit, published by Penguin Studio Books, includes a book and audiotape offering techniques for tapping inner strength and reducing stress, and a quartz crystal that Geller says enables psychic healing.
While the kit does include a few tips on bending silverware and fixing broken timepieces using only mind power (“On the count of three, you are going to shout the word, `Work!'”), it aims primarily at helping users control their physical and emotional well-being.
“I don’t believe that people who buy my Mind Power Kit will be able to sit down and bend spoons anytime and every time, or totally read minds like I do,” said Geller, who insists that ordinary individuals use only 10 percent of their total brain power.
“But I do believe they can do lesser things…like getting their target goals, like believing in themselves, like visualizing and making things happen, like awakening their willpower.”
Geller knows what it’s like to awaken willpower. In the mid-1970s, he conquered a one-year bout with bulimia, an eating disorder whose cycles of bingeing and purging can lead to severe health problems and even death.
“It was a vicious circle. It was killing me,” he said. “One day I was just so weak that I couldn’t get out of my car. I had to pull myself out.”
He recalls walking across the street at that point and yelling out loud, “One, two, three, stop!”
“I stopped [the bulimia] right there and then,” he said. “That proved to me there is willpower.”
Geller attributes his struggles with food to his swift rise to fame. Raised by his mother, a seamstress, in a tiny Tel Aviv apartment, he had little in the way of material possessions while growing up. Nearly overnight, the Israeli paratrooper turned paranormal pop star found himself swimming in wealth.
As a result, “I wanted everything — not one dessert [but] seven desserts. And because I didn’t want to get fat, I excused myself to the toilet and I stuck my finger down my throat.”
His food battles long over, Geller now boasts a healthy lifestyle and a high level of career satisfaction.
Now nearly 50, he lives in London with his wife and two children. There, he publishes Uri Geller’s Encounters, a magazine about the paranormal. Lately, it has been selling more than 100,000 copies a month.
In addition, Geller works as a consultant, offering businesses advice based on psychic predictions, and entertains live and on radio and television. He recently appeared on the afternoon talk show “Leeza,” where he had a group of children bending spoons with abandon.
In his spare time, he applies his mental skills to a variety of puzzles.
The London Sunday Telegraph ran a story earlier this month about a long-lost submarine, recently found just meters from where Geller, eight years ago, told a radio producer it was.
The producer had originally approached Geller about the submarine as a joke.
“I don’t know how he did it, or if it was just pure chance, but it was spot-on,” the producer told the Sunday Telegraph after the submarine was found.
Geller seems to make waves wherever he goes.
Here at the Jewish Bulletin, his spoon stunt quickly divided the staff into two camps: Afterward, some staffers looked as if they had just witnessed a meteorite. Others, however, shook their heads incredulously.
“There’s a sucker born every minute,” copy editor Joe Berkofsky said, quoting P.T. Barnum.
Staff writer Teresa Strasser urged her colleagues to think of Geller as “an entertainer, like Elvis.”
Such skepticism irked the Bulletin’s believers. “He stopped Big Ben twice!” one staff member declared. “It’s arrogant of people to believe that we know everything about our human capabilities.”