What Does It All Mean?
One cold winter morning in 1825, a five year old boy was taking a walk with his father. Suddenly he asked, "What hour was I born?"
"Four o'clock in the morning."
"What time is it now?"
"Seven fifty."
A few minutes later, the child said, "In that case, I'm now 188,352,000 seconds old."
His father noted down the number. When they got home, he did the calculation on a sheet of paper, and told his son, "I'm afraid you were 172,800 seconds wrong." "No," said the boy, "You've left out two days for the two leap years 1820 and 1824."
Was the child some great, universally acclaimed genius, like Newton or Einstein? No, he was Benjamin Blyth, son of an engineer, and his name is otherwise unknown. Children with this peculiar power to calculate immense numbers are by no means a rare phenomenon. Most of them lose this power when they enter their teens.
The baffling thing about such prodigies is that there is no good reason why the human brain should possess such extraordinary potential. Scientists tell us that we developed from primitive fishes, which turned into reptiles, then into mammals. Man's remote ancestors came down from trees, survived the era of upheaval and drought known as the Pleistocene Age, and learned to live together in communities for their own protection. Man's brain developed as an instrument of survival, like his hands and his teeth. Why, then, should it be capable of such incredible feats of calculation, beyond anything he can ever have needed? It is as extraordinary as if, like some super-flea, he could leap 500 feet into the air.
This kind of puzzle is not confined to the human species. Birute Galdikas-Brindamour, a naturalist who has closely observed orangutans in their natural environment, and who has brought up baby orangs, observes that they seem to possess an intelligence far in excess of the needs of their forest environment. Recent observation has revealed that even the shark is more intelligent than - according to the theory of evolution (as understood in 1976) - it ought to be. For 300 million years this creature has remained unchanged, perfectly adapted to its environment, with senses that automatically guide it to food. With no choices to make, and no natural enemies, the shark does not need intelligence. Yet when tested for intelligence in laboratory mazes, the shark proves to have intelligence equal to that of a rabbit - a far more highly evolved form of life, which has plenty of natural enemies and therefore a greater need for intelligence.
Obviously the key to this mystery lies in the brain itself. Text books on the brain admit that there are vast areas within it about which we know nothing. Some physiologists have suggested that man uses only about one tenth of his brain. What is the purpose of the other nine tenths? No one seems to know. Presumably these other parts must have a purpose, or they would not have evolved. Is it conceivable that they govern faculties for which we no longer have any use? Most animal lovers can tell some story about the "second sight" of their pets, of a dog bristling and whining when forced to enter a room in which some tragedy has taken place, of a cat that knows when its owner has died, even though he or she is in a foreign country. The archaeologist and dowser T. C. Lethbridge observed that his cat would respond to other animals, such as mice and voles, which it could not see or hear because they were on the other side of a thick wall. It is now widely believed that the mysterious homing instinct of animals and birds may be some kind of sensitivity to the magnetic forces of the earth - those same forces to which the dowser's rod responds. Animals seem to be more telepathic than human beings. So it is a reasonable assumption that these faculties may also be connected with the unknown nine tenths of the brain. Human beings no longer need for survival a "homing instinct" or a "second sight" to warn them of the approach of enemies. Therefore, in most of us these faculties lie dormant.
All of which should certainly help us to understand Uri Geller's ability to read minds. Something has awakened his dormant faculty. But what about his power over metals?
Here we have to consider another possibility. In an important essay called "The Energies of Man," the psychologist William James talked about the phenomenon of "second wind" - how we can apparently be exhausted, and then quite suddenly seem to switch over to a "reserve energy tank" and feel completely re freshed. He speaks of the case of a colonel during the Indian Mutiny who was in charge of a besieged garrison with many women and children under his care, and who went for an entire week without sleep, living on brandy. He never became drunk, and it did him no harm; the emergency called upon his vital reserves. James concludes that we all possess immense "vital reserves" that we seldom use because we are habit bound and allow ourselves to become easily fatigued.
In speaking about Uri Geller and other similar cases, Professor John Taylor has also discussed these vital reserves - for example, how a frantic mother has been known to lift a heavy vehicle from her child, who was trapped under it. He concludes that the muscles themselves probably store up the immense energies required for such feats. This, he thinks, might explain the energies involved in poltergeist activity, and possibly in Uri Geller's metal bending.
This is an interesting and plausible idea, but it contains one pitfall. When we think of the human body or brain as a kind of battery that stores energy, we are thinking in exclusively physical terms. But when the colonel lived for a week on brandy, he was creating energy, burning up surplus fat, converting the alcohol to "fuel." When Felicia Parise tries to move a glass by the power of her mind, she perspires heavily and loses weight - she is creating energy out of mass. Yet, oddly enough, she first succeeded in moving an object by Mindpower when she was not trying. Uri Geller has frequently made the same observation: that a spoon may remain unbent while he tries hard to bend it, then start bending when he puts it down and thinks of something else. The logical inference is that the energy used in these poltergeist-type activities is not ordinary muscular energy, but some other kind, that we are less able to control. It is analogous to the situation in which you try hard to remember something - for example, a name - but fail totally while you keep trying; then, as soon as you think of something else, the name comes to you. Your brain was doing its best to obey your command, but you were somehow blocking its proper activity by summoning crude will power.
The picture that begins to emerge is a complex one. It begins to look as if both the brain and the body have great untapped resources, including the ability to create vital energies at short notice. But the energies involved in psychic activities are not the energies we normally use, so most of us have some difficulty in calling on them. Certain people, like Uri, are able to do so - just as some children can calculate enormous numbers.
Uri's powers may have originated in the sewing machine incident, when he received an electric shock. At least, it seems significant that he "draws power" from both metal and water, the two substances that conduct electricity.
The expression "draws power" suggests another possibility. The earth is an enormous magnet. The ancient Chinese believed that lines of force run across the landscape. They called them "dragon paths" and built their temples on them. In England, students of the countryside have observed how many ancient stone circles and monuments seemed to be built on similar alignments, and how certain religious centers, such as Salisbury and Glastonbury, seem to be the meeting place of several such lines. There is some evidence that these "ley lines" correspond to natural lines of force in the earth. They certainly respond very powerfully to the divining rod, which suggests that there is some form of interaction between the dowser's brain - whose activity the divining rod "meters" - and the force he is tuning in to. Some dowsers, such as T. C, Lethbridge, are so sensitive that they experience a kind of electric shock, like mild static, when they place their hand on ancient stone monuments.
If Uri derives power from a metal radiator - which is presumably earthed, or grounded - there is at least a reasonable possibility that the power he is using comes from the earth. It may seem to be a contradiction that his powers are stronger in airplanes; but then, as everyone knows, the lines of force in a magnet run around it from one pole to the other; in an airplane Uri could have been in the center of the force field. (It would be interesting to see how his powers would operate if he actually stood on the north or south magnetic pole.)
It is also worth bearing in mind that occultists have always held the view that magnets possess peculiar properties. This seemed to be given scientific backing in the 1770s, when Franz Anton Mesmer, the discoverer of "mesmerism" (now called hypnotism), declared that he had been able to cure sick people by stroking them with magnets. Within 10 years, scientists had decided that Mesmer was a charlatan, and he died an embittered old man. In the 1840s another scientist, Baron Karl von Reichenbach, discovered that his patients were not only sensitive to magnets but also able to see colors streaming from the two poles. In one experiment an assistant in the next room uncovered the poles of a huge magnet, and a patient lying in bed - and observed by Reichenbach - instantly detected the magnetism as a tingling sensation. When the patient was unconscious, her hand would stick to a magnet as if it were metal. Reichenbach believed he had discovered some unknown energy, which he called "odic force"; he said that it could also be detected streaming from the ends of the fingers. Again, it took only a few years for scientists to decide that he was a crank, and that human beings cannot be influenced by magnets. Yet now, in the second half of the 20th century, investigators believe they have discovered a method of photographing this "aura" that streams from the ends of the fingers. The technique is known as Kirlian photography, and it is under systematic investigation in various laboratories. Could Reichenbach also have been correct about magnets? Is it possible that certain human beings may be sensitive to magnetic forces of the earth? If so, then we have one more vital clue to the mystery of Geller's powers.
The real problem, as we try to explain the feats of a Daniel Dunglas Home or Uri Geller or Matthew Manning, is that we lack a firm theoretical foundation. The philosophers of ancient Greece were highly intelligent men, but all their attempts to explain lightning were a waste of time, because they had never heard of electricity. In fact, no one was in a position to understand lightning until Benjamin Franklin literally brought it down to earth in 1752 by flying a kite with a wire cord in a thunder storm. Poltergeist activities can leave us in no possible doubt that we are dealing with some unknown force that does not obey the known laws of physics. If 100 years of psychical research have taught us anything, it is that the mind is able to ignore some of the laws of nature. For example, in our natural world, time flows onward, in the words of the hymn, "like an ever rolling stream," and the future is hidden from us. Yet there are thousands of well authenticated cases of people who have been able to glimpse the future, in dreams, in visions, or in waking con sciousness.
If you were a worm, and were made to crawl across an enormous chessboard, you would soon begin to believe that one of the laws of nature is that black always follows white, and white follows black. If someone explained to you that black does not follow white, or vice versa, and that they were both present at the same time, you would find it incomprehensible.
We human beings are accustomed to day following night, in a predictable order; and because, like the worm, we cannot see ahead, we believe this to be a law of nature. Yet the evidence of hundreds of prophets and seers seems to demonstrate otherwise; yesterday and today and tomorrow somehow exist simultaneously.
Another tale of mathematical genius may help us to understand this. In 1837, a 10-year-old Sicilian peasant boy was brought to Paris to be examined by great mathematicians; his name was Vito Mangiamele. The mathematician Arago asked him, "What satisfies the condition that its cube plus five times its square is equal to 42 times itself increased by 40?" It took Vito less than a minute to produce the correct answer: five.
Arago complained that the teachers of Vito Mangiamele had kept secret the methods he used to work out these problems. But if we think about it for a moment, we can see that this is absurd, Vito was not applying some simple formula to solve his problem. What he did was somehow to envisage the whole system, to see it whole in his mind's eye, If you or I try to work it out in our heads, we quickly realize that this is the trouble, We can't envisage it, As we struggle with one aspect of the problem, we forget all the others. Vito could see the whole problem as if it were a kind of drawing traced in the air, in three dimensions.
Imagine, for example, that someone drew a donkey's tail on a blackboard, then its head, then its back, its belly and two front legs, and then asked: "What have I left out?" Any child could say: "Its hind legs," Yet if the same person only described the parts of the donkey verbally, it would be rather more difficult to pinpoint the missing part of its anatomy - particularly if you were a poor visualizer. For most of us, a mathematical problem is something to be dealt with in sequence; we relate the numbers to each other as we are directed by certain words such as "equals" and "times itself," using a linear process. But Vito was somehow able mentally to draw the problem in the air and see its parts, so that the unknown quantity, the missing part, was immediately obvious.
When we try to solve a problem of this kind we realize that the mind itself seems to be weighed down by a kind of gravity. We are like the worm on the chessboard. We may try to make our thought take wing; but except in rare moments it can only crawl on its belly. By some odd freak, Vito was free of this limitation at least where mathematics was concerned.
The same thing seems to be true for people with powers of prophecy, of foreseeing the future. The gravitational force that holds most of us in the present moment seems to permit them to escape. They float up into the air like a balloon, and can see what lies ahead.
Most human beings cannot even begin to imagine a universe in which all events have already taken place. Yet the evidence of seers and prophets suggests that this is what the universe is really like. Time is a kind of illusion, produced by our worm's-eye view.
The same may be true of other laws of nature. If Ingo Swann really visited Mercury in eight minutes, then space, like time, is also a kind of illusion. If poltergeists can make solid objects pass through walls, then the laws of matter are less rigid than we assumed.
Yet these suggestions still leave a great deal unexplained. Puharich's book, in particular, seems to defy all attempts at rationalization. But let us look at it a little more closely.
Most of the strange happenings described by Puharich conform to the pattern of poltergeist activity. Objects appear and disappear or fly through the air, metals crack or bend, items of furniture move of their own accord. But metallic voices speaking from a tape recorder, and sightings of flying saucers, are a different matter.
It is worth comparing Puharich's experiences with those of Jesse Lasky, the Hollywood screen writer. In October 1975, Jesse Lasky and his wife Pat went to a London bookshop where Uri was signing copies of My Story, Jesse introduced himself; Uri looked at him sharply and asked them to wait until after he had finished the book-signing session. After bending a woman's car key, Uri said, "Look at your keys, everybody," Pat opened her handbag and discovered that her door key was bent. Afterward, Uri returned with them to their apartment. He declined to bend a key, saying he was too tired, but when the Laskys' attractive daughter Lisa arrived, he seemed to be revitalized, and instantly bent a thick metal spoon, placing himself against a refrigerator door to draw power. On the second occasion when he visited their home, there was a pinging noise like a bullet, and an American Indian-style silver button bounced on the kitchen counter in front of Trina, Uri's secretary. It came from a card in Pat Lasky's bedroom drawer, three rooms away; Uri knew nothing of its existence and had not been into the room. At the time the button flew across the kitchen, he was standing with a bottle of milk in one hand and a tin of cocoa in the other. The drawer in the bedroom was found closed, and inside it was the card, with one button missing. They calculated the path of the button, and concluded that it had travelled through three walls.
(When I saw him in Barcelona, Uri told me that a television camera had actually filmed an apport - a watch - under laboratory conditions, and that when the film was projected in slow motion, it revealed that the watch appeared and disappeared several times as it fell through the air.)
A week before the Laskys met Uri, a lever in their fuse box disconnected itself seven times in quick succession; an electrician could find nothing wrong. An important book disappeared, then reappeared - after a search - under a chair that they had searched several times. One evening some months later, the lights of a house where they were staying continually turned on and off in an unaccountable manner. On the following morning they received a transatlantic phone call from Uri; and they suspected that these events might be related.
There would be no point in detailing the many other events that occurred during Uri's visits to the Laskys; they conform to the same pattern. There were no metallic voices, no messages from space.
It is interesting to speculate on why Uri "took" to the Laskys so quickly - in fact, on first meeting them. He took to Puharich in much the same way. The Laskys radiate an air of warmth and sympathy, Jesse, like Puharich, is a man in his 60s, something of a father figure. The Laskys had no doubt whatsoever about Uri's powers before they went to his book signing. Significantly, Jesse's account of their friendship begins: "In October of 1975, we felt a compulsion to see Uri in person. . . ." The word "compulsion" suggests that they felt literally drawn toward him. Moreover, Uri's powers seem to have been unusually active whenever he was in their company. We have already noted that his powers tend to "dry up" in front of a hostile audience; even my sympathetic but unpsychic presence seems to affect them adversely - as in the case of our unsuccessful telepathy attempts in Barcelona. On the other hand, certain people seem to stimulate his powers, as if their subconscious minds provide some kind of energy or support. Could this explain that immediate intimacy that sprang up between Uri and the Laskys?
Pat Lasky made an observation that may be relevant to Uri's powers. She normally diets fairly carefully, but while the Laskys were seeing Uri, this proved to be unnecessary. She ate what she liked and still lost weight. She commented that other people who have spent time with Uri have had the same experience. It is as if Uri is drawing energy from people with whom he establishes a certain rapport.
Assuming that a similar close rapport existed from the start between Uri and Puharich, and assuming that Puharich was already predisposed to regard Uri as a possible messenger from "the Nine," it hardly seems surprising that the incidents of their early acquaintance included messages from space and sightings of UFOs.
Of course, it is possible that a real, objective UFO did appear, as Puharich related in Uri. There are far too many sightings reported around the world to dismiss them all as illusion. Yet Puharich admits: "I recognize the possibility that there may not have been a spaceship there at all. I am aware that the three men in the command car saw nothing because there was nothing to see; I recognize that the three of us certainly had the image of a spaceship in our minds. That is to say, the spaceship could have been some kind of collective telepathic image.
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung had an interesting suggestion about UFOs. He believed that they were neither real nor imaginary, but some kind of psychic projection of the human subconscious. In our materialistic age, he suggested, many people experience a longing for messianic visions. But UFOs may not be an "hallucination" in the ordinary sense; they might be seen by many people at the same time, some of them wholly skeptical or uninterested. A symbol from the "collective unconscious" would somehow, in such a case, find its way into the objective world. It would be real in somewhat the same sense as a picture projected onto a movie screen is real.
It seems clear that Puharich - if not Geller - has a tendency toward "messianic expectations." This reinforces the suspicion that he may have been as responsible as Uri for the curious events described in this book.
The word "magic" is frequently used in connection with Uri Geller, though never by respectable scientists. In some ways, it is not wholly inappropriate. Magic is basically a belief that the known laws of nature - of physics, in particular - are not the only laws of our universe, and that man can make use of a completely different set of laws. The concept of the "true will" is particularly important. In our everyday dealings with the physical world, we use a clumsy, physical kind of will. A scientist would say that wishful thinking could have no possible effect on the real world. Yet many people have had the experience of wanting something intensely, of directing the whole will toward it, and of eventually getting it, as if by the operation of some unknown law of attraction. The poet Robert Graves, for example, asserts that many young men use a kind of unconscious sorcery in seducing young women. This, say occultists, is the operation of the "true will," a deeper will than our ordinary state of volition.
Sometimes this true will operates on a purely physical level. William James cites the example of a football player who plays the game with technical expertise, but who one day seems to be carried away and achieves a strange perfection so that everything he does turns out right. Again, this is the true will in action.
Human beings are, on the whole, passive creatures: a little discouragement upsets us; a dull Monday morning depresses us; a few setbacks destroy our will to win. Yet the right kind of stimulus can call forth remarkable potentialities - as in the case of the colonel who lived on brandy during the siege, or that of a mother lifting a heavy vehicle off her child.
Great artists, great performers, great sportsmen, may spend years of discipline learning how to tap the power of true will, and so raise a technically brilliant performance to the level of genius. By contrast, some people seem to be born with the ability to contact the true will. Hitler struck people as rather ordinary in personal conversation; yet in front of an audience some extra-ordinary power seemed to emanate from him. Many religious leaders have possessed this power in a different form. If such men have not achieved their power by long and painful discipline, they may sometimes be dangerous - as in the case of Hitler.
Gifted psychics seem to form a subgroup within this category. They create an impression of freakishness. Reading about telepaths and mediums, one sometimes feels as if two lines in a telephone exchange have been accidentally crossed so that normal conversations get interrupted by unwelcome voices - or as if the insulation has worn away from an electric wire, so that unexpected short circuits occur. People under stress may become telepathic for a short period, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, told a story of a German pilot in World War I who began to know in advance which of his companions would be killed on missions. This knowledge thoroughly unnerved him. Steiner advised him to drink wine; when he followed this prescription, the insights vanished. Significantly, Uri does not drink, because he feels this would damage his powers. Peter Hurkos, as we have seen, gained his powers of second sight after serious concussion. Uri's powers may originate in the electric shock he received as a child.
It may be significant that most normal human beings feel either bored or repelled by the thought of paranormal powers. If we examine the matter objectively, we have to admit that the powers of Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Paladino are as undeniable as those of Mozart or Einstein. Yet we instinctively feel that the powers of Mozart and Einstein are important and relevant to us as human beings; those of Home and Paladino are unimportant and irrelevant.
If this is true, it suggests that humans may be intended, or programmed by nature, to evolve along certain lines, and that such powers as communication with the dead, or thought reading, or metal bending, do not lie along the direct path of evolution. The occultist Aleister Crowley, sometimes called the "Great Beast," once said that the aim of the magician is to become a god. But if you asked most people to name a godlike human being, Crowley is the last name that would occur to them; they would be more likely to mention Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Beethoven. True greatness, in the eyes of most thoughtful people, is the spirit's attempt to transcend human triviality and self absorption.
This is one of the reasons why the majority of people are still indifferent to psychic matters in general and to extraordinary individuals such as Uri Geller in particular. But there is also a less creditable reason. If you ask a roomful of people how many believe in ghosts, most of them will say they do not; speak to them individually, and most will admit the possibility. There is a fear of being thought credulous, a desire to maintain a reputation for sturdy common sense.
Yet if the powers of a Peter Hurkos or Matthew Manning or Uri Geller are genuine, they may be of considerable importance to the development of the human race. Only a fool would reject the assistance of something that could make his everyday life easier and more agreeable. There are many ways in which we can make practical use of psychic powers. Uri Geller's ability to dowse for metals from an airplane and Croiset's ability to find missing people are rather spectacular examples of the use of psychic powers. But there are hundreds of dowsers who, when they lose something, do not spend hours searching for it, but simply allow their dowsing rods or pendulums to guide them to the missing object. There are hundreds of sensitives who can diagnose an illness by laying their hands on the patient, or simply looking at a sample of his handwriting. Andrija Puharich cites a well-documented story of a workman who was buried when a trench collapsed, and succeeded in sending a telepathic message of his plight to a workmate at another site. I myself once used telepathy to locate my family, when we had become separated in a large park - by making my mind a blank and simply allowing my feet to take me to them. All these are examples of powers that most human beings could develop and utilise.
In most rural areas such powers are generally accepted; country doctors, for example, know that a wart charmer can remove warts more quickly and efficiently than they can with their scalpels and caustic soda. Whether this is due to suggestion or hypnosis is beside the point; it works. It would work equally well in cities, but the mental attitude of city-dwellers is somehow hostile to the idea. Accustomed to the use of all kinds of mechanical aids, they find the idea of "magic" disturbing and somehow irrelevant.
The problem is that humans have become machine-minded. Surrounded by complex technology, we have become passive in the face of our artificial existence. The passivity, the sense of helplessness, breeds neurosis that expresses itself in a variety of disturbing symptoms: urban guerrilla warfare, a soaring crime rate, and a world-wide drug problem. This collective neurosis is one reason for the occult revival and the current interest in all kinds of messiahs and gurus: many people feel that man ought to return to the task of finding himself.
In this sense, Geller may be a more relevant figure than most contemporary cult leaders. In insisting that anyone could develop the power to read minds and bend metal, he represents a healthy and sane individualism. His power over metal could be regarded as a symbol of the power of mind over the material from which all machines are made, just as his power over clocks seems to be a symbolic defiance of time. The skepticism he arouses is partly an emotional resistance to the challenge of developing one's own spiritual powers. Geller represents the belief that man is an altogether less passive and helpless creature than most of us assume. He represents a flat denial of the current nightmare - dramatised so effectively in the film 2001, A Space Odyssey-that man will one day be superseded by computers. For Geller, the computer remains the servant, one that can be immobilised or regalvanised by the curious powers of the subconscious mind. A civilisation that accepted the powers and ideas of Uri Geller would be a great deal healthier than a civilisation that accepts the gloomy predictions of every "scientific" futurologist.
The question of Uri's own future is an interesting one. When he left Israel for Germany in 1972, it must have seemed that his possibilities were endless. Yet the trajectory of his career continued to rise only for another 18 months; then the anti-success mechanism began to operate, The problem was that he had become a household word. No psychic had ever achieved so much international publicity - not even Daniel Dunglas Home. The only "magician" of comparable celebrity was Houdini; and he made the sad discovery that he had to devise more and more sensational effects to hold public interest. This, unfortunately, is the law that governs notoriety, Uri's problem, therefore, has been to try to escape this vicious circle, and to find a new direction for development, But which direction?
There are obviously a number of possibilities. The most straightforward would be close co-operation with scientists in an attempt to understand the source of his powers. Are they electrical or magnetic, or (as Professor John Taylor believes) in some way muscular? If they spring from his unconscious mind, could they be explored by modem techniques of depth psychology?
There is also the possibility of deliberately developing these powers. In his childhood, they were limited to reading his mother's mind and influencing watches. Later, he discovered that he could read other minds, and bend metals. More recently, he has developed powers of dowsing and psychometry, and even explored the possibility of healing. The episode of the moving saltcellar, witnessed by the Esquire reporter, also suggests that he may possess unusually strong powers of telekinesis of the type practiced by Felicia Parise, among others.
There is another possibility - one that holds great promise of self-fulfillment not only for Uri himself, but also for others. All major religious teachers have taught that man's powers, both physical and psychical, can be developed and controlled by discipline, and that the most effective disciplines are those that aim at control of his inner being. The philosopher Gurdjieff, who himself possessed remarkable psychic powers, taught that man consists of "personality" (the "outer man") and "essence" (the "inner man"). Psychic powers, he declared, are a mere by product of the development of essence.
Geller recognizes the seriousness and importance of the challenge, He also recognizes that the development of his powers has so far proceeded in a rather haphazard way. In a life of constant travel and performances, he has had no opportunity to try to explore that inner space in which his powers probably originate. The next stage of his career, the stage of self-exploration, will provide him with that opportunity. When I spoke to him about it, he seemed both attracted and alarmed by the prospect.
What is clear is that Uri Geller is in an ideal position to test the truth of the assertion that psychic powers can be increased by inner discipline. In an age that has become obsessed with questions of the psyche and expansion of consciousness, he could help to provide the answers to some fundamental questions and also, perhaps, become an important symbol of the search for self-knowledge and self-meaning.