Whatever happened to Uri Geller?
26jul23 update note in The Sun of all place...
URI Geller has claimed he took part in the investigation into
the Kennedy assassination — and made "shocking" discoveries about the
murder that rocked the world.
The spoon bender said he was hired by the CIA to dig up information into JFK's killer Lee Harvey Oswald....."
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4751552/uri-geller-cia-jfk-assassination-trump-files/
Do you remember Uri Geller? (his new website) - or his British contemporary, but not direct counterpart, Matthew Manning ..?
Both these characters are hard to "position" or define with respect to conventional reality, and both try to avoid pigeonholes like "mystic" or "psychic" as they operate at the boundary or interface of "mind and body", in a mystical hinterland where the faithful and the cynical seem willing to accept that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of etc."
This New York Times feature will probably bypass anyone under the age of 50, but it is well worth reading by anyone who is wondering what on earth is going on in a world that that has lost all vestige of common sense. And what may come next... here I have précised the article which I commend to you as a fine piece of writing.
"... In 1973, a young man named Uri Geller appeared on one of the BBC’s most popular television shows, “The Dimbleby Talk-In,” and announced that the laws of Newtonian physics did not apply to him. Or that, at least, was the implication. A handsome 26-year-old Israeli, dressed casually and flanked by a pair of academics, Mr. Geller performed a series of bewildering feats using nothing more, he said, than his mind.
He restarted a stopped watch. He duplicated a drawing that had been sealed in an envelope. Then he appeared to bend a fork simply by staring at it.
“It’s cracking,” Mr. Geller said quietly, speaking over a tight shot of his right hand, which was gently rubbing the fork between his fingers. “It’s becoming like plastic.”
A few seconds later, the top of the fork fell off and hit the ground. By the time the applause of the studio audience died down, Gellermania had begun.
Mr. Geller became not just a global celebrity — a media darling who toured the world and filled auditoriums for dramatic demonstrations of cutlery abuse, with the humble spoon becoming his victim of choice — but also the living embodiment of the hope that there was something more, something science couldn’t explain. Because at the core of his performance was a claim of boggling audacity: that these were not tricks.
They were displays of raw psychic powers.
A mere handful of magicians have left anything close to this kind of imprint. If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled. And now that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers seem almost innocent.
Mr. Geller is an entertainer, one who’d figured out that challenging our relationship to the truth, and daring us to doubt our eyes, can inspire a kind of wonder, if performed convincingly enough. Mr. Geller’s bent spoons are, in a sense, the analogue precursors of digital deep fakes — images, videos and sounds, reconfigured through software, so that anyone can be made to say or do anything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/business/uri-geller-magic-deep-fakes.html
Matthew Manning has a rather broader foundation in the unexplained - well described in his book the Link. He was subject to classic poltergeist manifestations at school from the age of 11 involving objects that appeared from thin air. It's a good read, and he was interviewed in an excellent GQ feature from 2014.
"Harassed by spirits since the age of eleven and apparently gifted with the power to heal cancer the 'Poltergeist Boy' is not your common-or-garden kook."
We can reasonably ponder the proposition that Manning has got something going on - and that he does not know himself entirely what is going on. The closest approach to an explanation may be a reference to Star War's "Force".... a concept that provides a refuge somewhere between belief and agnosticism - but without the trappings or baggage of a traditional formal religion, and that encompasses observations of a universal consciousness made after Manning had made a trip an Indian mystic. Whether Geller would want to occupy this same ephemeral zone is open to conjecture.
Fans of either would not be surprised to see them appear in a new season of Stranger Things. We are in the hinterland of every idea that you have seen worked into science fiction, last word for now to Matthew...
"Manning's thoughts turn to the question of whether time is a uniquely human perception. "I have this idea," he says, "that there is no such thing as time; that time is a man-made concept.
If all time was simultaneous, as I believe it to be, it would mean that there is no such thing as past, present or future. I think that would explain certain phenomena. I think scientists may one day come up with an explanation that has little to do with spirituality and everything to do with quantum physics."
Which ideas have indeed edged into some mainstream physics thinking since 2014, after observations of black holes with the latest deep space telescope observations.
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