March 2008


My wife recently attended a one day energy work seminar.  One of the exercises was to use your energy to soften a spoon and then bend it with your hands, using perhaps one tenth the force it would normally take to bend the spoon.  There were 8 or 10 people present.  Every one except my wife and father-in-law was able to bend their spoons.  My mother-in-law bent her spoon so far, that it broke.

Mother In-Law’s broken spoon med 

Why should someone learn to bend spoons?

People are all regulated by a mechanism in their brain that I call the governor.  The mechanism normally will prevent the brain from believing the impossible is possible.  Learning that spoon bending is possible is one way to start to remove the constraints of the governor.

Here is a great article on attending a spoon bending (aka PK) party from Uri Geller’s website:

In the spring of 1985, I was invited to attend a spoon bending party. An aerospace engineer named Jack Houck had become interested in the phenomenon, and from time to time had parties at which people bent spoons. I was given a street address in southern California, and told to bring a half-dozen forks and spoons I didn’t care about, since they would be bent during the evening.

It was a typical suburban California house. About a hundred people were there, mostly families with young kids. The atmosphere was festive and a little chaotic, with all the kids running around. Everybody was giggly. We were going to bend spoons!

We all threw the silverware we had brought into the center of the floor, where it made a great metal pile. Jack Houck then dumped a carton containing more silverware onto the floor, and told us what to do. He said that, in his experience, to bend spoons we needed to create in atmosphere of excitement and emotional arousal. He encouraged us to be noisy and excited.

What usually happens after someone is successful bending a spoon?

If a person is actually confronted with evidence that reality is not what we think, then governor will again step in… and make the extraordinary into the ordinary.  In a sense, it will make us forget.  Also from the article on Uri Geller’s website:

“You mean you experienced this extraordinary phenomenon and you didn’t try to explain it?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s very strange,” he said. “I would say that your behavior is a pathological denial of what happened to you. This incredible experience occurs and you do nothing to investigate it at all?”

“I don’t see why it’s pathological,” I said. “I don’t go investigating why everything in the world happens. For example, I know that, if I bend a wire rapidly, the wire will get hot and break-but I don’t really know why that happens. I don’t think it’s my job to rush out and find out why. In this case, spoon bending, the room was full of people doing the same thing, and it seemed very ordinary. Kind of boring.”

In fact, this sense of boredom seem to me often to accompany “psychic” phenomena. At first the event appears exciting and mysterious, but very quickly it becomes so mundane that it can no longer hold your interest. This seems to me to confirm the idea that so-called psychic or paranormal phenomena are misnamed. There’s nothing about them. On the contrary, they’re utterly normal. We’ve just forgotten we can do them. The minute we do do them, we recognize them for what they are, and we think, so what? Spoon bending is like doing the laundry, or riding a bicycle. No big deal. Not really worth much conversation.

Looking through links I have saved over the years, I found this really good instructional video on spoon bending. See the spoon bending videos at the Zensight website.  Notice how Carol Ann bends the spoon into several loops in the first video.

Jack Houck has some good information about how have successful PK parties and Material Deformation by Intention.

At the time this paper was presented on March 28, 2003, I had given 361 PK Parties that were attended by approximately 17,000 people since January 1981. All of these parties have been documented. The date, location, number of attendees, and the number of people who had success in each of the phases of the PK Parties are kept in a computerized database. Similarly, from PK Party #44 through #343 attendees filled out questionnaires, recording their perception of what they did and that data has been recorded in another computerized database. 59% of the 14,315 people attending those PK Parties turned in completed questionnaires. Pictures of individuals, couples or families were taken at each PK Party and a copy given to the people in the pictures when possible. Occasionally it was not possible to correlate the face in the picture with the name and address of the individual. Figure 2 shows typical results during these phases of a PK Party.

One of the first rules in spoon bending is to not let yourself be skeptical… or let other skeptics influence you.  This encourages the governor to step in and prevent the experience.

Sometimes, while you are doing kindergarten bending, you find that there is some guy looking over your shoulder saying, “AH, you are just bending it physically.” That really doesn’t help you at all. So I suggest using a little technique that I developed to shut down the interference from the skeptics. You simply get a big smile on your face, look at the skeptic, and shout “SHUT UP!” I really don’t want the skeptics to get in the way. I want you to learn how to do the PK and have lots of fun in the process.

My next to the worst PK Party was for a group of nine Ph.D. physicists and their families at Los Alamos. All the wives and children bent silverware, but none of the physicists bent. It wasn’t that they were physicists because many physicists have been to PK Parties and bent. But these scientists all worked together in a very closed environment and, in a sense, their subconsciouses would not allow them to deviate from the norm. The same phenomenon sometimes occurs between spouses at PK Parties. They are so linked and patterns established at the subconscious level that they do not allow each other to learn this new skill. For this reason, I suggest spouses not sit next to each other at PK Parties.

PK Parties have become so popular all over the world that literally millions of people are learning to bend metal. Eldon Byrd went to Japan to put a PK Party on for national Japanese television. He gave the PK Party over the airways where the people at home could participate. They had TV cameras placed all over Tokyo and told the people to bring the things they bent out to the street so they could be photographed. The TV station estimated that between 6 and 20 million people came running out into the streets with bent up metal and chop sticks.

We try to create a peak emotional event at a PK Party. The bigger this peak emotional event, the better the results. When I am in different parts of the United States, I say “It’s OK to do these things in California.” Usually the people can relate to doing weird things in California, so I have them pretend that they are in California for the PK Party. It is important to act silly and have fun during the party.

The PK Party is not really about bending metal, but allows you to experience things which you may not have believed possible, which in turn should help you reduce some of the artificial limits placed on your life. At the end of the PK Party I always take a picture of people with their bent up forks and spoons, and later send it to them so they will have a record of how happy they looked after the party with all of their bent material.

Namaste, my friends.  Soon we will change the world.

I am huge fan of increasing connectivity between people; E-mail, the internet, cell phones.  It’s like adding additional neurosystems to the planet.  I was under the impression that the cell phones in Europe are better and cheaper the in the United States because that’s what someone from Europe living in the U.S. told me.  Then I started to do my own research and found this blog: CTIA 2007: How far behind is the U.S. vs. Europe?

US Europe wireless comparision

I guess you shouldn’t always believe what someone tells you.

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Artist: Peter Gabriel

On the Vanilla Sky sountrack, among other places. 

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city lights
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night
He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing, stretching every nerve
I had to listen had no choice
I did not believe the information
Just had to trust imagination
My heart going boom boom boom
Son, he said, grab your things I’ve come to take you home

To keep in silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut
So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
Till I thought of what I’d say
And which connection I should cut
I was feeling part of the scenery
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart going boom boom boom
Son, he said, grab your things I’ve come to take you home

yeaah, back home

When illusion spin her net
I’m never where I want to be
And liberty she pirouette
When I think that I am free
Watched by empty silhouettes
Who close their eyes but still can see
No one taught them etiquette
So I will show another me
Today I don’t need a replacement
I’ll tell them what the smile on my face meant
My heart going boom boom boom
Hey, I said, you can keep my things they’ve come to take me home

I have thought a long time about how a country like the United States could take the lead in improving the situation in other countries in a way that would actually improve things for other people.  Here is my current best idea for how this might be done:

The US President picks trouble spot in the world such as Africa.  There is a lot of despair in Africa right now that affects the entire world, whether people recognize it or not.  Then President appoints a new cabinet level position; the Minister to Africa.  The new cabinet member gets a very small budget to set up some offices, hire a few staff members and funds for overseas travel.

Then the US President lobbies Congress for additional aid money to Africa, a small amount to start,  perhaps an additional $300 million.  That money, when approved, becomes available for countries in Africa to buy from the United States the things they think they need to improve their countries.  Of course, there are a few conditions, but only a few.  The money is only available when all countries in Africa act together, in consort.  And a few goods, such as anti-malarial drugs, the US government mandates to be sold at cost.  The consortium of African countries must pay their own shipping for the goods they acquire here.

Help Africa help themselves.  Then a united Africa can come to the US, and buy things they want to improve their situation.  Need water technology; fine, buy it with part of the $300 million.  Need an engineer to build a damn, fine, we will pay his salary.  Need anti-AIDS drugs or anti-malarial drugs, fine, buy it.

Encourage other countries to provide aid in the same manner.  Say India puts up $20 million in African aid.  This could be a real benefit because perhaps drug costs are half in India that they are in the United States.  This frees up the US money for other things.

Then every year, audit how the money is spent.  Did it reach the people?  Did it help?  Yes, then raise the amount to $330 million the next year.  Did a government official in country XYZ steal the drugs and sell them on the black market and hide the profits in his Swiss bank account.  Darn, only $270 million the next year.

Senator Suggests Need for New Party

…the Iraq war might be remembered as one of the five biggest blunders in history.

“a reckless foreign policy … that is divorced from a strategic context.”

“the triumph of the so-called neoconservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence.”

Hagel said Vice President Dick Cheney and others “cherry-picked intelligence” and used fear to intensify “war sloganeering.”

During visits to the Middle East in December 2002, Hagel said, Israel’s top security officials asked, “Do you really understand what you are getting yourselves into?”