Second Sight (9 page)

A lot of talk was circulating inside the NPI. A well-known Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, had agreed to take part in an experiment at the lab. He was coming in a few weeks, and even the receptionist at the front desk had been grilling me to get the full scoop. Uri had made some incredible claims: that he could bend thick metal rods without touching them, that he could fix broken clocks with his mind. Uri was controversial; he stirred people up. Everyone had a strong opinion about him, all equally convinced they were right. Nancy, a clerk in Medical Records and a fundamentalist Christian, accused Uri of doing the “devil's work.” Jean, a psychic herself, was adamant that he was authentic. Stan, a skeptical pharmacologist down the hall, swore that Uri was a fake, nothing more than an expert magician who wanted to put something over on us. I didn't know what to think.

The day of Uri's visit the lab was buzzing, our small space packed with researchers, students, scientists, and other psychics who'd come to witness Uri's feats. It had gotten so crowded that we had to turn away anyone who hadn't specifically been invited. A friend of Barry's, the West Coast editor of
Popular Photography,
was there to document the event on film. The atmosphere in the lab was electric; we were preparing for a celebrity.

Uri arrived with the fanfare of a true star. He was a handsome man in his twenties with wavy black hair and large sparkling eyes, and he walked as if he owned the place, strutting around the room like a prize rooster at a county fair. He was charismatic in the most obvious way. Like a little kid starved for attention, he craved the spotlight and wouldn't be satisfied until it was his. Uri had a boyishness, and a seductive air; although I tried to resist, I was taken by his charm.

Uri started his career as an entertainer for the Israeli armed forces, touring the country performing psychic readings and doing metal bending. Andrija Puharich, a well-respected parapsychologist, saw him at a club in Tel Aviv and was so struck by Uri's ability to bend rings from a distance that he brought him to the United States. From what I understood, Uri's act had begun as a mixture of magic and true psychic prowess, but few could discern which was which.

After his stagy entrance at the lab, Uri settled into a chair beside Thelma in the far corner with a crowd of observers huddled around him. The experiment was scheduled to begin at one o'clock. Although I was riveted by his presence, his self-confidence disconcerted me. I was content to stand back and watch at a distance. But Barry grabbed my hand and led me up to the front to make sure I could see. As I stood there staring at Uri, I remembered having heard that his act in Israel included a psychic attempt at randomly guessing the color of a woman's underwear. It was a gimmick, I suppose, a way to get laughs. But I certainly didn't want him to choose me!

To my relief, the experiment started with a metal-bending demonstration. Thelma handed him an ordinary kitchen fork. He took the fork and, with great tenderness, stroked it with one finger, as lovingly as he might have petted a favorite cat or dog. Then, holding the fork high for everyone to view, he spoke to it in a loud, assertive voice.

“Bend!” he commanded.

For a moment, I thought he was joking. He was addressing the utensil as though it could understand him.

“Bend! Bend!” he yelled, perhaps five more times, repeating it like a mantra with sacred powers. Then, without emotion, he set the fork on the table. All eyes were glued to it, but nothing happened. Not at first. But then, suddenly, the prongs began curling inward until the fork had rolled itself into a tiny metal ball.

“I can't believe it,” I almost blurted out, but caught myself. I didn't want to create a stir by letting on how startled I was; I did my best to appear adult about the whole thing. The fork, however, was only a beginning. A consummate showman, Uri proceeded to bend the contents of a large desk, including a complete table setting of matching forks, knives, and spoons. Within an hour, the desktop was strewn with an array of demolished metal utensils that looked like they'd been crushed by a steam roller.

What do you say when your concept of reality has been seriously altered, especially by somebody as self-absorbed and attention seeking as Uri Geller appeared to be? Uri had defied both out expectations of the physical world and our skepticism about the authenticity of performers. I simply stood there speechless, my throat dry. Barry, on the other hand, seemed elated; he was talking up a storm. Stan, the pharmacologist, left as soon as the demonstration was over, declaring that we had all been tricked. He felt that despite the precautions we had taken to ensure the experiment's authenticity, Uri had used magic to deceive us. I knew that Uri had many critics—magicians, parapsychologists, traditional scientists—who would agree. Some went as far as to call him an illusionist with a panoply of tricks, ranging from chemicals, magnets, and presoftened metal to the purposeful misdirection of an audience's attention.

It was difficult to sort through the emotional uproar Uri created to evaluate him fairly. The general consensus among lab members was that Uri's talents were genuine. Ordinarily, I would have been put off by someone like Uri, but I ended up liking him. Despite all the hype, though he might well be a trickster, clearly he had a real talent, and there was a sweetness about the man. Although he went overboard to show off, I found it easy to forgive him. I guess I empathized with his need to feel special and be understood. Only a very short time before, I had been too frightened to express my psychic abilities at all, and so Uri's fearlessness and need to prove to the world what he could do struck a special chord in me.

After Uri left, Thelma gave me a bent spoon as a souvenir. I carefully placed it on the front seat of my green Volkswagen bus and headed for Venice, my head swimming with the day's events. I felt as though I had just swallowed several cups of strong coffee: wired, yet at the same time drained. But I had to shift gears and reenter my day-to-day life. My refrigerator was bare and my laundry had been piling up for days.

Bent spoon in hand, still a bit giddy, I trudged up the stairs that led to my second-floor apartment. Reconciled to an evening of chores, I reached into my pocket for my house key. I placed the key in the lock as I'd done hundreds of times before and tried to turn it, but it jammed. Something was odd. I flipped on the porch light and pulled out the key. It was the correct one, but, incredibly, the entire metallic body of the key was bent backward. It was useless.

My God, I thought. Uri must've done that. I shook my head in disbelief. Laughing out loud, I reached under the mat and pulled out another key, grateful that I'd hidden a spare.

Touching someone with the goal of helping or healing can do so much more than I ever imagined. I was familiar with traditional medicine; my parents were both doctors. Whenever I got sick, I would go to my internist, he would listen to my heart and lungs, ask me a lot of questions, and then write out a prescription. But he rarely touched me. No doctor ever placed his hands on my body the way Jack Gray, a hypnotist and healer at the lab, touched his patients.

I was told that Jack had performed a miracle. A young man named Mitchell had been in a near-fatal accident. A car collided with his van head on, demolishing it and shattering his leg in forty places. The ligaments and bones were so badly damaged that a team of orthopedic, vascular, and plastic surgeons concluded the leg would never heal. Infection was threatening his life; they recommended amputation. Unwilling to accept this outcome, though he understood the doctors were doing their best, Mitchell took an enormous risk. Through a combination of prayer, laying on of hands, and hypnosis, Jack effected a regeneration of the bone, nerve, and muscle tissue that the surgeons had deemed impossible.

I still had stereotypes in my mind of what psychic healers should look like, and Jack didn't fit the part. Short, thin—almost gaunt—and in his sixties, Jack always wore inexpensive-looking blue suits and a white shirt, sometimes with a handkerchief in the coat pocket, never dressed more casually, and appeared to be a conservative retired businessman. Something about him seemed rural, simple, newly arrived in the city. He was kind and friendly, apparently quite ordinary. In fact, there was nothing notable about him except for his clear, steel-gray eyes and a face that vaguely resembled Fred Astaire's.

Jack came to the lab to conduct some healing experiments a few times a month, and his healings were the most loving acts I had ever witnessed. Working in the sensory-deprivation chamber, he saw patients with illnesses ranging from cancer to heart attacks to broken bones, and he allowed some of us to observe. One day, a woman came in with a painful tumor in her stomach. She lay down on the thin leather bench in the chamber and closed her eyes, her head propped up on a small hospital pillow. Jack's hands took on a translucent quality as he waved them about six inches above her body. He was performing what he called “magnetic passes.” After a few sweeping passes up and down and across the entire span of her body, he placed his palms directly on her skin, resting them for a few minutes at various locations, starting at the heart. Then he moved to the top of her head, her throat, her abdomen, and finally the soles of her feet. Jack was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, even cracking jokes, but the tenderness with which he touched this woman made me think of a mother with her newborn infant.

Whenever Jack worked, his patients would become so relaxed I could barely see their chest walls moving up and down. They looked so peaceful, in fact, that I often wondered if they were still alive. Faces wracked with pain at the onset of the session would appear angelic as their suffering dissipated. Jack's healing sessions were contagious; I often felt better simply from being there, even when I hadn't felt bad to begin with. It was as though someone had tapped me on the head with an invisible wand, awakening me from a deep rejuvenating sleep.

One of Jack's patients was a young housewife, Claire, with debilitating lower back pain from an automobile accident. She had a medicine cabinet stocked with medications for pain, but they made her feel so listless and disconnected she couldn't function. And then, when the pills wore off, the pain always returned. Conventional doctors had pretty much given up on Claire, and she was getting beaten down. Jack was her last resort.

It was hard for me to be around Claire. Within minutes of seeing her, my lower back would develop a nagging, dull ache, which alternated with an annoying burning sensation. It disturbed me so much I'd fidget in my chair, unable to find a comfortable position. At first I wrote off my reaction to being “overly suggestible” and decided not to mention it to anyone. I didn't like complaining, and I didn't want anyone in the lab to think I was being difficult. So I dreaded the days when Claire would show up. Then, once while suffering through another of her healing sessions, I remembered I'd been through this kind of thing before.

Growing up, if I was around someone in pain, occasionally, within seconds, I would develop the same discomfort. Once in junior high, for instance, I was eating lunch with a friend on the lawn and suddenly started getting stomach cramps. When I mentioned this to my friend she said she wasn't feeling well either, having started the day with nausea and stomach pain. I saw nothing strange in this until, several minutes after she left, my symptoms disappeared completely. The times I told my mother about such incidents, she would be concerned that I wasn't feeling well, but neither of us ever made the connection that I might be picking up another person's pain.

That afternoon in the lab, I took a risk. I mentioned my reaction to Jack, and he didn't seem at all surprised. Quite the contrary. To my great relief, his eyes lit up and he winked at me. Always the perfect gentleman, he patiently took the time to explain that psychics often perceive many of the physical symptoms in the people around them. He called it a powerful form of empathy, which if unrecognized could be overwhelming. He said that the resistance and fear I associated with pain or unpleasant sensations was what caused them to persist. He suggested that whenever I picked up symptoms, instead of fighting them I could relax and let them flow right through me. It would involve some practice, but he was sure that I would get the hang of it.

I never saw Jack reverse cancer or perform any such miraculous cures, but his patients did improve. Naively, I had hoped he could relieve them of all their symptoms, but I soon discovered that healing didn't work that way. What Jack gave his patients was a second wind, a jump-start of powerful energy. With the added boost, they could continue their own healing processes. Jack was not a magician; he was an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities, which made him all the more credible to me. At a time when his patients were about to give up out of sheer desperation, he offered them hope. He handed them their power back and they took it, an interchange that ultimately inspires the most profound healing of all.

What I relished about Jack and other healers who came to the lab was that they talked about forbidden subjects such as death, a tremendously compelling topic for me. One afternoon when I was thirteen years old, coming our of a movie theater with a girlfriend, I suddenly realized that my time on earth was limited. For no apparent reason, I was faced with my own mortality; for the first time I realized that someday I would die. Since then, I have thought a great deal about death, though it has never been a morbid topic for me. Rather, this kind of contemplation has helped bring an immediacy to my life, a sense of impermanence that has kept its specifics in a clearer perspective. The healers didn't think it strange that I found graveyards to be peaceful places where I could sit, meditate, and connect with myself when I wanted to be alone. Most of the healers I met at the lab had a strong set of spiritual values underlying their practices, and we would often have conversations about an afterlife.

As a child, I always believed in an afterlife. This wasn't something that anyone taught me. I had just never thought to question it. To me, the spirit felt different from the body, stronger, more resilient. That it would ever die seemed impossible. Yet in Hebrew school and on the high holidays, the subject of an afterlife was rarely mentioned. The rabbi's sermons focused more on politics and ethics than on spiritual truths. In the Reform Jewish faith I was raised in, there were no psychic role models to train children. My experiences never seemed to fit into the mold. Now as a young adult, I found the lab a safe place to express my spiritual beliefs. I had finally found other people who thought as I did and understood.