Chapter One

Dear Shmuley,

    I love to get a reaction. I love it when people get excited, when they start to stare, when something about the universe is revealed to them that blows their minds. I must have bent a spoon for someone every day of my life since the sixties, and I've never tired of it. I love the reactions.

    Some people nod and say: "Wow! I always wanted to see that. I always believed in it, but it's incredible to hold the spoon in my own hand and watch it bend." They're the believers.

    Others shake their heads and swear. "I can't believe my eyes!" they say. Later on they reason, "It must have been a trick. I don't know how he did it, but it's got to be impossible." They're the skeptics. They won't let themselves believe, even though they have no real alternative.

    And there are some people who refuse to look. "You'll trick me," they say, "and I won't be able to see how it's done." I really try with these people. One of them was a Nobel prize-winning physicist who asked to meet me but would not let me demonstrate my powers. I wondered how a scientist who could accept the incredible realities of quantum physics could refuse to watch someone else breaking the rules.

    But at least he wasn't indifferent. It's those who don't give a damn that really upset me. Bending spoons is draining work. I'm low on power for an hour after bending just one spoon, so walls of indifference are hard to take. And when it's someone close to me, that's so much worse. When it's someone I really loved a long time ago, that does hurt me.

    I won't tell you the girl's name. You've probably heard of her. She's a daughter of one of the West's most powerful families, and long before I married Hanna, I was in love with this girl. But she was a Christian, and her family didn't care for me and it didn't work out.

    She never had children. When I was younger, I used to think, what if I'd married her, what would our kids have been like? How many would we have had? What would we have called them? But then my own two children came along, and all the might-have-beens ceased to matter.

    A long time after we first met, she visited my home and stayed in the guest apartment. She had changed. Her vitality had gone, and she was sullen and distant, as if some essential piece of her mind had been cut out. On the third day of her stay, we went for a walk along the banks of the Thames behind my house, and I asked her to give me her copper hairslide so that I could bend it.

    My energy is always greater beside running water. A good friend, the philosopher Colin Wilson, suggests this is caused by electromagnetic flow. And it's true, ghosts often walk beside rivers. In feng shui, running water carries chi, the lifeforce. Whatever, as soon as I began to stroke the slide, it bent. I handed it back, a twisted piece of metal. The pin dangled and dropped off.

    "Sorry," I said.

    "It doesn't signify," she said.

    "But I blew your mind, huh?" I asked, more in hope than expectation. Her face still wore its blank gaze.

    "It's pointless."

    "I reveal the power of the human mind, and that's pointless to you?"

    "You can bend metal. So look, I can bend it back." She turned it in her fingers.

    "You can't mend the pin," I said, sulkily.

    "That's a fact. It's useless." And she flicked the little shining crescent into the water.

    "You're mad because I broke it."

    "I couldn't care less. It means less than nothing."

    That's the reaction I dread. The empty indifference, the hollow shrug.

    "It does mean something."

    "What," she said, "are you going to tell me there's a God, and a God who bends metal just for you?"

Excerpted from THE PSYCHIC AND THE RABBI by Uri Geller & Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Copyright © 2001 by Uri Geller and Shmuley Boteach. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.