Geller

I witnessed a famous case of personal synchromythism unfolding in my interviews with Uri Geller in the mid-1970s. He is shown in the above picture with Andrija Puharich. Whether he was aware of it or not, Geller had built up a complicated edifice of little lies and fantastic assumptions that he kept on the border between his conscious down-to-earth life in the Israeli military and his childlike subconscious mind.

Geller’s personal myth is that he was given psychic powers by an extraterrestrial being when he was three years old. “Slowly settling down from the sky,” he told researcher Andrija Puharich, “was a huge bowl-shaped object that looked like one of my mother’s aluminium bowls.” According to Geller, a tall man in a long cape—apparently without arms or legs—emerged from the craft. Then a blinding beam of light shot from the man’s head and struck Geller so hard he fell backwards and went into a deep sleep. That synchromythic scenario—true or not—changed Geller’s life.

Uri Geller was born in Tel Aviv in 1946 and joined the Israeli Army when he was 18 years old. In 1967 he was wounded in action during the Six Day War. When discharged the following year, he publicly professed to having psychic powers and started performing at nightclubs and theaters in Israel.

In 1971, Geller was interviewed by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich (1918-1995), who brought him back to the United States for scientific study. Famed consciousness studies researcher Itzhak Bentov (1923-1979) assisted in the investigation.

When Geller decides to “show people my magic” he recreates his synchromythic inner world in an arena of high-energy chaos. When he feels “connected,” he looks for synchronistic clues that “something is happening.”

Geller exhibits boundless boyish enthusiasm and a deep-seated expectation that something is really going to happen. And the more people who believe something is going to happen the better. Obviously, this is a synchromythic environment.

In 1976, I interviewed Andrija Puharich at his farm and research lab in Ossining, New York. Puharich had absolutely no doubt that Uri’s psychic talents were genuine, and he related a number of astonishing phenomena he had documented with Geller, including psychokinesis, metal bending and transmutation, telepathy, and remote viewing. Once, Puharich said, he visited Geller in Israel, and the young Israeli teleported a camera case Puharich had left behind in New York. In 1974, Puharich told me, Geller teleported a dog through the walls of his house.

A few weeks after interviewing Puharich, I visited Uri Geller at his Manhattan apartment. We were sitting in his living room talking, when, in sheer panic, he jumped up and started running around a glass-block coffee table in front of us. Then he scurried down the hall to his bedroom. “Follow me!” he shouted, and I raced behind him. He turned on the light and pointed to a large glass cabinet filled with souvenirs, and then whispered excitedly: “Something’s going to happen.” The cabinet was made of clear glass on all sides and had six glass shelves. It stood about five feet tall with two full-length swinging glass doors. I examined it closely, and it was solidly built.

Geller opened one of the doors, took out a small blue faience statuette, and handed it to me. He said it was a gift from a friend in Egypt, but it had a tendency to dematerialize.
“Dematerialize?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “One day it's there and the next day it's gone.”

At the time, Geller was devoting a lot of effort trying to bring back some equipment that Apollo 11 left on the moon. He felt it would be definite proof of his “magic” if he could bring an object from the moon into his Manhattan bedroom.

I put the figurine back on the shelf and closed the door to the cabinet. I honestly didn’t believe this stuff and wanted to continue our interview in the living room. Geller was in front of me as we started to leave the room, but he swung around and pointed back to the cabinet. Then he shouted: “Something's happened! It's not there! Look, it's just not there!”

I looked into the cabinet and the figurine—enclosed in a solid glass cabinet—was gone. I opened the door and felt around the shelf where the figurine had stood. There was nothing but empty space—no trap doors or anything like that. A week later, Geller called to tell me the figurine had reappeared at the exact same place in the cabinet.

In my further studies of Geller, I witnessed many valid demonstrations of his ability to synchronize his inner mythos with outer reality. He told me that sometimes he believed that extraterrestrials were helping him and sometimes he didn’t. It was great when the connection was flowing through him, but when it wasn’t there, he sometimes resorted to trickery to get people to believe. Belief, if only for a moment, was key.

Geller is an intense person with a complicated personality, who is exhausting to be around. Stage magicians and some academics have condemned him as a fraud. But I think the Geller Phenomenon is a real instance of mind affecting the physical environment. For me, it is not really magic but a demonstration of Synchromythism. Geller has found a way to synchronize his inner mythos with outer reality. This kind of meaningful alignment of information produces physical synchronicities that are real events in what we think of as time and space.