12
Waging Peace

On a warm evening in July 1985, a fleet of buses wound its way along a hillside road in southern Spain. Its destination was a secluded luxury villa standing in grounds five times the size of Monaco, and its passengers were some of the 400 guests who had been invited to a birthday party. Meanwhile, a helicopter shuttled back and forth from the 285-foot yacht anchored off Marbella to fetch some of the more distinguished guests.
This was no ordinary party. One of the world's wealthiest and most influential men was jointly celebrating his son's fifth and his own fiftieth birthdays, and his guest list must have read like a draft for Who's Who in the Middle East. Most of them were Arabs, and many had flown over specially for the event from the Middle East. There was also a handful of eminent local residents, and some family friends from other parts of the world.
The buses turned into the driveway, cruised along between rows of guards dressed in medieval uniforms and holding large pikes, and drew up outside the huge villa, where the host was waiting to greet his guests. For three of them, at least, it was their first meeting with him.
They knew a good deal about him, however. As the Saudi Arabian chairman of the vast Triad group of companies, he was said to be personally worth about £2 billion, and to have an income of around a million pounds a day. He certainly knew how to spend it: he had eleven other homes around the world in addition to this Spanish country palace, and his parties tended to leave the gossip columnists at a loss for superlatives. His yacht Nabila was the one you may have seen in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again.
Among the guests who stepped out of their buses and lined up to shake hands with Mr Adnan Khashoggi were a Jewish-American musician named Byron Janis and two Israelis, Shipi and myself. What, you may want to know, were we doing at this glittering gathering of the elite of the Arab world? Let me explain.
About a year previously, Byron and I had been talking about ways in which people like ourselves - musicians and entertainers - could use our talents to bring people together and turn their minds towards peace instead of conflict. We both felt we could do more than merely provide audiences with an evening of pleasure in our respective ways. But where to start? Starting a war was fairly easy, we agreed, but how do you go about starting a peace?
I had an idea. 'Whether we like it or not, Byron,' I said, 'many parts of this world are dominated by very powerful individuals. I don't see any chance of real peace until they can be brought together and made to sort out the obstacles that keep them apart.'
We drew up a list of those we reckoned to be capable of influencing the hearts and minds of large numbers of people in various ways, and the first name we came up with was that of Mr Khashoggi. We decided to get in touch with him somehow or other, and began asking around.
He was not an easy man to meet, as he was constantly on the move. Anyway, we wrote him a letter asking if it would be possible for us to see him. Nothing happened for six weeks, then Byron received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as one of Mr Khashoggi's personal aides. What, he asked, would we like to see him about?
'We just want to come as human beings,' said Byron. 'We have something very important to convey to him.'
'I understand that,' said the aide. He must have heard it before. 'But what is it about?'
Byron went straight to the point. 'The world has a lot of problems, and we think that together we might be able to identify some of them, and maybe do something about them. Who knows?'
The aide's tone of voice changed at once. 'We're always ready for that,' he replied, and immediately announced that he would like to invite us both to Mr Khashoggi's birthday party. It was as simple as that.
The formal invitations duly arrived, and I telephoned the aide to ask if he would like some background information about me. I was a little concerned that he might not know I was an Israeli. 'Shall I send you a press kit?' I asked.
'Oh, that won't be necessary, Mr Geller,' was the reply. 'We know all about you.'
I shook the mothballs out of my dinner jacket, which I had not worn since I had been one of the judges at the Miss Universe pageant several years earlier, and here I was, one of the few Israelis outside the diplomatic corps ever to meet a Saudi Arabian, let alone shake hands with one in his own home. As our line moved forward, I remembered the day I had queued up in the White House to send my message to President Carter. Now, I had another message to deliver.
My turn came. The aide muttered something into Mr Khashoggi's ear, and after eyeing each other hesitantly for a moment, we shook hands. I immediately had the feeling that here was no villain, but a man of great warmth and goodness. This was not the time for a discussion about world peace, though, and I was ushered into the enormous glass pavilion that had been built especially for the occasion.
It was like a Hollywood set. A band was playing on the stage, and tables had been laid out for a sit-down dinner that was already well under way. Every beautiful woman in the world seemed to be there, each of them wearing a new creation from a top fashion house, and there was more priceless jewellery on display than you would find in the whole of Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. I saw emeralds the size of golf balls, clusters of sixty- or seventy-carat diamonds, and examples of just about every other precious mineral that ever came out of this earth. Balloons were floating up to the domed ceiling, the champagne was flowing like the river Jordan, and the din was tremendous. Despite my experience of high life in Mexico, West Germany, and the homes of a number of presidents, dictators and ministers, I have never seen anything like it.
Although Byron and I had been asked previously by the aide if we would demonstrate our 'powers' - his on the piano and mine on the cutlery - it was obvious that this was no occasion for a formal show of any kind. It was a great big noisy family party, not a show business event. The only celebrities I recognized throughout the evening were Brooke Shields, a friend of the family, Shirley Bassey, whose performance was limited to a rendering of 'Happy Birthday to You', and the original 007 himself Sean Connery. Although he was there as a neighbour and was not on business as a secret agent, his presence only added to the illusion that I had wandered on to the set of the next Bond picture.
For the first hour or so there was no further sign of our host, and we decided to relax and enjoy ourselves. Eventually, the aide appeared at our table, took my arm and said he would like me to meet Mr Khashoggi's wife. This, I thought, was a step in the right direction.
Whatever I had been expecting the wife of a Saudi Arabian businessman to look like, it was not what I saw: a ravishingly beautiful Italian lady of about my own age, who greeted me with a smile that only Sophia Loren could match.
'Oh, Uri Geller!' she cried. 'I've heard so much about you. Come and sit down.'
I was too dazzled by her beauty to make much in the way of conversation. Before long, she handed me an expensive-looking spoon and asked me to show her what I could do with it. I let her hold it herself and watch as it began to curl upwards at my command, in the usual way. Then, all too soon, the aide whisked me away to meet a member of King Faisal's family and numerous other pillars of Arab society - Sheikh this and Prince that - all of them clearly men of considerable power. Like our host, they gave me an impression of great human warmth, and they greeted me as a fellow creature.
I managed to bend a couple more spoons in my spontaneous strolling cabaret act, and was getting fairly tired when at last the hard-working aide found his way to me again and led me into a private room. I prayed for all available strength, both to bend another spoon if necessary and to do what I was really there for: deliver my message.
To my disappointment, there was still no sign of Mr Khashoggi. His son was there, however, and we made some polite conversation. He was intrigued to hear that I was from Israel, and I was tempted to ask if I was the first Israeli he had ever met, also to tell him that I actually had a Saudi relative. My wife's mother was at one time married to a Palestinian who had gone to Riyadh after their divorce, taking their daughter with him, and still lived there. Thus I have an Arab half-sister-in-law, with whom we are still in touch.
Before I had time to embark on that rather complicated story, Mr Khashoggi at last came into the room and greeted me for the second time that evening. The atmosphere was relaxed and very private and, as I had expected, the first thing he wanted me to do was another spoon-bending job. I had already done more than I can usually manage m one evening, but this was one request I could certainly not refuse, and mercifully all went well. As I had also expected, he immediately wanted to know if I could teach him how to do it!
A few minutes later I was quite exhausted after all the concentration I had needed, not so much to bend the spoons but to push my silent message into his mind. Luckily, it was a short one, consisting of the single word: peace.
Although we said little to each other, I know he received the message. When we parted, he did what I am sure no Saudi has ever done to an Israeli: he came up to me and planted a kiss firmly on each of my cheeks.
I felt that I had accomplished my mission, and it was clearly time to leave. On my way out, before I had fully realized what had just taken place, I ran into somebody I already knew personally for the first time that evening. It was NBC television producer Robin Leach, whom I might have expected to be there, although he looked surprised to see me. He had filmed an interview with me a couple of years previously for his series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and now he was recording an example of the lifestyle of somebody a great deal richer than I was. The next thing I knew was that there was a television camera pointing at me, a microphone under my nose, and Robin was asking me, 'What do you think of the party?'
I cannot remember my exact words. This is what I was thinking, and what I hope I said, though I expect most of it was cut:
'How can you ask me such a banal question? What do you want me to say? It's a great party, the food and the champagne are fine? Look at the people around me don't you realize that I'm an Israeli? And I'm among what some people think are my enemies: Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Saudi Arabians, even members of the King's family? Do you realize that Adnan Khashoggi got up and kissed me on both cheeks? All barriers were demolished when he gave me that sign. Here I am among my so-called enemies, and all I am getting from them is feelings of peace, love and unity. That's what I think of this party. Anybody can celebrate a birthday, but to celebrate the coming together of "enemies" is not so easy.'
I was not over-reacting. Nor was I overestimating what had happened. It is possible to break down barriers by a simple gesture. When that great man, President Sadat of Egypt, flew to Israel and stepped on the soil of the country he had fought a few years before, he made a tremendous and lasting impact without saying a word. Hatred between Egyptians and Israelis began to dissolve at once, not because of anything he said, but because of what he did.
It is possible to reshape the world for better or worse by simple gestures and simple intentions, provided those concerned have the power and the influence to get them across. Remember how pop singer Bob Geldof got off his backside and raised over £50 million for starving Africans! It was not just the money, but a change in attitudes that was his real achievement. That was mind-power in action, and if he can use it then so can anybody else. All you need to begin with is imagination.
More than a year after Mr Khashoggi's party, I learned of a curious sequel to my meeting with him and my delivery of my silent message. In the autumn of 1986, the NBC team came to film me at home for their programme, bringing with them a copy of the material they had shot at the party. After I had left, they had interviewed the host and asked him if he had any message for the world on his fiftieth birthday. He had, and it was a short one: 'Peace'.
I was interested to read recently that scientists are making a study of people who are what they call 'fantasy-prone', and finding that these people are more likely to have experiences of telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition than those who do not make much use of their imagination. It has also been found that such fantasy-prone people are very good hypnotic subjects, although they are just as normal and well-balanced in their personal and professional lives as people who do not go in for much in the way of fantasy or imagination.
I have been very highly fantasy-prone for as long as I can remember. Perhaps being an only child without too many toys to play with helped. I have already mentioned my first experiments in space travel, when I used to launch my little rockets made from old bullets towards the moon and the stars. Long before the first Sputnik went into earth orbit (in 1957) I was designing special suits for space travellers with all the necessary fittings for oxygen and heat supplies, pockets for their proteins and liquids, and so on down to the smallest detail.
When I was at Terra Santa College in Cyprus, I often used to entertain my class with my imagination: at the end of term, after the exams, our teachers would ask some of us to come to the front of the class and make up a story, and I soon became the most successful of the spontaneous storytellers. One of my classmates, Joseph Charles, remembered my space-fantasies clearly more than twenty years later.
'They were all about men going up in rockets and meeting people from other worlds,' he told me when we met in London in 1985. 'You would describe flying saucers and little spacemen, and your stories sometimes went on for two or three hours. If you hadn't finished when the bell went, you would go on from where you left off the next day, or the next week. I wish I could have written them all down.' (Later, I did manage to write one of them down myself in my novel Pampini.)
This may explain some of the confusion that was caused by Andrija-Puharich's book Uri (1974), in which he included a lot of material about extraterrestrial forces that were supposed to be controlling me. Although much of his book was accurate factual reporting, many people were put off by the space-fantasy passages, and I admit that they caused me some embarrassment. You must remember that all of this fantasy material was obtained while I was under hypnosis, and I cannot be held responsible for what my imagination produced under such conditions. One reason I wrote My Story was to give my own version of events, though I must emphasize that there is a slight possibility that some of my energies do have some kind of extraterrestrial connection. Andrija and I are still the closest of friends and I have never forgotten how much of my success is due to him.
I have made good use of my imagination in the past, and I shall continue to do so in the future, whatever the areas into which it may lead me. If it should lead me astray, as it has once or twice, I know that my internal alarm system will sound as it did that morning after my visit to that London casino.
I am glad that more interest is now being shown in the areas of imagination and fantasy, but it may surprise you to hear that I really do not want to know what theories or conclusions the scientists might come up with. When I was very young, soon after I discovered that I could do things that other people thought unusual, I accepted my natural gifts without question and made use of them without worrying at all how I was able to make the hands of watches move, or how I could tell what other people were thinking of doing.
There were times when I was curious to know how these things were done. Yet when I began to work with scientists, in 1972, I found that I had built a protective barrier around myself between wanting to know how my powers worked and just using them. The barrier was put up to keep the explanations out, and every time somebody drilled a little hole in it and pushed through some scientific theory or other, I felt threatened. I was afraid that the hole would explode, like a dam bursting, and that I would be flooded with information that would destroy me. If Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ or Wilbur Franklin had come up to me one day and said, 'Hey, Uri, we finally figured out how you do it!', I know I would not have wanted to listen to them. My protective barrier would have been demolished. I was glad to demonstrate my powers for scientists, for a time, because I was asked to by people I admired and respected, as I still do. However, I did not and still do not want to know what any of them discovered.
I do not want to clutter up my mind with theories or conclusions. In any case, these will probably be disproved in a few years' time, and then proved again, and so on. People often ask me what I think about Edgar Cayce, or some other famous psychic of the past, and I tell them I know nothing about them because I have never read a book about anything to do with psychical research or parapsychology in my life. I have never even read right through any of the books or scientific papers about myself. Some of my friends think I should, so that I can be better at what I do, but I would rather go out for a run in a park and enjoy nature than break my head over theories of the mysteries of life by reading books about them. I prefer to live the mysteries.
Fantasy has played an important part in the evolution of the human race ever since our remotest ancestor crawled out of the mud. Our species is unlike the rest in the way that it has evolved, and especially in the speed with which it still evolves, both physically and mentally. Much of this rapid evolution depends on the way we use something probably no other species can equal: our minds.
There are people alive today who were born before the first aeroplane left the ground. They might even remember being told that heavier-than-air flight was scientifically impossible, and reading all the technical explanations that proved this. We have forgotten the names of the scientists who provided the explanations, but we remember the names of Langley, Santos-Dumont and the Wright brothers. They were the ones who used their imagination and made their fantasies come true. It was the same with space travel - learned professors went on assuring us that it was out of the question right up to a year or so before Sputnik went into orbit.
The first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896, shortly before the first aeroplanes flew. In that year, an American named Robert Garrett threw the discus just over ninety-five feet to pick up the gold medal. In 1960, the year before Yuri Gagarin went into space, another American named Alfred Oerter flung the thing more than twice that distance. If we can evolve both physically and imaginatively to this extent in a mere seventy years roughly a human lifespan -what is still to come?
I can visualize two scenarios: the good one and the bad one. I will describe them in that order.
As the next thousands and millions of years go by, our bodies gradually change. We have less and less hair on them. Our hands, feet and legs grow less powerful because we no longer use them as we once did. Our heads, however, are much larger, especially our foreheads. As we make increasing use of our intelligence, we evolve to the point where our brains are more important for our survival than our limbs and our primitive sensory organs.
Moving ahead still further, I can see a species without anything we would recognize today as a body. We will have found new ways of seeing that do not require eyes, new ways of transportation or teleportation that do not involve the use of limbs, and new ways of pleasure-seeking and reproduction that do not depend on the archaic sexual organs we use at present.
Finally, we will no longer have physical bodies of any kind. We will no longer be men or women, but masses or fields of consciousness that will be able to travel through the universes and the cosmoses towards the infinite.
The second scenario is very different. According to this, in a matter of two or three hundred years we will be forced to abandon our planet, after making it uninhabitable, and start all over again elsewhere. Only a privileged few will be able to escape, for the rest will have polluted themselves to death or simply exterminated each other. Those lucky survivors will adapt to new environments and their seeds will create new civilizations, and for all of them there will always be the choice of futures: evolution towards the Creator, or self-destruction and starting again from the beginning.
I wish I knew which of these scenarios is going to come true. If we make full use of our minds and our fantasies, it will be the first. If we do not, it will be the second. The choice is ours.
Real psychic power is not about reading tea-leaves or tarot cards and telling people what they should already know. It is something to use to help us evolve. Somerset Maugham once wrote that money is 'the sixth sense which enables you to enjoy the other five'. He was wrong, it is not money which enables you to enjoy them, but the sixth sense itself.
You may be using your sixth sense already without realizing it, or dismissing it as mere intuition or coincidence. If you are a religious person, you use it every time you pray. Prayer is an energy of the soul used for a specific purpose, and if it never produced any results people would not still be using it.
I have never had to learn how to use psychic power, and I have never taught anybody to use theirs. All I have done is show them they have it. Thousands of people all over the world know this, and they have something to prove it: a drawing, a bent piece of cutlery, or a watch that has started working again.
There is not much I can say about how I do what I do. To bend a spoon, I simply hold it and order it to bend, without visualizing anything at all. I just say silently, 'Bend, bend, bend!' Some scientists, such as Eldon Byrd, Thelma Moss and Jack Houck, have developed a way of teaching anybody to do the same, although their methods are different from mine and involve intense visualization exercises in which you 'see' a force flowing out of your body into the spoon, which then becomes warm and flexible.
When I am transmitting a word or a picture by telepathy, I hold it on my mental television screen and will it into the mind of the receiver. When the image starts to fade, I usually know I have been successful. When I am receiving something, the procedure is similar: I visualize my blank TV screen and wait for something to appear on it. If it stays there for ten or fifteen seconds, I know I have picked up-the right message, and I write it down. In the case of a drawing, it is nearly always exactly the same shape and size as the original, although all the details may not be right.
You can practise doing this at home, just by looking at a picture and trying to send its contents to your partner across the room or in the room next door. Or you can do 'remote viewing' experiments like the ones Puthoff and Targ did at SRI, where one of you goes out to a certain spot at a certain time, and the other describes whatever impressions come in about the place. Once you have learned to concentrate and keep your mind under control, it is really very simple. The difficulty for many people is believing that they can do it.
I have used my psychic powers to entertain people, to show them that they too have the same powers, and with them I have diversified into several professional fields. What you do with yours is up to you. In a thousand years, if we are still around on this planet, we will look back at the twentieth century much as we now look back on our cavemen ancestors. They rubbed sticks together to make fire for cooking and keeping themselves warm. In a thousand years, the psychic and paranormal activities of today will seem as primitive as those cavemen's fire-lighting methods seem to us.
What will be possible once we have learned to control psychic power and make full use of it? In this book, I have told you what I have been able to do with my own powers over the past fifteen years, and whether I have made full use of all of them time alone will tell. Maybe in ten years' time I will be able to write a completely different kind of book.
A good example of what can happen when psychic powers are not controlled was described in detail by the writer Dotson Rader, in an article entitled 'A Charming Evening with Uri Geller' which appeared in the March 1976 issue of the magazine Esquire.
It was quite an evening, for both of us. It began with a meal at the brasserie in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, during which Mr Rader noticed the salt-shaker 'moving determinedly by itself across the white tablecloth toward the edge of the perfectly level surface' while I was looking the other way. Then we went back to my apartment to continue our conversation, and things really got moving.
First, a wooden carving shot off the table right beside him and 'flew across the room, hitting the opposite wall and falling on the floor'. Then a spoon appeared from somewhere or other and did the same thing. Next, a lump of rock landed on the floor behind him, having apparently fallen from the ceiling. This was followed by a steel tape measure whizzing around the room on its own. By the end of the evening, my guest was in quite a state. I drove him back to his apartment, and as he was getting out of the car his front door key bent in his hand, so that he had to borrow one from the porter in order to get home.
He came to see me again a couple of days later. While I was in the bathroom, he took the wooden carving, put it under a cushion and sat on it, hoping this would stop it flying around. Apparently it did, but when we went out to the lobby we found it standing in front of the door of the elevator. I told him I was used to this kind of thing, which was true, though there had been more of it than usual in his presence. None of it was caused by me - I cannot imagine why I would want to throw my belongings around my own home, even subconsciously, and almost nothing like this happens when I am on my own. The unusual activity must have been caused, at least in part, by his psychic powers. That Brazilian journalist was right. We are all Uri Gellers.
One day, we will be able to teleport objects, and people, much as we transmit words and pictures today by telex. Space and time are not what we have been taught to believe, and once we have learned full control of the mind and all its powers, there will be no more physical barriers. Even today, some of those barriers are not as impenetrable as they might seem. Anything is possible. Everything is possible.
What is very probable is that in the future I shall continue to be attacked and debunked by all kinds of individuals and committees who have appointed themselves to save mankind from the paranormal, and indeed from any kind of religious expression or belief.
According to one of my most persistent detractors, Martin Gardner, 'people who no longer believe in religion are searching for some sort of substitute', and 'the paranormal provides a way of believing in the supernatural without having to adopt a traditional religious point of view'. He laments the fact that the media exploit this public interest and stimulate it further, thereby 'keeping the ball rolling'.
He and his colleagues do not seem to appreciate that they are doing more than anybody to keep the ball rolling. They have made a religion - a very profitable one - out of their anti-religious crusade, and by attacking the whole area of human psychic experience they have only added to popular interest in it. As far as I am concerned, every time they think they have finished me off for good all they are doing is oiling the wheels of my publicity machine. In fact, now and then they actually do me a major favour.
One recent example: on 30 July 1985 the Sunday Times published a letter from a British member of the 'Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal' which was, to say the least, unflattering. However, it was read by the chief of a major mining company who promptly flew several thousand miles to London in order to sign a deal with me, which I am happy to say he did.
I hope my critics will keep up their good work. In spite of their efforts, or perhaps because of them, the magic and the mystery of Uri Geller will continue to survive, as they have already survived for fifteen years. This is because the believers outweigh the non-believers.
I cannot of course omit to mention my chief publicist, James Randi, who has contributed so much over the years to the boosting of my career that I am often asked if he is on my payroll! (In fact in 1986 he won a $272,000 award for his services to the anti-psi cause.) He has been announcing my professional demise for as long as I can remember, and life is not long enough to answer all the allegations he has written, spoken and circulated about me, although I have already dealt with some of the more blatant ones.
He admitted to reporter Connie Woodcock of the Sunday Sun (26 December 1976) that he wrote a book about me to 'destroy' me. 'With great pleasure', the reporter wrote, 'he waves his book and claims smugly he has "put him [Geller] out of business".' He claimed on the Long John Nebel WMCA radio programme (22 March 1977) that 'You don't hear anything about Geller. He's not heard of at all now. He's pretty well out of business.' Three years later, he was still at it, assuring an interviewer (Omni, April 1980) that I was 'generally discredited'.
Randi has in fact come very close to going out of business himself, according to the Toronto Sun (5 November 1974):
The Amazing Randi, magician by trade, almost died of embarrassment yesterday, not to mention lack of oxygen - while bound and locked in the Sun's office safe.
The world famous magician was pulled unconscious from the safe nine minutes and 35 seconds after he entered it while horrified staffers looked on . . . It had started out as a demonstration of how to crack a safe from the inside. It turned out to be a brush with death for Randi.
He described himself to the reporter as 'a professional fraud', and took the opportunity to refer to me as 'a very good magician'.
He must have been somewhat surprised when I turned up on the NBC television special Magic or Miracle? (8 February 1983) and was given virtually equal time on what had originally been planned as a show entitled The Miracle Seeker and featuring him. (Our contributions were filmed separately, and we did not meet.) At one point on the programme, I was asked to give an example of what I considered to be a miracle. My answer was 'The birth of a child', to which Randi, a bachelor and self-confessed agnostic, commented 'Messy!' To me, this epitomized the fundamental differences between his attitude to life and humanity and mine. A well-known sceptic later told a friend of mine that 'Uri made Randi look terrible'.
'We could have been good friends, you and I,' he says in one of his books. No, Randi, we could never have been good friends. Not even friends. You have told a newspaper reporter that you admired me as you admired Adolf Hitler. You have seen fit to mention my name in the same breath as that of a mass-murderer, and also with that of Jim Jones, who brought about the suicide of hundreds of religious fanatics in Guyana. You have circulated a statement, dated May 1986, alleging that I have blackmailed and defamed you, which is absurd because I would not resort to such activities. You have alleged that one of the scientists who investigated me 'died not long afterward under conditions described as not natural'.
I will merely repeat the self-analysis Randi gave on the PM Magazine television programme on 1 July 1982: 'I'm a charlatan, a liar, a thief and a fake altogether. There's no question of it.'
I do not have to challenge, confront, argue with or even defend myself against anybody. Individual opinions, however extreme, cannot outweigh those of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who have experienced a little real magic in their lives after seeing what I and they - can do, or those of countless millions who have been experiencing the same thing in many forms throughout recorded history.
I am now able to afford the luxury of being able to tell any of my witch-hunters exactly where they can go and what they can do there. As I have indicated throughout this book, there are more important challenges to be confronted: those that can lead to new possibilities and new realities.
It is for those challenges that I will save my energies.
I have made a good living, by making the best use I can of my natural abilities. This has brought me comfort, and something much more important to me: the 'quality time' I can spend with my wife and children and with my close friends, or in pursuing my other interests of painting, writing and enjoying nature.
I only regret one thing in my life, and that is that my father did not live to see his grandchildren.
I thank God every day for having given me and my family health, love and peace. I pray every day for the sick in body or mind to be healed, and for a better world to come for us all.
I also give thanks for my share of some mysterious human abilities which neither science nor I can explain, but the reality of which can no longer be denied.
Almost exactly ten years ago, I ended my first book with the words: 'Either the people accept My Story or they don't. There is no in between.' So it is with The Geller Effect. You are free to accept or to reject this effect, as you please. I do not think you can deny its existence.

12 Waging Peace

12
Waging Peace