When the sing-sing is over, they remove their headdresses, wrap them in plastic, and take them home to their huts. Headdresses are extremely valuable, and great care is taken with them. But the men leave the paint on their faces. That night, around the fire, they are all red and yellow as they laugh and smoke. They delight in personal ornament. During the day Hebrew will sometimes decorate his hair with small green leaves. At night he puts fireflies in his hair, so his head winks and glows like a Christmas tree.
Their makeup has a purpose: to disguise the warriors. Thus, if a warrior kills an enemy in battle, the enemy may have trouble distinguishing which warrior actually did the killing. Yet in practice everybody knows who did the killing—one more contradiction too difficult to resolve for an anthropologist on a time schedule.
But I would like to see a tribal war. I have only read anthropological accounts of these battles, which are formal affairs lasting all day. In the early morning the two sides meet at a field, and begin by prancing and exchanging insults. Later some spears and arrows will be shot. As the day continues, combat will become progressively more serious, until finally someone is killed or mortally wounded. Then everyone goes home.
If there is a battle, spectators are allowed to watch, and even to move among the warriors, snapping pictures. I say I would like to see such a battle.
One man who drove tourists in a bus told me that on a certain day he had come upon a tribal war, and all the tourists—they were Italians—piled out of the bus to take pictures. While they were taking pictures, one warrior beheaded another with an ax. Right there in front of the tourists!
But the tourists never saw it. They were preoccupied with the pageantry, the colorful costumes. They never saw the head cut off and the blood spurting and the body twitching.
But the driver saw it. “I do not like to see such things,” he said. “They are too real.”
In the night, when everyone is sitting around the fire, the subject of snakes comes up. Nemo describes the poisonous snakes of Australia. The Tari men listen. One of them then says he once saw a movie about snakes.
The Tari man becomes very excited as he talks about the hero in the movie, whose name was Hindy. Hindy was afraid of snakes, and in the movie he came upon a room that was entirely filled with them, crawling and hissing all over the floor. Thousands of snakes, terrible snakes. To conquer his fear, the man Hindy had to enter the room, and he did! And he fought all the snakes, until he killed them all, and he won! The Tari man says he would never enter such a room, but Hindy did. The snakes were very exciting!
I ask the man if he remembers anything else from the movie. He says no, that it was a story about a man and snakes, and the rest of the movie was just leading up to that.
So there it was, the Italian tourists taking snapshots and literally not seeing a man beheaded, and the New Guinea tribesman seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark and considering it a movie about a man and his snakes. The longer I stayed in New Guinea, the more profound the gap between our cultures appeared. I was losing my romantic illusions, but I wasn’t getting clarity in its place. I was getting hundreds of flea bites and a lot of confusion.
Eventually I left the Highlands and went to the Sepik River, where dense clouds of mosquitoes hung in the humid air, and tribespeople looked and acted entirely different. The Sepik River people do not fight with weapons. They kill one another with sorcery.
Finally I went to the coast. On my last day in New Guinea, I dived on a sunken B-24 bomber, a relic of World War II. The wreck was overgrown with corals and quite beautiful, but the most surprising thing was its size. The airplane was so small. In the 1940s the B-24 had been a large plane. Seeing it there on the bottom was a striking reminder of how much the world has changed, and how swiftly the change continues. When I got to the surface, I asked about the plane. Did anyone know its history, how it got there, why it had crashed? No one did. There were only stories, and theories, and possibilities.
Spoon Bending
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 an atmosphere of excitement and emotional arousal. He encouraged us to be noisy and excited.
We were supposed to choose a spoon from the pile and to ask the spoon, “Will you bend for me?” If we didn’t think the spoon would respond, we should toss it back in the pile and choose another. But if we had a positive feeling about our chosen spoon, we were instructed to hold the spoon vertically and shout, “Bend! Bend!” Once intimidated by being shouted at, the spoon was to be rubbed gently between our fingers, and pretty soon it would bend.
That’s what Jack Houck said.
People were looking at him pretty skeptically.
The party began: a hundred people selecting spoons and saying, “Will you bend?” and tossing them back in the pile if the feeling wasn’t right. Then all around me, I heard people shouting, “Bend! Bend!” at their chosen spoons. A lot of people were laughing. It was hard not to feel self-conscious, holding up a spoon and shouting at it.
I was sitting on the floor next to Judith and Anne-Marie. They had finished shouting at their spoons, and now were rubbing them between their fingers, but nothing was happening. I was also rubbing a spoon, but nothing was happening for me, either. I felt foolish. As we rubbed, a gloom descended over the three of us.
Rubbing her spoon, Anne-Marie said, “I don’t think this is going to work. This is silly. I just don’t see how it can work.”
I looked down at her hands. Her spoon was bending.
“Look, Anne-Marie.…”
Anne-Marie laughed. Her spoon was like rubber. She easily twisted the spoon into knots.
Suddenly Judith’s spoon began to bend, too. She was able to bend the bowl in half. All around me, spoons were bending. My spoon remained stiff and solid. I rubbed it dutifully, but it wasn’t even getting warm.
I felt annoyed. The hell with it, I thought, I’ll bend it with sheer force. I tried: the neck of the spoon would bend, of course, but the bowl itself wouldn’t bend. I was hurting my fingers trying. I relaxed. Perhaps it wasn’t going to happen for me. Jack Houck had said a few people couldn’t bend spoons. Maybe I was one.
“Congratulations,” Judith said to me.
“What?”
“Congratulations.”
I looked down. My spoon had begun to bend. I hadn’t even realized. The metal was completely pliable, like soft plastic. It wasn’t particularly hot, either, just slightly warm. I easily bent the bowl of the spoon in half, using only my fingertips. This didn’t require any pressure at all, just guiding with my fingertips.
I put the bent spoon aside and tried a fork. After a few moments of rubbing, the fork twisted like a pretzel. It was easy. I bent several more spoons and forks.
Then I got bored. I didn’t do any more spoon bending. I went and got coffee and a cookie. I was now far more interested in what kind of cookies they had than anything else.
Of course, spoon bending has been the focus of long-standing controversy. Uri Geller, an Israeli magician who claims psychic powers, often bends spoons, but other magicians, such as James Randi, claim that spoon bending isn’t a psychic phenomenon at all, just a trick.
But I had bent a spoon, and I knew it wasn’t a trick.
I looked around the room and saw little children, eight or nine years old, bending large metal bars. They weren’t trying to trick anybody. They were just little kids having a good time. Staying up past their bedtimes on a Friday night, going along with the adults, doing this silly bending stuff.
So much for controversy between magicians, I thought. Because spoon bending obviously must have some ordinary explanation, since a hundred people from all walks of life were doing it. And it was hard to feel any sort of mystery: you just rub the spoon for a while and pretty soon it gets soft, and it bends. And that’s that.
The only thing I noticed is that spoon bending seemed to require a focused inattention. You had to try to get it to bend, and then you had to forget about it. Maybe talk to someone else while you rubbed the spoon. Or look around the room. Change your attention. That’s when it was likely to bend. If you kept watching the spoon, worrying over it, it was less likely to bend. This inattention took learning, but you could easily do it. It was comparable in difficulty to, say, learning to count off exactly five seconds in your head. You practiced a few times, and then you could do it.
Why do spoons bend? Jack Houck had theories, but I had long since decided to concentrate on the phenomena, and not worry about the theories. So I don’t know why spoons bend, but it seemed clear that almost anyone could do it. What was all the fuss about?
The party broke up around 11:00 p.m. Judith, Anne-Marie, and I went home, taking our bent spoons with us. The next day I tried to bend one of my spoons back into its original shape. I couldn’t do it, but I didn’t try very hard. I showed my bent spoons to some friends, though not many. The whole thing just seemed rather ordinary.
A year later, I mentioned to an M.I.T. professor that I had bent spoons. He frowned in silence for a while. “There’s a way to bend spoons,” he said, “by a trick.”
“I think so,” I said. “But I don’t know the trick.”
The professor was silent for a while longer. “You personally bent spoons?”
“Yes.”
Then he went through the whole thing. Where did I get the spoons? How did I know the spoons had not been previously “treated”? Did anyone help me to bend the spoons? Did anyone touch me while I was bending, or substitute a bent spoon into my hands.… He went on like this for a while. I tried to explain the quality of the room that night, and how impossible it was that everyone could have been tricked.
“So you believe the spoons bent?”
“Yes.”
“Did you investigate why the spoons bent?”
“No,” I said.
“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 seems 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 abnormal 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.
Seeing Auras
All the religious teachings of my youth were powerful because they were inexplicable. In my family, you could discuss anything except religious matters. These were considered unarguable. The story of Joseph and his coat of many colors wasn’t a story; it was a postulate. Similarly, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ—a story I had difficulty with from an early age—was not a fable or a metaphor. It had actually happened that way.
The reason why such things were possible was that they had happened a long time ago. Antiquity meant that anything they told you in Sunday school had to be taken as true, no matter how preposterous. Parting the Red Sea, and turning water to blood, the Burning Bush … nothing like that was going on now. Not even in New York City!
Many years passed before I came to know the complicating truths of pregnant nuns and whoring popes; the complex histories of the Old and New Testaments as historical documents; the anthropology of nomadic herding tribes in the Middle East; and so on. Along the way I discovered that lots of people, including my own parents, didn’t believe these religious stories in any literal sense.
But at the time I just struggled to understand. And since the narratives seemed unbelievable, I looked at pictures.
Unfortunately, religious pictures were equally confusing. Everyone in the Sunday-school books wore a bathrobe. I had trouble imagining a world where everybody walked around that way.
And grown-up religious art, in museums, made me slightly ill. I could feel all the emotion at the service of what I felt was some kind of insanity. Those saints smiling at the sky while they were stuck full of arrows and bleeding: you couldn’t tell me those people weren’t crazy.
Even modern artists made me queasy. The floating rabbis of Chagall were exactly how I thought of religion—everything uprooted, swirling free, spinning, and making you nauseated, because you didn’t know which end was up. I couldn’t see why the floating people and animals were smiling, why they didn’t find their condition horrible, like people in the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
Confused, unable to understand, I eventually retreated into a world of disbelief about all things religious, and all religious images. And so, after a time, I stopped puzzling over the most perplexing feature of my childish examination of religious art—the halos that appeared over the heads of some people. The yellow circles behind the heads.
What’s that?
A halo.
What’s a halo?
That’s what very religious people have. It’s a circle of light.
Do religious people have it now?
No. Not any more.
But they had it then?
Well, artists imagined they did.
You mean religious people didn’t actually have halos but artists thought they did? It was an illusion?
Well, it’s how the artist is showing us that the people in the picture are very religious.
Oh.
The explanations didn’t satisfy me at all. For one thing, the halos were portrayed different ways. Sometimes they were a ring above the head. Sometimes they were an orange glow coming out of the head. Sometimes only one person, like Jesus, had a halo. Sometimes everybody in the picture had a halo.
For another thing, nobody in these paintings did what I thought a normal person would do—point at the halo and say, “Wow, look, he’s got a big yellow ring around his head!” The other figures in the paintings ignored the halo. Or perhaps they didn’t see it.
Furthermore, there were some paintings of Jesus with no halo at all. Some artists painted halos and some didn’t. The more recent artists didn’t. This seemed significant. A halo was just an artistic style. It was a way of painting. Halos didn’t have any reality. Maybe back in the old days people believed in such superstitions, but modern people didn’t. Yellow light coming out of your head! The very idea was crazy.
I never told anybody, but I secretly looked for halos. I thought maybe our minister, Mr. Van Zanten, was religious enough to have one. I peered at him during services. Apparently not. At least, I could never see one around him. I inspected pictures of the Pope
in Life magazine, but he never appeared to have a halo. Maybe halos didn’t show up in photographs.
Sometimes I looked at my friends and, when conditions were right, I could see a whitish thing around their heads, against a uniform background like blue sky. But this was obviously an optical illusion of some kind, caused by too much staring.
I knew about other optical illusions, like the spots you saw if you closed your eyes and pressed on your eyeballs. Or about how, if you looked down at your hands against a dark surface and squinted, your fingers would seem to be twice as long and kind of streaky yellow. This was obviously some illusion caused by your eyelashes’ getting in front of your eyes.
Anyway, I never saw any halos.
I finally gave up.
Occasionally, as an adult, I wondered again about halos. They were so prevalent in religious art—could they really be just an arbitrary convention? If so, why had artists settled on that particular convention? Why a circle instead of a star, or a crescent? Why yellow instead of some brighter color, red or blue or green? Why did artists draw halos in the ways they did?
The simplest explanation never occurred to me: that the artists had drawn halos because everybody had one, and everybody who wanted to could see them.
The only difference is, today we don’t call them halos. We call them auras.
I wanted to see auras. I felt it was time to try this. In the last few years I had come to regard most activities, even the most mysterious, as having a component of practice. Maybe by practicing a lot I could learn to see auras.
I had heard that Carolyn Conger was a good person to teach me. I attended a two-week seminar with eight other people in the high desert of California, in the spring of 1986.
Carolyn’s unassuming frame house was located at the foot of desert mountains a mile high. Carolyn was very warm. “You must be Michael,” she said, and gave me a hug. That was the first thing that struck me, how warm she was, and how down-to-earth.
Travels Page 38