And the fork was stiff and I couldn’t, and then suddenly it just collapsed in two. And I was like, “What just happened?” So she’s like, “Yeah, if you’re in certain mood states, you can do it. In other mood states you can’t.” I was like, “Whoa, this is really interesting.” Or energetic states.

So I went home and started bending every spoon in my house and then I moved on to bending heavier objects. The soup ladle was my big project for a while. Then it was rebar, the stuff they use to build buildings. I was bending metal, and I got pretty good at it. It gets so that you can be good at it. Anyway, so what? After a certain point, it’s like, “Well, that’s a nice party trick.” But the interesting thing is not that you can bend spoons. It is that sometimes you can bend them, and sometimes you can’t bend them.

So, this is my update. I am blending this silly fixation with another one that I don’t think is quite so silly, which is listening to near-death experiences online. I will have mentioned this in like five Gathering Rooms in a row because I listen to one every night. And this one woman, she was dead, she was clinically lifeless according to the doctors and the measuring equipment, but she was having a near-death experience, and she came back from it able to bend spoons.

And she did this as a kind of party trick for weeks and months. And then she was like, “So what—I have to die and have this experience in the afterlife and then I’m left with bending spoons?” But then she severely injured her shoulder to the point where doctors told her basically, “You’re never going to get full use of that arm to return.”

This was interesting to me because both I and a guest in my house had hurt our shoulders. We were having shoulder issues and this woman who had the near-death experience, she was worried about her shoulder and she felt this loving presence say, “Well, use your spoon bending.” She was like, “Spoon bending will not fix my shoulder.” And they said, “No, but the same energy that allows you to bend a spoon will allow you to fix your shoulder.”

So she started practicing using her spoon-bending energy on her shoulder, and she did reportedly fix it. Now these are all just faith-promoting rumors as long as you’re hearing me tell you—and then this woman, I suppose. I could find the link to her story online so you could hear her firsthand, but both of us could be making it up, right? We’re not. I don’t think she was. I’m definitely not, but you have no way of totally knowing that. I could have bent this with a machine. I didn’t, but you have no way of knowing that.

So then I was talking about this in Wilder. Wilder is the online community that my partner Rowan and I have been running for the last couple of years, and some of you are from Wilder, and it’s just the most amazing crowd of people. It’s like a village where everybody is interested in the same things that I am. Anyway, I was mentioning the whole “fix your shoulder with spoon bending” and people started saying in one of our many hangouts, they were saying, “I can’t do that.” And I said, “Yeah, of course you can do it. Everybody go get a spoon.” 

Now this is the great thing about a virtual community because when I speak to crowds or whatever, they can’t all just run and get a spoon. But in a virtual community, everybody was at home, so they all toddled off and toddled back with their spoons, and I was saying, “Well, this is how you do it. I had this spoon and I was going to bend it straight again.” And then I can’t, like I couldn’t at all because I’m not in the right energy. There’s too much anxiety, and there’s a certain element of stillness that is missing in me when I’m looking at a camera.

Anyway, I couldn’t, and I can’t right now. Although I was trying to bend this right before we got on for The Gathering Room and it was just absolutely—no give at all. But the moment people started coming in and I was saying, “Oh, somebody’s from Hungary, somebody’s from Germany,” it started to get softer and right now I can bend it. I can make it much bendier. Let’s see if I can open it up a little. You have to get very relaxed, and it’s hard for me to do that when I’m on a broadcast. Anyway, I made it more bendy. Now I get more bendy, less bendy. Anyway, I’m better at it now than I was in Wilder the other day. But here’s the thing, there were a whole bunch of people who read my book 20 years ago about how I learned to spoon-bend, and they’d all gone and tried to bend spoons. Three people had been able to do it. But online, before I even got started talking to people about it, everybody started holding up their spoons, and like 14 people who had been trying this for years and given up could suddenly do it.

Now, the utilitarian—this is a very nuts-and-bolts Gathering Room because if this woman is correct with the shoulder injury, learning to bend a spoon is actually not the most impractical thing we could do. And in fact, what if we can access states of well-being, states of healing, maybe even offer healing to other people? It’s actually not a trivial skill. There is something about this zone you go into and it has everything to do with love.

So just in case you’re trying to use this, the way I get the spoon to bend is I hold it and first of all, I think of it as being alive and conscious and I invite it to play with me. And then I think of the most beautiful, loving, joyful connection with a being that I can possibly remember. So I just am thinking about my little five-year-old and I was able to unbend it more. I was playing, we were creating a fairy village yesterday and when I think about that, I can bend the spoon. I couldn’t bend it at all before this call, and your energy’s probably helping.

So it’s not a trivial skill. There are states of consciousness we can already access. I’m always talking about the new consciousness, right? It’s actually not something brand new. It’s like a bandwidth, a frequency of consciousness that we go into and out of all the time. And the best things in our lives happen when we hit the sweet spot of it. And when we’re out of the sweet spot, we can’t get things to work as well. And if we could hold the sweet spot, we may potentially be able to heal our bodies, heal other people’s bodies, heal our hearts, fix situations in the world. I don’t even know what the limit of it is.

The reason I’m bringing it up this week is that in Wilder, because there was a village, because it was communion, people who’d been trying this for years were suddenly boom, boom, boom, getting it to work, even though I couldn’t. And it really showed me this is the time of community. This is the time of communion. This is the time when the joyful celebration of being with other people is the absolute prerequisite for fixing the world. For fixing ourselves, for fixing the physical systems we live in and then for rippling out that kind of healing into the world because this very, very loving state is the state that seems to move matter and when we join together in that state, the result seems to be more than the sum of its parts.

If you have ever heard of the scientist Rupert Sheldrake, he wrote a book called Dogs Who Know When Their Masters Are Coming Home. I think he’s at Oxford or Cambridge, one of the big UK universities, and he does research on things like dogs who know when their masters are coming home and sets up this experiment with cameras on a big crowd of dogs in a warehouse and then they randomly select from like a random-number generator who they’re going to call and say, “Come get your dog.” They make a phone call on the video as they call the person and say, “Come get your dog,” that dog perks up and goes and waits by the door.

I saw Bilbo, our cockapoo, do this today. I was taking care of him while Karen, his true mommy, had gone away in our electric car, which makes absolutely no noise, and about four minutes before she got home, he jumped off the couch and ran and waited at the door and wagged his tail and I thought she’s nowhere inside, she’s not here. Sure enough, I went out and joined him and 30 seconds later, here came this completely silent car, and I don’t believe he heard it. I think he felt it. So when there’s this loving communion vibe going on, it magnifies the ability that we have to sense each other, and Rupert Sheldrake calls this a morphogenic field, morphogenic meaning it shapes things. “Genic” is the origin of something; “morpho” is shape. So it generates the shape of things. And I believe that when you not just imagine something wonderful and loving, but actually participate in something wonderful and loving, even if it’s just like a FaceTime call with someone you love or a Zoom call with friends, which is what we were doing, the ability to make things happen starts to increase exponentially.

It’s so funny because this doesn’t get as floppy as it did when I bent it the first time because I was doing a seminar, and there were like 20 people that I really cared about in the room with me because it’s even stronger then, but it does keep fluctuating. It gets softer, harder, softer, harder, depending on my consciousness state, but also I think because of my connection with you because before I got on the camera with you, it wasn’t bending at all.

All of this just to say, spend some time going to the zone of your consciousness where you feel love, but not a frantic, desperate, yearning love. That is something our culture calls love. It’s not the state that creates miracles. The state that creates miracles is one of absolute confidence that love is your state of being. So a very simple environment where there aren’t many demands on you, but there are others present that you love, start going there and then trying things like, for example, if you have work to do and it requires a good idea. Get yourself to the point where you’re ready to have the good idea, like you’re pushing the problem, and then go hang with people you love and keep that energy cooking.

My guess is, and my experience is, that the part of your brain that is busy cooking up solutions can pop a creative answer into your brain better when you’re in that state of love or joy. If you’re physically hurt, hang with people you love, find the zone where there is no fear and no struggle, and then just invite the tissues of your body to readjust themselves. This is not like “Expelliarmus!” magic as some huge effort. This is realizing that the zone of communion is the zone of magic and that it affects all physical systems from spoons to our shoulders to our, I don’t know, everything.

I hope this is not too silly for you. I hope you’re all grabbing spoons and seeing if you can do this. I’m not reading the comments, but maybe some of you are getting it to work. But now we’re going to do the Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation and see what, if any, that does to our ability to affect physical systems, physical reality. So take a deep breath, let it out in a long exhale, straighten your spine, or relax where you’re sitting or lying down, and ask yourself the nonsense question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? See if you can do that.

Can I imagine the atoms in the distance between my eyes and can I imagine the space that makes up most of the volume of every atom? 99.99999999% of the atom is empty space. Can I imagine the space in the atoms between the spot between my eyes and the back of my head? Can I imagine the space in the atoms between the top of my head and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the distance between the tip of my left shoulder and the tip of my right shoulder? Can I imagine the distance, space inside the atoms of my heart?

Can I imagine that space as a stillness in which my heart is beating? Can I imagine the stillness spreading to every other person on this broadcast and connecting seamlessly with the space and stillness inside their hearts? Can I imagine the love that is the space between our hearts and within our hearts lifting those who suffer, comforting those who are afraid and holding those who are in danger? Can I imagine the silence beneath all of the sounds I hear right now? Can I imagine that silence, stillness and space as my fundamental being, as consciousness itself? Can I imagine how it brims with love?

All right. Okay, this spoon just got very, very flexible while we were doing that. Oh, Anandi is bending the spoon as we speak, and Mary Janine says, “Mine started bending a little and then I got excited and I stopped.” Yep, yep. This has gone impossible again for me.

So someone says, “How can we get ourselves into this state of love? How can we cultivate this?”

One of the ways that I had not tried until we had the Wilder hang-out the other day is what I’m suggesting today is like the whole point of this broadcast is this is the time of communion, of magic in community. So the first thing I would say is get together with some of your favorite people on a phone call, on a Zoom call, whatever—in real life is even better—and play with it, play with it and make sure that you’re having a really good time.

Another thing is: get yourself laughing. Watch a really funny comedian or a movie that you love to laugh at, or watch a basket of kittens playing. I mean, there are many, many things that can get you laughing in a joyful way. That’s an incredibly powerful way to access this state of consciousness. And then it’s fun to sort of carry around a spoon and sort of test, “When am I in that state of consciousness?” That’s the first thing is just find actual communion and then the dropping in—which we just did with the Stillness, Space, and Silence meditation—that is a really, really powerful way as well. So as we get together and as we get still—and especially if we can get still together—that’s the way.

Okay, Jessica says, “Would you chat a second about the paradox between learning to master these abilities while not trying is what makes them work.” 

So Jessica, yes, I love that you asked about the paradox between trying to master something and not trying. Trying not to try. This is one of the hardest, most delicate balancing acts we ever have to do and it’s in every element of spirituality. It’s in self-healing, it’s in how to fall in love, it’s in how to play the piano or learn to draw. Everything’s about pushing your abilities while being completely relaxed with your lack of ability. And here’s what I can say is working for me best right now, the use, the absolutely focused use of my physical senses.

I have tried to play the piano for years and years, never had lessons, but I decided that I was going to try a new experiment to see if I could get my brain in a child state. I read something about how to get your brain in a state that’s like you were when you were a child. So I thought, “I’m going to do that and then I’m going to try to learn to play the piano, but this time I’m going to try it by ear instead of reading music.”

And I realized that what I had been missing, I’ve been reading music and trying to translate it ultimately into sound, but it’s really different when I close my eyes and feel for the keys and listen. There’s such an intense listening. And before that, reading music is literally reading. It’s marks on a page and it’s an amazing recording system, but it’s not music. And so suddenly I found myself in this zone where, yeah, I started to make big improvement quickly. Sometimes even suddenly playing something that came out seemingly by itself, like I’m definitely accessing something that knows better than I do how to play the piano and the key is I’m listening. As soon as I try to master it, forget it. I’m listening.

Same thing when I’m painting or drawing. I need to look. Like instead of thinking, “What is going to work here?” I need to just surrender to vision, to like looking so intensely at the world that it kind of translates itself inside me into the ability to create images because I’m so focused on looking. So instead of my accomplishment and my ego being central, I’m looking at the physical world and saying, “What do I feel in my hands? What do I hear in my ears? What do I see with my eyes and how does it go through my whole body?”

And somehow the use of those receptive senses, if it’s very, very focused—and it helps that I’m doing something fairly difficult like painting or playing music because I have to be present. I cannot be thinking in past and future. I’m super present and I’m very, very focused on my senses and I think—I mean, to jump to a whole different type of phenomenon, when you have a baby or when you fall in love and you’re making love, when you love a being, a human being and you feel, a little baby can’t tell you what’s wrong so you get really, really focused on feeling the tension in that baby’s body and hearing exactly which cry signals what. Same thing if you’ve got a cat or a dog that you love. When you go into the present moment and focus on your senses, that’s when it works. That’s when it works.

Okay, question: “I have a job interview with a small organization I admire and appreciate. It’s in two days and I find myself fluctuating between wanting to convince them in embracing me. Suggestions?”

This is absolutely perfect. This is a classic spoon-bending exercise because I’ll tell you something: When you’re in the consciousness that bends the spoon/heals your shoulder, whatever it is, love flows so easily between you and other conscious beings in the world that the feeling if you’ve bent a spoon while we’ve been talking, you will probably realize that the feeling that you have in yourself when the spoon bends is that the spoon loves you and you love it and that is incredibly powerful. I used to use this when I was doing things like crossing borders in African countries where it can get slightly daunting. You’re facing officials who can be quite stern and I used to use this to try to get them to smile. And I was traveling with a bunch of women and they would all go through the border crossing before me so that they could turn around and watch and see if I could get the border guard to smile. And the way that worked and it works, I think it would work with spoons too, I’m trying it right now. I would just say in my mind, “I like you and you like me. I like you and you like me.” 

And if it caught, if the energy caught, what happened was I would start to feel a wave of joy of sweetness from the border guard and then I had enough belief in it to ramp it up and I’d think, “I love you and you love me. I love you and you love me. ” At that point when I could really say that and believe it, I knew that they were going to smile. They just always did. They couldn’t help it. They could not. I would smile at them and they would smile at me and it was just mirror neurons working. And then years later, a friend of mine was teaching, a wonderful rider was teaching me to ride a horse and she had me say in a rhythm with the horse as I felt the horse in my own body, the way to ride a horse, which she does brilliantly, I don’t do it as well very much like bending the spoon.

You feel a seamless connection between your physical framework and the horse’s physical framework. And then she had me say, “I am with you, you are with me, I am with you, you are with me.” And then she moved it to, “I am you, you are me. I am you. You are me.” At that point, the illusion of separation collapses and the oneness that we are all actually a part of becomes undeniable and the horse feels it. I will tell you the horse feels it. The other person feels it.

If you go into that interview to have joy yourself, to experience joy in the interview and with the love of the other person and the desire to serve them and allow them to feel joy, if you can hold that, it’s not easy, but if you can hold that, it’s going to go really, really well, maybe too well. I’ve had people try to make friends with me and follow me home when I’ve used that too much. You must use your powers for good. So good luck with that and use it, try it. It works, y’all. It works. Try it in business, try it in anything, but just remember you cannot use it for evil. It won’t work.

So another question, “Is this the zone you all tapped into when you were house hunting earlier this year, trying to find the right home and the place you were feeling called to?”

Yes, and I was terrible at it. I was so anxious because we were looking in the winter, and it was like, I really loved the house we lived in before, and I had a lot of like… My energy wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t consistently in a place of joy. Thank God I have two partners because they were easily holding a state of joy, and it was a while before the right place came on the market and I just was in complete panic. I was not the teacher to go to in this particular instance, but Ro and Karen, they were so smooth, and they just knew we were going to find it. And we had written a long list of things it had to have, everything from solar power to “we want it to be a wildlife refuge.” Well, it is. We got the whole thing, and they did it. I watched them do it with their relaxation and their joy. Yeah.

So, “Can this help—”another question—”Can this help with writer’s block, possibly?”

Oh yes.

“How? It’s a PhD synthesis on planetary crisis, law, and creativity, but I write it alone for now.”

Wow, that is a hell of a PhD synthesis. So here’s what you do, and this is whenever you want to do something that challenges your ability, you stop doing anything, you go into the space, stillness, and silence. You imagine situations where you were in love, capital L, when you were loving other beings and they were loving you. And then you start to invite whatever is on the other side to serve the world through you. You try to make yourself a pencil in the hand of God. But as Jessica said, you don’t try to try. You relax and you say, “I love you and you love me.” You say this to the world. You say it to the planet that is in crisis. You say it to the legal system that is a mess. You say it to creativity, which is hard to access, but you don’t think about hard and a mess. You think about, “I love you and you love me. I am you and you are me. I am with you and you are with me. We are together.” 

Then you put your pen on the paper, and you let it move. And for me, if I can get through a few sentences and I just let them be really crappy, I find that the connection occurs and I sort of start diving into a sort of well where words flow very, very easily for me. And I get blocked as hell, so I’m hoping that everybody out there is sitting with spoons bent all—I mean, I had another one here that I had twisted into like a candy cane shape. Can’t bend the thing at all now, but I hope you’re all playing with bendable spoons or forks and that you’re finding that zone.

And whether you’re healing your body, creating a relationship, fixing a work problem, or healing the planet, we’re onto something, people. This stuff works. And that’s what I have to say about that. And I’ll see you later on The Gathering Room when we get back. Bye!