“I feel awkward saying this.”
That’s how it opens. Asim had been badgering Tom to record this since February and Tom had been finding reasons not to.
What happened was that Tom sat holding a spoon, thumb resting on it with almost no pressure, eyes closed, picturing a bend, and meditated to find love in his heart and an intense desire for the spoon to bend. He didn’t expect anything to happen. And then:
“It just suddenly moved in my hand and folded over. And I just freaked out.”
The panic came first. The excitement arrived a beat behind it.
“Holy shit, what just happened? I did it.”
That’s where this episode begins, and it is the gateway to insights that you might not expect.
Why the resistance?
Asim believed Tom instantly all the way back in February, but Tom wasn’t comfortable talking about it publicly. He had direct experience of something inexplicable happening and had multiple pieces of physical evidence to prove it, yet still resisted it even within himself.
That’s the discovery of the episode, that modern humans seem to have an inability to process things that present too much of a challenge to their model of the world. Our own minds try to rewrite the past to make it fit into the old paradigm, and then social pressures reinforce those limits. We stay inside the lines and move on with our lives as if nothing happened.
It isn’t hidden. There’s a booking link.
The standard argument against strange phenomena is often availability: if it’s real, why isn’t everyone doing it?
But this isn’t even hidden. The Monroe Institute runs a spoon-bending workshop. It’s four hours, on Zoom. It isn’t hidden in a cave in Tibet or inside a secret society. It’s here in plain sight, and yet we pretend we haven’t seen it. Which means the suppression isn’t happening out there, but inside of ourselves.
Tom thinks that’s what most anomalies do. Plenty of people have had an experience that doesn’t fit, and rather than let it detonate their worldview, they discount it and move on.
Asim actually has a tattoo specifically to stop himself doing this — somewhere he can’t avoid looking, because otherwise the strangest thing that ever happened to him would fade into the background like a dream.
Spoons are the door
Halfway through, Asim says he’s nervous about moving on from spoons, because moving on is exactly the shelving behaviour we had just diagnosed. So we stay, and it opens out.
If your mind can alter steel, then consciousness and matter aren’t the separate categories we’ve been told. Telekinesis becomes a kind of manifestation; manifestation becomes a claim about consciousness; and with that, telepathy and remote viewing become almost trivial.
“Historically, in my mind, these have all been separate things. But they’re actually all just the same thing.”
Which raises the possibility that we don’t manifest things within the rules of reality, we manifest the rules. Tom’s route there is the observer — every experiment ever run needed someone to look and write it down, so consciousness isn’t a topic within physics, it’s the precondition. Once you notice that, permanent laws start to look less fundamental.
The closest thing we could find to a physical explanation for spoons actually bending came from Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Science, but it covers about half of it and leaves the important half untouched. Tom’s fine with that:
“There’s a point at which people should stop clutching at straws and just say: we don’t know.”
The film about aliens that isn’t about aliens
Tom’s spoon bending wasn’t the only disclosure in the episode. We went to see Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day together at the IMAX. Tom enjoyed it while Asim spent two hours interrogating its motives. Spoilers ahead.
Tom’s catch is to ask, where is your attention while watching that film? On the aliens, on whether they’ll be revealed — that’s the whole basis of the plot. And yet you barely see one. What you actually watch, scene after scene, is telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing, being acted out in plain sight while the script writers keep your eyes on the skies. Magicians call that misdirection.
There are breadcrumbs in the film too, if you like breadcrumbs — a military character with always exactly the same name as a real general who signed the 1947 memo saying the UFO phenomenon was real and not visionary or fictitious, and a defector called Hugo Wakefield, whose name means something approximating to “watch your mind”. Tom doesn’t claim to know what it means. He just doesn’t think the film is about aliens.
So who is disclosing what?
Asim’s objection isn’t to the pattern, it’s to the motive. Aliens he can model: if it’s real and uncontrollable you control the narrative instead, and if it’s advanced hardware the alien story is superb cover. But telepathy and telekinesis don’t compute — psychic ability is the last capability an intelligence apparatus would want distributed.
Then they land somewhere worse, and Tom takes back his framing entirely. Nobody walks out of a Spielberg film thinking that was real. Fiction is the most efficient inoculation ever devised: put a thing on a cinema screen and anyone who later reports it in life gets told they’ve watched too many movies. After all, Asim grew up knowing spoon bending was fake because a famous man once failed to do it on television.
“The more people that think it’s not real, the more people that think it’s not possible, the less likelihood there is of anybody even trying to explore that space.”
Belief is upstream of capability. Which is the same claim as the spoon, at a global scale.
Chop wood, carry water
Like in many of our episodes, we don’t pretend to have the answers, but this time we land in very different places emotionally. The world is not what it seems and the more we dig the less we feel we know, Tom’s enjoying the ride. Asim is being eaten alive by it.
“Meanwhile, everybody else is just ordering things on Amazon and watching Netflix.”
Then the episode ends as Tom had to go and cook dinner.
As the buddha said, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Tell us what you think
Have you had an experience that didn’t fit? How did it make you feel? How did others react? Did you find a way to integrate it into your life or did you suppress some part of it?
Leave us a comment on Substack or wherever you found us. And if this one tickled your curiosity, we’d be grateful if you liked, restacked and shared it — privately with one person who’d enjoy it, or publicly with everyone who’ll think you’ve lost the plot.
Thanks for listening,
— Tom and Asim
