Observations placeholder
North, Stephen – No touch metal bending - softening can appear and vanish very quickly
Identifier
026947
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
THE METAL-BENDERS” by PROFESSOR JOHN B. HASTED
Temporary softening, as is shown by evidence from the Stephen North video-tapes, can maximize and decay within a small fraction of a second. This is relevant to the problem of the tight single twists of cutlery shown in Plate 1.1.
Some metal-benders, realizing that the softening can appear and vanish very quickly, wonder how the spoon twists in this short period of time. It would, of course, twist if it was already under torsional stress, being held so between right and left hand; but this a metal-bender is reluctant to do, since it would look as though unnecessary manual force were being applied.
The ‘trick’ is that the torsional stress is inertial in origin, being applied by twirling the spoon, rotating it between the palms of the hands rubbed together, or throwing it in the air with slight spin, or ‘English’.
These applications of stress look ‘innocent’, because the feature of the sudden softening is not yet understood by observers. One may learn a lot from throwing in the air and otherwise manipulating a bisected spoon, with the handle and bowl joined by a short length of thin tape. Intuitively the metal-bender learns that twists are puzzling and that they can be brought about by such manipulation; but he probably does not understand them in detail.