Cosmic ordering

The Cosmic Ordering Service is a perfect creed for our age, says Tom Leonard - no commitment but unlimited benefits

If, over the next month, a once ubiquitous large pink and yellow-spotted TV character answering to the name of Blobby is declared a national cultural icon and BBC Television Centre disappears in a puff of smoke, don't worry. It's just Noel Edmonds getting his last two wishes.


In touch with the cosmos:
Noel Edmonds
The Cosmic Ordering Service, the latest New Age "faith" to win celebrity endorsement, has a straightforward appeal that will be familiar to anyone who has thrown a coin into a pool and paused for a few seconds of silent entreaty. It claims to grant your heart's desire.

In a nutshell - and there are lots of nuts involved in this product - you write what you want on a piece of paper and the cosmos does the rest. The former presenter of Noel's House Party has already made four wishes, he told Michael Parkinson at the weekend. They were a home in a sunny place which he wanted by October, a new challenge in his life and two that he won't identify (hmm, what do small, middle-aged men wish for?).

Let's ignore the fact that the house in the south of France hardly appeared as if by magic - Edmonds bought it. And that while his "new challenge" - the Channel 4 daytime game show Deal or no Deal - is an unexpected hit, it was surely only a matter of time before some broadcaster took the plunge and gave Edmonds another chance after his years in the TV wilderness.

What's important here is that Edmonds believes he got what he wanted within just six months of reading a best-selling (in Germany) book by Barbel Mohr about the power of positive thinking.

It's a perfect creed for the age - no commitment but unlimited benefits.

Mohr, 41, who lives near Munich with her twins (she wished for them), is a former journalist. She first outlined her thinking in articles in her magazine, Sonnenwind (Solar Wind), and they have since been made into books. Her best-known tome - the one that Edmonds was given by his reflexologist - is called Cosmic Ordering Service - A Guide to Realising Your Dreams. It has sold a million copies in Germany alone.

Mohr says she developed her theory after chatting with a friend who had been reading up on positive thinking.

"She suggested I imagine the perfect man with all the right qualities and just ask the universe to send him my way - to place an order for him with the universe," she says.

No, it wasn't Noel - that would have been too perfect - but it was the man who is now her husband, Manfred. She says she also asked for - and got - her dream job, money, health and a castle to live in.

So, not for Noel the mystical complexities of the Kabbala. Anyone familiar with, say, Waitrose's Ocado grocery delivery service will also grasp the basics of Cosmic Ordering. You just write down what you want, set a delivery date and wait for it to arrive. What's more, there's nothing to pay.

On her website, Mohr insists that the cosmos works like a mail-order company. As to whom exactly you place the order with, she says that "to some degree you order with yourself" because you influence the "reality of your expectations". How disappointing. But she adds that in connecting with the cosmos you also connect yourself with what some call the "united field theory". This theory assumes that "basically everything is one and that you are able to connect with the power of the entirety".

Anybody can order cosmically, she says, because we all order unconsciously anyway. What about ordering for somebody else? You can with Ocado. You can with the cosmos too. For while we all "produce our own reality", since we are all connected to one another, we automatically influence one another with what we are thinking of each other.

Fairy-tale wishers always have to be careful not to be too greedy, but Mohr says you can wish as many times - and for as much - as you want. But the more "loving purposes" an order receives, the quicker it will come true because it contains more light, or "fundamental element-energy". And don't be nasty. Mohr says that if you want to "wish your neighbours technical breakdowns in their home or anything else unkind", the Cosmic Ordering Service "won't want to know about it".

OK, but did the cosmos want to know about letting Noel Edmonds back on television, and how much "loving purpose" was there in that? Quick, give me a piece of paper.