It was like closing time in a nightclub at the sixth annual Mind Body Spirit Festival in the RDS yesterday afternoon.
Everywhere you looked there were people feeling each other. From Indian head massage to reflexology, few body parts were left untouched in the physical side of the exhibition, which also featured a stand advertising something called the Robert Gray Program - "a massive step forward in the long history of intestinal cleansing".
But it was the mind and spirit which dominated the event. Umpteen fortune-tellers, face readers and other psychics did a roaring trade.
Doing brisk business was Archangel Michael's Soul Therapy Centre of Glastonbury ("providing tools for personal and planetary healing"), which drew a steady stream of customers to sit under a tubular pyramid while holding strange instruments and listening to even stranger sounds.
Nearby, a stand called Flower of Life 2000 offered "ascension teachings from the Alpha and Omega Order of Melchizedec", promising "freedom from energetic interference" with dramatic before-and-after pictures of the aura of a client who'd undergone treatment. Another stand promoted the virtues of VortexHealing, a system of magical transformation "used by Merlin".
Many of the treatments on offer boasted at least some scientific basis, like the "Complete Crystal Control" programme, which uses crystal chips (at £14.99 a throw) as "magnetic keepers" to counteract the "paramagnetic" fields generated by mobile phones, televisions, VDUs, microwave ovens and all the other modern appliances that may be killing us with convenience.
In a similar line was a stand promoting the notion of "healing with magnets". The theory here was that since the industrial revolution and the many changes this had brought, there had been a 5 per cent drop in the earth's magnetism. The use of magnetic inserts for your shoes and other places helped redress this imbalance, with all sorts of benefits.
That at least was designed to help keep your feet on the ground, but it was very much in the minority yesterday. Among the workshops on offer during the afternoon was one promising to "connect you to a special angelic oversoul, and receive its name to guide you through time and space".
There was the inevitable lecture on rebirthing - "letting go of past negative experiences" - in a separate room, while another workshop involved the use of shamanic drumming "to restore balance and harmony in your life and connect with your totem spirit power animal".
For the uninitiated, the natural tendency is to sneer at this sort of thing and this reporter has to admit he did, at first.
But then I left the RDS and watched on television as the Irish rugby team rebirthed in Paris, letting go of past negative experiences and playing like 15-totem spirit power animals against a French side who looked like they had magnets in their boots. And now I can believe in anything.
