Testing for Telepathy
“By means of thought, we are able to obtain all the elements we need from the universe and to reach all the beings we want to contact. Yes, through the law of affinity, thought takes charge of seeking out these elements or these beings. Even if the person you have in mind is on the other side of the world, out of the six billion people on earth, your thought will go directly to him or her and to no one else, as if it had been magnetized to make contact with precisely this person. So from now on, when you want to acquire an element from the universe or to contact someone, think about this element or this person without concern for their whereabouts. Provided your thought is intense, it will go straight to its target.”
–Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
Of all the subjects that I’ve discussed, one of the most difficult is telepathy. It is difficult not because of a lack of empirical data, but because it is such a polarizing topic. Some people believe in it, and others claim it is impossible, that any research that says otherwise must be wrong and if you believe in it, you will believe in anything. Yet it is an important subject, and the research data keep on coming.
The English biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake has just published a study in a well known and peer reviewed journal. Perceptual and Motor Skills is a journal with a reputation to protect, so you can be sure that this study was scrutinized particularly carefully. This study investigated possible telepathic communication in connection with emails. In the study there were four potential email senders, and for each trial one of them was selected at random, and there were 50 email receivers, who had to guess who was going to send them an email one minute before it was sent. Further experiments were done with a small number of people who were videotaped continuously. All the experiments generated results that were significantly above chance.
What this means is that we have another piece of evidence to add to the overall body of knowledge about telepathic interactions between people and animals.
Part of the difficulty about telepathy is in understanding how it could happen. When people are in close physical proximity they can pick up on subtle physical cues like body language and dilation of the pupils. I am also persuaded by the data from the HeartMath Institute, indicating that the electrical field generated by the heart can be detected by other people at a range of several feet, and that it can lead to entrainment of the electrical rhythms two people’s brains. But the email experiment is important because none of these factors come into play. My own take on this is that we are all constantly and inextricably interlinked with one another. Most of the time we don’t notice it because of the constant chatter of the mind and the efforts of the ego to protect our individuality. But under certain circumstances – shock, meditation, deep relaxation, sex, and near-death experiences – the walls come tumbling down and we experience our connection for what it truly is. And then we see the non-dual reality of the world.
The other point is this: I have made the point that the Laws of Healing have been gradually changing and evolving over the last century, and our individual and cultural consciousness is evolving and adapting. Because of that, more and more people are having first-hand experience of the interconnected web of life.
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together . . .” {All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV, Sc. Iii} –William Shakespeare English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616
Technorati tags: Intuition, Rupert Sheldrake, Telepathy Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
I’ve always found the articles of the Heartmath institute less than convincing, see for example http://maurits.wordpress.com/2006/01/23/can-your-hart-predict-the-future/ for an analyis of one of them.
I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis of that one!
But I wonder if this is a straw man? What I find more convincing is the evidence of entrainment of EEG rhythms of people in close physical proximity (1 to 1.5 meters), and the evidence of crosstalk between the heart and the amygdala and nucleus accumbens.
But you also raise another important point that I have been discussing in a number of posts. Don’t believe anything until it has been replicated independently! There are so many examples of people who have produced loads of data that could not be reproduced elsewhere. There is an example right now, where a physician in private practice has done innumerable SPECT studies which, he claims, enable him to diagnose all sorts of brain problems. yet teams of scientists in research centers have been unable to do anything like that. Maybe they haven’t done enough scans or maybe the technology cannot yet be used for individual interpretation.