The Telepathy Tapes, PART II

the Shift is upon us

Last week I started this series with PART I, introducing The Telepathy Tapes and shaking my head in wonder at the vituperation of the podcast’s critics. I recommend you read PART I to get up to speed for today’s continuation…

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I left you with this quote from McGill University’s Office for Science and Society:

“If we approach any surprising event with the belief that some things simply cannot be explained by science, we will never make progress in understanding our world.” [emphasis mine]

Before I start digging into its implications, I want to share a final thought about anecdotes.

In my youth, I remember vividly watching a rerun of The Miracle Worker (1962), a movie about Helen Keller’s awakening to communication with the outside world. In it, formerly blind tutor Anne Sullivan (played by Anne Bancroft) reaches into the dark, silent world of Helen (played by Patty Duke) to rescue her by teaching sign language into her palm.

The most famous scene — Helen’s breakthrough flash of understanding at the water pump — is seared into my mind forever:

This scene kept coming back to me over and over while I listed to The Telepathy Tapes. The parallels are undeniable. Helen’s parents had been told that she was unreachable, permanently damaged, forever lost inside her non-functioning senses, just as millions of parents today are told the same thing about their non-speaking autistic children.

But there is a less-obvious parallel: it took an anecdote to initiate the chain of events that freed her. Author Charles Dickens took a six-month sightseeing trip to America in 1842, and wrote about it in American Notes for General Circulation, published widely.

Helen’s mother read that book, which included Dickens’s glowing account of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf, blind, and mute student in America to learn to communicate at The Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, MA. Stunned and encouraged by this seeming miracle, the Kellers contacted the school to recommend a teacher for their daughter. Anne Sullivan was that teacher.

Would Helen have emerged from her shell had Charles Dickens not taken up his pen? I doubt it.

Now we have creator of The Telepathy Tapes Ky Dickens (no relation, I assume, but wouldn’t that be fun?) sharing multiple stories of non-speakers’ emergence from their own shells, which in turn, is awakening more parents to pursue facilitated communication methods, despite the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA) strongly advising against them, due to their lack of “scientific validity.”

It’s attitudes like ASHA’s that are turning comment sections of disapproving scolds into sources of lived-experience anecdotal wisdom. For example, thanks to Katharine Beals’s scathing review of the movie Spellers, parents have a place to discuss the merits or demerits of facilitated communication. (BTW, her comment section holds plenty of notes from parents who are using it successfully.)

Not that these methods work for all autistic non-speakers. No one is claiming they do. But they clearly work for some, and dissuading parents from trying them with their kids — in order to what, protect the parents from hope? — seems ridiculous at best, cruel at worst.

Yet officials at places like ASHA can’t seem to let go of what I’d call the “scientific high ground.” Which opens up an opportune moment to pivot back to: “If we approach any surprising event with the belief that some things simply cannot be explained by science, we will never make progress in understanding our world.” [emphasis mine]

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That statement by McGill University could easily be the opening salvo in a materialist manifesto, don’t you think? A quick primer: materialism and idealism are the two main philosophies that explain the nature of reality — that is, what reality consists of and how it originated.

Materialism maintains that matter — the stuff you can touch — comes first, and mind/spirit/ideas follow behind, whereas idealism believes that mind/spirit/ideas actually provide the foundation for all matter. These two distinctly diametric belief systems are at the heart of the disputes over The Telepathy Tapes.

Let’s bring PhD biochemist and author Rupert Sheldrake into the mix, since Ky Dickens mentions him for both his research on telepathic events and his outspoken disappointment in fellow scientists’s adherence to what he describes as blind dogma. And when he says dogma, he means fealty to materialism:

“For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry.”

To be clear: we’ve all benefitted from the tremendous progress that materialist science has achieved, and Sheldrake is quick to acknowledge those benefits. But he believes that science has gotten tripped up in its own pride of accomplishment, deluding itself and thereby ignoring — or worse, discounting — new evidence that challenges the very foundations of the materialist model.

In his 2012 book, The Science Delusion — Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Sheldrake describes an encounter with scientist Richard Dawkins, in which Dawkins invited him for an interview to discuss Sheldrake’s research on unexplained abilities of people and animals… but then admitted he actually had no interest in the evidence; he just wanted to debunk Sheldrake’s claims. As Sheldrake encapsulates,

“…in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason.”

In 2013, Sheldrake’s popular TED talk based on his book was banned; it was taken down by TED and placed in a special corner of their website in response to protests from two militant materialist bloggers in the U.S. That’s how fervent the fealty is; it feels religious in its intensity. For good reason: as Dawkins admitted to Sheldrake, if telepathy really occurred, “it would turn the laws of physics upside down.”

Literally. Take a look at this helpful visual description of materialism vs. idealism.

In the first diagram, the materialist one, consciousness sits at the top of the pyramid as something arrived at by working bottom-up through all the levels, starting with physics, the laws of which purportedly support the foundation of our universe:

And here is its opposite, idealism, which simply moves consciousness from the top of the pyramid to the bottom:

So simple, yet so revolutionary. In this model, it is consciousness itself that forms the basis of everything above it; consciousness is the origin of matter.

Dickens claims that materialism’s prominence makes most people reject her conclusions about telepathy’s possible validity. I think she’s right. Whether we realize it or not, we’re all so steeped in its codified negation of the unseen, that our skepticism feels like truth — rather than the knee-jerk, conditioned response it really is.

An article about idealism in The Debrief, “a news site providing a public venue for credible reporting” flatly states, “One of the main objections is that it defies common sense. The idea that inanimate objects like rocks or electrons could possess any form of consciousness strikes many as absurd.”

When it comes to materialism vs. idealism in my own life, I’ve found medicine to be the most convincing indicator of reality’s true origins.

The western, allopathic model has certainly advertised itself as the only healing option that is trustworthy and “scientific,” a predicable outgrowth of materialism’s deep, abiding influence on medical school curriculum, research funding, and even health insurance policy.

(Many of my readers are aware of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew B. Carnegie’s roles in shaping what we now consider mainstream medicine; here’s a quick summary of Rockefeller Medicine Men by E. Richard Brown if you’re not familiar with those robber barons’ interference in this country’s medical trajectory.)

But healing is both a science and an art. When western medicine spectacularly failed members of my family, it was “alternative” modalities that succeeded. My favorite quick example: as an adolescent, my eldest son Charlie had a terrible case of warts on his hands, near his fingernails. At a well-visit, the nurse kindly offered to “freeze them off” with liquid nitrogen, which she did — not a painless procedure, and, as it turned out, not a permanent one, either. Within two weeks, the warts were back with a vengeance. If anything, they were worse than before.

Enter my husband Peter, the hypnotist. After he explained the interplay between viruses, immunity, and the power of the mind, Charlie agreed to be hypnotized — figuring, correctly, that he had nothing to lose. Peter dropped him down to a deep level of focused relaxation, told him to picture in his mind the warts losing their blood supply and disappearing, then brought him back up to his awakened state, calm and refreshed.

One week later, I kid you not: gone. Every single wart, without a trace. Fifteen years later, they’re still gone.

I suppose there might be multiple explanations for Charlie’s miraculous wart cure, chief among them the placebo effect. But as Sheldrake says: “If materialism were an adequate foundation for medicine, placebo responses ought not to occur.”

Fortunately, there are doctors like

Pierre Kory, MD, MPA

and

A Midwestern Doctor

who are revivifying trashed therapies that didn’t fit the Rockefeller materialist model of medicine (talk about a materialist!), as well as journalists like

Unbekoming

, who are doing the same by excavating books and authors buried by materialist bias. It’s an exciting time in the arena of healing.

It’s also an exciting time in general, amidst the chaos.

To an idealist, the McGill statement I keep harping on — that we won’t understand our world if we believe that “some things simply cannot be explained by science” — is a total canard. Science is, as the Substack writer

Philip Mollica

commented on PART I of this series, “merely *camouflage instruments measuring a camouflage world.*”

Clearly, Mollica resides firmly within the idealist camp. He believes — as do I — that what we see — all physical reality — is “imagery created by us to mirror processes undertaken by us in our true non-physical form.” But to see reality that way is a HUGE jump for materialists. In fact, that idea exists so completely outside their very world, it might as well not even exist.

When I first read that McGill statement, I thought, it takes an astounding amount of hubris to make an assumption like that. What else but pride could underlie such a bald declaration?

But upon a more charitable reflection, I realize there is something else: McGill’s quest for “Separating Sense from Nonsense” exists within a data-driven echo chamber that simply doesn’t allow for encounters with wisdom.

Psychiatrist, literary scholar, author and neuroscientist

Iain McGilchrist

, has this to say about the self-inflicted narrowing of science’s accepted window:

“Censorship has no place in science. In the end it will defeat its own purpose by undermining the credibility of science… Uncomfortable facts, or realities that do not corroborate whatever theory is currently enjoined, are particularly important if we are to make any progress in our understanding of the world. If nothing is allowed to correct a theory, we are doomed to live by lies.” [emphasis mine]

Yes.

Until science steps out of the echo chamber and welcomes the totality of what is arising, even the anomalies that prove it wrong, we will continue to witness evidence of science’s censored existence, manifesting as lies in some cases, “bafflement” in others.

As

Jenna McCarthy

has noted, we seem to come across “scientists are baffled” in headlines a lot. While I sympathize with those who maintain it’s a result of sloppy headline writing, there are cases when it’s not, as when msn.com writes:

“The universe shouldn’t even exist and scientists are baffled that we’re here at all”

That’s not poor journalism. Based on a materialist view, that’s just the truth.

For comic relief, as always, here’s McCarthy:

“Drawing—deeply here—on my dusty tenth grade biology background, the first three steps of the scientific method are 1) observe, 2) question, and 3) hypothesize. Baffle happens somewhere between steps two and three.

Step one: Wow, something is weird!

Step two: I wonder why that is?

Step two-and-a-half: I guess we’ll never know.

In scientific circles, being baffled is the new black.”

Of course they’re baffled. It’s probably not too difficult to ignore outliers like Sheldrake and “woo-woo” places like the Institute of Noetic Sciences, both of which have devoted time and resources to doing exactly what other brave souls have been suggesting for decades: applying our considerable intelligence and talent to the study of consciousness.

They can even ignore Nikola Tesla, who talked about it long before that:

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

But it’s far harder to ignore the stunning progress in quantum theory, discoveries in distant space, and new understandings in neuroscience that collectively just keep tossing wrenches into the materialist machine.

Speaking of machines, McGilchrist has this to say about an imminent release of the materialist stranglehold:

“There are signs, thank goodness, that this is at last giving way in the face of fascinating, revolutionary observations, which reinforce an already unassailable body of evidence, at least a century old, that organisms are nothing like machines.”

These signs are not just coming from the scientific community. They’re rising up within the culture, too. Phenomena such as the dwindling faith in traditional doctors (thanks in part to government overreach in what I would charitably describe as a materialist solution to covid), the growing mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, even the popularity of The Telepathy Tapes — they all point to a new, necessary reframing of reality, one that willingly accepts the possibility of idealism.

Mollica again:

This is the Shift, and it is shaking the foundations of our existence, and what we think we know.”

I believe both McGilchrist and Mollica are right: the Shift is upon us. We are at the water pump, and Grace is signing into our hands to free us, like Helen from her shell.

An unmistakeable sign of that Shift is the many book titles published recently by scientists who are beginning to see the handwriting on the wall logic of idealism. One such book is Why? The Purpose of the Universe, by Dr. Philip Goff, a philosopher and professor at Durham University.

Dr. Goff argues that the materialist approach has failed to account for consciousness, and ever-so-helpfully introduces the concept of “teleological cosmopsychism,” a phrase he coined to describe his hypothesis — that the universe itself is conscious and has a cosmic purpose: to create self-aware life as an expression of its own consciousness.

It’s hard not to giggle. Here’s a passage from Tantra Yoga, the book I co-wrote with Todd Norian in 2021, that describes universal consciousness from the perspective of a more-than-2000-year old religious philosophy called Shaiva Tantra:

“Quantum physics, latecomer to the energy conversation, has determined that there is a unified field of cosmic consciousness that interpenetrates everything, and string theory suggests that we are all connected as if by threads of energy. Tantra had already figured that out, adding that not only are we connected to divine energy and to each other, we are the expression of that divine energy.

(And from from Chandogya Upanishad, this:)

‘In the city of Brahman is a secret dwelling, the lotus of the heart. Within this dwelling is a space and within that space is the fulfillment of our desires. What is within that space should be longed for and realized. As great as the infinite space beyond is the space within the lotus of the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained in that inner space, both fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and stars. Whether we know it in this world or know it not, everything is contained in that inner space.’ ”

Ah yes. “Teleological cosmopsychism.” Fairly trips off the tongue, it does. Thanks, Dr. Goff!

I have compassion for brainwashed people, myself included. It’s not easy to buck the system. When I think about the scientific community, I’m reminded of Hamlet’s fantastic line in that eponymous play:

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” ~Shakespeare, supposedly

No matter how solid things look in light of day, when night falls, the truth creeps in. And progress is made.

More in two weeks.

Join me then for PART III, the final installment of this series.

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As always, keep your light shining bright.
xox
M