The Telepathy Tapes, PART III - FINAL
yes, McGill, we do want to believe
In Part I & Part II, I look at the abundant criticism of The Telepathy Tapes and trace it back, at least partially, to society’s unholy marriage to materialism. I recommend reading both prior essays to fully appreciate the direction I take in this last installment.
By its sheer volume of smugly supercilious quotes, McGill University’s Office for Science and Society has provided much snark-grist for my mill during this series. The very title of their Telepathy Tape takedown is no exception:
“The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe”
It’s such an interesting title, isn’t it? First of all, “Prove”? Really? They are using that word? That scientifically sacrosanct word? How arrogant!
And second of all, to pile on the arrogance: from McGill’s perspective, the title perfectly encapsulates the average shmoe’s obsession with The Telepathy Tapes because it foregrounds, with tsk-tsk energy, what McGill deems our unfortunate-yet-innate inclination toward suckerhood. (My guess is that Jonathan Jarry, author of the article, silently substitutes “You” for “We” inside his head every time he reads that title.)
Sorry. Snark is contagious.
Yet from where I sit, “The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe” is not an indictment, it’s a revelation. I read it as evidence (remember, the word “prove” is right there!) that one of our most magnificent, powerful human capabilities — belief — is on task as I write, assisting us in breaking free from the iron grip of western materialist orthodoxy.
And it’s beautiful to behold.
One of the reasons I decided to do an entire series on this popular podcast was the reaction of two of my adult children when I described how the episodes were affecting me.
When I shared with them my excitement, both of them listened carefully and politely, expressed their happiness that I was so lit up by it, and then started asking questions. Not that I minded the questions, mind you — there’s a healthy skepticism that burbles throughout this family, thank goodness — but I could feel something else at play.
They are both recent graduates of higher education, and they’ve been trained well by the materialist system of scientific inquiry — some of which I covered in Parts I and II. What I sensed from them as the questioning continued was a whiff of the same underlying propellant that fuels McGill’s imperious cynicism: a desire to not be duped or played the fool.
Look, no one likes to be hornswoggled. And my kids are not imperious or cynical by any stretch… yet anyone who successfully goes through four (or more!) years of higher academia has been pummeled by a certain worldview that’s hard to shake. I’ve felt it myself. It’s taken years to deprogram.
Currently, there’s no shortage of pinched journalists and academics who are outraged that vast swaths of the population are paying attention to The Telepathy Tapes. Clearly, quite a few of them work at McGill. (Which is ironic, given McGill’s zealous participation in MKULTRA experiments. How about some outrage about that?)
According to these pinched folk, it just “proves” how damn ignorant we all are. I beg to differ; it “proves” that vast swaths of the population are waking up from a very long, very bad dream.
In that dream, everything is explainable given enough data or technology or both, and sterilized research studies are the only way to prove the validity of anything. In the words of Jarry, Crusader Against Pseudoscience,
“It would involve not showing a child’s mother the random number or word to prevent any conscious or unconscious cueing of their child, who should be able to read the journalist’s mind. And it would mean not simply stringing together a number of wild anecdotes about parrots who can read their owner’s dreams and elephants who commemorate the day their rescuer died.” [bold emphasis mine]
Got that? No wild anecdotes! Nothing that couldn’t be recreated inside captivity! And for God’s sake, no telepathy test that requires a relationship between its subjects! The child “should be able to read the journalist’s mind.” I’m sorry… says who? Should my child run and hug someone he’s never met to prove he hugs? Should I be able to put my own head inside the jaws of the lion-tamer’s lion to prove the act is real? And should both of those take place in sealed laboratory basements so that nothing can affect the outcome?
Taking sentient beings out of their natural habitat and hooking them up to machines to monitor their responses to stimuli is like taking a plant and removing it from soil, light, and water, then wondering why it’s not doing what it “should” do. “You claimed you could grow, you charlatan petunia!”
It’s impossible, anyway, to remove all influence. If just the simple act of observation changes outcome at the quantum level, isn’t every experiment that’s done by a human being, being influenced? Fun fact: in the 1920s, scientists shifted from writing in an active voice (“I heated the solution in the beaker”) to using a passive voice (the solution in the beaker was heated”) to make scientific research seem more objective and impersonal.
Scientific journals have, in the past decade or so, shifted back to active voice. I like to think it’s a small, leading linguistic indicator of an impending implosion of materialism. A gal can dream.
Let’s look more deeply at the concept of relationship as it pertains to telepathy.
Rupert Sheldrake, whom I mentioned often in Part II, conducted his own experiments to determine whether telepathy works more effectively when there is a close relationship between the individuals doing the communicating. As he says in his book, The Science Delusion — Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, the tests he ran “supported the idea that telepathy occurs more between people who are bonded to each other than between strangers… this is a real phenomenon. It does not fall off with distance.”
Telepathy is not distance-dependent, it’s relationship-dependent — like quantum entanglement, defined quickly here by Sheldrake:
“When two quantum particles have been part of the same system and move apart, they remain interconnected or entangled in such a way that a change in one is associated with an immediate change in the other.”
Albert Einstein provided an even shorter definition, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”
Of course, anything relationship-dependent is simply a bridge too far for the scientific community. How can you possibly measure the complex, myriad aspects of a relationship? You can’t.
So instead, they bash anything that happens outside their labs. Crusader Jarry again:
“Throughout the [Telepathy Tape] podcast, a laundry list of explanations is given as to why telepathy sometimes fails when tested: anxiety, negativity, hatefulness, skepticism, crowds.”
Yep… and it’s a fact that some women have a harder time giving birth when they’re anxious or surrounded by crowds. Would Jarry chastise one of these women for her laundry list of “explanations?”
It’s highly unpopular these days to generalize about male/female proclivities, and decades ago I railed hard against the whole Men Are From Mars conceit… but the older I grow, the more apt I find it: men on the whole inhabit left-brain thinking, and women, the right. Yes, there are exceptions, yada yada yada.
In my earlier essay Tech Titans, I quote
, who describes how the mostly-male tech gurus exhibit signs of left brain dominance, including “lack of empathy, a lack of imagination, an attraction to the mechanical, [and] a tendency to treat people and body parts as inanimate objects,” among other characteristics.McGilchrist also says this in a recent essay:
“Where the left hemisphere sees things in isolation, the right hemisphere sees processes that are relational.”
Relational. The realm in which women excel. Modern science, the edifice that mostly men have built (thanks, Francis Bacon, “father of empiricism”!) has engineered no great room for the relational.
But all that is shifting. Thanks to the information now flowing through formerly gate-kept channels (fingers crossed those channels stay open), that edifice is shuddering; poor McGill University and Crusader Jarry just don’t know it yet.
McGilchrist takes it a step further:
[The right hemisphere]… “is the substrate of the mature self as opposed to the immature ego. It can understand that suffering can be generative. And it can understand the valour in vulnerability, and the dark side to what we think is merely good. None of this makes sense to the reductive materialist. And this is another sense in which the left hemisphere leads us away from the truth: the truth of the divine.” [Emphasis mine]
Yes. All of that messy human murk — suffering, vulnerability, the hallmarks of all relationships in general — is not to be avoided, and yet science does just that. With its cool detachment and passive voice, it takes pride in doing just that.
Yet the murk is home to the divine as much as clarity is. We come into this world bloody, waxy, wet with amniotic fluid — not pristine like the goddess Athena who sprang fully formed from Zeus’s forehead and not coincidentally, was pretty much the epitome of left-brain dominance.
It makes sense to me that relationship — between everything we think are “opposites,” including left and right brain — is a fundamental universal law, perhaps even the fundamental universal law, because there is one energy that underlies, supports, and weaves this whole impossibly vast tapestry together: love.
You don’t have to take my word for it; Einstein said that love is “the universal force… the most powerful force in the universe.”
You don’t have to take his word for it, either, because you probably already know. And you know this, too:
Love requires relationship.
So is it really any surprise that telepathy requires relationship, too?
In an Atlantic magazine article entitled “The Telepathy Trap,” Daniel Engber, for all his suggesting that “the forces of conspiracism” are implicated in the mass appeal of The Telepathy Tapes, ends the piece this way:
“This is not telepathy, but it is connection — a connection so intense that I don’t think it would be far off to call it love…”
Fine, Engber. Don’t call it telepathy, if that makes you feel better. Call it love.
I want to share with you some wisdom from my dear friend Kim Womack, LMHC, LPC, NCC, a truly phenomenal, brilliant therapist. I have Kim to thank for introducing me to The Telepathy Tapes. I have many other reasons to thank her, but that’s for another essay.
Kim is an equine-assisted therapist, and she works with her own horse Luna in a way that is far, far beyond anything I’ve ever known. It’s truly horsemanship as an art of freedom. It’s the opposite of what we think of when we think of training — for a pet or a child. In her own words:
“We put our infants into high chairs to hold them, to help them learn to sit still so that they can eat properly. We don’t let them wander and then come back and get food like other animals might; we say, ‘now is the time to eat and you must do it this way.’
Because one day you and I were both sitting in our high chairs, shoveling in our oatmeal really happily with our hands… And then out of the blue, somebody took our hand and said, “no, no,” and put a spoon in it. There are so many ways that we restrict, train… program. I hate to use that word, but yeah.
But here’s the cool thing. When you take away the conditioning, what you’re left with is the belief, the energy of a natural relational dynamic.
So I could put a halter and a lead rope on Luna; I could get on her back with a bridle and use that to turn and stop and all that. But if I take all that off, what’s left? What do I have? It’s the truth of my relationship with her.
And what builds that truth, is trust. It’s consistency, it’s predictability, it’s all the things that go into compassionate leadership. Not just me as her leader; she gets to lead, too. Sometimes she gets to say, ‘Let’s do this.’ And I go, ‘Okay, let’s!’ And then I say, ‘Hey Luna, wanna do this?’”
When Luna first came into Kim’s life, she was “unbroken,” that is, she’d never been ridden. Fortunately, the olde spaghetti western method of “breaking” a horse, which included the violent imposition of the owner’s will over the wild mustang, is now considered passé. Somewhere along the line, horse riders discovered a better, less damaging way — one that centers on relationship and preserves belief, not only from the rider’s but also from the horse’s point of view.
Kim calls what she and other trainers do “attunement:” attuning first to the self, then to the other sentient being, the space between the two, and finally the environment around both. I shake my head in wonder — what could all our relationships be with one another if we always did that before we opened our mouths to speak?
Kim’s relationship with Luna is so strong now, she rides Luna with minimal tack. The implements most riders need to exert their will aren’t necessary; Luna and Kim share “control,” though that word doesn’t really fit. Kim describes it as becoming one, as seeing the world through Luna’s eyes or feeling the earth through Luna’s legs.
That description dovetails with the way autistic non-speakers and their facilitators mentioned in The Telepathy Tapes seem to communicate. It’s as though they’re merging in order to share the same sensory input — a word, a visual image, or feeling.
To do that, though, requires what Kim and Luna, or Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, or patient parents and their non-speaking autistic children have cultivated: a relationship built on trust and love. And that’s why the left-brain sterility of scientific research necessarily shuts down telepathy: it not only ignores humanity’s inherent interconnectedness, it’s actively hostile toward it.
Almost nothing but active hostility continues to flow toward The Telepathy Tapes, hostility I believe is intentional.
The conscious dismissing of humanity’s greatest gifts — our visionary capacities, our imagination, our reliance on anecdotes we share with one another, our ability to form deep, loving relationships, our right brain — has stunted us evolutionarily. We cannot move forward as a species, let alone solve the greatest challenges of our time, with only half a brain — the half that happens to be male.
In the Tantric cosmology, Shiva and Shakti represent the dynamic interplay of masculine and feminine energies, symbolizing the divine union necessary for creation, sustenance, and transformation.
I’ll say it again: these two need each other.
As set out in the first line of the Saundarya Lahari (c. 800 CE): “If Shiva is united with Shakti, he is able to create. If he is not, he is incapable even of stirring.”
From the book I co-wrote with Todd Norian about Tantra:
“Shiva is Absolute consciousness, the essence of all that is, but Shakti is the power of that consciousness, the embodiment of the formless. As Shiva is the sun, Shakti is the rays of the sun; as Shiva is the stream, Shakti is the current of the stream. They are different from each other, and yet paradoxically, they are one and the same. One can’t exist without the other; you can’t have the sun without its rays!”
Male-female polarization is rising, across a manufactured chasm. If relationship is the fundamental universal law, and love the most powerful force in the universe, then can any of us truly imagine what would happen if men and women stopped sniping at each other and joined forces?
Those who profit from our arrested development and separation — either by offering their own high-tech “solutions,” maintaining their status as “experts,” or keeping us disempowered and malleable — don’t want us to find out.
This stunted status quo is the end result of a game they’ve created and the rules they established as the ones we all have to play by.
Because really, when someone says “there’s no scientific proof” of something, they’re using an invented paradigm that can only be applied in certain material circumstances. There will never be “proof” that telepathy is real, or precognition, or God… because the parameters of science are set up so they cannot stretch beyond their limits to address those potential realities.
So when McGill says that The Telepathy Tapes “Prove We All Want to Believe” they are really trying to reinforce within all of us this disempowering idea: belief is a silly trifle, a childish desire of no consequence, a magic trick played on us by our baked-in gullibility. Belief is the quaint absurdity of tiny hands clapping so that Tinkerbell will fly.
When really, belief is the exact opposite.
Belief is the limitless, essential source of power. It’s what initiates the chain of any actions in this world, the foundation for all creation. It is the consciousness from which everything material ultimately arises.
In a recent roundtable interview that
facilitated, the healers, scientists, and medical mavericks present agreed: information becomes energy, which then becomes matter:I → E → M
Another way of stating that is this: our beliefs are really just information, ideas that we’ve taken up like spoons being put in our hands. That information — those beliefs — drives our energetic responses to the world around us in the form of emotions or actions, which then take shape as an electromagnetic blueprint for material existence.
It’s a hierarchical relationship. Matter is the end result of the organizing process which starts with information. When you change the information, you change the matter.
Which is why Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work on the power of belief is blowing the doors off modern medicine.
If and when love replaces all other information/belief — when that becomes the dominant consciousness at the foundation of the idealist pyramid — then the only possible material result is perfect health and right relationship, individually and as a planetary ecosystem.
So yes, McGill, we do want to believe.
While I don’t know if this three-part series I’ve written will induce my kids to tune in to the podcast, I do think it’s possible. After all, my daughter has a beloved bracelet we gave her many years ago, into which Helen Keller’s famous quote is inscribed:
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
This is why millions of listeners around the globe have loved The Telepathy Tapes — not only because the stories of parents who love their children enough to try to rescue them send us directly into our hearts, but because deep down, we know that what Shakespeare (allegedly) said is true: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The power of belief is at work, right now.
So beautifully and lovingly written Mary. I think you nailed the resistance: they want us to BELIEVE them. They've got an identity-snag going on. If they are not right, then they are no longer the authorities and that's hard. They're basically throwing a tantrum.
The story is so much bigger. Materialism has been a box humans are breaking free from in larger numbers and the whole false-paradigm is going to shite. Yippee!! :-)
Which reminds of this short video I watched this morning. (10mins)
A challenge to a long standing theory on universal grammar. (Largely credited to Noam Chomsky who met the challenge by casting personal attacks on the upending researcher. The question is not yet settled - more are looking into it, but I suspect it's another deep assumption that's about to die.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQnyh_1kqy8
Love this subject and the much larger questions it raises. I have the bones of book called Living Faith: Freeing God from Religion. This is very much the same.
Inquiry and wonder will always exceed any theory - we really can't pin down our reality since it evolves and changes, along with us.
We need bigger minds and hearts to become our new experts.
XOX
As I read through this, the words that kept coming to me were Harmony and Complement.
When the pendulum swings out too far in either intuition or reason, fanaticism follows.
Both are required, in harmony, for a healthy, happy, self-aware individual to find their greatest path.
Harmony and complement, right and left brain, male and female...
Our recent history has been dominated by the left brain, the male energy of reason. Call it "science" if you like. Since the turn of this century, we have been returning to the right brain, female energy of intuition, though none of it has anything to do with males and females.
This after the so-called "women's movement" of the late 20th century, which had nothing to do with right-brain, female energy, but more to do with women expressing more left brain to match their male counterparts. And while it was necessary to counteract male dominance, it did nothing to advance the right brain, female "energy."
This was not the answer, only more of the same predominance of a lack of intuition.
Now this has changed, and we can see everywhere the result of the pendulum swinging back from fanatical left brain dominance into a more nuanced balance.
This is all due to the prescient Shift in Consciousness in which humanity is becoming more self-aware and willing to entertain subject matter that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.
Men and women everywhere are much more free to express both these energies in balance, in complement, in *harmony*.
Our best work, as usual, is to ignore the so-called "experts" in the peanut galleries of our world, and move forward - advancing interest and acceptance of this female energy of intuition, and recognizing its rightful place in the balance of our physical reality.
A great finish to the series, Mary, and I can't wait to see what comes next for us!