Believe me? Maybe now he will.

There was a man, once, who followed my writing on Medium. He always clapped and was invariably charming and polite in the comments he left.

The trouble was, I persisted in writing about my experiences with Asher, and how he had announced to me, at the tender age of eight, that he could read my mind. I then proceeded to write about how that little boy had grown up and taught me to enter into a two-way telepathic dialogue that lasted for many years.

Since, in adulthood, that pupil-turned-teacher had refused to communicate with me in any meaningful way other than telepathy, and since I was the only person able to pick up his astonishing messages, I could offer no proof that the words I was sharing in my articles were his, rather than being figments of my imagination or, worse, something I was making up to give me spurious material to write about.

Unbelieving

The man reading my stories was caught between a rock and a hard place. He found my writing engaging, he was kind enough to say, and felt himself being carried along with the information I provided. At some point, though, his lifelong conditioning kicked in and the inner materialist was unable to accept that such things could happen. He wanted to believe me, but he couldn’t.

I was sorry to lose him as a follower. I had the greatest respect for his thoughtfulness and integrity, and I completely understood his reasons for doubting my word.

For decades I’d doubted myself, faced as I was with family, colleagues and an entire worldview (at least in my part of the planet) that branded psi abilities as nonsense and charlatanism. There were times, too, when Asher doubted it too. You can only take so much of people branding you delusional before you wonder if you should just give up and start to believe them.

There were times when one or other of us did just that. Fortunately, though, those times didn’t coincide. Whichever of us still believed in what we were discovering would encourage the other, and eventually we’d get back to the work in hand.

What was the ‘work’?

Asher told me there were other autistic people, many of them, who had no ability to speak. Telepathy was their only way of communicating. We owed it to them, he insisted, to spread the word; to tell anyone who would listen that the non-speakers had amazing and important things to share, and should not be written off by those whose expertise didn’t extend to finding ways to communicate with them.

At that point, I hadn’t encountered any of these people, but I did — very much — want to tell others about the wisdom and insights Ash was sharing with me.

That’s why I wrote A Mind Beyond Words. That’s why I spent more money on publicity than I could truly afford, ensuring that I’d never turn a profit. That’s why I put myself through the fear and anxiety of giving talks and interviews, writing social media posts and articles, and generally putting my introverted self ‘out there’.

Was it worth it?

As I’ve been reporting lately, I started to meet, or hear about, others like us. The trickle of new contacts grew to become a steady stream.

As explained in this article: Three Sides of a Coin, even Asher put his head above the parapet when Ky Dickens started to release episodes of her groundbreaking documentary series, The Telepathy Tapes.

Yes, it was worth it. Most definitely.

This afternoon, I settled to listen to Episode 5 of Ky’s series. I listened to my Medium friend Mary Ann Harrington explaining, so eloquently, the telepathy experiments she had done with her own students, the experts she’d tried to interest in her work and the many brick walls she had hit. I listened to other educators sharing almost identical experiences to those I’d had with Asher and his young classmates. I listened to my own voice, sharing my early discoveries, as honestly as I could… And I listened to Dr Rupert Sheldrake explaining how and why telepathy works, and how and why the mainstream establishment is refusing to listen.

I hope many people discover and listen to Ky’s series.

Above all, though, I hope that polite and thoughtful gentleman, who used to read my stories with such consternation, somehow finds his way to the podcasts, and is helped to broaden his worldview.