Prelude
I was sitting ready to connect telepathically with my non-speaking friend C, as I usually do on a Tuesday evening.
I’ve only known her for a year or two. We care deeply for one another, but I don’t merge minds with her as easily as I do with Asher. The bond is not as strong. I tend to use a crystal pendulum over my keyboard to help me pick up her messages. On this particular evening, though, I got an instant response.
Me: Evening C. How does this new time work for you?
C: Better
Me: It’s odd. I knew you were saying that before using the pendulum. But on Saturday, when we met up and I was sitting right beside you, I couldn’t get anything at all, telepathically. Any idea why?
C: The face-to-face contact overwhelms your subtle senses.
Me: Yes. I see that. It’s almost as if I need some distance to tune out a bit before I can tune in on a different wavelength.
C: It’s like trying raw food while smelling vindaloo. You wouldn’t pick up the subtle tastes.
I took her point, and her rather striking analogy. It’s that word subtle that is key to this whole issue.
I thought back to a time we’d been sitting having a coffee together with a mutual friend who can pick C’s thoughts up instantly, anywhere. C had suddenly started to become anxious and dysregulated. She urgently needed to leave the café and move somewhere quieter. She told our friend the ‘static’ coming from some people at another table had been disturbing her and making it impossible to focus. Those other people hadn’t been yelling or screaming. I’d barely been aware of their existence. C, though, was picking up the subtlest signs of a disagreement and it was messing with her mind. That’s what being highly sensitive feels like.
Testing Telepathy
There are people who are very keen to use scientific testing to prove or disprove that bonded pairs of people (and particularly at the moment — in the wake of The Telepathy Tapes podcast — autistic people and their carers) can communicate telepathically.
Before I go any further, I’ll declare an interest here. Asher and I have been engaged in telepathic contact, on and off, for 28 years. We were featured in several episodes of The Telepathy Tapes and I’ve written a book about our story. Telepathy is a huge part of our lives. We know it is real. We are delighted with the interest this subject is now receiving and loved the way it was dealt with by Ky Dickens in Series One. We’d love it if everyone accepted that it’s a thing.
Certainly it can be tested. Ky and Dr Diane Hennacy Powell demonstrated that again and again with different families in different ways throughout the series. Autistic kids were able to pick up random numbers, identify Uno cards, spell out a word someone across the room had written on a scrap of paper, and always without being able to see the source. They were filmed from several angles and the team went to great lengths to ensure there was no way the families could cheat. The results were at, or close to, 100%.
So were the sceptics convinced? Some were. Others were not.
Could a set of tests be devised that are so rigorous, so coldly and clinically scientific that they leave no room for doubt? Yes, almost certainly.
And would the results convince every sceptical, dyed-in-the-wool materialist on the planet? Almost certainly not, Asher tells me, but that’s not the problem.
What follows is a joint endeavour by Asher and myself. We worked on it together and I can’t say where his thoughts stopped and mine started, so I’ve written it as a narrative, rather than the conversation format I use in other articles.
There’s absolutely no judgement here — not of anyone involved. We can stand back and see the motives and reasoning of all involved. We can see the ways it could play out.
Someone is going to be disappointed.
The Sceptics
Some are interested, intrigued and wanting to see what happens, in order to further scientific research and add to humanity’s knowledge base.
Others have decided already that it cannot be true. The possibility is unthinkable for them. It violates all they believe. They have to debunk it, one way or another. If that involves changing goalposts and making wholly unrealistic demands for endless replications and whatever else would make the tests virtually unworkable, that’s what they’ll do. This is not malice or evil intent. They are desperate people, fighting to protect their worldview, their reputations and their life’s work.
The Scientific Innovators
These are people eager to provide evidence for the new discoveries and expand scientific and psychological boundaries. If telepathy is indeed a reality, they want to convince the sceptics, so they are keen to placate them in every way possible. That means they will follow all the protocols and do whatever it takes to demonstrate this beyond all reasonable doubt. If some autistic kid has to be sealed in a Faraday cage and sent 50 or 100 or 200 random numbers or images on however many occasions deemed necessary to silence the critics, they’ll do it. They need this data to provide proof.
The Subjects
If you’ve listened to The Telepathy Tapes (and if not, why not? Do yourself a favour) you’ll be very familiar with several of them. They and their parents long to show the world what they already know: that these super-sensitive people can take their minds outside of time and space and pick up the thoughts of people they are closely bonded with. To show that they are not stupid or delusional, and that this gift or ability or whatever it is, is real, they’ll jump through all the hoops the testers set out. It will be boring, repetitive, exhausting and stressful. They know this, but for them, it’s a price worth paying.
What Could Go Wrong?
Dr Marjorie Woollacott speaks of how some individuals (autistic people, for example) have a very porous dissociative boundary in the brain, which can make them highly susceptible to subtle sensory experiences. In other words, they can’t always block out all the extraneous stuff that gets in the way of everyday living. It’s a double-edged sword. Such people are easily overwhelmed or distressed by sounds, tastes, textures against the skin and much more that wouldn’t bother the rest of us. Those same people, though, are the ones like my friend C, or Asher, for that matter, who can routinely use skills such as remote viewing, telepathy and much more. They can receive thoughts from a close relative or carer, but — just as C did in the café — they could also receive blocking or disruptive ‘static’ from others. That’s important.
If the behaviour of photons fired through a double slit can be influenced by the presence of an observer, could one cynic in the room not have a profound effect on the subject in a telepathy test?
All You Need is Love
As Mary Ann Harrington pointed out years ago, the reason this mind-merging can work comes down to the relationship between the people concerned. It’s no accident that the young people in The Telepathy Tapes invariably picked up the thoughts of a mother, close friend or loved and trusted teacher.
Testing love will feel deeply uncomfortable to even the most open-hearted and eager scientist. Their discipline requires objectivity, but with humans, that isn’t what you get. Every tester, technician, camera operative and even the guy who gets the coffees, has a subtle but critical part to play.
Human emotions, and the interplay between them, affect every facet of life. No veneer of objectivity and professionalism will work with a mind so sensitive that it’s being buffeted by every nuance of doubt, fear, cynicism or boredom.
Put into that testing team just one person who had a row with their partner that morning, and that individual’s emotional state has the capacity to override all the carefully calibrated equipment and airtight protocols.
We’re not saying that will happen. Some autistic brains are more porous than others. Some testers and teams will be benign or indifferent and calm enough for spectacular and seemingly irrefutable evidence to be gathered.
And then…?
It’s uncomfortable even to write this, but let’s imagine a scenario where tests performed under the strictest conditions, which all parties had agreed upon, prove that telepathy is a skill which many non-speakers and semi-speakers possess.
What will the disbelievers do then? They’ll do what they’ve always done. They’ll do what they’ve done on countless occasions to anyone testing aspects of paranormal activity. Their choice sounds, on the surface, quite reasonable. They’ll demand that THEY repeat the tests themselves, with every procedure exactly the same as in the original experiments.
So now the young lab rats will once again be stuck in their cages and asked to note the random numbers and so forth their parents are thinking of, just as before. This time, though, the testers will be people wishing them to fail, people who believe, to the depths of their souls, that the subjects must be lying, cheating or using some kind of subterfuge they haven’t yet figured out.
Will they get similar results, or will their own thoughts and expectations inadvertently become the ghost in the machine and skew the results?
The tester and team are the hidden variables.
We wish these people well. We truly do. We’d love to see the rather clunky machinery of scientific testing baffled by the silent and infinitely subtle wonders of the autistic minds. We hope it works out wonderfully and that those sceptics shake their heads and step into a new paradigm with the rest of us.
If it doesn’t happen that way, though, just remember that no one has disproved telepathy. They have simply come up against a force that can’t be tested.
And that is why Asher has no wish to be a lab rat.