TELEPATHY

An excerpt from our forthcoming book, Phenomena

Telepathy

When you Google telepathy, one of the first links that comes up is a dictionary definition: the supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses; mind-reading; thought transference. Notice the supposed? It’s a subtle way of telling you that telepathy hasn’t been proven scientifically, which simply isn’t true.

The problem is that the consensus among mainstream scientists is that studies of telepathy and all psychic abilities are pseudoscience, fringe stuff. When Sheldrake published his experimental findings in peer reviewed scientific journals, mainstream scientists and skeptics attacked his methodology, insulted him personally, and the science journal Nature even suggested in an editorial that his books should be burned.

In 2013, Sheldrake was invited to talk about his new book, Science Set Free, at a TEDx White Chapel event. Afterward, an anonymous panel of scientists working for TEDx determined that his talk should be banned because his theories crossed into pseudoscience. So the talk was banned, which ultimately provided Sheldrake and his ideas far more exposure and recognition than if the panel had simply ignored him. The talk can be found on You Tube and it’s fascinating.

In his book, The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake lays out his evidence for the existence of telepathy. From his scientific tests on telephone telepathy to the sense of being stared at to his research into the telepathy between people and their beloved pets, his case for telepathy is compelling.

His telephone experiment involved one individual and two to four callers. In a test run with three callers, there were 2,080 trials. In this test, a caller selects three people with whom they have a social bond. The monitor of the test uses a random number generator or a die roll to choose one of the three callers.  That caller is then selected to call the participant.  Before the phone is picked up, the participant is asked to choose which of the callers he or she thinks it is.  The results were impressive. On average, participants guessed the caller 41.8%, considerably above the chance rate of 33.3 %.

“Seemingly telepathic experiences with telephones are very common,” Sheldrake writes in The Sense of Being Stared At. “Indeed, they may be the commonest kind of telepathic experience in the modern world.” He notes that the “evolution of telepathy “ is ongoing and that email telepathy is the second most common type. “People find that they think of someone they have not thought about for a while, and shortly afterward receive an email from that person.”

Telepathy is also common among parents and their children, people and their pets, close friends, married couples, and identical twins. Our neighbor, Annette, has an identical twin, Jannette. Over the years, they’ve experienced some dramatic instances of telepathy.

Some years ago, Jannette was living in Memphis with the man she was dating at the time. She worked for Channel, so numerous bottles of perfume lined her bathroom shelves.  One night, a loud crash from the bathroom awakened her and her boyfriend. “Someone’s broken into the house, they’re in the bathroom,” she whispered.

Her boyfriend grabbed a baseball bat and moved quickly and silently toward the bathroom, Janette right behind him. No intruder. But every bottle had fallen from the shelves and shattered against the floor, almost as if someone had swept an arm across the shelves, knocking them down. “Right then, I knew something had happened to Annette. I just knew it.

Moments later, the phone rang. It was Annette, who lived in another city, and she was hysterical, sobbing. She had just been robbed at gunpoint while delivering a night deposit to the bank for her employer. “While it was happening,” Annette recalls, “I was praying that the guy wouldn’t kill me. I was telling God that if I was killed, Jannette wouldn’t survive it. My husband would, he would get past it, but Jannette wouldn’t. I called her before I even called the police.”

We asked how the bottles had gotten broken. She didn’t know. The incident was an example of synchronicity, telepathy and – what else? Psychokinesis? But by what?

And that’s often how these experiences end – with more questions!