Is telepathy a genuine phenomenon? For Beischel and Boccuzzi,
a now-married couple who met one another at the Institute of Noetic
Sciences during a psychical experiment, the answer is a
resounding yes.
These two future lovebirds originally encountered one
another at a conference when they both agreed to participate in an experiment supervised
and conducted by Dean Radin, a senior scientist and researcher of psi phenomena
at IONS. For the experiment, Beischel was placed in a room by herself, unable
to see anyone, while Bocuzzi, located in a separate building, was instructed to
attentively stare at her via a closed circuit screen that intermittently showed
her image. What they found was that Beischel’s physiological responses heightened
when Boccuzzi could see her and dropped when he couldn’t, indicating that some
sort of nonlocal informational exchange was taking place between the duo.
Crediting telepathy as a factor to them falling love, the pair
were, funnily enough, married by Dean Radin and have begun to write a book
called Psychic Intimacy: A Handbook for Couples
highlighting the practical applications of DMILS (distant mental
interactions of living systems) ‘tweenst lovers.
Yet these aren’t the only two to
have noticed this uncanny ability amongst people that share an emotional bond. Upton
Sinclair – a notable social, political, and religious critic – and his wife, Mary
Craig Kimbrough, conducted a series of 290 experiments whereby he would try to
transmit an image he had drawn to his wife’s mind via telepathic communication, yielding
in statistically relevant results which he later wrote about in his book Mental Radio.
Similar in
nature, a succession of ganzfeld experiments, which test people for extra sensory perception,
have taken place since the 70s, and still stir up quite a bit of debate in
the scientific community to this day. The official status in science of this
research is that, although meta-analyses of the ganzfeld results points to the probable
existence of psi that aren’t due to chance or selective reporting, final conclusions
can’t be drawn without further experimentation.
Despite science’s stance on psi, there have been tens of thousands of anecdotal stories throughout the ages whereabout some sort of subjective telepathic communion has taken place. The most typical stories span from family members having some awareness of danger having
befallen their kin, digital
modes of telepathy where an email or telephone call is sometimes sensed just before
it happens, to someone stating the idea that popped in your mind milliseconds before you get the chance to verbalize it. The more rarified forms consist of instances of interspecies telepathy ranging from cats
and dogs to dolphins
and elephants, psychedelically
induced telepathy whereby subjects pick up on the ideation and emotions of
others in the same altered state, to, the most tenuous of all, superconscious telepathy, a phenomenon sometimes accompanied with mystical experiences, in which people have reportedly tapped
into the noosphere downloading cosmic information not readily available to them by
what seems to derive from a seemingly other, supra-intelligent source (of which has been attributed to and dubbed under many a name including the collective unconscious, aliens, pooka, the right
hemisphere, the Self, the Great Spirit, God, the Holy Guardian Angel, or the
transcendental Other).
Regardless of the aforementioned stories or the current ruminations
of how this nonverbal communication might function – whether it works via
Michael Persinger’s theory of magnetic
fields and biophoton emissions, Dean Radin’s proposal of natural processes
akin to biological
quantum entanglement effects, a syncretization of the two, or something
completely undiscovered as of yet – the materialist science crowd is likely to continue marginalizing the phenomena without much consideration as telepathy
looms over our collective psyche with the same disappointing “you’re imagining
things” mentality for the next few decades.
Image by collins303, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing
