Brainwaves

"So, if you guys can like... talk with your minds, how come you use phones at all?" he asked. He'd been asking about telepathy a lot lately, ever since he saw us 'thinking at each other' to avoid talking aloud.

I was kind of surprised he hadn't figured it all out. I've seen him literally respond to thoughts in my head as if I'd said them out loud. We've made devious plans in delicate circumstances with our eyes. "Well, it's more complicated than that," I replied, trying to put it into words, "it's not like a cell phone. It's something much deeper and more unpredictable. Plus, we actually DO do that a lot. But I wouldn't count on most people to successfully receive or, more importantly, realize they'd received, a sensitive message without some way of confirming it. It's mostly just about being in the right place at the right time."

Telepathy is an important basis for a lot of magical work. It is based on the principal of non-locality. Everything affects everything. Your cells are constantly picking up subtle signals from everything around you. On some level, you respond to every stimulus you detect, because merely detecting it in the first place is a response. Whether it's a proximal energy transmission, or simply an evoked memory or feeling, you're constantly affected by your surroundings. This is obvious.

So it's mostly an awareness thing. Telepathic skills flowed quite naturally out of meditation practice for me. When you start becoming more and more aware of the patterns of your own mind, you start to become aware of the minds around you. You become aware how predictable we humans are, you realize with a shock how many thoughts you share with the people around you throughout the day. Descends the eerie feeling that you are not alone in your head, that maybe we don't create thoughts so much as we just detect them, hear them echoing in our skulls off of the vast outside world.

That's when the telepathy starts. It begins when two people move past verbal communication. I think most people have at least one friend like this. Someone with whom you needn't talk. You both just know eachother's thoughts. That's the beginning.

The actual mechanism, I think, is the same one on which psychic healing operates. Your cells broadcasting information to someone else's cells. Just think about it. That's how your whole body works anyway. Your brain sends a message for some cells to do something, and they do it. That's why it's so much easier to send sensations than it is to send detailed sentences. With words, you just have to hope that the receiver's cells interpret words the same way as yours, but sensations take little or no interpretation.

That is why the awareness is the most important part. Because your bodies broadcast signals between each other effortlessly. Posture, scent, demeanor, facial expression, energy. You're always exchanging information whether or not it's intentional. The trick is to understand each other enough to know what you're sending, and how the other person will receive that. It's super easy to send what you want to send without error, and have the other person interpret it all wrong.

Non-local communication is part of our animal heritage. It is not a refined, developed skill, like language. Rather, it is something that in language's wake atrophies and is forgotten. But it's SO damn valuable.

A telepathic link stems from a deep, deep understanding of a person, of a meshing of selves together. To share thoughts with other people is to do more than just communicate, it's a synchronization of existences. Because you are your thoughts, to think collectively with someone else is to BECOME that person. And it's natural. It's supposed to happen. It DOES happen. Effortlessly. We're pack animals, remember. Just look at a pack of wolves. Think of how much they communicate without ever directly communicating. They just know each other. They know they are one mind. We all have that one-mindedness, because you have to in order to relate to someone. We just don't pay enough attention to make use of it usually. Too caught up in ourselves, usually.