The implications of telepathy

I have pretty much always believed that telepathy was a reality; from manyfold personal experience. Indeed, if telepathy is assumed to be possible, then many other supposedly 'paranormal' phenomena become straightforwardly explicable.

But for most of my (pre-Christian) life, belief in telepathy did not have any challenging implications - because my hypothetical explanation for telepathy was purely materialistic; it simply slotted into my mainstream, scientistic world view: part of the world of observation, hypothesis, testing...

This was because I regarded telepathy in terms of some kind of sensory process of communication. I assumed that some kind of thought waves or forms were being 'beamed' between people's brains - or else there was a tuning-into thoughts; but that because this process was unreliable, not under control of human will but rather 'instinctive'; therefore the mechanism had not (yet) been unravelled by science.

However, I now regard what I used to call telepathy as a instance of direct knowing, of intuition; which I now understand to be more like two people thinking the same thought simultaneously.

It is not a form of communication, and nothing like a signal passes between brains. Rather, the telepathic process entails two people being simultaneously attuned to the 'collective consciousness', the 'inner world' - the single world within every person, every 'thing' - the same world we visit in dreams, the world of 'the gods' (the Ancient Egyptian dwat) and of 'the dead' (Hades/ Sheol).

When telepathy is understood in this way, it becomes an instance of (become 'evidence' of) something that goes beyond science, goes beyond the mainstream modern world view - it becomes an experience of a life beyond the senses/ models/ data; and itself a taste of primary thinking and direct knowing.

Telepathy therefore opens us to a qualitatively different way of being, beyond observations and hypotheses; and becomes a possible model for gaining knowledge on other topics of concern. If telepathy usually happens with people who are important to us, especially people we love; then the telepathic kind of thinking may become a direct way of experiencing, learning, and knowing matters that are important to us - matters of love.


Note: This example illustrates how metaphysical assumptions - the basic framework of our understanding of reality - are more important than our specific observations or beliefs. In other words; metaphysics shapes evidence; metaphysics tells us what counts as evidence, and what that evidence means. By contrast, evidence cannot rationally affect metaphysics. Metaphysics is primary - evidence (including science, history etc.) is secondary. The implications of telepathy therefore depended on my metaphysical understanding of reality; and when my understanding of reality changed - the implications of telepathy changed.