|
Let's start
by defining what telepathy is. Telepathy is an exchange of information
between two people without any known sensory or energetic interaction.
My
own case with the earthquake seems to have been telepathic in nature,
momentarily linking my psyche with my mother's experience. The literature
on spontaneous psychic experiences indeed reveals that a very large
proportion of reported telepathic cases involve two major elements, both
of which were present here: an exchange between close relatives,
particularly a mother and her children, and a life-threatening
situation to one of the two persons involved. As my mother later told
me, during the first seconds of panic, she had an intense moment when she
thought she might die without ever seeing me again.
In everyday language, we often refer to telepathy as "thought
transmission," one person being the "sender", the other the
"receiver." But this is where words can get us into trouble. For
one thing, it's far from certain that we're really talking about a
'transmission' of anything across space in the traditional sense;
that's just one possibility, and not the most plausible one at that. Also,
thoughts are not the only things picked up by receivers; some of the most
interesting telepathic cases involve exchanges on a deeper level than
conscious thoughts. In fact, some of the most fascinating recent psi
experiments bypass the conscious mind completely, and use the body
as a psi-detector.
For example, in THE LAB section of the Psi
Explorer CD-ROM, a video shows how a receiver's physiology reacts at
the very moment a distant sender is concentrating on her. Essentially, in
these 'Body-Psi'
experiments, 
the receiver is hooked up to a physiological
monitoring device (in this example, the Galvanic Skin Response or
GSR, a sensitive detector of psychological stress). The sender, in a
distant room, is instructed to either concentrate on the receiver, or else
to just relax. A growing number of studies now show that, although
receivers cannot consciously distinguish between 'sending' vs. 'relax'
periods, their body somehow does know: GSR levels are consistently higher
during the sender's concentration periods than during the relaxation
periods, which strongly suggests that the receiver is indeed detecting the
efforts of the sender. |
