Reality, Hierarchy...Telepathy?

Anti-Materialistic Reflections on the Telepathy Tapes

Howdy Friends,

I recently wrote about the “pseudo-phenomenal entity” the electron. That’s an Owen Barfield term that I like a lot. It denotes an abstract concept coming from reductionist science that has become so ingrained in our consciousness that we treat it as if it were a real thing. Barfield also calls these “idols,” and I think this term is also right on the money.

For the last several years on this Substack, one of the main themes that I’ve explored, and hope to keep exploring, is my support for the stance that I’ve called “anti-materialism”. This is a concept I borrowed and adapted from Ibram X Kendi, who writes about anti-racism. Wendell Berry has a similar approach that he calls “Contrariness,” and he has a great poem about it. Inspired by the “anti-” approach, I’ve made some good headway shedding my own materialistic baggage that I picked up simply by being part of our society today. We are addicted to materialistic idols, deeply so, and attempts to loosen one’s attachment to these idols takes effort, some amount of bravery, and a willingness to “go out on a limb.” That is what, in my own way, I’m trying to do with my writings about this subject here. As a lover of science and a science teacher for 20+ years, it’s important to me on many levels. Here are a few of those levels: First, I don’t want to be teaching idolatrous falsehoods to my students! Second, I don’t want to be tied to idols that prevent me from knowing nature more fully. Thirdly, the joy one can receive from shedding these idols and attaining deeper levels of knowledge can be wonderful.

Now, in this post, I feel I must step tentatively and briefly into popular culture, because in the same week I was teaching electricity and magnetism, I became aware of a podcast that is sweeping the country and was briefly number one on the list. It is really remarkable, again on a number of levels. I don’t like to spend much time in the popular conversation for all the reasons I just stated above, but I couldn’t ignore this one. I’m speaking about The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

In this podcast the host, Ky Dickens, takes us through a documentary journey as Ky explores the claims of a very particular and special group of people and their caregivers and loved ones: those are nonverbal people, most of whom have an autism diagnosis. Ky is a masterful storyteller, and she is telling her story for the “open-minded skeptics” among us. For this reason, she begins the ten-episode podcast from the humble beginnings of her own personal curiosity and skepticism. She takes us through her first contacts in the world of non-speakers. We meet a researcher, Dr. Dianne Powell, and Ky and Dr. Powell perform some informal “telepathy tests” with several non-verbal people and their parents or caregivers. (Dr Powell has done much more formal tests with the same folks, in her quest to establish her research as rigorous, repeatable science.) The stories and the people have great personal interest and warmth, and I found myself carried along by Ky’s narration and description interlaced with clips from interviews and tests with the folks involved. Most of the nonverbal people are children or young adults, and all have learned to communicate through a letterboard. This is simply a board with the letters of the alphabet and the Arabic numerals, so the user can point or tap each letter to spell words.

The story of the letterboards alone is riveting: the innovative use of them, the detractors who have criticized and banned their use, and the raging debate about whether a nonverbal autistic person is even “in there” in any way beyond that of a permanently immature child, and therefore whether one can “believe” that what they tap on the letterboard are their own words (rather than, as the detractors say, the words of the ones holding the letterboards). But this is only the most basic level. In test after test, Ky describes how she and the others she enlists to help her construct, administer and record them, are experiencing that these special people are able to…read minds! They are able to “see” long numbers, words, entire sentences and images that their parent or caregiver sees, but which they do not. And they are able to do this nearly 100% of the time.

I really encourage everyone who’s interest is at all stirred by this to give it a listen. It can bring up all kinds of emotional reactions, from disbelief, to amazement, to skepticism and suspicion, to laughter and warm fuzzy feelings. My wife is currently listening to it, and, while she says she is open to the possibility of what’s being presented, she also says her “charlatan radar” is sometimes on high alert when she listens to it. She is turned off by the repetitive theme of Ky saying things like, “Now, I know it sounds crazy, and I didn’t believe it myself, but, this really happened!” or, “My cameraman was a strict materialist and skeptic, but he can’t deny what he saw happen with his own eyes.” etc. etc.

I find this podcast so fascinating, on so many levels. Setting aside the question of whether “I believe it” (generally speaking, I do), or whether they are somehow conspiring to hoodwink the world (I don’t think they are), it’s the experience of listening to this story being told, and one’s reaction to it, that deeply draws me to examine it further. I can only recommend warmly and strongly that you give it a try, and pay attention to your reactions as you listen to each episode.

Episode 6 is an important pause from the excellent storytelling. Ky spends time introducing the listeners to the thinking behind rejecting or revising materialism as a flawed and limited model. It’s no surprise that Rupert Sheldrake features strongly in this episode, and his contributions as one of the few well-known anti-materialism rock stars out there are solid and predictable. If you’ve never been exposed to Rupert Sheldrake, this is a great way to get a taste of his approach. And, in general, I found myself (mostly) cheering for this very concise presentation of some of the fault lines in materialistic thinking. Ky did quite a good job representing some of the very same anti-materialistic approaches that I’ve been trying to build and advocate for here. However…there is one part of Episode 6 that really caught my ear and caused me to start to argue with what was being presented. Arguing, of course, is a sign that someone else is very close to where you are in your own thinking, and you want to discuss the fine points. In other words, arguing means we almost (but don’t quite) agree. Keep that in mind next time you witness a couple folks (or political parties) verbally duking it out with each other. They mostly agree!

At about minute 28:00 Ky introduces us to Dean Radin, head of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Dr. Radin says,

One way of thinking about a scientific model of reality is in the form of a pyramid. So most scientists would say that the bottom of the pyramid, the thing on which everything rests is physics, and the next level up is chemistry, and the next thing is biology, and the next thing up from that is, maybe, psychology, and somewhere near the tippy top of this pyramid is awareness. Where the awareness comes from is a big mystery, but nevertheless, that’s generally the way that many scientists will think about the nature of reality. . . .

I really appreciate Dr. Radin bringing up this “pyramid”. All my life this pyramid has been implied and sometimes explicitly taught, and it’s this hierarchy that is the heart of the materialistic paradigm. It is this very edifice that I, too, in my own way, am taking playful pot shots at any way I can to show folks that this pyramid at the heart of science today… is not at all scientific! It lies behind and beneath our science, and colors everything we do, what we choose to do, and how we do it. Rupert Sheldrake calls this pyramid “scientism,” the dogmatic beliefs that lie behind our science today. This pyramid is why so many people feel like they have to choose between believing in telepathy and believing in “reality.” This pyramid is the reason why so many people believe they “have to believe” in electrons and atoms, and squash their dissatisfaction with the way in which these physical models make us feel like something really big is missing, and that a universe of nothing but random particles is flat, distant and cold.

Dr Radin agrees that something really big is missing. That thing for him is: consciousness. Later in the same episode, they cut back to him and this is where my ears perked up. He surprised me when he basically affirmed that the pyramid is correct, but needs just one correction:

He says this:

Materialism works really good…we’re not going to throw away the textbooks. But because it doesn't account for experience we need something a little bit broader. . . . the pyramid is pretty close to correct, except it’s not consciousness at the top, [Ky jumps in here and says: “It’s at the bottom”]. The pyramid of reality is resting on awareness. If that were true, it suggests everything is mental.

This is where I found myself groaning, “Nooooo! Don’t stop there. Take it further!” I don’t know anything about Dr Radin and the Institute for Noetic Sciences. However, judging just by the term “Noetic”, I suppose it’s not surprising that he places consciousness at the base, but leaves everything else undisturbed. This doesn’t go nearly far enough. Deciding that the basis of the universe is consciousness alone, to me, is just as one-sided as deciding that the universe is only atoms and energy. Dr. Radin is preserving materialism, but inserting consciousness as a new idol anterior to the idols which he is not interested in disturbing.

What is the alternative? I’ve been working for several years now with the book The Plant Between Sun and Earth, published in the 1950’s and updated in the 1980’s. Here is what George Adams and Olive Whicher have to say about the very same pyramid in that book (the language is quite different, but see if you can also perceive the hierarchy in the description):

A striving to perceive the phenomena of life through the whole, rather than through the part, receives no help from the ancient, Euclidean, finite geometry inherited from the past. This is why there is a tendency in biology to borrow basic ideas from physics, for though in general the old conception of space is adequate for the understanding of organic matter, it is so only to a certain limit today. It may be said that the atomic physicist allows himself greater ideal freedom than the biologist. This dependence upon physics has undoubtedly been a hindrance to the proper development of biology. It has even been said that while biology in its effort to be an exact science has taken the basis of its ideas from physics, in future the laws of physics would reveal themselves to be special cases of the more universal biological laws awaiting discovery in the future.” (my italicized emphasis)

Do you see what is being suggested here? I’m not sure whether this quotation is going to hit you like it hit me. But when I first read it, hit me it did, like a ton of bricks . . .or maybe “like a big warm bear hug” is a more appropriate image. This excellent book, which takes you on a beautiful journey through plant forms and projective geometry, is an answer to Dr. Radin’s pyramid. In other words, I think Dr. Radin should have been much more bold and turned the pyramid upside down entirely. Dr Radin’s universe (and ours) could be a conscious, alive universe that brings about a multitude of living forms, living forms that manifest physically, yes, but which do not depend on physicality for their coming-into-being. This is very different than saying that everything is mental. The wholistic approach says rather that everything is everything, and nothing gets left out; not consciousness, not living processes, not emotions, not experience, and there is no reducing it to “all mental,” or “all particles”. It is irreducible, and it begins with our own human experience. An inverted pyramid would have the human being at the inverted vertex, raying out and rising up into the entire living, breathing, conscious universe.

Thinking the pyramid upside down has huge consequences. Our obsession with particles, and with matter, drifts away in importance, or is understood only as a curiosity or an echo of the total reality, not fundamental to the basis of our understanding. Rather, we start to see a continuity both up and down in our picture of the universe. One of the saddest things about the materialistic worldview is that it has placed us in our imaginations into a cold, dead, vast nothingness that operates only upon random interactions, without agency and without meaning. No wonder so many people find it depressing, or turn to fundamentalist religion to counter it. However, a world that is integrated would take into account that, as I’ve written about before, our world is self-contained, whole, living and cyclically renewing, and yes, conscious. Rudolf Steiner said once quite openly that everything is conscious, but that the consciousness of things like stones was simply a sleepy consciousness. See if you can get in touch with the sleepy consciousness of the stones, or with the radiating consciousness of the Sun. See if you can feel just how different an inverted pyramid would really be.

I hope this makes it clear that whether any particular person “believes” that the Telepathy Tapes are real or not is not based on logic. It is based on what Barfield calls “collective representations,” agreement we are unconsciously making with each other about our imaginations of what is real. Constrained as we are by our materialistic pyramid, it seems like a huge stretch to accept a new data point like special people that have non localized minds that can see into other minds. Listening to it and dealing with my own skepticism, I found myself internet searching and looking into Ky, and into Dr. Radin and Dr. Powell. I wanted to know if the internet had dirt that proved them to be obviously loony before I went including them in this post. And why do we do things like that? Not because we want to know if it’s true, but because we don’t want to be labeled loons ourselves. Yet if enough of us begin to really experience the living conscious, connected universe, we soon won’t have to check credentials like this, because it won’t be considered fringe, and more and more people will begin to trust their actual experience.

The podcast mentions “the gatekeepers”, those that have kept telepathy research marginalized for 60 years now, and surely these same gatekeepers will be at work discrediting the show. One professor of biology at McGill University has already written a detracting piece (and Dr. Powell has written a responding rebuttal).

My wife is a minister, and so as you might imagine, she’s actually quite practised and comfortable with speaking about transcendental and miraculous things. But she’s married to me, and I’m a science guy… and so I think we have found ourselves surprised to be talking about this show with wonder, curiosity and a fair bit of credulity. It has provided a nice link between her world and mine, and stimulated some good “what if?” conversation. What if there are special humans who have access to a great sea of consciousness? I once again encourage you to listen to the show and ask yourself these What If questions. The show takes us well beyond mind reading of loved ones to things like “the Hill,” a place where telepathic people can meet together, independent of spatial separation; and the Akashic Record, a background of consciousness created by the activity of humans through history, accessible to certain persons, like a kind of World Library where one can go to learn the wisdom of the ages. Rudolf Steiner wrote about accessing the Akashic Record quite often.

Actually, I think the majority of people in their secret hearts have had experiences that, if they felt free to do so, they might call telepathy, even if only in childhood. Feelings of being intertwined emotionally, mentally, or spiritually to other people (or to nature) are, of course, pretty much universal when we are children. Waldorf pedagogy is built on the assumption that young children swim in a non localized sea of collective consciousness, including the spiritual world out of which we each come. I bet plenty of people talk about it in the privacy of their homes and families. I even suspect that many powerful people, even those that are gatekeepers for materialistic orthodoxy, also secretly harbor questions or wonderings about these things. So who, exactly, is invested in keeping this pyramid supreme? I don’t intend to imply a conspiracy here, but why, oh why, is it even a big deal to admit that the reports of these folks are believable, and that telepathy is real? Inside the pyramid of materialism, in the throne room, there sits… really nobody at all (maybe the ghosts of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, but I bet they would even tire of it). I see this podcast as a sign that the facade of materialism may really be ready to crumble in a more noticeable way. I welcome it. But let’s not get too hooked on mind and let go of life and matter. That becomes spiritualism, which isn’t really different from materialism. We need to hold it all together: the living universe, the conscious universe, the physical universe, and the universe of our own interconnected bodies, minds and hearts.

P.S. Here is a poem I wrote inspired by The Plant Between Sun and Earth