"When a man addresses another from a distance he
has to speak
more loudly. If he is close he can whisper into his ear. If it
were possible
to come into close contact with the spirit of the soul
he would need
no speech. All he wanted to say would reach the hearer by a
soundless way."
- Psellus
"Telepathy" is derived from the Greek terms tele
("distant")
and pathe ("occurrence" or "feeling"). The term was
coined
in 1882 by the French psychical researcher Fredric W. H.
Myers, a founder
of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Myers thought his
term descrbed
the phenomenon better than previous used terms such as the
French "communication de pensees,"
"thought-transference," and "thought-reading."
Research interest in telepathy had its beginning in mesmerism.
The
magnetists discovered that telepathy was among the so-called
"higher-phenomena"
observed in magnetized subjects, who read the thoughts of the
magnetists
and carried out the unspoken instructions.
Soon other psychologists and psychiatrists were observing the
same
phenomena in their patients. Sigmund Fraud noticed it so often
that he
son had to address it. He termed it a regressive, primitive
faculty that
was lost in the course of evolution, but which still had the
ability to
manifest itself under certain conditions. Psychiatrist Carl G.
Jung thought
it more important. He considered it a function of
synchronicity (1). Psychologist and philosopher William James
was very enthusiastic toward telepathy and encouraged more
research be put into it.
When the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was
founded in 1885, after the SPR in 1884, telepathy became the
first psychic phenomenon to be studied scientifically. The
first testing was simple. A sender in
one room would try to transmit a two-digit number, a taste, or
a visual
image to a receiver in another room. The French physiologist
Charles Richet
introduced mathematical chance to the tests, and also
discovered that telepathy
occurred independent of hypnotism.
Interest in telepathy
increased following World War I as thousands of bereaved
turned toward Spiritualism attempting to communicate with
their dead loved ones. The telepathic parlor game called
"willing" became popular. Mass telepathic experiments were
undertaken in the United States and Britain.
Telepathy is about
communicating mind-to-mind, making someone feel or think
something from far away, without the use of sounds or
symbols or anything else but bare thought. There are some
things in life that are hard to explain outside of telepathy
: think, for instance, of how our mothers seem to be able to
make us feel guilty no matter how far away we might be.
Telepathy is said to come in several forms : telepathic
impression (planting an message, image, or word into someone
else's mind), mind reading (copying, but not interfering
with, what's going on in someone else's mind), mental
communication (a wireless phone of the mind, but without the
bills) and as a medium for mind control
If telepathic
ability does
exist in all or even some of us, could it be that we're to
relate to each
other based on trust and cooperation and love rather than by
the knowledge of reading minds or the power of planting
thoughts? And what of symbolism, visual art, literature, and
the art of speech, once the mind can go straight to what the
artist is conveying?