The term ‘Mental telepathy‘ is misleadingly broad. It essentially means the direct communication of thoughts between people without using the basic five senses. There is a huge difference, however, between having a creepy feeling that someone is watching you and being able to pick the plans for a nuclear reactor out of an unsuspecting scientist’s mind. Mental telepathy covers a huge range of abilities from very basic to fairly complex. This article will attempt to explain the different levels of mental telepathy.

NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

If you are a parent who has tried to tell your kid or spouse something non-verbally by using your body language, eyes and facial expressions, then you would know what Kinesics or non-verbal communication is. In this form of non verbal communication almost everything can be said without speaking by merely using the eyes and expressions and body language. For this kind of communication you need to know the other person well in order to communicate effectively. Its most effective between parents, children, lovers and intimate friends.

This may not count as mental telepathy, as the two people are using their senses to communicate, just not verbally and this is correct. However, mental telepathy plays a role, because their minds are more attuned to each other because of extended exposure to the way the others mind may think and some predictability comes into play, so there is a sort of mental connection. Two people that know each other well enough to understand more subtle body language, or have created nonverbal signals to communicate, might be argued that it is not be classified as mental telepathy.

EMPATHY:

Empathy is the ability to recognize, perceive, or directly experience the emotions of others. Some people are very poor at this, and others are very good at this, being able to mentally ‘put themselves in another’s shoes’ and understand how they must be feeling. Empathy can be increased with training and practice. Actors, for example, are able to imitate the emotions of others, even to the point of being able to make themselves spontaneously laugh or cry.

Sympathetic pain or truly feeling the pain of the other person is often experienced by many. This can be particularly prevalent in mothers who even develop a fever when their children are sick. There are times when close friends or relatives actually feel the pain whether it’s emotional or physical or even mental of the other person. Then there is something known as long distance empathy which all of us have known and experienced at one time or the other. This happens when some one real close to us has problem or gets hurt or even is in danger and is somewhere else and we feel their pain and emotion.

Psychologists write off such empathetic phenomena as a simple trick of an overactive imagination. At the very least, they do have a point that other senses are being used. Would we be able to feel the sympathetic pain of a broken arm, for example, if we could not actually see the injury? This does not explain, however, the phenomena of long-distance empathy.

SYMBOL AND OBJECT PROJECTION:

There is another kind of telepathy which involves sending and receiving concrete symbols and objects between two people. Here advanced Mental telepathy is involved and it is a phenomena outside the five senses. This kind of mental telepathy involves a lot of training, concentration and practice. There is a receiver and a sender involved in this.

Here the principle is that simpler concepts are easily communicated. For instance an animal is more difficult to communicate than a shape or color.

Zener cards often used in mental telepathy test are an example of this principle. Simple, concrete black-and-white symbols (a circle, square, star, plus sign, and three wavy lines), gives even a random guess a 20% chance of being right. On the other hand, a shared, known, limited set of concrete symbols may increase the coordination of the thoughts between sender and receiver. A success rate of 50% or higher (which have happened) can not be explained away by simple statistics, but may indicate a level of mental telepathy, instead.

ABSTRACT CONCEPTS

Mental telepathy at this level involves abstract concepts like ideas or actions, which are more complex to communicate than colors and shapes. Telepaths rarely achieve this level, and lower success rates are indicated in experiments.

Telepathy shouldn’t be ruled out when it comes to animals that seem to communicate ideas to each other through non-verbal actions. Because animal brains lack prefrontal lobes, telepathy would probably not go beyond simplistic ideas such as hunger or danger signals, but many have seen two dogs look at each other and go running for an almost pre-decided location.

Some people feel that initially in the olden days man had the power of telepathy, which declined as language and man, evolved. Assuming this is true, and then right research can show us the right way to rediscover this lost skill.

However, there are some who feel that man may be able to develop ESP and telepathy and such psychic abilities in the near future. As man’s psychic powers grow it may be possible for the entire race to become telepathic in the future.